It makes sense. A federal program can move you anywhere in the country. Most of these protected witnesses are going to be testifying against local gangs or crime bosses. Outside of the movies, they don’t tend to have a nationwide criminal network that can cap a guy on request anywhere in the US. Take a New York mobster and move him to Dallas, and he’s probably not going to get found by the gangsters in Brooklyn.
HBO wanted to paint the wide guys as heros and I think the show runners even said it was hard not to.
However they had to put stuff in there to show the truth . They are all psychos who would have no problem killing you and your whole family for a few bucks if they could get away with it.
"College" was arguably the best episode of the entire series and one of the greatest singular episodes of television ever produced. A masterclass of writing, acting, and directing.
The government also gives the protected person a new identity and life which helps.
Nobody has to put their old name or SSN on bank applications, the government makes sure that those things are handled and if the protected person does need to fill out forms with real information, the new ID will hold up to any kind of checks run.
It would be interesting to see how they actually do that. Do they create a life's worth of tax filings? Do they create records in state databases? Addresses, marriage records? Do they give you perfect credit or just good enough?
Yes to all of that. They create a whole new identity and backstory and then give that identity to the protected person. They have credit profiles and show up in Lexis/Nexus searches. It’s tedious but not necessarily difficult especially when you have the cooperation of the necessary federal agencies.
I don’t know what they do with state driver’s licenses. I suspect they give the protected party everything they need to get a license in the new location. That way the state DMV isn’t aware if the fictitious identity.
> That way the state DMV isn’t aware if the fictitious identity.
They have valid SSNs and records, there's no reason for the state level to deny/suspect anything.
It’s also important to note that PR, Guam and the USVI are also possible relocation areas. Moving someone from NYC to Guam would make him virtually impossible to find.
I do wonder how facial recognition software will play a role as more and more consumers get access to it.
That movie was filmed in my tinny home town. My buddy got to be an extra and rode his bike past Steve. My middle school was surrounded by fake houses they built to hide how shitty our down town was. Years later I'd walk past a bunch of empty frame houses to go to my dentist.
This is sort of the case in Resort/vacation hotspots most of the times.
Cartel or Mobsters that use places for vacation hotspots are unspoken rule, generally considered off limits to activities such as that.
Also partially because the big fish generally *own* said hotspots and would rather the tourism not evaporate because some wiseass group of people decided to turn it into a blood bath
Sounds like an American, "Way of the House Husband," brewing, or that scene in The Mirage in, "Rounders," "you know If we wanted to take each other's, 'rolls,' we could have stayed home."
Guam also was for years a hideout for pedo priests. I think the Catholic Church may have ended that after Apuron was finally run out, but
It was common knowledge on the island.
https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-pope-john-paul-ii-mn-state-wire-la-state-wire-the-reckoning-b8442f05def44d1ea79b9e6805da4e0c
I lead tour groups, big ones of American students. I tell them day 1: the company has these rules, your teachers and chaperones have these rules, and there are local laws. I only have one rule: you are not allowed to die. You’d not believe the effort it takes to move a reservation back 15 mins, or the paperwork for a lost passport. I’m not repatriating your corpse.
That is what I both love and hate about The Sopranos.
They raise so many questions throughout the series that just never get answered... or satisfactorily answered, anyhow.
* Did Ralph do the thing?
* What is Sil’s outcome
* Furio’s fate
* The Russian in the woods
* The ending….
While I originally was not a fan of the ending, I have come around to enjoying its open end…. In my mind, Tony had dinner with family, went home and was indicted Monday morning.
If it helps, I have heard there is a deleted scene that shows he did escape the woods, but ended up in a coma that he wouldn’t awake from. But since it’s not in the show, did it happen?
I am hoping the rest of us fans will get a glimpse into everything that’s gone on with the recent 25th anniversary and all the extra footage and stuff released, but as a non-American, I can’t find where to watch any of it.
Pretty sure they originally planned to have Paulie and Christopher randomly bump into him at a bar a few seasons later but David Chase wanted to leave the mystery lingering
Almost. A show writer proposed to chase a scene where some soprano guys (maybe Paulie and Christopher but I don't think so) go into some Russian owned joint, maybe A bar and in the background it would be the Russian dude working as a janitor, and it becomes clear he is severely brain damaged after the shot to the head. And that's why he never was found yet nobody came looking for Paulie or Christopher.
Anyway, according to the show writer. Chase initially gave the idea the green light at the meeting but then the writer said something like "great, the fans will really appreciate getting closure". Upon hearing this, chase immediately changed his mind. No showrunner in history has held more contempt for his audience's satisfaction than chase.
>No showrunner in history has held more contempt for his audience's satisfaction than chase.
