The Wiseguy Next Door

It was Nearly 21 years ago that Michael Raymond, a beefy, Brooklyn-bred con man and stock swindler, got into a tight spot with the law. After a lengthy trial in Illinois state court, he received a four-year prison term for trying to use stolen Treasury notes to buy two small Midwestern banks. A silver-tongued grifter with a robust appetite for the good life, Raymond had no intention of serving his sentence. Instead, he cut a deal with the Feds.

What Raymond received, however, was far from your average, run-of-the-mill Government deal. In exchange for testifying before a Senate subcommittee on stolen securities and the Mob, he was placed in what was then a new, top-secret Federal program called Witsec, short for Witness Security Program, now commonly referred to as the Witness Protection Program.

At the time, fewer than a hundred people had entered this experimental program, thought to be the Government's most potent new tool against organized crime. Despite its controversial nature, the program had never actually been debated, or even proposed, on Capitol Hill. The U.S. Justice Department simply requested funds for "witness relocation," and the various appropriations committees gave it the rubber stamp. Over the next 21 years, the program would attract a vast following, not the least of which were the more than 13,000 criminals and their family members coerced into its ranks. Back in 1970, though, Witsec was a theory to be tested. And like any new theory, it had bugs to be worked out--bugs like Michael Raymond.

As part of his agreement with the overseers of Witsec, Raymond was given a new identity and relocated to sunny southern Florida. The Government also immediately began paying him $1500 a month, plus $50,000 for "job assistance." Over the next several years, Michael "Burnett," as Raymond officially became known, would learn to use Witsec to underwrite one scam after another. During one deadly three-year period, three business associates of his disappeared under nefarious circumstances. One of them was a 67-year-old socialite and widow whom Raymond had been romancing. The woman was last seen getting into a car with him just hours after she cleared out her bank accounts. Raymond later became a prime suspect in her disappearance when an informant told local cops that he had bragged of killing her. "They're never going to find the stone she's under," he reportedly told the informant.

When Florida authorities began looking into the past of Michael Burnett, they were amazed to find that he had no personal history whatsoever. His life of crime as Michael Raymond had been effectively expunged, courtesy of WITSEC. Furthermore, the Federal Government helped Raymond disappear while the investigation was under way. He had intentionally violated his security, so the Justice Department--unaware that its prize witness was also a primary suspect--relocated him to another region of the country and covered his tracks after he left.

In the years that followed, Raymond often caught the attention of Federal crime fighters. Although the U.S. Marshals Service--the branch of the Justice Department that administers the Witness Security Program--believed that his life was in danger, he moved around like a man without worries. He drove Cadillacs and wore mink coats, and his fingers sparkled with diamond rings. A gourmet chef with a taste for fine wines, he allowed his waistline to grow in proportion to his criminal deeds, until he topped the scales near 300 pounds.

Now 61 years old, Raymond/Burnett is no longer in WITSEC. His long, notorious life of crime finally caught up with him when, after he resurfaced in Chicago a few years ago as an informant in an FBI sting operation, the Feds caught on to his act. In 1987, he went off to prison on weapons possession; there were no deals left to be struck. For more than 20 years, Raymond had feasted on the Federal Government's naïveté and largess, turning the Witness Security Program into a criminal hide-out.

The stupefying result of all this is that little has changed since the days when Raymond first made chumps out of the U.S. Justice Department. Although few inductees have abused WITSEC with the same panache as Michael Raymond, the 21-year history of the program reveals a virtual catalog of failures, from recidivism through bureaucratic ineptitude to Government callousness and neglect.

Throughout it all, WITSEC continues to grow, amassing a rogues' gallery of inductees. "Almost everything that could go wrong [with WITSEC] has, at one time or another," says Donald Bierman, a former Justice Department official who is now a criminal defense attorney in Miami. Bierman has had several clients enter WITSEC, often against his recommendation. "If you absorb enough scandal, eventually you become immune," he says. "Ironically, because of the program's long history of failure, it has now become virtually scandalproof."

