Over time, I established important contacts with a human rights organization based out of an office in downtown Kingston that was dealing primarily with the issue of police brutality in the city’s poorest areas. They assigned me a guide, a kid who appeared to be about fifteen years old. One hot, tropical morning I set out with my guide on what would be an all-day journey around Denham Town, an especially rough shantytown right in the center of the action. The kid took me around and introduced me to wise neighborhood elders, shop owners, people at a bicycle repairman’s shop, average denizens of this unremittingly poor but vibrant neighborhood. My guide introduced me as a journalist from the United States who wanted to know about life in Kingston during this time of strife and violence, and then I was more or less on my own. Some people did not want to talk to me; some did. All were startled to see something they rarely saw—an outsider from another country who was interested in hearing about the reality of their daily lives.
At one point in the afternoon, my guide led me into a sprawling tenement yard. He warned me that the physical terrain was ragged (no paved streets or sidewalks) and that sudden and explosive violence was always a possibility. The homes, such as they were, were wood shacks with roofs made of corrugated tin. We made our way around shacks and through the yards of what seemed like one huge collective living space. People gaped at me like I was a visitor from another planet, some smiled, some scowled. The entire environment was dominated by the sound of reggae music coming from distant radios or cassette players, and the pungent aroma of ganja.
Eventually, my guide led me into a yard where a group of four or five dreadlocked Rastas were sitting around a homemade grill roasting salt fish, listening to reggae and smoking from a huge chillum pipe. The look on their faces as I was brought into their lair on a leisurely afternoon was one of astonishment. They all looked at me, then looked at my guide, with an expression that said, “Junior, you better have a good reason for bringing this stranger into our yard in the middle of the afternoon while we be chillin’ in our private space.”
The kid explained, as best he could. The response was not enthusiastic. Two of the Rastas simply up and left. The other three stayed put mostly out of curiosity.
I attempted to explain what I was up to. The lead Rastaman—the one who controlled the chillum pipe—took it upon himself to scold me about exploitation and colonialism, explaining how absurd it was that they had to speak to me in a different language—American English—as opposed to their own Jamaican patois, so that I could understand them. Referring to our interview, he said, “Dis a colonial relationship.” The others chimed in: “Ras clot.”
I was sweating from the sweltering afternoon sun and the heat off the grill. The Rastaman had a valid point. I was there representing a big corporate American enterprise—
Playboy—
and I was asking them to share their experiences with me without them having any guarantee that what I might write would be accurate or informed. All I could do was try to assure them that my motives were sincere, that I was not ignorant of their plight, and that I was capable of seeing beyond a colonial or imperialist point of view.
As I spoke, they passed the pipe around.
“Let me ask you this,” I said. “How many times have you had a journalist here in Denham Town, a white journalist from New York, here in your yard by himself asking to hear your perspective, your point of view, from your mouth? How many times?”
They were all quiet for a few seconds. The lead Rastaman said, “Nevah.”
“Okay,” I said, “Come on, then. At least you have to give me that.”
One of the Rastas chuckled. The others hit the pipe, blew smoke in the air, and pondered what I had said. I sensed some of the tension drifting away with the ganja smoke. Now, as neighborhood people came and went, each of them looking at me as if I were a ghostly apparition, it was the lead Rastaman who took it upon himself to explain, “Him a journalist from Babylon, from New Yawk, him inna Kingston to get a bird’s eye view of de politricks an’ di violence.”
I laughed when he said “bird’s eye view.” That was a fair description of what I was doing.
Eventually, the moment of reckoning arrived. The lead Rastaman handed me the chillum pipe. Everyone watched to see how I was going to react.
A number of equations ran through my head. First of all, my young guide had disappeared, so I was in the middle of a Kingston ghetto, sitting with a bunch of strangers, with no real idea of how to get back to where I came from. It was the kind of situation in which you would normally want to have your wits about you. Second, I knew from experience that Jamaican weed was about ten times stronger that what I was familiar with in the United States. All of this was weighed against the simple fact that if I expected to sit there in that environment, to come into those folks lives for an afternoon and ask questions, to not be judgmental, to show them that I could—to the extent possible in this transitory moment and on this transitory day—be one of them, I would need to take a hit off the pipe.