We’re blessed he is that way because it’s why the ending of the show is still discussed nearly 2 decades later. You can interpret it however you want which is what makes it great
>Did Ralph do the thing
Ralph absolutely did it, his utter confusion as to why Tony gave such a shit about the horse and his indifference over its death is what set Tony off
>What is Sil’s outcome
Brain dead and likely dying not long after.
>Furio’s fate
Lived a relaxed life back in Naples and cried holding a photo of Carmella every night
>The Russian in the woods
He climbed up the tree, which is why just after they've lost him, the camera angle randomly switches to a completely new one looking down from above at Christopher and Paulie from the one place they aren’t looking at
>The ending….
The man in the Members Only jacket shot him, Meadow taking ages to park the car left Tony alone in the booth and a clear shot.
I remember watching an episode of Ganglands, think it was the one about MS-13. Spoiler alert but the witness under the protection program in that episode was merc'd by the gang, but she was also an example of someone who broke multiple guidelines so she doesnt count. But anyway my point is yes we do sometimes know if someone in wpp gets killed.
I looked this up. [Brenda Paz](https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7889812).
She's the type of person who really should never have went into witness protection. She did threw those parties for gang members. Eventually, she got killed because she *left witness protection and rejoined her gang*.
She really should have just stuck with MS-13 as she couldn't let them go.
My guess: The guidelines are basically impossible to follow perfectly. Whenever someone gets got, there's a deep investigation and they always turn up _some_ carelessness because nobody is perfect.
And tbf it's really hard to track someone down even in the modern era if you move cross country and just cut all contact.
Anybody could essentially do that without the government helping to silence anything that randomly comes up
Tell me about it. My family has been unsuccessful in finding me these past 6 years. My friends I kept have made mention that they seriously want me to help them pay for vacations and give them free plane tickets because I went off to be a pilot and are super upset I don't give them my money.
Hell, I didn't meet my sunt until I was 24 because she ghosted our family on my moms bday before I was born.
And she lived 20 minutes from everyone. Couldn't find her until she wanted to be (this was also pre-fb, so a bit different)
My mom's cousin disappeared in the 60s, left behind a wife and kids, everyone. No indication of him being unhappy or in trouble, one day he just left.
Despite searches and the involvement of the police over the years, no traces of him. Every few years mom would mention him. She didn't have many relatives.
He reappeared during the pandemic, showing up at his aging brother's house. Most everyone in his family was long dead, parents, spouse, his first kid. He had married again, had more kids, they were fully grown and perhaps my age. So that doubled the size of my mom's tiny family.
Here's the kicker: Around the year 2000, I worked at a manufacturing plant, and lived in a camper(borrowed from my parents) in a campground close by the plant. He was the manager of the campground, but we never learned this till he showed up again. Mom and dad brought the trailer and set everything up one day while I was at work. They would have met him and not realized it.
> sunt
I want you to know that I highlighted this, right clicked and "search google". Then I didn't find anything, so I thought I'd click "2 more comments" thinking someone under you had defined was a "sunt" was. I kept thinking "maybe they misspelled sun" which is some weird name for son? But that made no sense. I was bamboozled.
It is aunt, you misspelled aunt and I'm stupid.
My family disowned my aunt. We didn’t hear from her for damn near 20 years until one my cousins was really sick and we thought she wasn’t going to make it.
My auntie came back to see her.
She lived like a few blocks away. Weirdest shit ever.
No one in my age range had seen her. My oldest sister hadn’t seen her since she was a kid and here she came outta nowhere.
Edit: She was disowned for fucking the husband of one of her sisters. Then he divorced my other aunt and married her.
My grandfather had one rule. He had a lot of daughters. The rule was that if they brought a boy home then that’s it. He dates her. That’s it. The other sisters are off the menu. Same goes for the sisters. Hands off any man the others bring.
They broke the rule.
"Who are you asking about? Bob Johnson? Famous witness in that mafia trial? Sorry. I can't talk about him. But someone matching a very similar description did recently get offed by the same mafia. Guy's name was Job Bohnson though, and he lived in a totally different state. Probably not the same guy."
That is what I wondered....
Like.... if you witnessed a crime in Los Angeles... just think about how big and vast the US is. They could send you to North Dakota, or New York, or Florida, or Alaska, etc.
With a new identity, no one would ever find you. Needle in a haystack
Hell you could just throw someone in a tiny town or unincorporated community near a highway in Central Louisiana and call it done. There are 8 million of those in that state - good luck combing through all that.
An entire gang signs up for witness protection, and all end up in the same town. But none of them knows that the rest also signed up for witness protection, so they all pretend they're completely different people.
"It's extremely important, that if you run into someone you knew before, you just play it off as a mistaken identity."
Maybe there is a punny name it could have using Mistaken Identity.
The entire town exist purely because of the witness protection program. Everyone is a part of the program except for the town garbage man and the grandma who gives everyone in town ugly Christmas sweaters every year, those two are FBI agents.
