TAKING ON THE MOB : Broken Promises of Fast Money Pushed Roy Elson to the Edges of the West Coast Mafia. This Week, He Is Scheduled to Come Out of Hiding to Testify Against Alleged Members of the L.A. ‘Family.’

THE MOB IS ON TRIAL in Southern California. After four years of investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force, a dozen men--members of the Los Angeles branch of the Cosa Nostra, according to the government--were scheduled to take their places last week at the defendants’ table in federal court. Nearly a year ago, their indictment was announced with great fanfare--the most significant organized-crime case on the West Coast in a decade, said the U.S. attorney general; the Mob’s operations in Southern California are effectively gutted, said the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office.

The charges read like the outline for a Mario Puzo novel--18 counts of racketeering, attempted murder, extortion, assault, cocaine trafficking and conspiracy. But between the lines of the government’s case, in quick mentions throughout the 65-page indictment, lies another narrative. This is a story populated by more ordinary people, the innocent and not-so-innocent victims of the Mob and its associates, people who dabble, sometimes wittingly and sometimes unwittingly, on the shady side of the law.

This week, one of those ordinary people, Roy Lane Elson, is scheduled to come out of hiding to testify on behalf of the prosecution. A former candidate for the U.S. Senate and now a Washington consultant, Elson found himself on the edges of the Southern California Mafia through his dealings with one Daniel L. Mondavano. Although Mondavano is not indicted in the government’s case, it was Elson’s association with Mondavano that led Elson into contact with most of the men who are named.

What follows is the story of Roy Elson’s descent into the underworld. It is based on federal grand jury testimony; Roy Elson’s own extensive logs, diaries and secretly taped recordings of his dealings with Mondavano and others mentioned in the story; numerous interviews with Elson and other Mondavano victims, government investigators and prosecutors, and one of the defendants in the current trial as well. Danny Mondavano himself could not be found for comment, though the author did locate Mondavano’s ex-wife and son. The attorneys of accused Mafia members named in the story offered no access to their clients and, despite repeated requests, would neither confirm nor deny the content of Elson’s tale. This is one man’s story. It provides a rare look at the Southern California Mafia, and shows how members of the public can become both financiers of organized crime and its ultimate victims.

The Loan Shark

TO VINCENT (THE FAT MAN) Teresa, once the No. 3 boss in the Boston Mafia, Danny Mondavano was “one of the best thieves in New England.” “Danny became the most valuable property I had in my stable of hustlers,” he wrote in his 1973 autobiography, “My Life in the Mafia.” “We worked dozens of deals together, all of them profitable. He helped me operate at casinos, he helped me set up loanshark and gambling suckers, he worked in securities deals with me. He was a professional . . . one of the cleverest operators I ever knew.”

Brought up in East Boston--a rough, predominantly Italian neighborhood of aging triple-decker homes bordering the noisy runways of Logan International Airport--Mondavano had a silver tongue and a talent for attracting money. “We worked together like Mutt and Jeff,” Teresa wrote. When the Fat Man set up crooked card and dice games in Antigua, Mondavano was at his side; when he launched gambling junkets to the Colony Club in London, Mondavano was there, and once, according to Teresa, while sharing a table with Telly Savalas, Mondavano punched out another actor for getting a little too friendly with his girlfriend.

But casinos never had much appeal to Mondavano, who neither drank nor smoked. He preferred to do his gambling in the stock market, and he specialized in stolen bonds and securities swindles. His luck ran out, however, in the fall of 1967, about the time of his 40th birthday, when he was arrested for transporting stolen securities. Early in 1968 he was found guilty and sentenced to federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa.

Before long, Teresa, also convicted of transporting stolen securities, was Mondavano’s neighbor on Lewisburg’s Mafia Row. “When I got to the barbershop,” Teresa wrote, “two Mob guys were waiting for me, (including) my old partner Danny Mondavano. . . . (They) saw that I was taken care of right.”

Teresa also took care of Mondavano, in a somewhat different way. Faced with a sentence of 20 years in prison, he turned government witness. One of the first people he fingered was Danny Mondavano, who was once again found guilty of transporting stolen securities, this time $610,000 in U.S. Treasury bills.

