Authors: George Rowe
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Used with permission of The Associated Press Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved.
H
e'd been straight-out crazy dealing with the aftershocks of Operation 22 Green, but John Carr finally arrived at our motel a few days after the takedown. When I answered his knock, he thought he'd come to the wrong room until he realized that the clean-shaven baby face staring back at him was mine. John laughed and shook my hand, then I turned to introduce him to Jenna.
Holy shit!
It was like staring into the eyes of the Medusa. I mean, if a look could kill a man, Special Agent Carr would have been stone-cold dead on the floor.
“Hi, I'm Uncle John,” he said, gamely proffering his hand.
Jenna ignored it.
“No, you're not,” she snapped at him. “You're a fucking cop.”
A slow smile crept across John's face.
“I always knew you were going to be a handful.”
Jenna smirked back. “Whatever you say, Fabio.”
Fabio. Guess that was a slight aimed at John's shoulder-length hair. That's what Jenna would call John Carr from that day forward and
every chance she gotâjust to bust his balls. In her view, that ATF special agent was just as responsible for her predicament as I was.
John had come to the motel to talk about WITSEC. The U.S. Marshals Service had given a thumbs-up and were allowing us to enter the program, so John wanted to explain to Jenna what she could expect once she got on board . . .
if
she got on board. He told her we'd be given a place to live, that she could go back to school on the government tab and study to be a nurse (a bad idea Jenna wanted to pursue) and that I could learn how to operate the big cranes, something that interested me. But the entire time John was talking, Jenna's face remained scrunched up like someone in the room had farted.
“I can tell you're not really hip to the program,” John said after finishing the pitch.
“What was your first clue, Fabio?” was her snarky response.
“I know you don't like me, and that's okay,” said John. “I get that. This isn't the life you chose, and you're not happy about it. But you don't have many options here, Jenna. If you choose to split with the program and go off on your own, well, that's your choice. No one can force you to do this. But you and George have been together for almost three years, and you know as well as I do that the Vagos will think you knew what was going on. I really think you need to consider WITSEC as your best alternative.”
Jenna sat tight-lipped and refused to look at him. After a moment John and I left the room together.
“I'll have a marshal come talk to her,” he said as we started down the second-floor walkway.
I nodded and paused at the top of the stairwell to light a cigarette.
“What's going on with Billy?” I asked.
“If your fiancée gets on board, I'll talk to him and see if he'll sign off on the kid. But there's no point getting the process started until Jenna makes up her mind.”
“I think she'll do it,” I told him. “She's just a little pissed off right now.”
“A little?” John chuckled. “If that's a little, I'd hate to see her when she's really ticked.”
“It ain't pretty,” I said.
John smiled at this, then said, “Start getting your things together. We're moving you and Charles up to Oxnard this afternoon. There'll be more room there. You'll need it with the baby on the way.”
“We'll be ready.”
“And I'll need your cell phone when we get there. Jenna's too. Just precautionary.”
“Understood.”
John paused to look out over the parking lot.
“You know, George. To be honest, with all the crazy shit we've had to deal with, I'm amazed we pulled the fucking thing off.”
“We did, didn't we?” I smiled, and we shook hands.
John headed down the stairs and I tossed my cigarette and returned to the room. I found Jenna crying when I stepped through the door.
“I hate you for what you did,” she said, choking back angry tears.
“I know you do,” I replied. “But this is where we are . . . for better or worse, huh?”
She looked at me with scorn.
“Do you really think I'd marry you now? After what you've done?”
“That's up to you,” I told her as I opened one of the bureau drawers and began pulling clothes. “Right now we need to get our shit together. They're moving us again.”
“Oh, let me guess. And Joe's coming with us.”
“Joe's coming, yeah.”
She shook her head and wiped her eyes.
“Maybe you should fuckin' marry
him,
” she said sarcastically.
I kept my mouth shut and dumped a load of clothes on the foot of the bed.