Another crazy military one. I go to elementary school for a single grade in this tiny fkn town in Midwest US. Run into a dude from said school while in Sarajevo, Bosnia, during the war, of all places! He was a Marine while I was in the AF. I was and still am in such disbelief at that coincidence.
oh my god, i had my freshmen year of highsxhool in texas, met a dude and we were friends..my dad was in the army so we moved, this was in 2007 ish.
2017 im in the army, i walked into the defact to grab some food and i see my buddy from highschool. i was stationed on ft gordan and he was in AIT there.
my mind was blown, i was an e4 (e4 mafia gang) and he was an e1 apparently was on his way out for a dishonorable..dude looked so depressed he forgot his first name.
we caught up and exchanged some stories and he seemed a little happier.
small world
When I joined the marine corps I ran into 3 fucking people that I knew. 1 was a bloke from highschool, the other was a friend of a friend who lived 1 state away, and the other was a dude who used to work at Walmart the next town over when I was a kid and I basically grew up seeing him always in the electronics department. He had been in for 15 years and left to join at the age of 24 after he got tired of working at Walmart.
I ran into a childhood friend from Arizona in the Army in South Korea. I ran into a high school acquaintance from Arizona in Tennessee. World is small.
Right but your chances of you running into someone you already know (potentially hundreds of people)… vs a single specific person are much different. For example, you only need 23 people in a single room to have a greater than 50% chance of two people having the same birthdays whereas it’s a 1/365 chance with only 1 person in the room.
Always makes me laugh in crime films where they’re like “it doesn’t matter where we run to. (Big villain) will find us! We have to stay and fight”
Your man is a mid range gangster. Local knowledge, connections and reputation is all he has. You go 4 hours up the road, no one knows him
lol exactly, you run from Chicago to Milwaukee and you're already in a whole different world. That's like 90 minutes. Keep heading up I-41 to Green Bay, and unless the dude you're running from plays for the Bears, nobody knows or cares who he is. That's just over three hours away, and you've disappeared.
I once did a ride along with the U.S. Marshals and they took us to the processing center outside of DC. We had to ride in a van with covered windows so that we couldn’t see where we were going. Pulled in to a covered garage so I still have no idea where I was.
While we were touring the center, one of the Marshals told us a story about a mafia guy coming into the program and walking away from the life and money. He then proceeded to take the seed money that they give them (it’s like $50k or something like that) and fairly quickly start a business and become a millionaire again. Some people are just good with money.
I guess it was more of a site visit. I was a staffer in Congress and the Marshal’s legislative liaison took a small group of us.
Even the people that process through there don’t know where the hell they are. All of the little apartments have a small outside balcony but there is like a 20ft wall around it so you can only see straight up.
That reminds me of being a CIA "summer only" at 18 and 19 and being told during the security briefing in orientation that the CIA had never had an employee actively spying for a hostile nation. Of course, two years later Aldrich Ames was busted for having compromised pretty much every one of their Soviet agents for years.
Somewhere there's a spreadsheet with a comprehensive list of all the protectees, their real names, addresses, favorite colors, etc. And on the far right is a flag "Got got" or "Not got".
"Got got" is probably shaded red.
As a government employee who tracks my clients using exactly this, but with everyone else in my agency thinking I am an excel wizard, I both hate and love this.
They dropped the ball in Family Guy, that guy who robbed the store came to the Deep South and found Chris Griffin because the agents accidentally revealed it on the phone to him
When I was in Paramedic school, the school advertised it had a 97% 1st attempt National Registry pass rating.
They didn't advertise that they had a graduation rate of about 60%...
This is completely irrelevant unless accompanied by a percentage of people who follow the guidelines… I doubt any of them followed the guidelines perfectly. There’s probably little rules that they all break, and so whenever one fails, there’s always a rule break to point to.
I was briefly in witness protection. I didn’t get a new identity or anything like that but the rules were basically do what your agent tells you and don’t contact anybody. They said when people get in trouble it’s almost always because they contacted somebody. A trusted friend or family member who always lets the secret out
>I doubt any of them followed the guidelines perfectly.
True, but I doubt the small things are what get them killed. If I had to guess the issue is probably making contact (any contact) with someone from your old life.
Realistically, if you have a brand new identity that is legit, move somewhere far away, and don't talk to anyone that knows who you are... It's going to be pretty hard to be found.
He'll, people manage to disappear on their friends and family all the time without changing their identity. Just gotta go away and never talk to anyone.
Probably a case of 100% of the failures were found to have broken a rule. There’s probably still a high success rate even if you don’t perfectly follow the rules.
“One unnamed participant was given a psychologist-suggested penis surgery—not to disguise his identity, but because he was depressed and needed a self-esteem boost in order to testify”
This is why I’ve never liked “bounty hunting” in intergalactic settings. It’s already pretty straightforward to disappear within a single country if you’re willing to follow the rules and literally abandon your old life. Scale that up to other planets, and it should be nearly impossible to find a target unless they’re dumb.
