Authors: Pete Earley
“Are you kidding?” Fratianno snapped. “You’re going to stick me in some town I’ve never seen before, and then put me to work? At my age? With all that I’m going to give you guys? Fuck that!”
“I think you have to understand something,” Shur said. “You’re not giving
us
anything. You may be helping the U.S. attorneys and the FBI, but those are
other parts of the Justice Department. I’m not here to cut any deals. I’m just telling you what’s going to be. If you don’t like what we’re offering, well, I can walk out of here today without a second thought about you.”
Shur’s hard-line stance flustered Fratianno, and his attorney suggested they take a short break.
“I felt Fratianno really didn’t have much of a choice but to say yes to our program,” Shur said later, “because he was already too far committed to turn back. No one in the mob was going to believe that he hadn’t talked to us. So I wasn’t really too worried. I also wanted to keep the upper hand.”
When the meeting reconvened, Fratianno explained that he had several girlfriends in California and didn’t want to be relocated out of state. Shur said he’d have to cut off all ties with the women and leave the state. “Listen,” said Shur, “you need to join the program for your own protection, but there is more at stake here. You need to testify because it is the right thing to do. You need to do it for your country and your family, to have something your grandkids can point to with pride.”
Donald “Bud” McPherson, a deputy marshal from Los Angeles sitting across the table from Fratianno, fought back a grin. “Gerry Shur was a great con man when it came to dealing with witnesses,” McPherson said later. “I had heard him sweet-talk people into WITSEC for years with his Kennedyesque ‘ask not what the country can do for you’ speech. But Jimmy the Weasel didn’t give a shit about his country or anything else that Shur was trying to move him with. It was the first time I ever saw Shur fail in trying to con a con.”
“Get out of my fucking life,” Fratianno snapped. “The question is not what I am going to do for my
country, it is what is the fucking country going to do for me?”
Shur and Fratianno continued at each other for nearly an hour. Fratianno would make a demand. Shur would reject it. When they took another break, Fratianno approached McPherson.
“Listen, this Shur character, now he’s the big boss in Washington, right, but you’re the guy who actually does the legwork,” Fratianno said, “so maybe you can help me out here?” McPherson knew Fratianno was trying to hustle him, but he, too, refused to promise the gangster any special favors through WITSEC. Finally, Fratianno asked: “Where you from?”
“Brooklyn,” McPherson replied. “I grew up with a lot of guys you probably know.” He mentioned several gangsters from his old neighborhood.
“You’re shitting me,” Fratianno replied. “You knew them guys?”
“I used to play football with ’em,” McPherson said, “and during the war, we stole ration stamps and sold them to neighborhood wiseguys.”
Fratianno laughed. “Hey, I didn’t know there were guys like you out here in California. I want you to be
my
guy in this program.”
McPherson told him the Marshals Service didn’t allow witnesses to choose who was going to protect them. “Sure they don’t,” Fratianno retorted sarcastically. “We’ll see about that, okay? Just remember: You’re gonna be my guy!”
Later that day, Fratianno agreed to enter WITSEC. Shur flew back to Washington. “I was exhausted. I hadn’t really given Fratianno anything he had demanded, but we had spent the entire day going back and forth while he tried every possible angle.” Shur still needed to tie up one loose end. He had to convince
Fratianno’s wife, Jean Bodul, to enter WITSEC. She had been the gangster’s longtime mistress until four years before, when they had married, but theirs was such an explosive relationship that they rarely lived together. “I contacted Jean by phone, and when I explained the rules to her—about how she would have to be relocated and given a new identity—she told me she wasn’t interested,” Shur recalled. “She said she was going to begin driving south. She wasn’t sure where she was going. I asked her to call me every day so we could be certain the mob hadn’t killed her. For several weeks she called and told me every day where she was. And then finally she agreed to enter the program.”
Back in L.A., McPherson got a phone call from WITSEC chief Howard Safir. “I want you to personally handle Fratianno,” he announced. “I’m not putting you in charge of him just because he asked for you. I think you’re the only guy who can handle him.”