“You know,” said Jenna quietly, “there was this one moment when we were driving away from the house that I thought, George could have left and I never would have seen him again. But he came back for me.
I'll finally have him all to myself. We'll be just like a real familyâjust the four of us.”
She gave a mocking laugh.
“And then I saw Joe standing outside that trailer and I thought, George, you motherfucker. Nothing's changed at all. This is how it will always be. George then Joe . . . then me.”
“Well, you'll be happy to knowâ”
“I don't want to hear it,” Jenna snapped as she rolled from the bed. “Go fuck yourself, George. You've ruined my life, you rat fucking bastard.”
She stormed into the bathroom and slammed the door so hard it woke Sierra.
John Carr was right. It would have been so much cleaner had I never let that crazy woman into my life. The hard truth was, I could shave the beard and change the name, but my past would continue to haunt me as long as Jenna remained . . . dragged from place to place like the chains of Marley's ghost.
Charles and I were
resettled at a Residence Inn in the city of Oxnard, about an hour's drive west of Los Angeles. Old Joe even got a room of his own. A few days later, true to his word, John brought in a coordinator from the U.S. marshals who explained the WITSEC program to Jenna all over again. And this time she listened. I guess as long as it wasn't Fabio doing the talking, she was willing to climb aboard the WITSEC train . . . especially once she learned Old Joe wouldn't be coming with us.
A few days later John Carr called Jenna's ex and explained to Billy the situation with Sierra and witness protection. I don't know how the hell John sold it, but I suspect that absentee father never really gave a shit whether his little girl was in his life or not. So he did the right thing for once in his fucked-up existence and signed away all rights to his daughter.
The three of us were now free and clear to enter WITSEC. We were just waiting on the arrival of the fourth, and ten days after the takedown he decided to join us. Unfortunately the baby's timing couldn't have been worse. Jenna and I hit the Ventura Freeway during the morning commute and crawled eastbound toward the medical center in Woodland Hills. As anyone who's ever traveled the 101 during rush hour knows, nothing moves. Drivers, stuck in their cars, are applying makeup, reading the newspaper and brushing their fucking teeth.
I couldn't bear to look over at Jenna beside me. The contractions were coming fast and furious, and she was kicking the door and biting the shoulder strap screaming in agony, “They're every two minutes now!”
I'm not sure how, but we made it to the emergency room with that baby still inside her. Per government instructions, Jenna was admitted as patient Jane Doe. As I walked Jane up and down the maternity ward, trying to jog the kid loose, the family members started arriving. It was a small group. First Bill showed up with Jenna's younger sister, then Charles and Old Joe came in with little Sierra. And that was it. When the time came to deliver, Jenna climbed onto the bed, the curtains were pulled and our little boy began punching his way out while an ATF special agent stood guard outside the door.
When the baby's head popped out, I think I tripped over my jaw. I'd never witnessed anything as amazing as a child entering the world.
My child.
Fuck Todd and all those other wannabes. This was my kid, goddammit.
As the baby's shoulders popped into view, Jenna grabbed hold and pulled him the rest of the way out, laying him on her chest. It was fuckin' amazing.
He was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
“Would you like to cut the umbilical, Mr. Rowe?”
“Huh? What?”
“Cut the cord?” explained the doctor, extending the scissors.
“Hell, no,” I said.
That kid just got here. I didn't want to fuck him up right out of the chute. So the doctor snipped the umbilical himself.
And that's how Baby Doe entered the world and witness protection. That was the little booger's name: Baby Doe. Seemed only fitting for a family about to vanish into anonymity.
That boy was healthy as a horse too. To Jenna's everlasting credit, except for an occasional joint, she'd stayed clean and sober through all nine months of pregnancy. It just showed me what that girl could do when she really put her mind to it. Of course, a few weeks after pushing the kid out, she was right back at it again.
The feds call it
“downtime.” I called it purgatory because you're stuck in limbo, caught between one world and the next. We spent two months hiding and going stir crazy at the Oxnard hotel, waiting for the U.S. marshals to get their shit together so we could get on with our lives. Jenna breast-fed the baby for a couple of those weeks, then got into alcohol and quit nursing. She started spending the hours down in the hotel lounge with Old Joe, drinking beer and wine on the government tab.
