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Partington was sent to a private airfield in Cape Cod to pick up Barboza. Even though it was nearly midnight, the gangster arrived wearing black sunglasses when he stepped out of an armored police van. He looked exactly as Partington had imagined. His greasy black hair was tucked under a fedora. He was unshaven. The collar on his trench coat was turned up, and a cigarette was dangling precariously from his lower lip. “There must have been twenty FBI agents carrying machine guns surrounding him,” Partington recalled. Strutting toward the waiting seaplane, Barboza yelled to Partington: “Hey you, where are my guards?” There was only one other deputy on the tarmac.

“Lose the cigarette,” Partington ordered. Barboza ignored him. “He was testing me,” Partington explained later, “so I told him, ‘Put out the goddamn cigarette or we’re not going anywhere.’ ” Barboza slowly took it out of his mouth and flipped it onto the runway.

“Who are you, the goddamn warden?” he asked. Partington didn’t reply. “I said, which one are you?” Barboza demanded.

“I’m Partington.”

“Oh, you’re the prick who’s been taking my wife to the beach in her bikini. You’re the one who’s been trying to …” The noise of the seaplane drowned out the rest of his sentence as they climbed aboard. They landed at another airport a short time later and boarded a helicopter for the final leg of the trip. The sun was rising by the time Thacher’s Island came into view. It was a half-mile-long clump of jagged rocks off the coast of
Gloucester, Massachusetts. “You gotta be shitting me,” Barboza groaned as the helicopter circled his new home. “You expect me and my family to live on this shithole?”

There were two lighthouses, known as the Twin Lights, on the island. Each was made of granite blocks, stood 124 feet high, and had been built in 1861. There were also two white Cape Cod–style houses, but they hadn’t been occupied since the Coast Guard had modernized the lighthouses several years earlier so that they operated automatically. The island was now inhabited only by bugs, rats, snakes, and seagulls, which survived by feeding off each other. The FBI thought it was perfect. Visitors were rare, and escaping from the island would be foolhardy. The waves crashing against its rocky shoreline were too strong for most swimmers, and landing a boat there would be very risky. Janice and Terri were waiting for Barboza in the smaller of the houses. The other was reserved for the sixteen deputies assigned to guard the family in three round-the-clock shifts. Both houses had been swept clean and painted but were still spartan.

Partington and Barboza locked horns from the start. Later that same day Barboza was outside helping his daughter learn how to ride a bicycle the deputies had gotten for her when Partington heard the child calling him.

“Uncle John,” Terri said, dashing up to him, “can I ride my bike some more?”

“Sure, sweetie, ride it all you want,” he answered.

Barboza grabbed her as she tried to climb back on the bicycle. Partington hadn’t known Terri had been told she was finished with her bicycle lesson and it was time for her to take a nap. “I don’t like you!” she screamed at her father. “I want John as my daddy.”

An hour later, Partington spotted Barboza walking on the rocks near the shoreline and went out to talk to him about what had happened. Without warning, Barboza sucker-punched him in the chin, knocking him down. At that same moment, a helicopter swooped down. Barboza walked to it nonchalantly and greeted the FBI agents who had come to see him. Striking a federal officer was punishable by ten years in prison, and Partington’s lip was bleeding by the time he joined the group.

“Is there a problem, John?” an FBI agent asked.

“No,” he replied, shooting a glance at Barboza. “No problem.”

From that point on, the two men held each other in grudging respect. “We spent hours talking. I was fascinated by how he operated, and he was curious about how we did our jobs. He explained to me how he killed people. He was teaching us his tricks as a mob hit man so we could do our job and keep him alive.”

When the FBI sent word that two hit men were headed toward the island on a yacht, Partington ordered all sixteen of his deputies to stand along the shoreline with their carbines in full view. He wanted the mobsters to think it was an armed fortress. It worked. The thugs retreated back to Boston. The deputies celebrated that night by giving Terri candy when she knocked repeatedly on their door. It was Halloween.

