Witsec (16 page)

“Teresa used to call me all the time,” said Shur, “always begging for money. He was like a kid in college who calls home every week asking for a check. He reinforced my view that we shouldn’t give complete backgrounds to witnesses, that is, supply them with false financial pasts, because he just couldn’t stop conning people.”

In yet another stunt, deputies told Teresa that he couldn’t take his car with him when he left El Paso for security reasons—he would be given a different one
after he was relocated. “Teresa waited until there weren’t any deputies watching him and then he drove his car up the ramp into the moving truck,” said Shur. “He’d filled the car with bottles of liquor he had apparently bought on credit, and hid everything under blankets to fool the deputies. When he got to his new relocation spot, he sold the car and all the liquor.”

Teresa’s final move was to Maple Valley, Washington, outside Seattle, but he got into trouble there, too. In 1981, his son was arrested on a murder charge, and the FBI claimed Teresa had threatened to kill two local prosecutors. A short while later, Teresa was convicted in a conspiracy to burglarize and torch a dentist’s office and collect insurance on the loss. He got off with a light sentence but in 1985 was sent to prison after he was caught smuggling hundreds of exotic and expensive birds and reptiles into the country for sale. Most were endangered species.

“Teresa made great use of the word
but
,” Shur recalled. “He would say, ‘Yeah, I got caught, but …’ I learned that with certain witnesses, you had to heighten your guard. I could trust some, but with others, I had to double- and triple-check everything, as well as look for corroborating evidence to make sure they were telling the truth.”

After he was paroled, Teresa returned to Maple Valley, where he died in obscurity in February 1990 at age sixty-one. The local newspaper noted that Teresa had been living under the alias Charles A. Cantino. The Marshals Service sent a deputy to pay for his funeral.

“Vinnie was an extremely likable guy,” recalled Kash, “but I never thought he could go straight. He simply didn’t know the direction, and as much as I liked him—and I did like him—I knew he was going to
victimize someone after we gave him a new identity. That bothered me.”

Teresa was not the only colorful witness to frustrate Shur and Kash. Another early troublemaker was Hugh E. Wuensche, who was given a new identity in 1971 after he testified against the mob and explained to the McClellan Committee how he had laundered more than $50 million in stolen securities for gangsters. “He had a British wife, and all he wanted from us was a new name, some cash, a passport, and an airplane ticket,” Kash recalled. “That was a low bid from one of these guys.” A year after Wuensche had boarded a flight to England, Kash received a Christmas card from him. “He said he was living in a seventeenth-century mansion, had a chauffeur-driven Bentley, and owned his own bank. I didn’t know whether or not he was telling the truth, but he appeared to be fabulously wealthy.” A year later, Kash received another Christmas letter from Wuensche, this time begging for help. He was in prison. It turned out that he had been paid some $250,000 in rewards from federal agencies for helping agents recover several million dollars’ worth of stolen stock certificates. No one had informed Shur or Kash. He had used his new WITSEC identity to hide his criminal past from British authorities and had bought a controlling interest in a failing London bank with his reward money. He then contacted several gangsters back home and had them send him forged stocks and bonds, which he used as collateral in England to buy an even larger British financial company. By the time he was caught, he had looted more than $2 million from depositors. Furious that they had been hoodwinked, British authorities filed a formal complaint with the State Department and accused Shur of trying to solve the United States’ crime problem by sending felons to
England under new names. “I got a letter from Wuensche that looked as if it was written on toilet paper,” recalled Kash. “He offered to testify against the mobsters who had helped him run his bank scam if I helped him return to the United States. I didn’t.” Wuensche then called Shur, but he also refused.

Shur noticed that every time a high-profile witness such as Teresa testified in court against the mob, other criminals would step forward and ask to enter WITSEC. “Word was spreading that we could keep witnesses safe and give them a fresh start,” he said. By 1972, the number of witnesses entering the program had doubled to about two hundred per year. In 1973, 338 new witnesses entered WITSEC, and by 1974 the number topped 400. By this point, Kash had gotten some help in the Marshals Service’s headquarters, but not much. Only ten new deputies had been hired to handle logistics, obtain documents, and help witnesses find jobs. Meanwhile, Kash’s WITSEC operation was responsible for overseeing what now was a total of a thousand witnesses and nearly twice that number of dependents. The program was growing at the rate of one new witness a day, and the Marshals Service simply couldn’t keep up. “Our success in attracting mob witnesses was choking the marshals,” said Shur.