Not long after the baby was born, Jenna started warming up to me again. When I overheard her talking to Sierra one night, I knew she'd finally come around. The little girl was asking why she couldn't see her friends back in Hemet anymore.
“Some of the people we thought were nice guys had been very bad and they got in trouble for it,” Jenna said, kneeling in front of Sierra.
“Is Daddy in trouble?”
“No, Daddy isn't in trouble, but he had to help put the bad guys in jail. And some of those bad guys are mad because Daddy told the truth about them. That's why you can't see your friends for a while.”
“Because the bad guys are mad at Daddy?”
“That's right.”
Fuckin' A right, little girl. The bad guys are pissed as hell at Daddy.
While we twiddled thumbs waiting on the marshals, my fiancée got back to abusing whatever she could lay her hands on. When ATF moved us from Oxnard to Lake Isabella out near Bakersfield, she fell in with an old friend and recovering heroin addict. Jenna got into that girl's methadone and before you knew itâwhoopee! It was zero to sixty in two seconds. Within days she was slamming dope. In a month she was strung out.
From Lake Isabella the ATF relocated us to Oceanside, but that didn't stop my Jenna. Hell, no. When I prevented the girl from leaving the house to buy heroin one day, she called the cops and told them I'd beaten her. I was arrested and taken away in handcuffs.
John Carr had to bail me out.
Occasionally during our time in hiding I'd catch bits and pieces of news from the old hometown. The Vagos knew where Bill Thompson lived, and they made a point of cruising past his property, hoping Jenna and I might show our faces. Bill bought himself a gun and mounted security cameras outside the house. But he and his new wife never felt safe, and eventually they sold their home and left Hemet for good.
The Vagos were never prosecuted under the RICO Act. The reason, according to John Carr, was the U.S. Attorney's Office lacked the manpower to handle the number of defendants Operation 22 Green had generated. For that reason most of those greenies were processed by the state of California, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing because they all got slapped with the dreaded S.T.E.P. gang enhancement penalties. When all was said and done, and the evidence gathered during the raids was acted upon, forty-two Vagos and their associates were charged for crimes ranging from drug and weapons violations to first-degree murder.
Big Roy Compton pled guilty to felony possession of a firearm while a member of a street gang and was sentenced to twenty-four months in prison. Big Todd got thirty months for felony possession and street gang membership. Apparently I was never going to get a fighting shot
at either one of those fuckers in their cells, though. John Carr couldn't make it happen.
In hindsight I figured that was never in the cards anyway.
Jack Fite, the baddest of the bad, was facing a felony conviction for possession of a controlled substance for sale and looking at an automatic twenty-five years to life under California's three-strike rule. He died of complications from hepatitis while awaiting trial, ending his days behind bars just like everyone always said he would. I don't figure many tears were shed for that evil sonofabitch.
The Hemet chapter that I'd gone undercover to drive out of town had been completely gutted, with most of those boys bagged on criminal street-gang-related charges. One year after the takedown, only Loki was holding down the fort, and that Vago was barely hanging on by his fingertips.
In the early spring
of 2006 came the news I'd been waiting for.
John was on the line again. It was time to go into WITSEC.
“You ready?”
“Hell, yeah,” I told him. “Let's do this.”
As instructed by the U.S. marshals, Jenna and I packed one suitcase each. There were no personal photos allowed, no paperwork, nothing of any kind that might link us to the past.
Old Joe and I spent our last day together fishing on Oceanside pier, talking about the time we'd spent together, the people we'd met and the experiences we'd shared along the way. The two of us had been partners for almost twenty years, sticking together through thick and thin. He relied on me as much as I did on him. Without that big gangly bastard I'm not sure I could have made it through those years undercover. We were brother tight, Old Joe and I, and now I was leaving that brother behind. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.