Free Witsec by Pete Earley Page B

officer after a two-year stint in the army. In 1961, he had joined the U.S. Marshals Service, and when Robert Kennedy fingered Patriarca as one of the LCN bosses he wanted to indict, Partington was sent to help two IRS agents nab him. They were not the first to try. As early as 1930, Patriarca had been identified as Providence’s “public enemy number one,” but he had been sent to prison only once, and that incident had sparked a statewide scandal. Patriarca had been sentenced in 1938 to five years for armed robbery but was paroled by the governor after serving only a few months. It turned out that one of the governor’s aides had arranged the release in return for a large campaign contribution.
    Partington had first met Patriarca in 1961, when the newly hired deputy was sent to serve a subpoena on the aged mobster in Federal Hill, an Italian American neighborhood that overlooks the state capitol in Providence. A Long Island newspaper reporter described Federal Hill this way back then: “It is Patriarca’s stronghold, an armed camp where gnarled old men with undersized fedoras watch suspiciously from their chairs propped against the walls of darkened social clubs, ready to make hand signals whenever a stranger approaches.” The moment Partington stepped through the front doors of the Patriarca-owned Nu-Brite Cleaners, two bodyguards stopped him. “Patriarca came out from his office in the back to see who I was,” Partington recalled. “He was eating a sandwich.” Not knowing any better, Partington started to reach inside his coat jacket for his badge. Patriarca dove behind a door, dropping his sandwich. His bodyguards grabbed Partington’s arms and pinned him to the wall. They thought he was reaching for a handgun.
    “It’s okay!” Partington yelled. “I’m a federal man.”
    After Partington handed Patriarca the subpoena, the LCN boss lectured him about mob etiquette. “Anytime you want me, kid, I am here. But don’t you ever go to my house, you hear? My wife, she don’t have nothing to do with my business.
Capisce?
” The FBI, which had an illegal bug planted in the cleaners, overheard Patriarca telling his attorney a few minutes later that he’d been served a subpoena by a “real Boy Scout.”
    Partington was surprised when he met Barboza’s wife. Janice Barboza was not the mob moll he expected. Still in her twenties, she was polite, bright, and beautiful. Her three-year-old daughter reminded him of the child movie star Shirley Temple. “I wanted them to live as normal a life as possible while we were protecting them,” Partington recalled, “so I told my men that no one was allowed to use the bathroom in the house. I didn’t want her cleaning up after us. I also had the Marshals Service send out a matron to be with us because I didn’t want three men alone with this very attractive woman every day and night.” Within minutes after Partington arrived, the Barbozas’ cat escaped out a back door, and Terri began to cry. The two deputies with Partington were not about to run outside and look for it, but Partington did—much to their irritation. “A lot of deputies didn’t like protecting witnesses or their families because they considered them scum, but I didn’t feel that way,” he recalled. “What had Barboza’s little girl ever done? It wasn’t my job to judge them. We were there to keep them alive, and I knew it would be easier if they knew I cared enough about them to chase down a family cat.”
    During the next month, Partington spent sixteen hours a day at Barboza’s house, and although he lecturedhis men not to get personally involved with Janice and Terri, he grew close to both of them. Terri waited in the kitchen each morning for “Uncle John” to arrive. At night, he read her stories before she went to bed. Once a week, deputies took Janice to visit Barboza, who was being hidden under an alias in a jail on Cape Cod. Otherwise she never left the house, and soon she was going