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adjusting to working-class sobriety. Such has been the case with thousands of inductees.
    Henry Hill, the Mafia wannabe 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.”
    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 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?”
    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-1970s, 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—small-time 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.
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