Witness Protection Program

Paper Summary:

This paper begins by describing the history of the Federal Witness Protection Program and why it was first necessary to institute such a policy. An examination of the content of the law is provided with quotes from the law itself. The paper then relates famous cases of people who witnessed against organized criminals and then describes how the system works and its implemented. It concludes with examining the necessity of the program today.

From the Paper:

"The Federal Witness Protection Program was created in response to the dangers faced by witnesses who testified against organized crime. Americans are familiar with the program largely through media presentations showing individuals who are in the program, many of them ex-mobsters themselves who turned state's witness and then needed a new identity. A film such as GoodFellas shows how this works. The film is based on the book by Nicholas Pileggi, Wiseguy, and that book is told in the first person by the man who lived the actual events recounted, Henry Hill, for forty years a gangster associated with a New York crime family. Hill started as a young boy who admired the gangsters in his neighborhood in New York in the 1950s and aspired to be one, and in the end he defected to protect himself from prosecution and testified against his friends in the mob in the 1980s. He now lives under the witness protection program with an assumed identity, and he told his story to Pileggi, who wrote a detailed account of Hill's years with organized crime, an account that also revealed much about the workings of organized crime, the members of the gangs, the people who tolerate and even assist them, and both the perceived advantages and limitations of being a member of organized crime."

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