Four years after his second conviction, in December, 1974, Mondavano was paroled and back on the cold streets of East Boston. He reported to his parole officer on time, and he kept out of jail. But by 1980, at least, he was up to some of his old tricks.

Invest money with me, he would tell an acquaintance; I’ll loan it out at high interest, and you’ll get a share. To the truly naive, it may have sounded like a simple, good deal. To others it probably sounded like a loan-sharking operation, into which, if they invested, they weren’t about to inquire too closely. It may also have been a Ponzi scam--in which the money from new investors would be used to pay off old investors in a pyramid structure while Mondavano took a cut off the top--or a combination of the two. Whatever the scam, it was a deal Mondavano pulled off successfully for the next three years.

On Wednesday, Jan. 7, 1981, he telephoned Roy Lane Elson, a friend of a friend, and made the pitch to him.

The Investor

IT’S BEEN SAID many times that he was the U.S. Senate’s 101st senator,” recalls one of Roy Elson’s former congressional associates, now a successful Los Angeles businessman. “He had indeed more power than many of the junior senators.” The youngest of nine children born to a Pennsylvania railroad engineer, Elson and his family moved to Tucson when he was 7. “Roy was always the best at everything,” says one of his old friends. “He was the marble champion, I think, of his elementary school. He went on to college at the University of Arizona in Tucson where he demonstrated great ability.” There he was selected by the dean to go to Washington and work for Sen. Carl Hayden (D-Ariz.).

At the time, in the early ‘50s, Arizona’s Carl Hayden was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of the most powerful men on Capitol Hill. Elson rose to become his confidant and top aide. Elson could “call up any bureau and department,” his former associate recalled, “any (Cabinet) secretary in the federal government, and merely say, this is Roy Elson, administrative assistant to Carl Hayden, and they would jump. . . .” In 1964, Elson himself, at age 33, won the Arizona Democratic Party’s Senate nomination by a landslide. And although he lost the general election for the seat vacated by presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, the margin was only a few thousand votes. Four years later he again won the Democratic nomination for Senate. “Roy Elson buried two Democratic primary opponents under an avalanche of votes,” said the lead in the Phoenix Gazette. But this time he was running head to head with an unstoppable Barry Goldwater seeking to recapture his seat, and defeat was almost inevitable.

Returning to Washington, Elson decided to capitalize on his fat Rolodex and his knowledge of the machinery of government. He turned his efforts to lobbying, first as a vice president/government relations of the National Assn. of Broadcasters, and later on on his own. He married and divorced twice, raised a son and a daughter, and for a dozen years kept at his business and achieved the sort of life generally called comfortable, middle class, normal. But after he took Danny Mondavano’s phone call in early 1981, his life would never be normal again.

The Deal

ELSON HAD FIRST heard of Mondavano several months before from a woman he had been dating, Anne McMeekin. As Elson would later tell a federal grand jury, she said that Mondavano ran a money-lending business in Boston, principally servicing merchants at flea markets in and around Boston, and that she had been investing with him for some time. Mondavano supplied the merchants with short-term loans at extremely high interest rates, and he dealt exclusively in cash. Investors got a share of that interest every week.

Elson was suspicious. It sounded to him like some sort of a scam. But during the next few months, he watched McMeekin get back in cash an agreed-on 2% in interest a week, and for special deals--what Mondavano called “ice cream” deals--up to 6%. While Elson’s money-market investment was barely bringing in 8% or 9% a year, Anne McMeekin was making 100% to 300% on her money.

Nevertheless, Elson was still skeptical when Mondavano called and offered him a chance to get in on the action. Elson did, however, suggest the names of friends who might be interested, and for them, too, the “juice”--interest payments--began flowing.

Finally, Elson decided to take the plunge. A con, he guessed, wouldn’t last this long or pay this handsomely. And if it was all based on loan-sharking, well, no one had gotten caught yet. “I watched my friends,” he said. “They were making a fortune from this guy. They were getting a point or two points (a week), and finally I said, you’ve got to be the stupidest guy imaginable.”

Eventually, Elson became not only an investor but also, in a sense, a partner. For every new investor he brought to Mondavano he received a half a percent in addition to his usual 2% interest payment. At first he took his money in cash; then he began to roll it over and add more to the pot. “All of a sudden, it was going so well that I started putting everything I had into it,” he remembers. “(It was) my chance . . . to do everything I wanted.”