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When 47-year-old Max Mermelstein entered the Witness Security Program in 1986, it must have seemed like the last possible option. As the man who had run U.S. trafficking operations for the Colombian cocaine cartel for seven years, he had a criminal career that had escalated to a point beyond his wildest dreams. From 1978 to the time of his arrest, Mermelstein is believed to have smuggled some 56 tons of cocaine into Florida. In a five-year period, he ran $300,000,000 in laundered currency through Colombia and Panama.

Mermelstein never planned on a career in crime. After marrying a Colombian woman he had met in Puerto Rico, he was introduced to Rafael "Rafa" Cardona Salazar, a major underboss for the Ochoa family, leaders of the Medellín cartel. On Christmas Day 1978, Rafa inexplicably murdered one of his fellow drugrunners after a long afternoon of free-basing cocaine. He and another smuggler then called on Mermelstein, whom he knew only casually at the time. They wanted Max to drive them around until they came down from their high. During their drive, Rafa, eyes ablaze, emptied five bullets into his roommate, who had been taunting him from the back seat of their rented van. "Just keep driving, Max. Don't say a fucking word," Mermelstein remembers Rafa saying.

Having witnessed, but not reported, a brutal murder, Mermelstein was an accessory to the crime, which effectively put him under the thumb of the cartel. His criminal associations with Rafa, Pablo Escobar and others flourished until June 1985, when he was jumped by a bevy of agents from the FBI, DEA, Customs and assorted other branches of American law enforcement. After searching Mermelstein's home, the Feds had enough on his drug operations to put him away for many lifetimes.

Faced with a life behind bars, Mermelstein remembered the words he'd heard many times from the murderous Rafa: "There are only two ways you get out of trafficking coke, in a box or in a cell." Mermelstein proved him wrong; he agreed to cooperate with the Government and go into the Witness Security Program.

"The day I got arrested was the best day of my life," says Mermelstein, now living under an assumed name somewhere in the United States. "If it hadn't happened, I'd be dead right now."

To initiate Mermelstein into WITSEC required extraordinary measures. Sixteen members of his family, mostly relatives of his Colombian wife, had to be relocated into the U.S. It presented the Marshals Service with a problem it has been forced to deal with more and more, as the so-called drug war escalates. According to the Justice Department's own statistics, nearly 80 percent of those now in the program are there because they or a family member testified in a drug-related case. More than one quarter of those are foreign nationals.

One might guess that with all the Colombians, Mexicans and Asians now entering the Witness Security Program, the Marshals Service would have devised a strategy for handling foreign refugees from our criminal-justice system.

Guess again.

Take the case of Arturo Jaramillo, Mermelstein's brother-in-law. Born and raised in Cali, Colombia, Jaramillo is described by his brother-in-law as "a quiet man who never wanted to be involved in drugs or violence." Still, he had been forced by Rafa to help dispose of his dead associate back in 1978, and he lived in fear of the Colombian drug merchants. When news of Mermelstein's "flip" reached him, he had no choice but to accept Uncle Sam's offer of a new identity in the United States. Although Jaramillo, his wife and young son spoke no English, they were inexplicably relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, a city not known for its racial tolerance.

The last time Mermelstein talked with his brother-in-law was November 13, 1986, "He was in a thoroughly morose mood," he says. "We tried to get an official assigned to his case to get him a Spanish-speaking psychiatrist--fast. What did the official do? He went on vacation."

One day later--on the day before his 49th birthday--Arturo Jaramillo was found hanged in a closet of the small apartment WITSEC had provided for him and his family. He had looped a rope over the hanger rod, tied it around his neck, then pulled on the rope with both hands until he strangled himself.

"I'll always blame myself, in a way, for what happened," says Mermelstein. "But I blame the program, too. Nobody involved [with WITSEC] understands the Latin mentality or the Latin people. They take my brother-in-law, his wife and kid, and stick them in a place like Memphis. Aside from the fact that it is one of the most bigoted places in the United States, nobody there speaks Spanish. They couldn't get a driver's license, because the tests weren't given in Spanish. They were just dumped in an apartment and left to fend for themselves." Echoing the sentiments of many currently in the program, Mermelstein adds, "Nobody (continued on page 156) Wiseguy (continued from page 76) cared. Those asshole inspectors out there just didn't give a flying fuck."