Some deputies thought Partington was coddling Barboza. When the gangster, who was an avid boxer, complained about being bored, Partington got him two different kinds of workout bags and arranged for a local prizefighter to be flown onto the island to spar with him. “Barboza would come busting into the deputies’ quarters foaming at the mouth and raising hell,” retired
deputy marshal Jesse Grider recalled, “and instead of saying, ‘Get your ass out of here and back to your own cabin where you’re supposed to be,’ Partington would calm him down by saying, ‘Joe, let’s talk about this.’ There were several times when I thought Partington needed to be firmer with him, but Partington said it was important to keep Barboza happy.”

The deputies rotated on and off the island every two weeks and most grew to hate their arrogant charge, but Partington lived on the island full time and later defended his actions by saying it was important to keep Barboza in good spirits. “If we simply had wanted to keep him safe, we could have stuck him in federal prison like we did with Joe Valachi,” he explained, “but keeping Barboza alive was only part of my job. Most people don’t have a clue about the emotional shit a guy like Barboza goes through once he decides to testify. Joe had been a criminal since age fourteen, and now he was turning against his friends and becoming the one thing he hated most—a rat. I had to keep him pumped up, keep his mind sharp so he’d testify. Otherwise we’d lose everything we’d spent months pulling together.”

With no television and few amusements, boredom and isolation began taking a toll. After two months, even Partington had had enough. “Barboza couldn’t stand losing, and one night we were playing cards and Joe says, ‘Whoever has the ace of hearts fucks his mother in the ass.’ I was sick of him, his attitude, being on the island, being away from my family—it had gotten to me—so I leaned forward, looked him right in the eye, and said, ‘Joe, what if I tell you I have the ace of hearts?’ and without flinching, he says, ‘Then, John, you fuck your dead mother in the ass, you asshole.’ I lunged at him.” The other deputies had to separate
them. Later that night, they made peace and talked about how their lives might have gone if they’d made different choices. “Joe was as cold as they came, but I discovered another side to him. Here’s a guy who would kill you in a heartbeat, but also wrote poetry and adored his daughter.”

When a Boston newspaper revealed Barboza was on the island, Partington arranged for a helicopter to ferry the family to a new hiding place. This time it was a seashore estate owned by a multimillionaire. The day after they left, the FBI learned that a hit man had planned on crashing a boat loaded with sixteen hundred pounds of dynamite into the island. During the next thirteen months, more than three hundred deputies served two-week stints under Partington’s command protecting Barboza. The Marshals Service had never before undertaken such a complex security operation, and matters were about to become even more dangerous. “When the trial finally began, we had to bring Barboza out of hiding, and that meant the mob would know exactly where he would be and when he would be there,” Partington explained.

The FBI would later learn that at least five different hit men were waiting outside the courthouse on the morning Barboza was scheduled to appear. One was hiding in a nearby office building with a high-powered rifle, the others at various entrances. Partington fooled them all. He had smuggled Barboza inside the courthouse three days earlier. The two of them had been sleeping on cots in a basement storeroom. Steel plates had been welded over the storeroom’s windows to keep bombs from being tossed inside. But the mob didn’t quit. A known LCN killer stole a police officer’s uniform and tried to bluff his way past deputies guarding the courtroom. When that didn’t work, the mob
planted a bomb in a car driven by Barboza’s attorney. The blast, which cost the attorney his right leg, was supposed to intimidate Barboza, but it only made him more determined. He testified for three days and kept his cool during intense grilling by defense attorneys. A jury found Patriarca guilty, and he was sentenced to five years in prison.

Patriarca’s trial was just the beginning. In the coming months, Barboza testified against a dozen other LCN members. Partington used a variety of schemes to sneak him into Boston for his court appearances. He had a Coast Guard cutter drop him at the Boston docks in the middle of the night, had him ride on a fishing boat to an isolated pier, hid him in the rear of the U.S. Postal Service truck delivering mail to the courthouse, and landed him by helicopter on the roof of a nearby office building. He and Barboza once arrived at the courthouse in a bright red sports car with caps on their heads and mufflers draped around their necks. Another time, Partington had a deputy disguised as Barboza arrive at the courthouse in an armored car with a police escort, complete with wailing sirens and flashing red lights, while Barboza sneaked in through a side door.

His testimony gutted Patriarca’s organization. After the last trial, the government decided to send Barboza and his family to live at a military base in Fort Knox, Kentucky, until it could decide what to do with them. Janice and Terri went ahead, but Barboza stayed behind. He was angry. By this time he’d become enamored of all the attention, and he didn’t want to be shuffled away. The night before he was scheduled to leave, he began threatening the deputies. He was going to “end it” his way.