Every few weeks, right on schedule, Mondavano would either Federal Express money and accounts to Washington or arrive in person. He would show up with a thick wad of cash--as much as $90,000 in hundreds--strapped to his leg under his trousers.

He and Elson would sit down and go over the figures. It could get complex. Each investor had made a separate deal, investing a certain amount at a specified interest rate. To some, Mondavano offered his ice cream deals--increase the investment on short notice, for example, and he could up the points one week. Some chose to take their gains in cash, some to roll them over. After he and Mondavano went over the books, it was up to Elson to pay off his expanding circle of sub-investors.

As Mondavano’s list of investors in the Washington area multiplied, he began making trips to Los Angeles, expanding his business. That’s where the money is, he told Elson; he was thinking about moving. But there was one obstacle. Mondavano still had about four years to go on his parole, and he was required to report regularly to a parole officer in Boston. Could Elson do anything to help?

By then, Elson had few illusions about Danny Mondavano, and Mondavano made no secret of his shady past. “He claimed he was connected with the Mafia,” Elson said later. Mondavano also claimed to have a “rabbi,” a protector in the Mob, according to Elson’s grand jury testimony. The rabbi, according to what Elson was led to believe, made it possible for Mondavano to move to California, to move into new Mafia territory. “. . . He was paying this guy about $25,000 a week for his insurance. . . .” says Elson. “If he had any problems . . . this is the guy he turned to.”

In November, 1981, Elson put Mondavano in touch with a friend who had served with the Justice Department. According to Elson, Mondavano paid the contact $15,000 to unofficially represent his case to members of the parole board. Within a month, the parole restrictions were lifted.

Mondavano was already at work in Los Angeles. His wife, Rose, and son had been living here for a while, with a fellow Boston emigre, Dolly Ford. When she opened her home to the Mondavanos, Ford says, she was unaware of Mondavano’s criminal past. And when he told her he could double or triple her assets by investing in a variety of deals, she believed him. “I was innocent,” she says, “and gave him the money.” Like Elson had, Ford ultimately became not only a Mondavano investor but also a broker, introducing friends to the deal.

Within a year, Mondavano was settled in a $385,000 home on a cul-de-sac in Tarzana. That summer, on July 31, 1983, he gave a wedding shower for his son Dennis’ fiancee at a restaurant in Woodland Hills. Among the guests were Dolly Ford, Anne McMeekin, Roy Elson and many other Mondavano investors from both Washington and Los Angeles. It turned out to be a sort of convention, although most of the investors at the party had no idea that among the guests they were chatting with were some fellow money suppliers. They also had no idea that their bubble was about to burst.

The Deal Goes Bad

IN THE WEEKS following the shower, Mondavano began slipping behind on his weekly payments for the first time. By Sept. 3, when Dennis was married at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, scores of investors on the East and West coasts were getting worried. Collectively they had millions of dollars riding with Mondavano, Elson judges now. Many had invested their entire life savings. “All of a sudden he started coming up short, . . .” Elson remembers. “He said he (was) a little short, but (he’d) have it.”

When the purple and white Federal Express envelopes started showing up empty (tampered with, Mondavano said), many of the Washington investors looked to Elson for their money. He began borrowing heavily to make the weekly interest payments. “I felt some obligation to all these people who put in their money, . . .” he said. “I probably put in $80,000.”

By the beginning of October, 1983, Elson’s fear began slipping into panic. Still hoping that the cutoff was just a temporary problem, and convinced that Mondavano could get the money, that interest would be coming in on his loans, Elson and Anne McMeekin flew to Los Angeles on Oct. 13. Elson was prepared to negotiate. Some of his investors just wanted their original investments back; others would agree to reduced interest rates. Elson also thought about threatening Mondavano with exposure--he had been secretly recording his conversations with Mondavano since 1981.

When they met, Mondavano wasn’t encouraging. Too many people had called in their money all at once, he said. And besides, he said in a taped conversation that was later described to the grand jury, he was having trouble with the Mob.

“See, when I came over here I got the OK. Who I got the OK with is out of the picture now. . . . The Milanos are in now. . . . They go back all the way with Mickey Cohen. . . . Now they want their money first, and I’m trying to tell them, look, I can’t give you as much as you want. I have to spread it out. One of them understands, but the other . . . we almost came to blows. . . . I said, look, you only go down once. I ain’t scared of that. . . .”

