Authors: Pete Earley
Events heated up quickly. In October 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal. Rather than comply, both resigned. Nixon had Richardson’s replacement, Robert Bork, fire Cox and ordered the FBI to seal off his office. The media called it the “Saturday Night Massacre.” “The country was in turmoil, and everyone was afraid Dean was going to get whacked,” McPherson said. “There were whispers that Nixon was going to send the CIA out to silence him. There were deputies who were afraid to help guard him.” Dean and his wife, Maureen (Mo), hadn’t wanted to use aliases or go undercover with new identities, so McPherson personally protected them. He and the couple flew to Nashville at one point so Dean could go over his Watergate testimony with federal prosecutors. “The Deans were getting cabin fever, so Dean asked if he and his wife, Mo, could take a break and visit the Grand Ole Opry,” McPherson recalled. He hid them under floppy hats and sunglasses, but he couldn’t conceal the fact that Mo was a shapely blonde. As they were walking through the Opryland amusement park, Dean became nervous. “Those guys are staring at me,” he whispered
to McPherson. Four men standing a few feet away were clearly gawking.
“Okay, let’s go,” McPherson replied, hustling them off.
“Those guys
were
staring,” he recalled later, “but not at Dean. They were staring at Mo, who was wearing a tight sweater. I just didn’t have the heart to tell him.”
At another point, Dean happened to cross paths with Vinnie Teresa, who was in California and also being protected by McPherson. “You look a little wet behind the ears to be the president’s lawyer,” Teresa told Dean. “How’d you get there so young? Your old man put in the fix?”
“No,” Dean replied. “I just kissed a lot of ass, Vinnie, a lot of it.”
During the next five years, McPherson relocated more than three hundred witnesses. They were usually sent to him by John Partington. “John would snatch up these guys in New York and New England and protect them while they testified. Then he would send them out to me and I would find them a place to live and help them adjust. I ended up buying furniture out of my own pocket and keeping it in storage so when a family got here, I had something to loan them until their furniture was shipped out here. They knew I’d do things like that to help them. I became ‘Uncle Bud’ to their kids, the best man at their weddings.”
If McPherson got into a pinch, he skipped over Marshals Service headquarters and spoke directly to Shur at the Criminal Division in the Justice Department. “My private line would ring,” Shur recalled, “and Bud would say, ‘This is a noncall,’ meaning that he didn’t want anyone to know he was calling me directly. He’d describe a witness problem that needed fixing, and I’d do
what I could to resolve it. It was his way to get around red tape, and I came to trust him completely.”
Relocating gangsters was difficult. “Italians are clannish,” McPherson said. “Families are very important to them. Nearly every wife who was relocated was angry because her husband was responsible for taking her away from her family and the neighborhood where she had grown up. In Brooklyn, she had her mother, her sisters, her brothers, her friends, her priest, whom she could turn to for support and help. Out here, there was only me. I’d get a call at two
A.M.
from a hysterical wife saying her husband was chasing other women or beating up one of their kids. I’d drive over and take the wiseguy into another room, because you never wanted to belittle him in front of his family, where his ego would be on the line. I’d say, ‘Listen, you’re in the fucking program now, and there are rules. You aren’t on the streets anymore. I’m running this show, and if you don’t like it, get the fuck out of here. You’ll be dead in twenty-four hours. You need this fucking program to stay alive, and I’m going to throw your ass out of it if you don’t straighten up and play by the rules.’ My lecture usually worked. What was difficult was when the wife and kids would get into a fight or the son would have a drug problem or get into trouble at school. I couldn’t threaten to throw
them
out of the program.”
McPherson generally relocated witnesses within a one-hour drive of his house in Los Angeles so he could reach them quickly if they called for help. He settled nearly a hundred witnesses in Orange County alone, and that soon proved to be a mistake. “We were flying witnesses back to New York to testify, and rather than keeping them separated in different hotels, we put them all in one place so it would be easier and cheaper to protect them,” McPherson recalled. “We
put them all on one floor of a New York hotel, and at night the witnesses would get together and talk.” Several discovered they were living near each other in Orange County, so they exchanged telephone numbers and addresses. When they returned home, they got together and decided to muscle in on the local drug business. The police didn’t have a clue what was happening in Orange County until October 1977, when an area drug dealer was shot to death as he was leaving a restaurant. All three shooters turned out to be relocated mob witnesses.