One of McPherson’s first assignments was to sneak Fratianno into New York City so he could help federal prosecutors there decipher some twelve thousand wiretapped conversations between mobsters. Their bantering was confusing because they referred to each other by nicknames and frequently used unfamiliar mob terms or spoke in Italian. McPherson hid Fratianno in a mothballed World War II women’s barracks at Fort Hamilton, an army base on the Brooklyn waterfront. It was only a short distance from where crime bosses Joseph Colombo and Frank “Funzi” Tieri lived. “Don’t you know there are twenty-five hundred made guys in New York?” Fratianno asked the deputy. “We’re sitting right in the center of their camp!” McPherson wasn’t worried.
“I knew wiseguys,” he said later, “and I knew
they were not going to come onto a military installation and whack a guy. Terrorists might, but not wiseguys—at least not back in 1978.”
When Safir sent word that he was flying up from Washington to personally meet Fratianno, McPherson decided to run a scam of his own. He attached empty beer cans to wire coat hangers and then looped them over the doorknobs in the barracks so the cans rattled each time someone opened a door.
“What the hell is this?” Safir asked when he walked inside.
“That’s our alarm system,” McPherson replied. “We don’t have any electronic anti-intrusion equipment, so we rigged up these beer cans.”
Two days later McPherson received a crate filled with infrared alarm sensors, motion detectors, and video surveillance cameras. “I had been reaching a bit with the beer can stunt,” McPherson remembered, “but we were desperate for equipment back in those days. We never got anything in WITSEC operations until Howard Safir became chief.”
Fratianno spent his free time in the barracks cooking for McPherson and the other deputies assigned to protect him. They pooled the per diem the government paid them, and Fratianno sent McPherson to buy groceries. “I went to shops owned by mobsters and brought back cheeses and meats for Fratianno to eat. These mobsters didn’t know it, but they were feeding the very guy who was going to destroy them.”
Months later, when it finally came time for Fratianno to testify in a case for the first time, he stayed up all night, pacing, smoking cigars, and talking to McPherson. “All of his life, Jimmy had hated rats, and now he was going to walk into a courtroom and be one,” McPherson remembered. “It was incredibly difficult
for him, but I kept reminding him of how many times the mob had screwed him, and he would pause and then tell me about some other incident where he’d been screwed. That night, and for many more nights that followed, he talked to me about his past and the things he’d done, the people he’d known. He told me his life story so many times that later, when he began giving interviews to the media, the two of us used to joke that I could have traded places with him.”
Fratianno had arrived in America from Italy in 1913, when he was only four months old. His parents settled in a tough section of Cleveland called Little Italy. At age three, he saw three men murdered in his neighborhood by gangsters wielding machine guns. When he was six, he hit a policeman with a rotten tomato and then darted between people and cars to escape. An onlooker yelled, “Look at that weasel run!” The policeman noted in his report that the suspect was nicknamed “the Weasel,” and it stuck. Fratianno became a waiter in a speakeasy at age twelve. By the time he was seventeen, he was robbing illegal gambling joints. He turned twenty-three in prison, where he was serving time for beating up a bookie. After he was paroled in the 1940s, he moved to Los Angeles, where he fell under the spell of John Roselli, who was Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana’s man in Hollywood and Las Vegas. Had Roselli been given a choice, he probably would have been a movie producer. He made several Hollywood B movies, but none was memorable. Still, in Fratianno’s eyes, Roselli epitomized the successful wiseguy. He had style, a code of honor, respect from gangsters and movie stars. It was Roselli who sponsored Fratianno in 1946 when, at the age of thirty-three, he became a made member of the Los Angeles crime family then being run by Jack Dragna.
During the next three decades, Fratianno established his reputation as a hit man and rose through the ranks. Casino skimming in Las Vegas; President John Kennedy’s sexual trysts with Judith Campbell Exner, who also happened to be Chicago mobster Sam Giancana’s mistress; the CIA’s attempt in the 1960s to hire the Mafia to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro—Fratianno gossiped with other mobsters about hundreds of such mob schemes. But in the early 1970s, he started to become disillusioned with the mob after he was sent to prison on an extortion charge and a fellow wiseguy tried unsuccessfully to rape his first wife, Jewel Switzer. He became even more embittered in 1975, after John Roselli’s body was discovered inside a fifty-five-gallon oil drum bobbing in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Roselli was seventy-one years old and had been living in retirement in Florida when he was choked to death. By the time his killers got his body on board a boat, rigor mortis had set in, so they had to cut the corpse in half to make it fit into the drum. They weighted it down with heavy chains, but it floated to the surface anyway. He had been murdered shortly after he testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s reputed covert attempt to kill Fidel Castro, but he hadn’t really revealed anything new, and Fratianno felt the hit was unnecessary. His relationship with the mob continued to go downhill after that.