Elson, hoping to win Mondavano’s confidence and find out who “they” were, offered to provide him with government connections, something he could use for “protection.” But Mondavano demurred: “That’s what they’re all afraid of,” he said. “If political people come in, they think you’re going to become a government witness, and that’s what scares everybody, and then (someone in the Mob will) blow (you) away. That’s what I don’t want.”

Elson and McMeekin left Los Angeles with a promise of partial payment, and a warning: “They don’t have Chapter 11 on the streets,” one of Mondavano’s associates told them.

BY DECEMBER, 1983, Elson, nearly broke and being hounded by his angry circle of sub-investors, had reached the breaking point. He made up his mind that Mondavano would pay up one way or another. “I’m coming out,” he told Mondavano’s son. “Your father better be available, or I’ll blow this thing. . . .” A little more than a week before Christmas, Elson dismantled two handguns he owned (a powerful 13-shot Browning 9-millimeter and a small, easily concealed .25-caliber Beretta), hid them in his suitcase and boarded a plane for Los Angeles. For added protection he took along an off-duty cop as a bodyguard.

Elson met Mondavano at a deli on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills and once again heard Mondavano’s hard-luck story: He was cleaned out; he needed more time. Elson gave him until Jan. 15 to come up with the money--by now he was asking for a flat sum of about $750,000, the total owed him and his dozen or so investors. He then gave Mondavano a list of dates and times to keep in touch with him.

Elson and his bodyguard had been staying with one of the Los Angeles investors, but after delivering the ultimatum to Mondavano, they decided to change addresses. Elson called an oldfriend of his from Washington, who invited them to stay at his house. At first, Elson kept his problems to himself. But when the story came out, to his surprise, his host, a consultant who had worked for Las Vegas interests, said he knew someone who might be able to help. He picked up the telephone, and a few minutes later, says Elson, a meeting was set up for the following afternoon in Palm Springs with Charles J. Caci, a.k.a. Bobby Milano, nightclub singer, bit player in gangster movies and, according to the Justice Department indictment, a soldier in the Los Angeles Mafia.

Elson knew it was a fork in the road. He could return to Washington or he could pursue Mondavano along a different, more dangerous route. It was time to go for broke, he thought. “I made the decision that night to go to Palm Springs,” Elson said later.

The next morning, the off-duty-cop-cum-bodyguard flew back to Washington, and Elson and his friend headed down the San Bernardino Freeway to Palm Springs. The meeting at Bobby Milano’s house, says Elson, “was almost something right out of ‘The Godfather.’ . . .

“It was in a great big living room, and we talked for four hours,” he said. “Not a drink, no coffee. Long couch. I’m sitting at one end. Behind me (is someone named) Vito, who looks the part of every hood. I told the story, and (Milano) said, ‘What do you want us to do about it?’ ”

Was Mondavano “connected” in Southern California, Elson asked, or was he simply operating as a maverick? If Mondavano was connected, Elson wanted to give Milano a warning. Me and my friends, Elson told him, had better not be hurt. “You do not want the heat I can bring to bear,” he said, while the consultant kicked him under the table.

If Mondavano wasn’t connected, continued Elson, if “he was out here cowboying on his own, . . . it seems to me you guys have got a real problem; you don’t even know what the hell’s going on right under your nose.”

Milano, Elson said, explained nothing, promised nothing. But he did agree to look into it. He would be in touch, he told Elson. The next day, Dec. 21, Elson flew back to Washington, hoping that his contact with Milano would at least yield some more information on exactly what Mondavano was up to.

For about a month nothing happened. Then on Jan. 23, 1984, Mondavano, while at his usual table in a favorite deli, was “paid a visit” by Bobby Milano’s brother, Vincent Dominic (Jimmy) Caci, and Stephen (Big Stevie) Cino, according to Elson’s federal grand jury testimony. Caci and Cino, says the Justice Department indictment, are Mafiosi.

Early the next morning, at 6:20 Pacific Time, Mondavano placed a frantic call to Elson, which Elson secretly recorded and played later for the grand jury: “I got called in yesterday from some people,” he said. “I had a sit-down yesterday, and your name was mentioned. I hate to tell you what they told me. . . . I almost got a smash in the . . . face.”