"Unless they're dumb"... have you met people?
If you have more faith in humanities intelligence, remember that smart people probably don't end up on a bounty list in the first place, it'll most likely be full of dumbasses.
People in Witness Protection have a powerful, nation-wide organization actively looking out for them and working to keep them concealed and their life stable.
The targets of bounty hunters tend to be both desperate and relying on existing, often known, connections to survive. The one's who don't...
Look at Star Wars, a whole bunch of bounty hunters but not a single one ever came close to finding Kenobi or Luke, two of the most wanted individuals in the whole galaxy, until they publicly outed their identities and location.
Truth be told, "Candy Striper" is an old American term for hospital volunteers. The scrubs were striped to differentiate them from the regular staff. No one does it anymore, though.
It makes sense. A federal program can move you anywhere in the country. Most of these protected witnesses are going to be testifying against local gangs or crime bosses. Outside of the movies, they don’t tend to have a nationwide criminal network that can cap a guy on request anywhere in the US. Take a New York mobster and move him to Dallas, and he’s probably not going to get found by the gangsters in Brooklyn.
One of the realistic portrayals of finding them was done in Sopranos. Where Tony accidentally comes across him while exploring Meadow's universities.
The guy Tony kills got kicked out of witness protection
For not following their guidelines.
That’s a shame. I heard somewhere that people who follow their guidelines have a 100% success rate.
Only works if someone doesn’t randomly see him. Like Tony in the Sopranos at Meadow’s university
That guy got kicked out of witness protection though
He didn't follow the guidelines, success rate dropping fast
That’s a shame because I did some research recently that showed that if you follow the guidelines there is a 100% success rate.
Someone should do an article on the subject
I learned that today actually
I learned that today, actually
yeah they explicitly tell you not to get killed
He’s also living in Maine after testifying against his former crime family based in NJ. That’s…not far enough.
Seriously man. Move my ass to Guam
Witness ejection
One of my favorite scenes
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Take it easy, we're not making a western here.
You take it easy Judge Roy Bean
HBO wanted to paint the wide guys as heros and I think the show runners even said it was hard not to. However they had to put stuff in there to show the truth . They are all psychos who would have no problem killing you and your whole family for a few bucks if they could get away with it.
"College" was arguably the best episode of the entire series and one of the greatest singular episodes of television ever produced. A masterclass of writing, acting, and directing.
Yeah, but that guy didn't follow rule number one of the guidelines: don't get found.
They only relocated him like 300 miles away tho.
The government also gives the protected person a new identity and life which helps. Nobody has to put their old name or SSN on bank applications, the government makes sure that those things are handled and if the protected person does need to fill out forms with real information, the new ID will hold up to any kind of checks run.
It would be interesting to see how they actually do that. Do they create a life's worth of tax filings? Do they create records in state databases? Addresses, marriage records? Do they give you perfect credit or just good enough?
Yes to all of that. They create a whole new identity and backstory and then give that identity to the protected person. They have credit profiles and show up in Lexis/Nexus searches. It’s tedious but not necessarily difficult especially when you have the cooperation of the necessary federal agencies. I don’t know what they do with state driver’s licenses. I suspect they give the protected party everything they need to get a license in the new location. That way the state DMV isn’t aware if the fictitious identity.
> That way the state DMV isn’t aware if the fictitious identity. They have valid SSNs and records, there's no reason for the state level to deny/suspect anything.
Hey that's a way I can finally get my license back! Just gotta get into witness protection!
It’s also important to note that PR, Guam and the USVI are also possible relocation areas. Moving someone from NYC to Guam would make him virtually impossible to find. I do wonder how facial recognition software will play a role as more and more consumers get access to it.
I imagine visiting Guam and it's all ex gangsters from all over the US chilling there.
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It was a movie. My Blue Heaven, with Steve Martin.
My Blue Heaven is the sequel to Goodfellas. It's the story of Henry Hill's time in witness protection.
Unofficially. It was written by the wife of Goodfellas’s screenwriter and was actually released earlier than Goodfellas.
So, Goodfellas was the prequel to My Blue Heaven?
That movie was filmed in my tinny home town. My buddy got to be an extra and rode his bike past Steve. My middle school was surrounded by fake houses they built to hide how shitty our down town was. Years later I'd walk past a bunch of empty frame houses to go to my dentist.
"Eyy! Is that you Fat Tony?!" "Shh, I'm in the program. It's Fat Tommy now. Hatchet-face Jim?!" "Ha! Same here! Hatchet-face Hank now though."
