Free Witsec by Pete Earley Page A

guy all his life, and now he was supposed to work forty hours a week in a manufacturing plant. It was unrealistic. He was supposed to start carrying a lunch bucket to work, but he didn’t even know what one was!” Within a week, Calabrese was on the telephone to Kennelly. “We’re dying here,” he griped. “You got to give us more money.” Kennelly suggested he take out a bank loan. That’s what legitimate families did. Three months later, Kennelly received a call from Calabrese’s boss at the manufacturing plant. The “Angelo” family had taken out a loan and then vanished without repaying a cent, leaving behind a very angry bank manager.
    Paddy Calabrese would later be identified as the first mob witness to be given a false background and relocated by the Justice Department. It was not an awe-inspiring beginning.

CHAPTER
FIVE
    A t about the same time the strike force was trying to decide what to do about Paddy Calabrese, the FBI was dealing with a mob witness of its own in New England, and its agents, much like their counterparts in Buffalo, were traveling in uncharted waters. Joseph Barboza, nicknamed “the Animal,” had agreed to testify against New England crime boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca after he learned Patriarca was trying to kill him. Like Calabrese, the Barboza case would become one of the steppingstones that was eventually to lead to the creation of WITSEC.
    A ruthless contract killer, Barboza was responsible for at least twenty murders, nearly all done at Patriarca’s bidding. He was such an important mob witness that J. Edgar Hoover personally called his agents each day when they were interrogating the hit man to hear what he was telling them. There would be speculation later that Hoover was hoping Barboza would somehow link the mob to the Kennedy family, since Patriarca controlled the LCN in Massachusetts, but apparently he didn’t know of any ties. The thirty-five-year-old Barboza had been arrested in October 1966 on several minor charges and had assumed Patriarca would post his bail, as he had done before. Instead, the crime boss seized the opportunity to killthree of Barboza’s closest friends and put a contract on him in prison. Patriarca had heard gossip that Barboza was secretly plotting to take over his operations, which stretched from the outskirts of New York City to the Canadian border with Maine. As soon as Barboza agreed to testify, the U.S. Marshals Service sent deputy U.S. marshal John J. Partington to protect the gangster’s wife, Janice, and his young daughter, Terri. The Marshals Service is the oldest of all the federal law enforcement agencies, dating back to 1789, when the first Congress created the job of U.S. marshal to oversee federal court proceedings, protect judges in court, and handle witnesses. Partington, who was stationed in Providence, Rhode Island, was chosen for two reasons: He’d guarded witnesses before in local cases, and he was familiar with Patriarca, who operated out of an office in a laundry in Providence. Partington suspected the FBI had another reason for passing him the job—its agents didn’t want to be bothered baby-sitting a mobster’s family.
    As soon as Partington arrived at Barboza’s house in Swampscott, Massachusetts, he posted deputies with shotguns at the front and rear doors. “Looking back on it now, I’ve got to say we were like the Keystone Kops,” he later recalled. “Protecting families was new to us. There were no manuals, no instruction books. We were learning as we did things.” Partington proved to have good instincts. To this day, he is considered by many to be one of the best deputies the U.S. Marshals Service ever produced when it comes to witness protection. Partington had just turned thirty in 1966, but he looked even younger. He had sandy brown hair, sparkling blue eyes, a lanky frame, and aw-shucks, small-town manners. He’d grown up outside Providence in a tiny hamlet, where he’d gotten his first job asa police