In 1981, of his own volition, Crouch went into the Witness Protection Program, though his wife took his kids and left for Florida, needing to be hunted down by law enforcement before she would cooperate. There were even cases of toddlers being caught in high profile suitcase bomb detonations. Over the next 13 years the wars with gangs like the Breed would include gang members being gunned down at funerals.
#Witness protection full#
” This was at a time when the Angels supposedly had a “Roll Bones Rule” that required an Angel to kill someone if they wanted to be a full member. By 1968 he was the vice president of the Cleveland chapter of the notorious Hells Angels gang, just in time for gang wars that would leave his group known as the “ Dirty Thirty. Clarence Crouchīorn in 1940 in Shreveport, Louisiana and almost immediately given up for adoption, Clarence Crouch grew up to be the kind of teenager who almost killed a guy for taking his girlfriend to a dance.
Potentially he was relatively lucky: For the months leading up to his arrest, it was alleged that there was an attempt to kill him with a bomb by John Gotti’s vengeful brother. Gravano plead guilty and served 17 years. In Tempe, Arizona, he was the boss of a 50 person group that was making roughly $500,000 a week selling ecstasy.
After serving his time, he moved to Arizona and was surprisingly outspoken about mocking the very mobsters that had very strong reason to kill him.Įight years after the deal that put him in the Witness Protection Program, in 2000 Sammy the Bull was back in the spotlight for running a new drug ring. In exchange for his testimony, which would take down a reported 38 mafia members, he received a sentence of only five years. Not all of it was good, particularly the 19 murders for which he pleaded guilty. Samuel Gravano has been touched on elsewhere on TopTenz, but there was much more to him than just his part in taking down John Gotti. Even by the standards of the time it was a lightweight, fluffy comedy, with Steve Martin playing the gangster based on Henry Hill as a cartoon character. It starred Steve Martin and Rick Moranis, making the fact it was a comedy unsurprising.
#Witness protection movie#
While the movie based on Henry Hill’s experience that everyone remembers is Goodfellas, there was actually another film that came out several months earlier in 1990, with the same source material, called My Blue Heaven, written by Nora Ephron after she got to know Hill personally. He struggled with his own addiction problems pretty much until he passed away in 2012. Despite that considerable success that would lead to him being a regular on The Howard Stern Show, he still devoted time to getting the certification to become a drug counselor. Said book was adapted into Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas, widely regarded as one of the best films of the 1990s. In 1987 his autobiography Wiseguy was published and went on to become a bestseller. Hill was discharged from Federal Witness Protection in 1987, having already been busted for burglary and drunk driving. When he decided to flip in 1980, his testimony would lead to 50 convictions. For roughly 25 years he had been associated with the Lucchese crime family his crimes included beating lots of people up (including a brother of an FBI agent, which came with a 10 year sentence, made easier by corrupt guards), burying bodies, the largest cash heist in US history ($5.8 million) in 1978, sports fixing, and large amounts of drug dealing. In 1980, it looked like this former mobster’s glory days were behind him. Other people didn’t quite get in, and some of them paid a terrible price. Some gained their fame through doing something good, some for doing something horrible, and some got a degree of glamour from it. If the testimony of witnesses granted protection by US Marshals through the program is used, the conviction rate is said to be as high as 89%.Ĭounterintuitively, some people that have accepted the service which changes their identities and is intended to hide them from the world have gone on to a degree of fame.
In legal terms it’s devastatingly effective. It’s by no means a perfect system, with some children that are entered in the program later saying that they have trouble with identity issues. Since it began in 1971, the Witness Protection Program has provided new identities for more than 18,000 people, though most of them are not the witnesses themselves but their family members.
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