An outraged Orange County sheriff demanded that McPherson tell him the name of every WITSEC witness he had relocated in the county, but the deputy refused: “That would have been a breach of security.” The sheriff complained to the Marshals Service headquarters, then to the Justice Department, and finally to the White House. But each time, his complaints were sent back down the line to McPherson to answer.
“The sheriff got his revenge, though,” McPherson said. “He spotted me at a convention of California police officers and announced from the speaker’s podium: ‘There’s Bud McPherson. He’s the guy who relocated the Mafia to Orange County.’ ”
Under pressure from a local congressman, the Justice Department told McPherson not to relocate any more witnesses in Orange County for one year. But Hollywood took a lighter view of the escapade. It used it as the basis of the movie
My Blue Heaven
, starring comedian Steve Martin as Vinnie Antonelli, a New York wiseguy who is relocated in a San Diego suburb and soon finds the community crawling with other mob witnesses. “The movie was a comedy,” McPherson said, “but it was more accurate than other movies and shows I’ve seen about relocated witnesses.
Steve Martin was just like dozens of mob guys I knew. There’s a scene where Martin, who has never mowed grass in his life, learns how. So he is out mowing the lawn one day in his silk suit and he calls to his neighbor, ‘Hey, good day for a mow.’ That’s how these guys were. They didn’t fit in.”
Although McPherson was friendly with witnesses, he knew most would turn against him in an instant. “They were testifying against criminals who used to be their very best friends. If they’d turn on those guys, they’d damn well turn on you, especially if they had something to gain by doing it. I used to warn younger deputies to be careful when it came time to terminate a witness and stop giving him monthly subsistence checks. The really smart witnesses would call up your boss and say, ‘Hey, you got to relocate me because the inspector guarding me is dirty.’ Then they would bring up how you’d cut a corner or broken some law to help them. Your boss would have to relocate them, which meant they would get at least ninety more days of subsistence checks, which is what they wanted. Meanwhile, you’d be in trouble.”
Sometimes deputies in the field would find themselves being drawn into a scam and wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it. “In the early 1970s, it wasn’t uncommon for relocated witnesses to run up debts and then claim their lives were in danger and demand that we move them,” McPherson said. “When the creditors came looking, you had to lie. You knew where the witness was, but you couldn’t tell anyone. I had a witness order a freezer full of steaks the day before we were going to relocate him to Phoenix. He packed all the meat in ice chests and took it with him, leaving me to deal with an angry butcher.”
Another example of the sort of sticky situations
that deputies faced was a 1977 incident when two relocated mobsters called McPherson in a panic from a Dallas, Texas, jail. “Believe me, as soon as a witness has any type of problem, you become his best friend,” said McPherson. Eddie Greene and Salvatore Cardinelli had just been convicted of defrauding a bank out of a $9,000 loan and were about to be sentenced. They begged McPherson to intervene.
Greene, whose real name was Edmund Graifer, had been nabbed by the FBI in 1972 trying to fence $3.5 million in stolen Wall Street securities. He had entered WITSEC after testifying against a bigger fish involved in stock fraud—John “Johnny Dio” Dioguardi, the Mafia’s so-called New York labor expert and the gangster behind the 1956 acid blinding of newspaper columnist Victor Riesel. Prosecutors had used Graifer’s sidekick, Cardinelli, to corroborate his testimony, and Dioguardi had been given a fifteen-year prison sentence.
McPherson flew to Dallas, but Judge Sarah T. Hughes had already decided that Graifer and Cardinelli were bums living off monthly WITSEC checks. “Inspector McPherson,” she declared, “I don’t care what Graifer and Cardinelli did for the U.S. government. I wish I could give them twenty years.” The maximum sentence was three years each, but Hughes added her own special twist. “I am specifically ordering you to take these men directly to the federal maximum-security penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, not one of your cushy country-club prisons,” she announced. “I want them delivered directly to Leavenworth today, where I can be sure they will do hard time.”
McPherson began to protest, but the judge refused to listen to him. “We had put several New York wiseguys in Leavenworth,” McPherson said later.
