Witsec

by Pete Earley

  Ottenberg’s health took a turn for the worse, and when she could no longer drive, the Shurs gave her rides. She died four years later at age sixty-eight. “She inspired me,” Shur recalled. “I was damned if I’d surrender to MS. She hadn’t. I said to hell with it! And that’s how I decided to live my life.”

  Shur threw himself into his job. There was plenty for him to do. He’d finally found a way to get the cumbersome OCRS index card system modernized. Congress had recently passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA), a law that gave federal funds to police departments to spend on new equipment and training. Shur had asked LEAA officials for money to computerize the index card information, but they’d told him LEAA funds could only be awarded to state and local police departments. However, a sympathetic LEAA administrator had proposed a way for him to circumvent his own agency’s rules. With the administrator’s help, Shur persuaded officials in six states to hire him, without salary, to develop an “organized-crime intelligence system” for their police departments. The LEAA then awarded those six states a federal grant, and the officials there, in turn, sent the funds to Shur. “My plan was simple: After we got our system going, we would teach the states how to replicate it. This would ensure uniformity and help them avoid costly start-up mistakes. Eventually, I thought, we would have a national network—a computerized intelligence system in every state with information about LCN members.”

  As soon as the LEAA money started flowing in, Shur told the Civil Service Commission, which helped federal agencies with hiring, that he wanted to find ten women to employ as criminal analysts. “I specifically asked for women because there weren’t a lot of them walking police beats back then, and there was a feeling that women couldn’t be criminal analysts because they’d never carried guns and therefore didn’t understand police work or crime. I thought this attitude was stupid, and I wanted to show that bright people, regardless of their gender, could do this sort of work.”

  The commission gave Shur one thousand résumés to review. “I spent three days whittling that stack down to sixty. When I interviewed those women, I asked each one: ‘Do you like to argue?’ Their answer was important. I wanted individually minded analysts, the kind of person who wouldn’t hesitate to tell me, ‘Hey, Gerry, this is a ridiculous request. I know a better way we can do this.’ I believed this free-speaking attitude would result in us coming up with better ideas, and the ten women I eventually hired certainly never had a problem telling me exactly what they thought!”

  Shur was following an axiom his father had taught him: Stupid people surround themselves with smart people, and truly smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them. None of the women had any police experience or knew much about organized crime. But Shur didn’t care. After some rudimentary training, he put them to work on the index cards and incoming reports. “We had to work fast because the LEAA grant was only good for two years. We had to demonstrate that what we were doing was worth permanent funding.”

  Shur had been in the midst of getting the intelligence system perfected when he was stricken by MS. By then, his analysts had fed information about four thousand racketeers into a computer. If a U.S. attorney in Chicago wanted to know whether a suspect was connected to the LCN, all the prosecutor had to do was call one of the analysts, who were jokingly known as “Gerry’s girls.” With a few keyboard strokes, they could provide him with a detailed printout. Their files contained information about LCN members’ aliases, home addresses, birthdays, business ventures, criminal records, sentences, prison release dates, marriages, divorces, relatives, best friends, even hobbies. For the first time, OCRS analysts were able to identify patterns in mob activities and links between various crime families. They discovered several mobsters who were related through marriage. “My analysts did such an incredibly good job that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms began hiring women as criminal analysts, too.” His analysts even developed their own computer program, with help from the National Security Agency, called the Organized Crime and Racketeering Intelligence Language, for processing LCN data.

  One night while Shur was working late, he noticed that Thomas Kennelly, the Buffalo strike force chief, also was laboring over paperwork in a nearby office. Shur stopped to say hello, and Kennelly mentioned that he was filling out a requisition form so he could give cash to two witnesses stashed in a motel. They had agreed to testify in a Utica, New York, mob case, and they needed to buy groceries.

  “Tom,” Shur said, “you’ve got better things to do with your time than to fill out these forms. Why don’t you let me handle this for you? I’ll take care of them so you can focus on getting ready for the case.”

  Kennelly was delighted.

  “Tom thought I was doing him a favor that night,” Shur recalled later, “but it was pure selfishness on my part. I was looking for an excuse to jump in and take charge of his witnesses. I’d been telling people for a long time that we needed a uniform way to protect our witnesses. Otherwise, every U.S. attorney was going to be starting from scratch each time a witness came forward. I had been in the Justice Department long enough to realize that if I could get control of the money, by volunteering to be the person in OCRS who handled the paperwork, I could begin to establish procedures about how our witnesses would be protected.”