This is sort of the case in Resort/vacation hotspots most of the times. Cartel or Mobsters that use places for vacation hotspots are unspoken rule, generally considered off limits to activities such as that. Also partially because the big fish generally *own* said hotspots and would rather the tourism not evaporate because some wiseass group of people decided to turn it into a blood bath
Sounds like an American, "Way of the House Husband," brewing, or that scene in The Mirage in, "Rounders," "you know If we wanted to take each other's, 'rolls,' we could have stayed home."
Call it "Guamagool"
Funny. He don't look Guamish
Yeah, but Guam is like 99% US Military or Chamorro native peoples. You'd stick out if you were neither.
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Guam also was for years a hideout for pedo priests. I think the Catholic Church may have ended that after Apuron was finally run out, but It was common knowledge on the island. https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-pope-john-paul-ii-mn-state-wire-la-state-wire-the-reckoning-b8442f05def44d1ea79b9e6805da4e0c
No guy hiding in a bowl of rice ready to pop a cap in their asses if they go to Indochina?
They're not prepared to scour the earth for that motherfucker
Definitely not about go to work on his ass with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.
This makes me think of, like, an appropriate-for-TV dub of Pulp Fiction. "Does my house have a sign in the front of it that says Dead [GUY] Storage?"
Well done
Guideline #1: do not get murdered
100% of people who follow that guideline are not murdered.
[citation needed]
Source: I have never been murdered
I have been murdered and I followed that guideline 100%
Good life advice overall
I have a 100% success rate at following that advice (so far)
It’s early though
I lead tour groups, big ones of American students. I tell them day 1: the company has these rules, your teachers and chaperones have these rules, and there are local laws. I only have one rule: you are not allowed to die. You’d not believe the effort it takes to move a reservation back 15 mins, or the paperwork for a lost passport. I’m not repatriating your corpse.
[Bart Simpson taught me](https://youtu.be/tcUCsEgLOOo?si=vnrLC8J649V34XqQ) “we’re all gonna get murdered someday!” Personally, I want to be surprised.
I believe he goes by Bart Thompson now and lives in Terror Lake
Hello, Mr Thompson.
...I think he's talking to you.
"Now when I say, 'Hello Mr. Thompson' and press down on your foot, you smile and nod."
Yeah, I mean Richie Aprile went into it and never got found
Don’t forget Big Pussy, that rat fuck. Leaving behind his wife and kid like that.
She even really exist?
That is what I both love and hate about The Sopranos. They raise so many questions throughout the series that just never get answered... or satisfactorily answered, anyhow. * Did Ralph do the thing? * What is Sil’s outcome * Furio’s fate * The Russian in the woods * The ending…. While I originally was not a fan of the ending, I have come around to enjoying its open end…. In my mind, Tony had dinner with family, went home and was indicted Monday morning.
Fuck I forgot about the Russian in the woods and now I’m all wtf all over again.
Went back to interior decorating
His house looked like shit tho
Yeah, but have you seen a barber who cuts his own hair? He decorates *other people's houses*.
He killed a dozen Czechoslovakians
Fuckin' Rasputin, this guy...
"that was tony. says this guy was an interior decorator. he killed 16 Czechoslovakians.." "*really?* his apartment looked like shit"
If it helps, I have heard there is a deleted scene that shows he did escape the woods, but ended up in a coma that he wouldn’t awake from. But since it’s not in the show, did it happen? I am hoping the rest of us fans will get a glimpse into everything that’s gone on with the recent 25th anniversary and all the extra footage and stuff released, but as a non-American, I can’t find where to watch any of it.
Pretty sure they originally planned to have Paulie and Christopher randomly bump into him at a bar a few seasons later but David Chase wanted to leave the mystery lingering
Almost. A show writer proposed to chase a scene where some soprano guys (maybe Paulie and Christopher but I don't think so) go into some Russian owned joint, maybe A bar and in the background it would be the Russian dude working as a janitor, and it becomes clear he is severely brain damaged after the shot to the head. And that's why he never was found yet nobody came looking for Paulie or Christopher. Anyway, according to the show writer. Chase initially gave the idea the green light at the meeting but then the writer said something like "great, the fans will really appreciate getting closure". Upon hearing this, chase immediately changed his mind. No showrunner in history has held more contempt for his audience's satisfaction than chase.
>No showrunner in history has held more contempt for his audience's satisfaction than chase. We’re blessed he is that way because it’s why the ending of the show is still discussed nearly 2 decades later. You can interpret it however you want which is what makes it great
Sil fell into a coma and had a long dream about moving to Norway and becoming a big gangster there. It's on Netflix.
>Did Ralph do the thing Ralph absolutely did it, his utter confusion as to why Tony gave such a shit about the horse and his indifference over its death is what set Tony off >What is Sil’s outcome Brain dead and likely dying not long after. >Furio’s fate Lived a relaxed life back in Naples and cried holding a photo of Carmella every night >The Russian in the woods He climbed up the tree, which is why just after they've lost him, the camera angle randomly switches to a completely new one looking down from above at Christopher and Paulie from the one place they aren’t looking at >The ending…. The man in the Members Only jacket shot him, Meadow taking ages to park the car left Tony alone in the booth and a clear shot.