After three years, Kash had had enough, but it wasn’t the lack of resources and overwhelming demands that had finally gotten to him. “I was having serious doubts about the wisdom of relocating some of these criminals in new communities,” he explained. “I knew we were sending them out to victimize people.” While Shur empathized with Kash, he also disagreed with his viewpoint. “This program was much too important to abandon, regardless of how horrible some of our witnesses were,” he said. “There is an old tort
adage that says ‘You take the actor as you find him,’ and that applied to witnesses. We were not going to get witnesses to testify against the mob who were priests and rabbis, and they weren’t going to testify unless we protected and helped them.”

The breaking point for Kash came when he was asked to relocate a pornographic bookstore operator named James Kelly. Kelly had testified against a major New York City crime family and had initially refused protection. Instead, he had moved to Baltimore on his own and opened a striptease club and porno bookstore in the city’s notorious “Block,” a seedy downtown area. One morning a mechanic doing a routine check on Kelly’s car switched on the headlights, and a blasting cap hidden near the engine blew up. It apparently had jiggled loose from the three sticks of dynamite it was meant to detonate. The Baltimore strike force asked Shur to accept Kelly into WITSEC because he had been secretly providing it with information about mob activities on the Block. Shur agreed, but almost immediately Kelly and Kash began butting heads.

At one point Kelly asked the Marshals Service for help cashing an $85,000 certified check—proceeds from the sale of his Baltimore strip club and bookstore. Kelly had just undergone a legal name change, so he couldn’t cash the check, which was made payable to him under his old name. Kash refused. An outraged Kelly telephoned the Baltimore strike force chief. The chief sent Shur an angry seven-page letter accusing Kash of being rude, arrogant, and contemptuous. Shur urged Kash to reconsider, but he refused. Kash didn’t like the pornographer, didn’t think the government should be paying him monthly subsistence, and didn’t want to be part of his taking the money from the sale of his businesses and then disappearing. A short time
later, Kash was promoted to a different job that took him away from the day-to-day handling of WITSEC. Shur got Kelly the cash that he wanted.

“Organized crime was suffering severely at the hands of the witness program, but we couldn’t keep putting some of these people out there and not get burned,” said Kash. “Someone innocent was going to get hurt someday because of these witnesses.”

Kash’s fears had not yet dawned on the public. In fact, WITSEC was riding a wave of favorable publicity. A newspaper column by Victor Riesel, the labor writer blinded by the mob outside Lindy’s restaurant, was typical. Printed in 1972 under the headline “
Omertà
Dead: Mafia Being Cracked by Hundreds of Informants Now Protected by Special Unit,” Riesel boasted about Shur’s program. “It works! No witness has gone bad after relocation. Some have been so successful, they are now executives in corporations and fear only their new prominence will expose them. It can be authentically reported that
Omertà
is dead, the Mafia’s lethal code of silence has been smashed.”
Reader’s Digest
weighed in later with a heart-tugging story about a small-time bookie who had been ready to kill himself because of his debts to the mob. Instead, he contacted federal agents and with Shur’s help got a fresh start. The magazine noted that Shur received a Christmas card every year from the bookie, thanking him for saving his life.

Favorable news accounts like these, however, were soon to end. Three ghosts from the past were about to visit Shur and cause havoc to his program.

T
he telephone call took Buffalo strike force chief Thomas Kennelly completely by surprise. A lawyer was on the line asking where former mobster Pascal “Paddy” Calabrese was hiding. It was early 1970, two years since Calabrese had testified against the Stefano Magaddino crime family and gone into hiding with Rochelle and her children. Buffalo attorney Salvatore R. Martoche got right to the point. “I represent Thomas Leonhard, who is Rochelle’s husband and the father of their three children. He says the government kidnapped his kids.”