“Just wait until tomorrow,” he warned. “You’re gonna see the real Joe Barboza, not the rat fink. You
bring your big shiny badges, bring your big shiny guns, because you’re gonna need them.”

The next morning, Partington announced he was going in alone. “I’ll take my walkie-talkie with me,” he explained. “If I click it twice, I want you to come in shooting.” Partington walked inside the house. Barboza hadn’t slept all night. He’d been exercising, preparing himself, just the way he did before a boxing match. Partington strolled over to the living room couch and stretched out on it lazily, pulling his cap over his eyes.

“Joe, we’ll leave here in about ten minutes,” he said.

“Where are the others?” Barboza asked.

“Do you think for one minute,” Partington replied, “after all you’ve done, after all we’ve been through, that I would let this end in a showdown? No way, Joe. We’re going out the way we came in. Just you and me. No leg irons. No handcuffs. Just the two of us.”

That deflated the crisis. The two men walked outside minutes later and rode to the airport. Waiting for them there was a delegation of U.S. marshals and the same U.S. Coast Guard seaplane that Partington had used to take Barboza to the island. The mobster climbed aboard, took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and defiantly blew smoke toward Partington. “It was his way of telling me to get screwed,” Partington said. He understood the importance of the moment. “We’d taken on the mob and we’d won. Trust me, there were lots of guys in the mob watching us, and the fact we’d protected Barboza and kept him alive gave them plenty to think about. We’d proved it could be done.”

G
erald Shur was lying on the living room couch with his head resting in Miriam’s lap one Saturday night in March 1966 when he suddenly felt ill. “As I started to lift my head, I felt dizzy and almost blacked out.” A wave of nausea swept over him. He felt jabbing pains in his legs and was wobbly. Miriam called their family doctor, but he was out of town. Another physician, a family friend, hurried over but thought the symptoms would pass. The next morning, Shur’s eyesight was blurry and he couldn’t move his legs or arms. The bee-sting pains had spread from his legs across his entire body. En route to the hospital in an ambulance, he felt certain he was about to die.

Blood tests, X rays, and a spinal tap revealed he had multiple sclerosis. A doctor told him there was no cure and that the course of the disease was totally unpredictable. Three days later, another ambulance took him home. There was nothing his doctors could do but treat his symptoms. Shur’s first thought was of Miriam and their children. “I had been working at the Justice Department slightly less than five years, and five was the magic number I needed to qualify for a pension. How was Miriam going to support the family?” She had returned to college and was about to graduate with a teaching degree, but it would be months before she
was working. “I told myself I had to live long enough for her to find a teaching job.”

A specialist at the National Institutes of Health told them that MS attacks the brain and spinal cord. Fifteen percent of MS sufferers show only mild symptoms, others have one or two flare-ups every few years, and still others become permanently disabled. While Miriam was encouraged, the report depressed Shur. “I didn’t want to be a burden for her.” He had developed quadruple vision, his legs hurt all the time, and he had no energy.

Up until that Saturday night, Shur had thought his life was perfect. He was happy at work and loved his family. He and Miriam had moved into a new four-bedroom house in a booming Maryland suburb. They were both active in community events. Together, they had helped start Temple Solel (
Solel
is a Hebrew word for “paving a new path”) as an alternative to the Conservative synagogue in the area. The congregation had held its first services in their living room. Now Shur began to wallow in self-pity and was tormented by self-doubt. “I sat in a chair and spent my days worrying about what was going to go wrong next. I could walk, but only if I was holding on to somebody. I was so afraid, I wouldn’t go outside.” He sat brooding in his room for two weeks until his twelve-year-old daughter, Ilene, confronted him.

“Daddy,” she said, “you’ve told us how we’re supposed to act when we have a problem, but you’re not acting that way. Tomorrow when I come home from school, we’re going for a walk.” All the next morning Shur worried. He didn’t want to disappoint Ilene, but he was frightened about going outside. What if he fell? What if he could only take a few steps? He hoped she would forget, but she came hurrying in to
see him as soon as she got home. “Okay, Daddy, it’s time,” she announced.