  After Kennelly turned the day-to-day handling of his two witnesses over to him, Shur became the OCRS’s de facto witness manager. The Justice Department had a small fund, called Fees and Expenses for Witnesses, that it used whenever a U.S. attorney needed to bring in an expert—usually a psychiatrist or other medical specialist—to testify at a trial or to reimburse witnesses for their travel, meal, and housing expenses. Shur began tapping into that fund to pay the cost of hiding mob witnesses. There weren’t many—in 1966, only six in the entire nation—and Shur estimated the number would never total more than ten per year. “I didn’t see this as a big operation, but I had been thinking about it for several years and I had developed some ideas about how we needed to proceed, based on my experiences in Brooklyn and the Valachi, Calabrese, and Barboza cases.”

  Shur was convinced that the most efficient way for the government to protect a mob witness was by giving him a new identity and relocating him to a new community. “Protecting someone with guards, the way the government had done in the Barboza case, was expensive and dangerous,” Shur later explained. “It also caused a witness problems in the long run. You couldn’t afford to have guards protect him for the rest of his life, so he’d always be looking over his shoulder. During the 1960s, I was also very aware of the threat of assassinations. President Kennedy was on my mind. If we couldn’t keep a president alive, with the very best agents in the world and unlimited funds, how were we going to protect a mob witness from assassination? The solution was protection through anonymity. The best way to keep a witness safe was by moving him away from the danger area, moving him to a place where no one knew who he was. We weren’t dealing with sophisticated KGB spies here, we were dealing mainly with New York metropolitan area mobsters, and many of them had never stepped outside the city. The United States is a big country with plenty of cities where people could be hidden. Of course, if we were going to relocate someone, we then had to give them a new identity so they couldn’t be followed.”

  At about the same time that Shur took charge of the OCRS’s mob witnesses, Charles Rogovin knocked on his office door. Rogovin, a professor at Temple University Law School in Philadelphia, was a member of a blue-ribbon panel that President Johnson had appointed in 1965 after the Republican Party accused him of being soft on crime. The panel, formally known as the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, was in the midst of a two-year nationwide study of crime in America. It planned to conduct five national surveys and had started interviewing thousands of prosecutors, police, attorneys, judges, criminals, and crime victims for their views about how the government could better fight crime. Ro
govin had been questioning Justice Department officials, and one of them had suggested he talk to Shur.

  “I’m looking for fresh ideas,” Rogovin told him, “and I was told that you had some.”

  Shur described the OCRS’s computerized intelligence system for organized crime and how the ten analysts running it were all women. “We need to bring more women into law enforcement,” Shur said, “if for no other reason than to perform desk jobs so we can get more gun-carrying officers onto the streets.” He talked about the need for more computerization and sharing of information between agencies. Near the end of their meeting, Shur also said the government needed to establish a witness protection program. “We need government safe houses,” he explained, “places where we can hide these people temporarily until we can relocate them.”

  Rogovin was impressed when he left Shur’s office. “Here was a man who I thought had a number of very interesting ideas,” he said later. “Everyone else seemed to assume that witnesses who testified against organized crime were going to be whacked. But Gerry was saying that it didn’t have to be that way. It was clear to Gerry that there was a need to do something in a much more sophisticated way to help witnesses than simply handing them a bus ticket to Toledo.”

  Rogovin relayed Shur’s ideas to Henry Ruth Jr., the presidential commission’s deputy director, and Ruth put them into writing for the full panel to review. Its final report was presented to President Johnson at a White House ceremony in February 1967, and two of Shur’s ideas were included in it. The panel recommended that local and state police departments begin using computers to collect and share information about the LCN. And then it addressed Shur’s idea about witness protection.

  No jurisdiction has made adequate provisions for protecting witnesses in organized crime cases from reprisal. In the few instances where guards are provided, resources require their withdrawal shortly after the particular trial terminates.… Therefore the commission recommends that the Federal Government should establish residential facilities for the protection of witnesses desiring such assistance.… After trial, the witness should be permitted to remain at the facility so long as he needs to be protected. The federal government also should establish regular procedures to help federal and local witnesses who fear organized crime reprisal to find jobs and places to live in other parts of the country, and to preserve their anonymity from organized crime groups.

  The panel’s endorsement had an immediate impact. “Now it was not just Gerald Shur who was running around the Justice Department talking about how the government needed a formal witness protection program,” Shur recalled. “A presidential commission had recommended that we begin protecting witnesses, and this gave the idea credibility and tremendous political clout. I jumped on that report. It was exactly what I needed to really get the ball rolling.”

  When historians, politicians, journalists, and critics would later set out to find the origins of the Federal Witness Protection Program, the paper trail would lead them back to this moment and the thick, blue-bound presidential commission’s recommendations. Those who took the time to look behind the panel’s one-paragraph recommendation would find Gerald Shur. But what no one, including Shur, realized in 1967 was the significance of what had been started. Thousands of lives were about to change, many for the better, others for the worse, because of his seemingly straightforward suggestion.