Kennelly’s mind shot back to late 1967, when he had arranged for Rochelle and her children to be hustled out of Buffalo and hidden at a military base in Maine to protect them from the mob. “We knew Rochelle had a former husband,” Kennelly recalled later. “I mean, we knew she was separated or divorced, so there had to be a husband out there, but it really hadn’t occurred to any of us that he had visitation rights with the kids. We were busy trying to protect Paddy and Rochelle, and Tom Leonhard wasn’t pounding on our door, so quite frankly, no one really ever thought about him.” Kennelly was suspicious of Leonhard’s motives. Why hadn’t he complained earlier?

“He has,” said Martoche. “He’s been trying to
find his children since they disappeared, but no one will tell him where they are.” Martoche recited the facts as he knew them. Leonhard and Rochelle were still married in 1967, but they didn’t live together because she had moved in with Calabrese. The couple had, however, signed a legal separation agreement that gave Leonhard visitation rights with their three children one day each week. He had driven over on a Sunday morning to pick them up, only this time the kids weren’t there. When Leonhard rousted out the landlady, she told him several men riding in two cars had come that Tuesday and taken them away. That was all she knew. Leonhard had gone to the police, but they didn’t know anything about Rochelle. It had taken him three weeks to discover that the Buffalo strike force was behind his children’s disappearance. But federal prosecutors refused to tell him anything about what had happened to them. Leonhard was a mild-mannered blue-collar worker without much money, Martoche explained, and he didn’t have a clue how to weave through the federal bureaucracy. He had tried to hire lawyers several times, but none would take the case. Until now.

“This has to be some sort of mistake, right?” Martoche asked Kennelly. “I mean, in Russia, maybe the government can snatch up a man’s kids without telling him, but that just doesn’t happen here. That’s why I am calling you. My client wants to be reunited with his children.”

Kennelly remained wary. “I didn’t know Martoche and my first concern was for Paddy Calabrese and his family,” he explained. “I knew the mob still wanted Paddy dead, and I was worried that this was some sort of ruse.”

Kennelly knew where Calabrese and Rochelle were
in hiding. After the couple’s failed start in Jackson, Michigan, Calabrese had telephoned him periodically. But Kennelly didn’t tell Martoche anything when they first talked about the children’s whereabouts in 1970. “I had promised Calabrese in my official capacity as the head of the strike force that the government would never reveal where he was hiding, and that was not a promise I was going to break.”

Kennelly stalled for several weeks, but Martoche was persistent, and after repeated telephone calls, he got Kennelly to agree to contact Calabrese and Rochelle and tell them that Leonhard was asking about his children. “Paddy and Rochelle screamed and carried on when I finally reached them,” Kennelly said later. “Paddy said to me, ‘Don’t you dare tell. If you do, we will move and you will never hear from us again. We’ll disappear.’ ”

Kennelly felt trapped. As a father, he understood how horrible it must feel to have your children vanish without warning. But he was convinced that if he broke his promise to Calabrese, he would be putting a witness’s life in danger and undermining WITSEC by sending potential witnesses a chilling message—the government can’t be trusted to keep your new identity and location a secret.

Kennelly told Martoche about Calabrese and Rochelle’s adamant stance, but the young attorney refused to give up. He persuaded Kennelly to forward letters to Rochelle from Leonhard. He wrote three times in late 1970, begging for a chance to be reunited with his children. “I love them dearly and do miss them so much,” he pleaded. “The years are slipping by faster and faster. I would like to see them a little before they grow up.” Rochelle didn’t respond for six months, and when she did, her answer was terse: “In no way shall I
ever allow [you] to see them. Calabrese is the only father the children will ever know.” She misspelled her husband’s name in the letter, adding further insult to her reply.

Martoche decided it was time to take Leonhard’s fight into court. He had his client file for a divorce from Rochelle and seek full custody. When she failed to appear at the hearing, the judge awarded the children to him. Armed with the judge’s custody order, Martoche marched into the federal court in Buffalo and demanded that the Justice Department reveal where Leonhard’s children were hiding. By now it was late 1971. Kennelly had resigned from the government to practice law privately in Washington and Shur was told to handle the dispute. In a letter that he would later deeply regret having written, Shur urged Leonhard to stop trying to find his children. He wrote that Leonhard should be proud of himself for allowing the United States to take them as a “sacrifice in our war against organized crime.” Shur’s letter infuriated Martoche. “I cannot help but wonder,” he replied, “if Mr. Shur would also like to sacrifice his children involuntarily in this undeclared war.”