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Back in the early Sixties, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy first made the pursuit of organized-crime figures a top Government priority, a program for protecting high-profile informants and their families must have seemed like a dandy idea. As early as 1963, Kennedy hinted to the Senate subcommittee on organized crime that a program already existed on an informal level. Although official procedures had not been worked out, the means for protecting important witnesses were established that year when Mob hit man Joseph Valachi spoke before a Senate subcommittee on organized crime. His testimony was a revelation, and the fact that he dared give it at all was proof of the program's power.

Along with its potential as a crime-fighting tool, the concept of witness relocation contained a peculiarly American notion--a chance to correct past mistakes and literally become a new person. There was a kind of implied freedom in the program that suited the Great Society. The idea--that a lifelong criminal might somehow cleanse himself with the help of the Federal Government and emerge a chastened, productive member of society--was, of course, incredibly simplistic and naive. Yet so appealing was this concept that for years the public accepted the Justice Department's contention that the program was working, even as the horror stories mounted.

"In the beginning," says John Partington, a former U.S. Marshal assigned to WITSEC, "we never had any manuals or textbooks to go by. Basically, we were making it up as we went along. Soon the demands became so great we just couldn't keep up. It became like the uninformed talking to the misinformed." The program was devised to handle fewer than 30 or 40 elite witnesses a year, but during his 15 years as a regional inspector, Partington would personally guard, relocate and help falsify I.D.s for nearly 2600 inductees.

"A big part of the problem," says Partington, now retired, "has always been that the program is run out of Washington. The bureaucrats don't seem to have any understanding of what's happening out there in the real world. They've never had to face up to their decisions."

For a long time, the Justice Department avoided making any written promises to witnesses. Only recently have inductees been required to sign a memorandum of understanding--known as an M.O.U. In the agreement, the Marshals Service makes it clear that while it will assist a witness in finding employment, it will not falsify credit or work histories. Thus, the witnesses are totally dependent on the Government to find them work and are prone to look for outside income. Says Partington, "You've got people in the program who are being asked to take on a lifestyle they've never experienced before. We've got guys--lifelong gangsters--capable of making two and three hundred thousand dollars a year through crime, and here we are, asking them to work nine to five, five days a week, for maybe fifteen grand a year."

An even more insurmountable problem than the financial strains faced by those in the program is boredom. It doesn't take a criminal sociologist to figure that people accustomed to an exciting, high-wire lifestyle will have trouble adjusting to working-class sobriety. Such has been the case with thousands of inductees.

Henry Hill, the Mafia wanna-be lionized in the book Wiseguy (the basis for last year's hit movie GoodFellas), is just one example. After a long career as a mid-level hustler affiliated with the Lucchese crime family in Brooklyn and Queens, Hill cut a sweetheart deal with the Government in 1980 and testified against his former pals, Jimmy "the Gent" Burke and the late capo Paul Vario. Relocated to Redmond, a Seattle suburb, Hill found his new life to be interminably dull. As he put it at the end of the book and film, "Today everything is very different. No more action. I have to wait around like everyone else. I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook."

The irony, of course, is that Hill did not wait around. In May 1987, he was arrested on Federal drug charges after an undercover agent bought cocaine from two underlings who fingered him. Like their boss before them, Hill's henchmen turned canary and agreed to testify against him in court. A jury took two hours to deliver a conviction.

Hill had a strong incentive to stay clean, yet his addiction to the excitement and danger of crime--and the notoriety it provided--took precedence, a fact amply illustrated at the time of his arrest. When confronted by Washington state troopers, Hill is said to have asked pleadingly, "Don't you know who I am? I'm Henry Hill--the wiseguy."

