by Pete Earley
There would later be a dispute about who was Shur’s first witness to get a new identity and to be relocated. This is because two big cases landed in his lap almost simultaneously. In his mind, they would come to represent everything that could go right and go wrong.
Paul Rigo was terrified when Shur first saw him fidgeting in a leather chair in a Justice Department office in 1969. The wealthy New Jersey engineer, who was in his late forties, had asked for the meeting, and he got right to the point: He was tangled up with the mob in Newark, and now the IRS was closing in on him. He wanted to cooperate but was afraid he’d be murdered. He was looking to cut a deal.
Rigo gingerly explained that the mob had first contacted him after his engineering company was awarded a lucrative city contract. Two men who represented Anthony “Tony Boy” Boiardo came into his office and demanded a 10 percent kickback for throwing the city contract his way. Rigo knew Tony Boy was the son of Ruggiero “Richie the Boot” Boiardo, one of New Jersey’s most feared gangsters, but he’d never met either of the Boiardos or asked for any favors. When he refused to pay, the thugs forced him into a car and drove to the Boiardo family estate, where Tony Boy personally threatened to break both of his legs with a baseball bat.
“You got to understand,” Rigo said, “I really didn’t have any choice. He was ready to bust my legs right there. He said if I went to the cops, he’d kill my wife and kids.”
After Rigo paid the kickback, his engineering firm began getting more and more city contracts, and he learned the Boiardos were bribing city officials to hire his firm. It was at this point in his story that Rigo dropped a big name. “Mayor Addonizio is part of this,” he declared, “and I can prove it.” Hugh J. Addonizio was a nationally recognized Democratic figure who had served seven terms in Congress. He had given up his seat in 1962 to become Newark’s mayor after the city suffered one of the worst race riots in the nation. In the seven years since then, he’d rebuilt Newark, and there were rumors he’d be his party’s next vice presidential candidate.
Shur and Thomas Kennelly, who was also in the meeting with Rigo, hid their excitement. They didn’t want to appear overeager because they suspected Rigo was much more involved than he was admitting. They asked him to meet with them again the next morning, and when he arrived, they fell into good cop/bad cop roles.
“You haven’t told us anything we didn’t already know,” Shur snapped. “Why should we help you? You could’ve stopped taking city contracts if you really didn’t want to get into bed with the mob. Instead you got rich, and now the IRS is coming down on you, so you want us to bail you out. Forget it!”
Rigo appeared genuinely shocked. A sympathetic Kennelly quickly offered him an out. “I think we can help,” he volunteered, “but you’re going to have to help us by testifying against these people.”
“Testifying? They’ll kill me.”
“We can protect you,” Shur added, “and we can help you get a new start, but only if you testify.”
During the next several hours, Rigo admitted that he’d been the Boiardo crime family’s “bag man,” responsible for collecting kickbacks from other contractors. He also began naming names. Shur and Kennelly called the U.S. attorney in Newark, who agreed to grant Rigo immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony. Now it was up to Shur to keep him safe. He called the U.S. Marshals Service, and it sent over Deputy Marshal Hugh McDonald, known as “Big Mac” because of his hulking size. “I called the marshals because they protected judges in court and handled witnesses.” McDonald and Shur drove to New Jersey a few days later to confer with Rigo and his wife. “I couldn’t believe his house when we pulled up,” Shur recalled. “It was a mansion. He owned a yacht and his own helicopter. The family had a full-time maid and butler. Rigo and his wife offered us cocktails, which we declined, and then gave us a tour. They had thousands of dollars’ worth of antique furniture they wanted us to move. I kept asking myself, ‘What in the world have I gotten into here?’ ”
McDonald arranged for the Rigos to go into hiding just before the FBI swooped into Newark with arrest warrants. The couple lived in hotels for more than three months, moving every few days, while they waited for the trials to begin. “Rigo was impatient because he was used to picking up the telephone and telling someone to have his yacht or his helicopter ready and we just didn’t operate that way,” said Shur, “but he was always very polite. Deep down, he knew we were keeping him alive, and he appreciated that.”