“Why did they want to see you?” Elson asks on the tape, sounding innocent.

“Because of the money I owe you and Anne. I mean, you don’t know?” Mondavano replies acidly.

Mondavano’s voice rises. “How do you do this to me?” he shouts into the receiver. “They want to hurt me, . . .” he yells. “I, I, I can’t take it. They’re going to come over here. They’re looking to shake me down. . . . They want me to go out to steal money to give to them, and they’ll make arrangements with you.”

Then, without mentioning his name, Mondavano brought up his rabbi, who had recently been convicted of mail fraud. “They know that the other guy’s out of the . . . picture; they know that the guy went to the can. Now they’re looking to . . . rape me. . . .”

It’s working, thought Elson, listening in Washington.

The Catch

AS THE alleged Southern California Mafia began to get to Mondavano, the U.S. Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force began to get to them. On Feb. 21, 1984, according to an FBI wiretap application and affidavit, Lawrence (Larry) Fiato volunteered to become a government informant, and about two weeks later his brother Craig followed suit. The Fiato brothers had been facing potential federal charges in a stolen-securities case, explained Richard Small, a prosecutor in the current trial. During the next two years, again according to the wiretap application, the brothers, wearing hidden microphones, tape-recorded hundreds of hours of conversations with the Mob in Los Angeles, giving federal authorities their first inside look at the structure and makeup of the Southern California “family.” The early tapes included mention of the pressure being brought to bear on Mondavano.

Roy Elson, however, was in the dark. He hadn’t heard from Milano, and he couldn’t find Mondavano. Then, in the middle of March, Elson got a phone call. Bobby Milano wanted to see him in Palm Springs. “I assumed it was about my collection, so I was pretty optimistic.” Elson agreed to make the trip and eventually spent a couple of days in Palm Springs meeting with Milano, his brother Jimmy Caci and Big Stevie Cino. “They were going to assume responsibility, they would find the guy, and I was going to get my money back,” says Elson. Then he asked what it would cost.

Instead of charging a hefty 50% commission for recovering the money, as Elson had expected, they wanted him to do favors for them in Washington. In his grand jury testimony, Elson remembered the kind of favors they had in mind. What could he do for Jimmy Caci, who was headed to jail on a currency-smuggling charge? Did he know the judge? Milano asked.

They were also very much interested in a long-term association. “Down the line,” says Elson, “I would be their man in Washington and they could call me when they needed help or something. . . .

“I was willing to do what . . . I could do legitimately without crossing that fine line of really . . . corrupting the system,” Elson told the grand jury.

Elson knew he was taking a big chance, getting in deeper. “It worried me,” he says. “But at the same time I thought I could handle that. If I got my money back, I’d tell them all to go to hell.”

During the next several months, Elson did a few small favors for Milano. He read the transcripts from Jimmy Caci’s case and met with a former New York senator, an old friend and the person who had nominated the judge in the case. Over drinks at the Washington Palm restaurant, Elson, without telling him why, pumped the senator for background material on how the judge was nominated. According to Elson’s grand jury testimony, his research and thoughts on the situation were of no use--Caci’s case was past appeal. Elson did similar checks on laws regarding a hotel in-room bar service that Milano was trying to develop, and he arranged for a lawyer for one of Milano’s friends arrested in Baltimore.

At about the same time, the Fiato brothers’ tapes show, within the Mob, shaking down Mondavano had become a major priority. They wanted to get to Mondavano through his son. The plan, as outlined in the FBI wiretap application, was to have him grabbed and beaten. Then the word would go out to Danny: “Now you see what happened to your son. . . . The next time we are going to bury the whole . . . family.”

Once again, Elson was getting antsy. In July, frustrated and angry, he spoke to Bobby Milano in Palm Springs. Milano told him Mondavano had been contacted and warned: “If you don’t straighten . . . out, you have no idea what is liable to happen here. I mean, you’ve got a lot of people on both sides very, very mad at you--on both sides.”

But Milano also said that he and Elson had no understanding, favors or no. “We never cleared any kind of a deal, you and I,” Milano said. “Other than a favor. I will do a favor. You know, if someone needed to be reprimanded, then I can do that. And I’m, you know, I’m choosing my words very, very carefully.” Milano then suggested that they again get together. “You got to talk to me,” he said. “You got to cut your deal.”

