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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 cared. Those asshole inspectors out there just didn’t give a flying fuck.”
    Back in the early 1960s, 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 informant 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 thirty or forty elite witnesses a year. But during his fifteen years as a regional inspector, Partington would personally guard, relocate, and help falsify IDs for nearly 260 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 MOU. 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 looking for outside income. Says Partington, “You’ve got people in the program who are being asked to take on a lifestyle that 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