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It's not hard to fathom the appeal the Witness Security Program might hold for a career criminal facing a long prison sentence. Although inductees are often warned that life in the program will not be easy, the difficulties seem remote relative to getting whacked with a baseball bat or stuffed into a car trunk.

The assumption, of course, is that the Government will be able to deliver on most of what it promises. "What the Government says it can do and what it has the ability to do are two different things," says Mermelstein, who has been relocated four times in the past four years. "I've known lifelong criminals with more of a sense of honor than some of the people who run this program."

The prime appeal of WITSEC has always been the manufacture of a viable false identity, supported by all the documents. Although the Government continues to insist that it can process records at short notice, the history of the program suggests otherwise.

"Every week I was on the phone," says John Partington, "with some witness shouting in my ear, 'My kid wants to play little-league ball and he needs medical records.' 'My daughter wants to get married and where's the goddamn driver's license?' And what about a birth certificate? You need a birth certificate before you can do anything.

"Most times, these are street-smart people--hustlers. They're not Billy Grahams. They'd say to me, Just gimme a week. I'll get my own documentation.' And I'd have to say, 'But that's not legal. You do that and you're back to your old ways.' It was frustrating. Why should it take the Government months to do what these people could do in days?"

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Despite the obvious failings of the program, there has never been a shortage of criminals trying to get in. During WITSEC's most ambitious period, the mid-Seventies, criminals were tripping over one another to cut a deal with the Feds and get relocated. From 1971 to 1977, the annual number of inductees exploded from 92 to 450. The standards for admission broadened beyond organized crime to include people for whom the program was never intended--smalltime dope dealers, innocent victims of crime and white-collar stool pigeons. As those inductees worked their way through the system, new problems arose. Witnesses were told by the Marshals Service that they could no longer consider Atlanta, San Francisco or San Diego for relocation, because those areas were full.

If providing documentation and satisfying employment for lifelong gangsters with minimal job skills has presented the Government with difficulties, finding adequate work for college-educated brokers and other white-collar types has proved an impossibility.

Consider the case of Marvin Naidborne, WITSEC's most notable white-collar failure. The bespectacled manager of a Brooklyn car-leasing agency, Naid-borne had a character flaw: He was an inveterate gambler often in debt to loan sharks. Arrested in the late Sixties, he was given leniency and relocation and testified in a number of trials, where he fingered, among others, a bank president who had received kickbacks for extending loans to his buddies at the Italian-American Civil Rights League.

After relocation in the program, Naidborne, who had a degree in business administration, waited around for the Government to come up with a job, as promised. One of the jobs was part-time work as a process server. "That's a great job," Naidborne later told a reporter. "I bump into someone who knows somebody in the Mob and I get killed."

In due time, Naidborne heard of an opening as general manager of a Volkswagen dealership that paid $42,000 per year. When he asked the Justice Department to vouch for him, his request was ignored.

Totally dependent on the Government for subsistence, Naidborne spent the next few years working as a freelance rat fink. He would wander into a city, nose around and eventually present the Government with a major crime case. He would collect informer's fees from the FBI or the DEA, witness fees from the Justice Department and sometimes insurance rewards for recovered goods. In one newspaper article, Federal officials confirmed Naidborne's claim that he had accounted for arrests across the country involving drugs, stolen and counterfeit securities, stolen airline tickets and bookmaking rings. In a good year, he claimed he could make $30,000 as a Witness Security vampire. But it was a sorry, paranoiac life, said Naidborne, living on the run in bad motels. He blamed WITSEC: "They just don't care. They leave you there, out in the cold, like an animal. I don't want their money. ... I just want a job, a chance to get my life straightened out."

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Throughout WITSEC's troubled history, its flaws have frequently been fodder for investigative journalists. The Marvin Naidborne case led to a series of damning articles in Long Island's Newsday. In 1976, Fred Graham published a book called The Alias Program, a scathing view of WITSEC. The bad press resulted, in part, in hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, chaired by Georgia Senator Sam Nunn. Federal lawmakers finally took a look at a program they had been routinely funding over the previous decade.

