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INSIDE WITSEC BLOG

POST DATED 10.16

 

Jermaine Orlovsky was part of the US Marshal’s service for more than twenty years. Like a lot of the other people who worked with WitSec, he didn’t like the idea of associating with criminals at first. Didn’t like coddling bad people (I can relate).

But he came to like his job, and he was good at it. Had spotless performance reviews every quarter, and he always got the full merit increase every year.

He came to feel that he was doing “good things” for people by making sure the entrants to WitSec were cared for.

You could say that Jermaine became dedicated.

At the tail end of a long and decorated career, Jermaine was tasked with protecting Sonny Catalino, a gangster from Philadelphia. Sonny was a real bad guy, in every sense of the word. He’d killed people, or at least the government had suspected him of killing people. Nothing could ever stick. When they eventually did catch him, it was for trying to pass counterfeit bills. Can you believe that? Such a stupid thing to get caught for.

Anyway, Sonny decided to rat on his mob buddies, rather than go to prison for twenty years. In exchange for testifying, he served six months on a lesser charge. When he got out, he joined WitSec, and Jermaine became his handler. Helped him move from Philly to Seattle, where Sonny was supposedly working as a loan officer at a bank.

The thing is, he wasn’t. Sonny figured out how to embezzle (thank God for spellcheck, because I would have never figured out how to spell that word on my own) money from the bank. And what’s even crazier is that he enlisted Jermaine’s help to do it. A criminal and a cop, working side by side to steal money from regular people in Seattle.

Of course, they got caught. When the sting went down, local cops had no idea who they were arresting (since WitSec is so hush hush) and both Sonny’s and Jermaine’s faces ended up on television. This was a big bust for Seattle PD, the kind that ends with everyone getting promoted.

Not Sonny and Jermaine, though. They were both dead within a week. The mob doesn’t take kindly to snitches, and all it took was one news story for Sonny’s old employers to find him. And Jermaine had to die too, because that’s how the mob is.

So the moral of this story is, maybe you think you’re a good guy, working for the government, helping people. But if you lie down with dogs, you’re going to get up with fleas.

Starting in the next post, I’m going to give you names. Names of people who had been arrested, and are now living new lives with new names. Don’t miss the next post.

 

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