Elson couldn’t believe what he was hearing. All of a sudden he was back to square one. He told Milano he would meet with him.

For nearly six months, Elson had been trying to get satisfaction from Mondavano. He had exhausted what little money he had left or could borrow. Worried about the security of his own phone, he would spend hours, in the dead of night, in phone booths around Washington, trying to locate other victims in the Los Angeles area who might have new information. At one point, some of his neighbors told him later, they began thinking he was heavily involved in a drug ring.

Finally, by the beginning of September, Elson had pulled together enough money to take himself and his bodyguard back to California. But at the meeting with Milano he found there was no deal to be cut. Mondavano had disappeared, and Elson felt that Milano and friends weren’t going to find him. Elson decided he would have to find Mondavano himself.

The Hunt

THROUGHOUT September, 1984, Elson turned the San Fernando Valley inside out searching for Mondavano. He tracked down other victims, looking for leads. He shared drinks and dinners with members of the L.A. family in Mob joints along Ventura Boulevard, hoping to discover whether his Palm Springs meetings were producing results. The few hours in between he stayed at Dolly Ford’s house, sleeping with his 9-millimeter automatic under his pillow.

Eventually, through a contact in Las Vegas, Elson and another victim turned up an acquaintance of Mondavano who, for a 50% share plus travel expenses up front, would try to recover their money. Elson gave the operative the name “Bronson.”

“He claimed he had this vehicle that was equipped to extract information,” Elson remembers. “And we didn’t want to ask too many questions, but I assumed he had his torture chamber in there. If he was really going to work Danny over or kill him, I sure in hell didn’t want to know.” But after driving his “torture van” to Boston and then to the Florida Keys in search of Mondavano, “Bronson” came up empty.

Next Elson planned a sting. Mondavano would be tricked into a meeting in Mexico, set up for a drug bust and left in jail unless he cooperated with Elson, who would use his Washington connections to free him once everyone’s money was returned. But no one could find Mondavano to lure him in.

Finally, Elson spoke to a hit man. He had been introduced to him by a Mob contact. “Bright, well-educated, came out of New Jersey,” Elson remembers.

“You want a termination . . . ?” the bright young man asked. “Do you want the guy done in? . . . I’ll pick up this phone right now and I’ll make one phone call, and it’s done. But, you’ve got to recognize the consequences. . . . Once I make that phone call, you’re in it all the way, ‘cause you’re the one ordering the hit.”

“I don’t want any bumping out,” said Elson. “I just want my money and the people’s money back.”

Elson had traveled a long way from his power days on Capitol Hill and his heady Senate campaigns. The final straw came the night someone broke into Dolly Ford’s house, apparently looking for him. “People were looking for me,” he remembers. “Things were not going too well, and I was out there all by my lonesome. I ran out of resources; I got double-crossed by all those hoods. I got scared, and I finally just got the hell out of town.”

The Game’s Over

ELSON WAS BACK in Washington on Oct. 2, 1984. Slowly he made a start at rebuilding his life. He patched up his tattered consulting business, developing a client in the cable industry and, gradually, a few others in broadcasting and other fields. But the ghost of Danny Mondavano refused to vanish.

Elson still received phone calls from people who had invested with Mondavano, looking to get their money back. He heard from victims he had talked to in California, who kept him up to date on new developments. For much of the next year, logs that Elson kept daily were peppered with messages from “Doc,” “Birdie” and other code names of those still searching for Mondavano.

Suddenly, the messages from California began to sound alike. One after another, the victims were being questioned by agents of the Internal Revenue Service, and being brought before a federal grand jury.

Elson didn’t know whether to be happy or terrified. He worried what the authorities would think of his dealings with Bobby Milano--they were sure to find out about them sooner or later. And as for the possibility that Mondavano would be arrested and tried, thought Elson, if it happened, he could kiss goodby to any lingering hope of recovering his money.