The result was an abundance of saber rattling--one Senator called WITSEC "a body without a brain"--but little in the way of legislation. It wasn't until 1984 that Congress enacted the Witness Security Reform Act, a toothless capitulation to the powers that run the program. Since then, there have been no substantive Congressional reviews, and WITSEC's budget has steadily increased, from $2,000,000 in 1972 to nearly $44,000,000 in 1988.

The program's most obvious deficiency has always been the degree to which it provides a framework for criminals to prey on unsuspecting communities, as in the case of Michael Raymond. Although the Justice Department claims that the current rate of recidivism among WITSEC's inductees is less than half the national average for felony offenders, this has never been very comforting for local cops. When trying to get information on someone they suspect might be a relocated witness, more often than not they find themselves butting heads with an intractable Justice Department.

One case that nearly singlehandedly sank WITSEC involved a bank robber and hardened lifer named Marion Albert Pruett. Pruett was released 11 months early from an eight-year prison term because he testified on behalf of the state of North Carolina in a murder case. After being relocated to New Mexico with his common-law wife, Pruett went on a violent rampage, murdering five people. One of those murdered was his wife, whom he bludgeoned with a hammer, strangled with a belt, then carried into the desert near Albuquerque, where he poured gasoline over her body and burned it beyond recognition.

When Pruett's case was brought before the U.S. General Accounting Office in 1982, it raised more than a few troubling questions. Local police in a number of jurisdictions had been trying to track him for years, but no one had been able to obtain information on his past. Even more pertinent was the degree to which informants like Pruett were supervised, and how closely they were monitored after their release from the program.

The Marshals Service may be correct in its claim that instances of people like Pruett's creating one-man crime waves are low, but there remain other troubling issues, such as the program policy toward innocent people who, for whatever reason, feel that they have been wronged as a result of WITSEC. In hundreds of cases, for instance, witnesses have used the program to dodge lawsuits and debt collectors. Some have even used it to keep divorced spouses from visiting their children. One such case, involving a Buffalo construction worker named Tom Leonhard, went as far as the U.S. Supreme Court.

A law-abiding patriot, Leonhard had been granted visitation rights to see his children each weekend by the courts of New York State. When they abruptly disappeared one afternoon with his ex-wife's new husband, Leonhard made the rounds of the local offices of the U.S. Marshals, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney. For two years, the Justice Department refused to admit it had had anything to do with his children's disappearance.

It was discovered that the children had, in fact, been relocated, so Leonhard sued the Government. Ultimately, a U.S. appeals judge ruled that since the officials of the Justice Department had "acted in good faith," the Federal court would not second-guess the officials' "rational exercise of discretion." Leonhard and the New York courts were bound by the decisions of WITSEC.

This example and others like it illustrate yet another flaw in the program--one that the Marshals Service has never been able to reconcile. In promising to protect the new identities of its inductees, the Justice Department is torn between its obligation to the witness and its obligations to the public. The result is that it is often unable to fully protect the interests of either.

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In contrast to the complex and abundant reasons WITSEC has never really worked as intended, the justification for its continued existence--according to those who support the program--is short and sweet: The Witness Security Program brings about convictions.

"You cannot make an organized-crime case in this country without it," says Richard Gregorie, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in Miami who initiated hundreds of people--including Max Mermelstein--into the program during his 17-year Government career. "Our system of law requires firsthand evidence. Hearsay won't make a case. Unless you have someone who can put the criminal there firsthand, a conviction isn't going to happen."

There is no question that the U.S. Government has won a number of impressive victories in the past decade against what it likes to call "traditional organized crime." Together with the Racketeering and Corrupt Practices (RICO) statutes, the Witness Security Program has played an important role in these convictions. Virtually every major Mob case in recent years has relied heavily on turncoat witnesses. Invariably, the promises of the program have laid the groundwork for informant cooperation.

