Whitey's Payback Read Online Free PDF Page B

employment for lifelong gangsters with minimal job skills has presented the government with difficulties, finding adequate work for college-educated brokers and other white-collar types has proved an impossibility.
    Consider the case of Marvin Naidborne, WITSEC’s most notable white-collar failure. The bespectacled manager of a Brooklyn car-leasing agency, Naidborne had a character flaw: He was an inveterate gambler often in debt to loan sharks. Arrested in the late 1960s, he was given leniency and relocation and testified in a number of trials, where he fingered, among others, a bank president who had received kickbacks for extending loans to his buddies at the Italian-American Civil Rights League.
    After relocation in the program, Naidborne, who had a degree in business administration, waited around for the government to come up with a job, as promised. One of the jobs was part-time work as a process server. “That’s a great job,” Naidborne later told a reporter. “I bump into someone who knows somebody in the Mob and I get killed.”
    In due time, Naidborne heard of an opening as general manager of a Volkswagen dealership that paid $42,000 per year. When he asked the Justice Department to vouch for him, his request was ignored.
    Totally dependent on the government for subsistence, Naidborne spent the next few years working as a freelance rat fink. He would wander into the city, nose around and eventually present the government with a major crime case. He would collect informer’s fees from the FBI or the DEA, witness fees from the Justice Department, and sometimes insurance rewards for recovered goods. In one newspaper article, federal officials confirmed Naidborne’s claim that he had accounted for arrests across the country involving drugs, stolen and counterfeit securities, stolen airline tickets, and bookmaking rings. In a good year, he claimed he could make $30,000 as a Witness Security vampire. But it was a sorry, paranoiac life, said Naidborne, living on the run in bad motels. He blamed WITSEC: “They just don’t care. They leave you there, out in the cold, like an animal. I don’t want their money…. I just want a job, a chance to get my life straightened out.”
    Throughout WITSEC’s troubled history, its flaws have frequently been fodder for investigative journalists. The Marvin Naidborne case led to a series of damning articles in Long Island’s Newsday . In 1976, Fred Graham published a book called The Alias Program , a scathing view of WITSEC. The bad press resulted, in part, in hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, chaired by Georgia senator Sam Nunn. Federal lawmakers finally took a look at a program they had been routinely funding over the previous decade.
    The result was an abundance of saber rattling—one senator called WITSEC “a body without a brain”—but little in the way of legislation. It wasn’t until 1984 that Congress enacted the Witness Security Reform Act, a toothless capitulation to the powers that run the program. Since then, there have been no substantive Congressional reviews, and WITSEC’s budget has steadily increased, from $2 million in 1972 to nearly $44 million in 1988.
    The program’s most obvious deficiency has always been the degree to which it provides a framework for criminals to prey on unsuspecting communities, as in the case of Michael Raymond. Although the Justice Department claims that the current rate of recidivism among WITSEC’s inductees is less than half the national average for felony offenders, this has never been very comforting for local cops. When trying to get information on someone they suspect might be a relocated witness, more often than not they find themselves butting heads with an intractable Justice Department.
    One case that nearly single-handedly sank WITSEC involved a bank robber and hardened lifer named Marion Albert Pruett. Pruett was released eleven months early from an eight-year prison term because he