And so I did. With hardly a hesitation. And that changed everything. I was still an outsider in their midst, but we’d had a ceremonial exchange, a sharing of the pipe, and it meant a lot.
I recount this incident now because it has become, for me, a kind of metaphor—a parable—about having to make split-second decisions, trusting your instincts in a way that will determine whether you are able to absorb and understand the story you hope to write about. In a way, the lesson can be condensed into that hoary cliché, one of my favorites, that has become my guiding principle as a journalist.
If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
It was nearly twenty-one years ago that Michael Raymond, a beefy, Brooklyn-bred con man and stock swindler, got into a tight spot with the law. After a lengthy trial in Illinois state court, he received a four-year prison term for trying to use stolen Treasury notes to buy two small midwestern banks. A silver-tongued grifter with a robust appetite for the good life, Raymond had no intention of serving his sentence. Instead, he cut a deal with the feds.
What Raymond received, however, was far from your average, run-of-the-mill government deal. In exchange for testifying before a Senate subcommittee on stolen securities and the Mob, he was placed in what was then a new, top-secret federal program called WITSEC, short for Witness Security Program, now commonly referred to as the Witness Protection Program.
At the time, fewer than a hundred people had entered this experimental program, thought to be the government’s most potent new tool against organized crime. Despite its controversial nature, the program had never actually been debated, or even proposed, on Capitol Hill. The U.S. Justice Department simply requested funds for “witness relocation” and the various appropriations committees gave it the rubber stamp. Over the next twenty-one years, the program would attract a vast following, not the least of which were more than 13,000 criminals and their family members coerced into its ranks. Back in 1970, though, WITSEC was a theory to be tested. And like any new theory, it had bugs to be worked out—bugs like Michael Raymond.
As part of this agreement with the overseers of WITSEC, Raymond was given a new identity and relocated to sunny Southern Florida. The government also immediately began paying him $1,500 a month, plus $50,000 for “job assistance.” Over the next several years, Michael “Burnett,” as Raymond officially became known, would learn to use WITSEC to underwrite one scam after another. During one deadly three-year period, three business associates of his disappeared under nefarious circumstances. One of them was a sixty-seven-year-old socialite and widow whom Raymond had been romancing. The woman was last seen getting into a car with him just hours after she cleared out her bank accounts. Raymond later became a prime suspect in her disappearance when an informant told local cops that he had bragged of killing her. “They’re never going to find the stone she’s under,” he reportedly told the informant.
When Florida authorities began looking into the past of Michael Burnett, they were amazed to find that he had no personal history whatsoever. His life of crime as Michael Raymond had been effectively expunged, courtesy of WITSEC. Furthermore, the federal government helped Raymond disappear while the investigation was under way. He had intentionally violated his security, so the Justice Department—unaware that its prize witness was also a primary suspect—relocated him to another region of the country and covered his tracks after he left.
In the years that followed, Raymond often caught the attention of federal crime fighters. Although the U.S. Marshals Service—the branch of the Justice Department that administers the Witness Security Program—believed that his life was in danger, he moved around like a man without worries. He drove Cadillacs and wore mink coats, and his fingers sparkled with diamond rings. A gourmet chef with a taste for fine wines, he allowed his waist to grow in proportion to his criminal deeds, until he topped the scales near 300 pounds.
Now sixty-one years old, Raymond/Burnett is no longer in WITSEC. His long, notorious life of crime finally caught up with him when, after he resurfaced in Chicago a few years ago as an informant in an FBI sting operation, the feds caught on to his act. In 1987, he went off to prison on weapons possession; there were no deals left to be struck. For more than twenty years, Raymond had feasted on the federal government’s naïveté and largess, turning the Witness Security Program into a criminal hideout.