The fact that it works as a crime-fighting tool evidently carries weight with legislators and the public. Both seem resigned to accept the concept of a flawed WITSEC, believing, perhaps, that by fabricating new names and identities for people, our Government is proving its daring and omnipotence. The problem, of course, is that by allowing Government this power, we are only encouraging arrogance and cynicism, a fact amply illustrated by those who run WITSEC.

The program is now headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, and is run by Gerald Shur. Described by one witness currently in the program as "a small man with a small mind and a God complex," Shur is often cited by inductees as one of WITSEC's biggest administrative problems. He is known as something of a monomaniac in the J. Edgar Hoover mold and his decision-making process has been called "dictatorial and capricious" by one former WITSEC employee.

Shur almost never talks with the press, and he turned down repeated interview requests for this article. Doug Tillit, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals, responded by saying, "Our position is that there are some people who support the program and some who don't. There's nothing we can do or say about it." Shur has always preferred to let those who benefit most from the program--Federal agents and Government prosecutors--extol its virtues. As for its deficiencies, to say that WITSEC has engaged in a cover-up or two would be a quaint accusation. The program was designed to engage in deception.

It would be a mistake, however, to blame the failings of WITSEC entirely on Shur, or even on the inadequacies of the Marshals Service. The real question is not whether the program is badly administered but whether or not it can ever be administered.

No single group has a more acute understanding of this than the witnesses themselves. Dozens have turned to the press or the courts seeking an outlet, usually out of frustration with the Justice Department's lack of accountability.

Most witnesses enter the program in such a state of paranoia and fear that they willingly follow the Government's lead. For every Michael Raymond or Marion Albert Pruett--lifelong criminals who see WITSEC as just one more exploitable branch of the system--there are hundreds whose motives are more confused. Once persuaded by the Government to become informants, they have little choice but to see WITSEC in the most hopeful of terms, as a kind of redemption, a chance to cleanse their misbegotten souls.

Joe Labriola, a smalltime gangster from Connecticut, was looking for just such a cleansing in 1987 when he was busted for trafficking in cocaine. At the age of 51, Labriola did not want to spend any more time in jail. Despite misgivings, he decided to become a Government informant.

As with many criminals who do so, Labriola seemed to crave the approval of his masters. After each trial in which he testified against his former friends, he sought reassurance from the agents and prosecutors, who told him, "You did the right thing."

Had Labriola known that the suicide rate among inductees into WITSEC was many times higher than the national average, he might have asked himself an obvious question: Why? And he might, have arrived at the obvious answer that those in the program were, after all, criminals, just like himself. To believe that the Government would ever truly concern itself with his welfare required the kind of wishful thinking of which only truly desperate men are capable.

Throughout his cooperation, Labriola sought to endear himself to the only friends he had left--the lawmen. Often he would cook meals for the police and prosecutors as they discussed his next day's testimony. Joe would regale them with stories from his Mob days, and they would all laugh and slap one another on the back. It was almost like old times, when Labriola had told wiseguy stories with his buddies until the dim hours of the morning.

But there was a difference. These men were cops and he was not. At the end of each day, they went home to their wives and kids, while he slinked around, feeling like a rat, hoping he wouldn't inadvertently blurt out some small fact that might betray his true identity. The contradictions in his life caused Labriola to suffer bouts of deep depression, which he sought to alleviate through the occasional use of cocaine and heroin.

In May 1990, Joe could take no more. Sitting on the bed in his tiny Government-assigned apartment in Springfield, Massachusetts, he swallowed an entire bottle of medication he had been taking lor high blood pressure, chasing that with illegal drugs. He left behind a suicide note in which he said he could no longer take the pressures of being a Government witness. The last line, scrawled in what looked like a child's handwriting, read, "Don't be mad at me."

"You know," said a cop familiar with Labriola's case, "it's not all that shocking to me. Joe was in a lot of anguish. He never felt good about turning. It was an abrupt change in lifestyle. He was caught between two worlds and wasn't comfortable in either of them."

There were no Federal agents at Labriola's funeral. He left the Witness Security Program the same way he entered it. Alone.

"The difficulties seem remote relative to getting whacked with a bat or stuffed into a car trunk."