  PART TWO

  BREAKING OMERTÀ

  If you have any doubts that the mob’s most basic tradition—its code of silence—has broken down, just look at what’s happening now.… Right this minute, there are more than seven hundred guys under federal protection [in WITSEC]. All of them have squealed on the mob. They’re street punks, big moneymakers, and made guys.… They’re talking because the government is providing them with something they can’t get anymore from their own: protection, real protection.

  Vincent Teresa, mobster

  My Life in the Mafia, 1976

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Having never created a new identity or a false background for anyone, Gerald Shur sought advice from the experts. He contacted the Central Intelligence Agency but decided it did too good a job creating false histories. “I wasn’t going to send a witness to penetrate a foreign nation, and I didn’t need to give anyone a deep cover,” he said. “What I needed was just enough new documentation for someone to get a fresh start in a new community.” Shur was worried about helping witnesses too much. “Most of them would be criminals, and I didn’t want them using us to get away with new crimes.” He asked Marcy Edelman, one of his criminal intelligence analysts, what documents she thought a witness would need to start over. They agreed that each person would need a minimum of three records: a new birth certificate, driver’s license, and Social Security card. If the witness had children, school records would need to be produced.

  Shur would later marvel at how much simpler it had been in the late 1960s and early 1970s to obtain documents and fabricate a new past than it is today. There were few computerized records and no Internet. Credit-reporting companies were in their infancy. Most birth and death records were kept in city or county courthouses scattered across the country, and there was little or no effort to cross-index them. Many states had laws that prohibited insurance and credit card companies from requiring applicants to provide their Social Security numbers; they were considered private, only for use when filing taxes. This meant there was no standard universal identifier or number that followed a person for life, as there were in some European countries.

  Shur turned to people he knew personally and trusted for help in getting documents. Several state’s attorneys arranged for him to get new birth certificates. He convinced the director of a motor vehicles department to provide him with new driver’s licenses. “Of course, I wouldn’t give anyone a driver’s license unless he already had a valid one.” Obtaining Social Security cards was more complicated. Initially, Shur had witnesses apply for a new number, but this meant each witness then had two different numbers—his original one and his new one. “My plan was that after a witness died, his family would send a letter to Social Security and explain that number A matches number B, and then Social Security would combine the two accounts,” Shur said, “but this created all sorts of problems. I eventually got officials at Social Security to create a new account for our witnesses and transfer their funds from their old number into the new one.” School officials in a Washington suburb agreed to help him with school transcripts. “We would get a child’s school records, black out the child’s name, and give those records to a school official. This official would then copy the child’s grades off their old transcript and onto a new transcript from a local school in the child’s new name. The grades were exactly the same, only the child’s name and the name of the school were different. We would even make sure any teachers’ comments were faithfully copied. Later, some witnesses asked me to give their kids better grades than they had earned. I said no.”

  There was one type of record Shur refused to provide witnesses. They were relocated without any financial documentation: no credit report, no prior banking records, nothing. They started clean. This made mundane tasks such as getting a telephone installed difficult because companies wanted to know their new customer’s payment history, but Shur felt it was too risky for the government to vouch for any witness’s fiscal past.

  While he tried to keep rules to a minimum, there were two he established from the start. Every witness had to undergo a legal name change. “This was no different from what happened when an ordinary citizen petitioned the court to change his name, only we asked the judge to seal the court records so no one would know the witness’s old name or his new one.” Shur did not want witnesses lying when they signed their new names to legal documents, such as real estate contracts or loan papers. “Over the years, witnesses would complain about how long it took us to get them new documents. They’d tell us they could buy a new driver’s license or a fake birth certifi
cate on the street in less than twenty-four hours, but I was not going to be part of any fraud.” There proved to be an unexpected psychological advantage to the name change as well. “It was a clear sign that the witness was starting over, getting a fresh start.”

  For security reasons, Shur also required witnesses to keep their new identity and relocation a secret from their relatives and friends from their past. “We didn’t want the mob torturing someone’s grandparents to discover where a witness was hiding.” This was by far the most difficult rule for witnesses to follow. “They could mail letters to one another and talk on the telephone through calls that we arranged through our switchboard, but that was the only contact we allowed them to have.” The criminal intelligence analysts in Shur’s office took charge of handling the mail. Witnesses sent their letters to Shur’s office, where they were put into new envelopes and forwarded. Relatives wrote back in care of Shur’s office, which passed those letters along.

  When it came to choosing new names for witnesses, Shur followed advice that he’d been given by an IRS agent who had created fake backgrounds for undercover agents sent to Las Vegas to infiltrate mob-run casinos. “He said I should let witnesses keep their same initials or their same first name. This way, if they had to write their name, they might be able to catch themselves if they started writing their old name by mistake. It was easier on everyone involved, especially family members, if Bob remained Bob and didn’t suddenly become Charlie.”