associates. The Government was later to argue that Friedland deceived them, faked his death in order not to cooperate, and did not in fact cooperate. While in the United States Federal Witness Protection Program he took a job with a mortgage firm owned by Joseph J. Higgins, a former member of the New Jersey General Assembly, and they made additional efforts to defraud the same pension fund. The fund suffered no loss. In 1983, United States Attorney for New Jersey W. Hunt Dumont was reported by The New York Times to be pursuing a major investigation of as many as 50 individuals based on evidence that Friedland had provided. Despite his conviction, Friedland was in Federal custody and told a reporter who had spotted him at Miami International Airport that he could end up spending more than a year in assisting with Federal prosecutions. Disappearance While Friedland was awaiting sentencing on September 2, 1985, the United States Coast Guard received a call from a boat off of Grand Bahama reporting that Friedland had disappeared while scuba diving. Friedland was said to have taken pain killers before diving with a friend at a spot 12 miles off of Grand Bahama and had failed to surface. His body was not discovered in an air-sea search and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He went on the run, using a fake United States passport and traveling under the alias of Richard Smith Harley. During his time on the lam, he had been traced to Kenya, Paris, Venice, Hong Kong and Singapore and worked his way up to become the number one fugitive wanted by the United States Marshals Service. In December 1987, two years after his disappearance, he was arrested by officials in Malé, capital of Maldives, an island country in the Indian Ocean, where he had been working as a scuba dive master. While in the Maldives, Friedland did little to avoid attention, including posing for a post card in which he was in scuba gear feeding a live shark with food held in his own mouth. Capture and conviction Friedland was flown back to the United States, arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 28, 1987, under the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service and taken for arraignment in Federal District court in Brooklyn. Upon his return he vowed to fight the charges against him, but said that