Holloway had been summoned here to testify against the prime target of his last undercover caper: Frank Nucci, a local boy turned drug trafficker with ties, cops say, to Italian organized-crime families and bikers. The subpoena was an unnecessary legal formality since Holloway was anxious to confront Nucci and point an accusatory finger at the short, heavy-set, nattily dressed gangster who had been mistakenly convinced that his former friend was also a loyal comrade-in-crime.
Although Holloway wanted no part of it, the Mounties were determined to shield their man from Nucci’s wrath, sequestering him for the preliminary trial in a nearby police barracks rimmed with barbed wire and assigning three well-armed officers to escort him in and out of court in a bulletproof vest. On the eve of his testimony, however, Nucci unexpectedly waved a white flag and pleaded guilty to drug charges, denying Holloway the opportunity to end his days as an agent on a salutary note.
Holloway’s disappointment was fleeting. “He took a plea. Fine by me,” he says matter-of-factly. For Holloway, Nucci was the final notch on his long belt of victories over crooks. Indeed, Holloway has spent hundreds of hours in court facing down an unsavoury assortment of targets, quietly relishing each confrontation as a fitting denouement to his subterfuge.
In a precarious business where the shelf life of an agent is usually measured in weeks or months and one or two undercover operations, Holloway’s assignments stretched over nearly a decade and involved members of the Cosa Nostra, biker clubs, drug cartels, Chinese gangs, even a dirty police officer who threatened, he says, to put a bullet in his head. His undercover work took him from Vancouver to St. John’s and several small and large cities in between.
Holloway was paid handsomely in exchange for services rendered. The investment paid dividends, with Holloway helping authorities to secure scores of convictions, mostly involving drug traffickers, including three dealers working out of a community centre in a small southwestern Ontario town. But the clandestine work, however lucrative, also nearly cost Holloway his life. He narrowly survived exposure of his true identity, suffered a near-fatal beating at the hands of suspicious drug dealers, and contracted a potentially deadly form of hepatitis along the way.
Given the arc of Holloway’s career, it is not surprising that enemies like Frank Nucci abound. What is startling is his perplexing decision to forgo repeated police offers for witness protection, where ex-agents are offered a chance of a new life with a new name, a new home, and a new job. Holloway has rejected it all, choosing instead to visit family and friends regularly and to live and work under his real name in a rural Ontario town close to where he recently participated in an undercover operation.
“People that hide are ashamed,” he says angrily. “I’m not fucking running from anybody. And what are they going to do when they find me? Kill me or die trying.”
Holloway’s defiance is either the stuff of movie heroes or a stupefying death wish. It is also, without question, a measure of a man who was prepared to take extraordinary risks not only in the undeniable pursuit of a healthy payday, but ultimately as a means of redemption, perhaps even salvation, from the troubling echoes of his past.
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