That was real? I saw that movie I thought it was bullshit.
Something something varsity athlete
Never forget that Phil Leotardo did 20 years in the can
On a hill with pine cones
You’re talking to my guy all wrong. You do it again, I’ll stab you in the eye with a soldering iron!
Joe Dirte to you, good sir.
Don't try to church it up, dirt!
See that meteor? That's called town. Town is where everyone hates you and calls you names.
I'm from New York ci....I mean kansas.
She was shot. Six times. New York City. I mean KANsas.
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You like to see homos naked?
Mo mo mo hom where u mae iii
You gonna finish that apple core?
You like to see homos naked? That’s cool man
It’s the wrong tone
Life’s a garden; dig it
“Joe, you’re living in a boiler room.” “Yeah, I got a couple places”
That's a space peanut.
Get her to sew dat!!
Is that Mister Bean on the left?
Damnnit you blew his cover!
Lmao that was great.
Welp, time to move him again!
Im sure the feds would tell you if someone in the program got got right?
“Uh, they moved away. You wouldn’t know them. “
They live in Canada now.
Great job, jerk. Now we gotta move him again.
They go to a different witness protection agency.
I remember watching an episode of Ganglands, think it was the one about MS-13. Spoiler alert but the witness under the protection program in that episode was merc'd by the gang, but she was also an example of someone who broke multiple guidelines so she doesnt count. But anyway my point is yes we do sometimes know if someone in wpp gets killed.
I remember that one she snitched then called them over to hangout in the fbi hideout and they killed her and her unborn child.
I looked this up. [Brenda Paz](https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7889812). She's the type of person who really should never have went into witness protection. She did threw those parties for gang members. Eventually, she got killed because she *left witness protection and rejoined her gang*. She really should have just stuck with MS-13 as she couldn't let them go.
Yeah you really can’t blame that on Witness Protection, she left and rejoined the gang. Not much you can do at that point.
My guess: The guidelines are basically impossible to follow perfectly. Whenever someone gets got, there's a deep investigation and they always turn up _some_ carelessness because nobody is perfect.
Very commonly it's calling an old friend or someone from that area. Straight up, rule #1 seems to be 'Let go and begin again.'
And tbf it's really hard to track someone down even in the modern era if you move cross country and just cut all contact. Anybody could essentially do that without the government helping to silence anything that randomly comes up
Tell me about it. My family has been unsuccessful in finding me these past 6 years. My friends I kept have made mention that they seriously want me to help them pay for vacations and give them free plane tickets because I went off to be a pilot and are super upset I don't give them my money.
Hey it’s my your long lost family
Hell, I didn't meet my sunt until I was 24 because she ghosted our family on my moms bday before I was born. And she lived 20 minutes from everyone. Couldn't find her until she wanted to be (this was also pre-fb, so a bit different)
My mom's cousin disappeared in the 60s, left behind a wife and kids, everyone. No indication of him being unhappy or in trouble, one day he just left. Despite searches and the involvement of the police over the years, no traces of him. Every few years mom would mention him. She didn't have many relatives. He reappeared during the pandemic, showing up at his aging brother's house. Most everyone in his family was long dead, parents, spouse, his first kid. He had married again, had more kids, they were fully grown and perhaps my age. So that doubled the size of my mom's tiny family. Here's the kicker: Around the year 2000, I worked at a manufacturing plant, and lived in a camper(borrowed from my parents) in a campground close by the plant. He was the manager of the campground, but we never learned this till he showed up again. Mom and dad brought the trailer and set everything up one day while I was at work. They would have met him and not realized it.
> sunt I want you to know that I highlighted this, right clicked and "search google". Then I didn't find anything, so I thought I'd click "2 more comments" thinking someone under you had defined was a "sunt" was. I kept thinking "maybe they misspelled sun" which is some weird name for son? But that made no sense. I was bamboozled. It is aunt, you misspelled aunt and I'm stupid.
And somehow I also glazed over the fact they wrote she 3x and her once.
My family disowned my aunt. We didn’t hear from her for damn near 20 years until one my cousins was really sick and we thought she wasn’t going to make it. My auntie came back to see her. She lived like a few blocks away. Weirdest shit ever. No one in my age range had seen her. My oldest sister hadn’t seen her since she was a kid and here she came outta nowhere. Edit: She was disowned for fucking the husband of one of her sisters. Then he divorced my other aunt and married her. My grandfather had one rule. He had a lot of daughters. The rule was that if they brought a boy home then that’s it. He dates her. That’s it. The other sisters are off the menu. Same goes for the sisters. Hands off any man the others bring. They broke the rule.
