THE NAMED PASSENGER

A true-crime narrative non-fiction memoir that exposes the structural cracks of the early Federal Witness Protection Program (WITSEC) through the eyes of a child born directly into it, targeted by it, and forced to spend decades fighting the government to reclaim his true name. In 1974, biological father Paul Parness took the stand as a federal informant against the Upstate New York mob, directly triggering the deportation trial of powerhouse mafia boss Russell Bufalino. To hide from the immediate blast radius, the government gave an infant proxy identity: a transposed birth certificate bearing a fake name, Christohper McDonald. Rather than safety, the journey descended into fugitive domestic chaos when the family aligned with a volatile hitman, culminating in an eight-year-old facing a mob drive-by shooting in Hacienda Heights, California. Spanning from strict Italian enclaves in 1960s Buffalo to the multi-racial landscape of Southern California, a military stint in the U.S. Army, and a grueling ten-year bureaucratic war against federal agencies, The Named Passenger is a fierce reclamation of personal sovereignty.