The stupefying result of all this is that little has changed since the days when Raymond first made chumps out of the U.S. Justice Department. Although few inductees have abused WITSEC with the same panache as Michael Raymond, the twenty-one-year history of the program reveals a virtual catalog of failures, from recidivism through bureaucratic ineptitude to government callousness and neglect.
Throughout it all, WITSEC continues to grow, amassing a rogues’ gallery of inductees. “Almost everything that could go wrong [with WITSEC] has, at one time or another,” says Donald Bierman, a former Justice Department official who is now a criminal defense attorney in Miami. Bierman has had several clients enter WITSEC, often against his recommendation. “If you absorb enough scandal, eventually you become immune,” he says. “Ironically, because of the program’s long history of failure, it has now become virtually scandal-proof.”
When forty-seven-year-old Max Mermelstein entered the Witness Security Program in 1986, it must have seemed like the last possible option. As the man who had run U.S. trafficking operations for a Colombian cocaine cartel for several years, he had a criminal career that had escalated to a point beyond his wildest dreams. From 1978 to the time of his arrest, Mermelstein is believed to have smuggled some fifty-six tons of cocaine into Florida. In a five-year period, he ran $300 million in laundered currency through Colombia and Panama.
Mermelstein never planned on a career in crime. After marrying a Colombian woman he met in Puerto Rico, he was introduced to Rafael “Rafa” Cardona Salazar, a major underboss for the Ochoa family, leaders of the Medellín cartel. On Christmas Day, 1978, Rafa inexplicably murdered one of his fellow drug runners after a long afternoon of free-basing cocaine. He and another smuggler then called on Mermelstein, whom he knew only casually at the time. They wanted Max to drive them around until they came down from their high. During the drive, Rafa, eyes ablaze, emptied five bullets into his roommate, who had been taunting him from the backseat of their rented van. “Just keep driving, Max. Don’t say a fucking word,” Mermelstein remembered Rafa saying.
Having witnessed, but not reported, a brutal murder, Mermelstein was an accessory to the crime, which effectively put him under the thumb of the cartel. His criminal associations with Rafa, Pablo Escobar, and others flourished until June 1985, when he was jumped by a bevy of agents from the FBI, DEA, Customs, and assorted other branches of American law enforcement. After searching Mermelstein’s home, the feds had enough on his drug operations to put him away for many lifetimes.
Faced with a life behind bars, Mermelstein remembered the words he’d heard many times from the murderous Rafa: “There are only two ways you get out of trafficking coke, in a box or in a cell.” Mermelstein proved him wrong; he agreed to cooperate with the government and go into the Witness Security Program.
“The day I got arrested was the best day of my life,” says Mermelstein, now living under an assumed name somewhere in the United States. “If it hadn’t happened, I’d be dead right now.”
To initiate Mermelstein into WITSEC required extraordinary measures. Sixteen members of his family, mostly relatives of his Colombian wife, had to be relocated into the United States. It presented the Marshals Service with a problem it has been forced to deal with more and more, as the so-called drug war escalates. According to the Justice Department’s own statistics, nearly 80 percent of those now in the program are there because they or a family member testified in a drug-related case. More than one quarter of those are foreign nationals.
One might guess that with the Colombians, Mexicans, and Asians now entering the Witness Security Program, the Marshals Service would have devised a strategy for handling foreign refugees from our criminal-justice system.
Guess again.
Take the case of Arturo Jaramillo, Mermelstein’s brother-in-law. Born and raised in Cali, Colombia, Jaramillo is described by his brother-in-law as “a quiet man who never wanted to be involved in drugs or violence.” Still, he had been forced by Rafa to help dispose of his dead associate back in 1978, and he lived in fear of the Colombian drug merchants. When news of Mermelstein’s “flip” reached him, he had no choice but to accept Uncle Sam’s offer of a new identity in the United States. Although Jaramillo, his wife, and his young son spoke no English, they were inexplicably relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, a city not known for its racial tolerance.