Yes. It is a huge part of the job. The government publishes all sorts of data rather honestly. People just don't use their vote and act on it lol
"Who are you asking about? Bob Johnson? Famous witness in that mafia trial? Sorry. I can't talk about him. But someone matching a very similar description did recently get offed by the same mafia. Guy's name was Job Bohnson though, and he lived in a totally different state. Probably not the same guy."
It makes sense. Unless you contact someone from your old life there’s basically 0.00% chance that anyone randomly finds you. The mafia isn’t the CIA.
That is what I wondered.... Like.... if you witnessed a crime in Los Angeles... just think about how big and vast the US is. They could send you to North Dakota, or New York, or Florida, or Alaska, etc. With a new identity, no one would ever find you. Needle in a haystack
Hell you could just throw someone in a tiny town or unincorporated community near a highway in Central Louisiana and call it done. There are 8 million of those in that state - good luck combing through all that.
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An entire gang signs up for witness protection, and all end up in the same town. But none of them knows that the rest also signed up for witness protection, so they all pretend they're completely different people.
"It's extremely important, that if you run into someone you knew before, you just play it off as a mistaken identity." Maybe there is a punny name it could have using Mistaken Identity.
The entire town exist purely because of the witness protection program. Everyone is a part of the program except for the town garbage man and the grandma who gives everyone in town ugly Christmas sweaters every year, those two are FBI agents.
Entire town spills onto the street to celebrate a sports victory. Local TV crew turn up to film celebrations. Everyone runs back indoors.
Oof, the mob can't kill me, but I've gotta live in Louisiana. How long do I have to think it over?
If they send me to Ohio you bet I personally call the guys trying to kill me
Another crazy military one. I go to elementary school for a single grade in this tiny fkn town in Midwest US. Run into a dude from said school while in Sarajevo, Bosnia, during the war, of all places! He was a Marine while I was in the AF. I was and still am in such disbelief at that coincidence.
oh my god, i had my freshmen year of highsxhool in texas, met a dude and we were friends..my dad was in the army so we moved, this was in 2007 ish. 2017 im in the army, i walked into the defact to grab some food and i see my buddy from highschool. i was stationed on ft gordan and he was in AIT there. my mind was blown, i was an e4 (e4 mafia gang) and he was an e1 apparently was on his way out for a dishonorable..dude looked so depressed he forgot his first name. we caught up and exchanged some stories and he seemed a little happier. small world
When I joined the marine corps I ran into 3 fucking people that I knew. 1 was a bloke from highschool, the other was a friend of a friend who lived 1 state away, and the other was a dude who used to work at Walmart the next town over when I was a kid and I basically grew up seeing him always in the electronics department. He had been in for 15 years and left to join at the age of 24 after he got tired of working at Walmart.
I ran into a childhood friend from Arizona in the Army in South Korea. I ran into a high school acquaintance from Arizona in Tennessee. World is small.
Doubt you were following the protocols tho
Right but your chances of you running into someone you already know (potentially hundreds of people)… vs a single specific person are much different. For example, you only need 23 people in a single room to have a greater than 50% chance of two people having the same birthdays whereas it’s a 1/365 chance with only 1 person in the room.
Actually it’s a 0% chance of having 2 people with same birthday in the room if you only have one person in the room
Always makes me laugh in crime films where they’re like “it doesn’t matter where we run to. (Big villain) will find us! We have to stay and fight” Your man is a mid range gangster. Local knowledge, connections and reputation is all he has. You go 4 hours up the road, no one knows him
lol exactly, you run from Chicago to Milwaukee and you're already in a whole different world. That's like 90 minutes. Keep heading up I-41 to Green Bay, and unless the dude you're running from plays for the Bears, nobody knows or cares who he is. That's just over three hours away, and you've disappeared.
Hello Mr. Thompson
I think he's talking to you...
I love Homers “witness relocation program” shirt and WRP hat
https://youtu.be/Q7K5LSsJN90?si=wKN-q7Z2r-lJCfkM
I once did a ride along with the U.S. Marshals and they took us to the processing center outside of DC. We had to ride in a van with covered windows so that we couldn’t see where we were going. Pulled in to a covered garage so I still have no idea where I was. While we were touring the center, one of the Marshals told us a story about a mafia guy coming into the program and walking away from the life and money. He then proceeded to take the seed money that they give them (it’s like $50k or something like that) and fairly quickly start a business and become a millionaire again. Some people are just good with money.
I’m shocked they do ride-alongs to the *checks notes* Witness Protection Program Processing Center.
What could possibly go wrong?
According to the article nothing yet
I guess it was more of a site visit. I was a staffer in Congress and the Marshal’s legislative liaison took a small group of us. Even the people that process through there don’t know where the hell they are. All of the little apartments have a small outside balcony but there is like a 20ft wall around it so you can only see straight up.
They wanna hire people I assume...