In the summer of 1985, Elson found a message on his phone answering machine. The IRS investigators had come up with his name. “My initial reaction was, ‘The game’s over. There goes the dough, that’s the end of that, and my ass may be in deep, deep trouble.’ ”

After several nervous days, Elson returned the call. He asked for immunity in exchange for his information. The request was denied, but Elson, hoping to maintain some part of his reputation, decided to cooperate fully anyway. Before long, the amazed investigators realized that they had discovered a bounty of evidence not only on Mondavano but on much of the Mob as well. Elson had secretly tape-recorded literally scores upon scores of telephone conversations with Mondavano and many of the alleged Mafia leaders they were currently investigating. In addition, he had kept meticulous notes, including dates, times, names and topics on virtually every meeting and activity he had concerning Mondavano and the Mob.

As soon as it could be arranged, Elson was whisked out to Los Angeles, where he spent three weeks going over his suitcase full of documents and tapes with both the IRS investigators and the federal Organized Crime Strike Force. Then, in 1986, he spent three full days before a federal grand jury.

That, he found, was the easy part. The hard part was going back to Washington and trying to live with the idea that sometime in the future he would be called as a key witness against the Mob. At first he thought it would be only a matter of months. But in the end, he had to wait for two years.

On May 22, 1987, in a press conference in Washington, Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese announced the indictment of “virtually all . . . the membership of the Cosa Nostra organized crime family in Los Angeles.” The scope of the indictment surprised even Elson--many of the Mob family members he had contacted in his hunt for Mondavano and his money were there, charged with racketeering, conspiracy, extortion. But Danny Mondavano was not on the list. Instead, he was listed among the Mafia victims, a target of extortion. But the final surprise was his own name, on the public record. His testimony, the indictment implied, would be key in extortion charges against eight of the men in the indictment, including Bobby Milano, Jimmy Caci and Stephen Cino.

A short while later, someone dialed his number and left a message: “Just tell Roy that people who talk don’t live too long.”

Elson made plans to disappear.

Life in Hiding

IN A QUIET, dimly lit corner of a Mexican cantina in Northridge, Roy Elson sipped slowly on a pungent jalapeno margarita and talked about running. But this time he wasn’t remembering his Senate races. Disguised, using an alias and packing a loaded snub-nosed .38 Special at his side, and a high-powered rifle in his nearby camper, Elson was running for his life.

Offered placement in the Witness Protection Program, Elson had rejected it. Too confining, he said. He chose to go into hiding on his own, changing his location weekly, sometimes daily. He spent part of the time in a cabin deep within an isolated section of the Tehachapi Mountains. And within hours of this meeting in the San Fernando Valley he would disappear once again. He had come out of hiding to tell his story; he would not emerge again until he was called to testify.

It was an anxious and difficult 10 months. “It’s ruined my consulting business, my personal life--I don’t have one,” he said. “My family never knows where I am. I’ve cut off totally. There’s no paper trail, no credit cards; nothing can be traced to me. I’ve felt very lonely and still feel very lonely. It’s not a normal life.”

Is it worth it? Elson considered the question in a phone call just weeks before the trial began. Yes, he said. “I skirted the fringes and got myself into deep trouble. Now I want to protect some other people who may be more gullible than me.” Then the regrets emerged. “I should have known better,” he said. “I should have blown the whistle way back, but I didn’t because it was my life savings, my future. I got snookered, and I got greedy.”

The future remains Elson’s most perplexing problem. “When I get through testifying, I’m still going to be a little nervous until I find out that all these guys have been put away. I’m scared about some of them. The advice I receive is to be cautious.” For just how long, he says, depends on which government official he talks to. “It goes from when I testify, to several months after, to I may never be safe again.”

And then there are his unanswered questions. What was the scheme, and what was its connection to the Mob? What happened to the money? Elson estimates he invested some $32,500 with Mondavano and was owed, with Anne McMeekin, around $285,000. Mondavano paid him a total of $5,000. Even more important to Elson, what happened to Danny Mondavano--where was he? Elson knows that Rose Mondavano and their son are in Phoenix, but they claim to have no knowledge of Danny’s whereabouts. Elson believes that one day Mondavano will be indicted, but he wonders about the delay. Perhaps, says Elson, the government has given him immunity, and Mondavano will make an appearance at the current trial.

But what if Danny Mondavano is never charged, never indicted?

Elson answers quickly. “I’ll get him myself,” he says. Then he pauses, considers. “I went on one Rambo hunt; I doubt I’ll do it again. I don’t enjoy living this way.”