The pretrial jitters that had kept Fratianno awake all night before his first trial vanished as soon as he was seated in the witness chair. “Jimmy had an incredible memory,” McPherson recalled. “He could remember times, dates, names, and details. He never finished high school, but I saw him outsmart dozens of brilliant defense attorneys. I remember one attorney shouted,
‘Isn’t it true you are a proven liar?’ And Jimmy replied, ‘Yes, I’ve lied all of my life and done a lot worse, but if I lie about your client, my deal with the government is off and I will be out on the street and I will be murdered. If I tell the truth, nothing can happen to me.’ He would make defense attorneys regret they questioned his integrity. He had a way of talking to a jury and connecting with them.”
As part of his plea agreement, Fratianno had to serve nineteen months in prison. He spent several weeks in the notorious Valachi Suite, but most of the time he was on the road with McPherson, living in motels while he was being interviewed by various prosecutors. The pairing of Fratianno and McPherson was a brilliant stroke. Rude, pushy, and often arrogant, Fratianno was considered “a royal pain in the ass” within the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations branch. He would strut back and forth filling the air with vulgarities, all the while threatening to drop out of WITSEC and disappear unless his demands were met. It was McPherson’s job to calm him down. “I never forgot who Jimmy was,” McPherson said. “I showed him respect, but I was firm. I told him what I could and couldn’t do for him, and I never broke a promise. That was important. He respected that.”
McPherson was forty-five years old and had been a deputy for six years when he was assigned to protect Fratianno. “I think the fact I had grown up in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood gave me an edge with Jimmy. Everyone was either Italian or Jewish back home. I was neither, so I had to get along with both to survive.” McPherson had gone straight from high school into the army, where he served in Korea, and then returned home to become a New York City cop. But he hated the politics. “On my first day at work, I was told never
to give anyone connected to Joe Profaci or Frank Tieri a hassle—not even a traffic ticket. I said, ‘Are you kidding? What the fuck makes these mobsters so special?’ But that was how it was. The higher-ups didn’t want to bother the wiseguys.”
McPherson switched to the city’s fire department, got married and then divorced, and was injured on the job. He remarried and headed to Los Angeles to make a fresh start. Warner Brothers hired him to work as both a fireman and a policeman on movie sets, but he lost the job when the studio changed hands. He and his wife sold everything, bought a tractor-trailer rig, and spent two years delivering furniture for Global Van Lines, living in the truck cab and motels. One morning he read that the government was hiring “sky marshals” to prevent airplane skyjackings, so he applied and was hired. “I’d sit in first class flying from Los Angeles to Hawaii, where I kept a set of golf clubs in a locker. I’d play a few rounds and then return home to L.A. just in time to catch a flight to New York City, where I visited my parents.” When the hijacking threat lessened, the government grounded the sky marshals and had them begin inspecting luggage. “I didn’t want to spend my life looking through people’s skivvies, so I became a deputy U.S. marshal.” He finished first in his training class, something no deputy from Los Angeles had ever done. As a reward, he was put in charge of protecting witnesses—a job no one else in the office wanted. He’d been at work for only a few weeks in 1973 when he was told to meet a witness at the airport.
“Who is he?” McPherson asked.
“You’ll recognize him when he lands.”
Passenger “John West” turned out to be ex–White House counselor John Dean, who had just turned against President Richard Nixon. The Watergate scandal
was starting to unfold, and Dean was the only witness at the time who could tie the White House to the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters. “The U.S. marshal in Los Angeles had been appointed by Nixon and was loyal to him. He told me: ‘I don’t want to know anything about what you are doing with John Dean. Just handle it and keep me out of it.’ I figured I was the fall guy. If something happened to Dean, my boss would say, ‘Hey, McPherson finished first in his training class. Don’t blame me, we put our best guy on it.’ ”