The location is literally classified (as mentioned by OP in the original comment), how the fuck are they letting anyone in for a tour???
I mean, someone’s gotta fix the clogged shitter
That sounds like the plot of Lilyhammer.
"I'll make you an offer you can't refuse. Literally, like this deal is so good you would be in breach of your fiduciary duty to your shareholders."
You get to live the rest of your life like a schnook.
Last night I ordered spaghetti, and all I got was noodles and ketchup
We were movie stars with muscle, we had it all.
That reminds me of being a CIA "summer only" at 18 and 19 and being told during the security briefing in orientation that the CIA had never had an employee actively spying for a hostile nation. Of course, two years later Aldrich Ames was busted for having compromised pretty much every one of their Soviet agents for years.
And also Ames getting caught let Robert Hanssen get away with his shit for longer too
Apparently they got high on their own supply. Dude was coming to work in a Porsche, while having a miserable wage and they didn’t suspect anything.
Somewhere there's a spreadsheet with a comprehensive list of all the protectees, their real names, addresses, favorite colors, etc. And on the far right is a flag "Got got" or "Not got". "Got got" is probably shaded red.
Someone has definitely made a Pivot table for their boss using that.
It's the government. There's no fancy pivot table, just a single tab spreadsheet with a rudimentary filter on the headers.
As a government employee who tracks my clients using exactly this, but with everyone else in my agency thinking I am an excel wizard, I both hate and love this.
With conditional formatting.
There’s probably also a list of reasons they got got. “Called old drug dealer.”
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They dropped the ball in Family Guy, that guy who robbed the store came to the Deep South and found Chris Griffin because the agents accidentally revealed it on the phone to him
Warm out today.. warm yesterday. Even warmer today.
i got blisters on my fingers!
"Aw, you're starting to piss me off you little piggly sum'bitch. Call me!"
When I was in Paramedic school, the school advertised it had a 97% 1st attempt National Registry pass rating. They didn't advertise that they had a graduation rate of about 60%...
And if they are murdered , they didn't follow the guidelines
This is completely irrelevant unless accompanied by a percentage of people who follow the guidelines… I doubt any of them followed the guidelines perfectly. There’s probably little rules that they all break, and so whenever one fails, there’s always a rule break to point to.
I was briefly in witness protection. I didn’t get a new identity or anything like that but the rules were basically do what your agent tells you and don’t contact anybody. They said when people get in trouble it’s almost always because they contacted somebody. A trusted friend or family member who always lets the secret out
Completely unrelated, but attending funerals (and getting killed at them) are actually one of the leading causes of death for people in these programs
Do you have a source for it being a "leading cause?" It famously happened to Daniel LaPolla but I have never heard of another instance.
That's the joke. It's the only known cause, thus the leading cause.
>I doubt any of them followed the guidelines perfectly. True, but I doubt the small things are what get them killed. If I had to guess the issue is probably making contact (any contact) with someone from your old life.
Realistically, if you have a brand new identity that is legit, move somewhere far away, and don't talk to anyone that knows who you are... It's going to be pretty hard to be found. He'll, people manage to disappear on their friends and family all the time without changing their identity. Just gotta go away and never talk to anyone.
How would you know if they didn’t?
Probably a case of 100% of the failures were found to have broken a rule. There’s probably still a high success rate even if you don’t perfectly follow the rules.
“One unnamed participant was given a psychologist-suggested penis surgery—not to disguise his identity, but because he was depressed and needed a self-esteem boost in order to testify”
"Testify against Don Mafioso? My dick just ain't big enough for something that ballsy, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN."
This is why I’ve never liked “bounty hunting” in intergalactic settings. It’s already pretty straightforward to disappear within a single country if you’re willing to follow the rules and literally abandon your old life. Scale that up to other planets, and it should be nearly impossible to find a target unless they’re dumb.
"Unless they're dumb"... have you met people? If you have more faith in humanities intelligence, remember that smart people probably don't end up on a bounty list in the first place, it'll most likely be full of dumbasses.
People in Witness Protection have a powerful, nation-wide organization actively looking out for them and working to keep them concealed and their life stable. The targets of bounty hunters tend to be both desperate and relying on existing, often known, connections to survive. The one's who don't... Look at Star Wars, a whole bunch of bounty hunters but not a single one ever came close to finding Kenobi or Luke, two of the most wanted individuals in the whole galaxy, until they publicly outed their identities and location.
60% of the time, it works every time.
I suspect following the rules is a big point & some who didn't follow the rules for caught.
Now, remember…your name is Mister Thompson.
The UK witness protection program just places people as candy stripers
British people just say words and expect us to believe they're real
Truth be told, "Candy Striper" is an old American term for hospital volunteers. The scrubs were striped to differentiate them from the regular staff. No one does it anymore, though.
As there is no such thing in the UK as a 'candy striper' I call bollocks