I became friends with Joe Barboza during the summer of 1969. We met at the Marine Cooks and Stewards’ Training School, which was located several miles east of Santa Rosa, California on Mark West Spring Road in Sonoma County. The school’s name had nothing to do with the Marine Corps. It was the name of the west coast maritime union that had jurisdiction over the work of the steward’s department. Joe and I were being trained by European chefs to cook on passenger ships and freighters.

I did not know it at the time but he was in the government’s secret witness protection program. The name he was using was Joe Bentley. Joe and I got along extremely well, although I was only 20 years old at the time. In fact, we got along so well that I took him with me to my parents’ house a few times that summer and introduced him to my mom and dad.

He was quite a character but I had no idea at the time that he had killed people for a living and was hiding out because he had turned state’s evidence against his don. The leader of Barboza’s crime family was the notorious Raymond Patriarca of the New England-based Patriarca crime family. The FBI had secretly taped a telephone conversation between Patriaca and his underboss in which Patriarca and the underboss had referred to Barboza in some very unflattering terms.

The world is a small place.