“Graifer and Cardinelli weren’t going to last twenty-four hours there without being stabbed. I had to do something.” McPherson ducked outside the courthouse to a pay phone and called his boss, who in turn connected him to the federal Bureau of Prisons. Its director explained that federal judges could only recommend where they wanted a prisoner sent; they couldn’t mandate it. The director gave McPherson verbal authorization to take Graifer and Cardinelli to a San Diego prison, where they would be safe. McPherson dashed back inside the courthouse to collect them. The three were then unceremoniously escorted by local deputies to the Dallas airport. “The U.S. marshal in Dallas was angry at me because I had put two criminals in his jurisdiction, so he told his deputies to make sure all of us got on the flight going directly to Kansas City, just as the judge had ordered.” While the local deputies watched, McPherson bought three tickets and boarded the airplane with his two prisoners. But just before the jet pulled away from the terminal, he hustled Graifer and Cardinelli off the plane. Just as he had expected, the local deputies had left, so McPherson raced to a nearby ticket counter and bought three new tickets for a flight going to California. It already had started boarding, so he and his prisoners ran to the gate. Just then McPherson realized there was a hitch in his plan. He hadn’t told the airline that he was transporting two prisoners, and the only way he could get them on the flight without a delay was by removing their handcuffs. “I am saving your fucking necks,” he told both men, “so before I take off the cuffs, I want your word you won’t try to escape.” Both gave it and walked onto the plane. He delivered them to the San Diego prison without a problem. But when news reached Dallas, an enraged Judge Hughes cited him for contempt of court
and issued an arrest warrant. “If you ever enter Texas, your ass is mine,” the Dallas marshal told him. The judge didn’t cool off for several months.
“Graifer turned out to be one of our success stories,” McPherson said. After he was paroled, he got a job selling cars in the San Francisco Bay area, and when he died in 1999, he owned a dealership worth more than a million dollars. Cardinelli was relocated and is still alive.
The problems McPherson faced with other witnesses during his career were minor compared to the demands that Jimmy the Weasel made. After Fratianno was paroled in 1979 and given the alias Jimmy Marino, McPherson stashed him in Boise, Idaho, for safekeeping. “We still needed him to testify in dozens of cases,” McPherson recalled. “I had to keep him safe and happy. Neither was easy.” Fratianno was on the telephone complaining to McPherson less than twenty-four hours after he was relocated. “Someone in your program has sold me out!” he shouted. “I saw a hitter I knew outside this motel.”
McPherson didn’t believe him. “Why didn’t he kill you?” he asked.
“It don’t work that way,” Fratianno replied. “We don’t carry guns when we’re looking for someone. You don’t want to get caught with a gun. What they do is they go to a town with three, maybe four guys, and look for you. And when they know where you are at, they set it up with a getaway car. You don’t just kill a guy when you see him. Now you get me out of here or I’m not testifying.”
McPherson moved Fratianno and his wife, Jean, who by this point had asked to be reunited with him, into a house in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I don’t want nobody to know where I am except you and
Safir,” Fratianno declared. Two months later, he got up one morning and told Jean that he was taking off on his own. “I’ll arrange to see you every so often,” he said.
“I think Jimmy just wanted to get away from Jean,” McPherson recalled. “He always kept a girl or two on the side, and having the mob chasing him was a good excuse to leave home.” McPherson found him in California and arranged to relocate him again, this time without Jean.
During the next five years, Fratianno testified in a series of sensational Mafia trials. In Kansas City, he was the key witness in what then was the largest mob case ever undertaken. Fifteen defendants, a virtual who’s who of the midwestern mob, were convicted of paying kickbacks in return for $67 million in Teamsters union pension fund loans used to build Las Vegas casinos. In New York City, newly appointed U.S. attorney Rudolph Giuliani used Fratianno in five major Mafia cases that were going on simultaneously. Overall, Fratianno helped convict six crime bosses during the early 1980s and sent scores of lesser-known mobsters to prison. In the process, he became a nationally recognized celebrity. His photograph appeared on the cover of a half-dozen national newsmagazines. He was interviewed by every major television network news show, and his exploits were recounted in two best-selling memoir-confessionals:
The Last Mafioso
, by Ovid Demaris, and
Vengeance Is Mine
, by Michael J. Zuckerman. With typical Fratianno bravado, he would later claim that he had never bothered to read either book, but that didn’t stop him from suing the first author for allegedly misquoting him, and later quarreling with his second biographer.