The United States has a provision in its Witness Security Reform Act that allows the victims of protected witnesses be compensated up to $25,000.
The Quebec government takes a similar approach and has an official policy of outing protected witnesses who commit major crimes.
Sabin Ouellet, a lawyer in the Quebec Crown Prosecutors Office, said: "It is done so that the public knows that those who have new identities aren't protected if they commit serious crimes again." Those protected people are given yet another new identity once they finish serving their new jail sentences, Mr. Ouellet said.
And then there is the case of Arthur Kane, the disgruntled investor who shot up the Merrill Lynch offices in Miami. His only living victim, Mr. Kolokoff, is still a stockbroker, but now he wheels into his office.
The bullet to his back left his spinal cord hanging by a thread, and he is classified as a T-6 paraplegic. On a good day, he has a little feeling in his lower stomach, but below that there's nothing.
He's still bitter that such a program exists and says the program does more harm than good. He's also launched a few lawsuits against the U.S. government. But at least, he says, the justice department told the whole story of Mr. Kane.
When he was told that, had Mr. Kane been a protected RCMP witness, it would have been illegal for anyone to tell him the truth, he replied:
"You might as well be in Russia."
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Identities revealed
The following are just some of the cases in the U.S. program and Quebec program - which doesn't fall under Canada's witness protection law - where witnesses have been exposed for using their new lives for crime:
April, 1981: Charles Pearson walked into a New Mexico sheriff's office claiming that a badly burned corpse found in the desert might be his wife. Police suspected Mr. Pearson was responsible, but before they gathered enough evidence to charge him, he fled. Over the next seven months, Mr. Pearson went on an interstate crime rampage, robbing six banks, two 7-Elevens and murdering four clerks. Along the way, it emerged that Mr. Pearson's real name was Marion Pruett and that he and his wife had entered the witness protection program after he gave evidence about a jailhouse murder. The case prompted a congressional investigation that toughened the screening process and required a thorough psychological assessment of every person who enters the program.
1997: A Quebec antiques dealer disappeared after he went to meet a man named Michel Simon who wanted to sell him some furniture. Mr. Simon later confessed that he killed the dealer and robbed him of $5,000. Mr. Simon was Michel Blass, a Hell's Angels hit man admitted to the program after he agreed to testify against other bikers in the 1980s.
February, 2000: On a well-to-do street in Tempe, Ariz., an entire family - husband, wife, daughter and son - were arrested in a raid and accused of running a drug ring, primarily selling ecstasy. It turned out that the husband, who identified himself as Jimmy Moran was actually Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, the Mafia informer and former hit man whose testimony brought down New York mob boss John Gotti. The truth about the Morans hit the newsstands immediately, and Mr. Gravano and his son were eventually convicted.
July, 2004: A short man with a greying beard walked into a Quebec courtroom and was sentenced to four years in jail for molesting a 14-year-old boy. He used the name Denis Côté. But the police and the Crown prosecutor revealed Mr. Côté's previous identity - Yves "Apache" Trudeau, a Hell's Angels hit man who cut a deal with investigators in 1986. In exchange for his testimony against his biker associates, he was allowed to plead guilty to 43 counts of manslaughter and enter the province's protection program.