The Rigos’ antiques and other household goods were crated by a moving company and delivered to a warehouse on a military base. Several weeks later their belongings were unpacked inside the warehouse and put into new crates by a different moving company. A third company would be hired once the trials ended to deliver the crates to their new home. Deputy McDonald felt confident these precautions would keep the mob from tracking them to the Rigos.
Mayor Addonizio, Tony Boy Boiardo, and thirteen city officials and contractors were convicted because of Rigo’s testimony. After the trials, Rigo flew into Washington to receive his new identity and be relocated. “I asked him where he wanted to live,” Shur recalled, “and when he told me, I said, ‘Well, that’s the last place we will be sending you.’ If a witness told me he wanted to move to San Diego, California, for instance, there was a good chance he’d mentioned how much he liked that city to someone in his past. We couldn’t take a chance and move him there.” The Rigos’ relocation went smoothly. After he and his wife settled into their new home, he started a new engineering firm. Shur liked him. He reminded Shur of his own father. “He was a decent man who felt he had to do business with the mob in order to survive. I disagreed, but I understood it.” Rigo died in the 1980s. “I am convinced people who were close to him knew about his past and knew his old name, but the mob never found him. He was our first real success story.”
Witness Gerald Zelmanowitz was not. Flashy, brash, and arrogant, Zelmanowitz would later claim he was the first important witness Shur had ever helped relocate. Like Rigo, Zelmanowitz was granted immunity by federal prosecutors in 1969 after he agreed to testify against a New Jersey crime boss. The defendant was Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo and the trial sparked national headlines, not because of who DeCarlo was, but because of a tactical blunder by the defense that inadvertently gave the public a never-before-seen look into Mafia operations. During the discovery phase of the trial, prosecutors revealed the FBI had bugged DeCarlo’s office between 1961 and 1965, transcribing 2,300 pages of conversations between him and other gangsters. The wiretap had been ordered by Robert Kennedy but had been discontinued when President Lyndon Johnson ordered an end to all federal wiretaps. In 1968 Congress passed legislation that permitted federal agencies to begin using wiretaps once again, but only if they followed rigid guidelines. Meanwhile, all information gleaned from pre-1968 wiretaps was deemed inadmissible in federal courts. DeCarlo’s defense demanded to see the 2,300 pages of transcripts because they suspected the FBI had used information from them to make its case against DeCarlo. If they could prove that, they could argue the charges against him should be thrown out. But the defense’s legal strategy backfired. It turned out the FBI had not used any of the earlier information. Even worse for DeCarlo, Judge Robert Shaw ruled that the 2,300 pages had become part of the court record once the defense had been given a copy of them, and that meant the public could now read them, too. Their release set off a media frenzy. In the transcripts, DeCarlo bragged about having dozens of New Jersey police chiefs, politicians, local judges, and prosecutors on his payroll. But the juiciest tidbits were about contract killings. Typical was this brief exchange:
TONY BOY BOIARDO: How about the time we hit the little Jew?
DECARLO: As little as they are, they struggle. (Laughs)
TONY BOY BOIARDO: The Boot [Boiardo’s father] hit him with a hammer. The guy goes down and he comes up. So I got a crowbar this big. Eight shots in the head. What do you think he finally did to me? He spit at me and said, “You fuck.” (Laughs
)
While shocking, the transcripts actually had little to do with the charges against DeCarlo. Still, they turned a national spotlight on his trial, and Zelmanowitz became an instant celebrity. Without any hint of remorse, he told jurors that he had found an ingenious way to earn millions of dollars by buying and selling foreign stocks overseas without paying U.S. taxes on his profits. His business partner and good friend, Louis Saperstein, had wanted in on the action and had borrowed $115,000 from DeCarlo to get started. But the IRS had been watching Saperstein and froze his bank accounts before he could make any deals. When Saperstein couldn’t repay DeCarlo, the mobster threatened to kill him. For five months Saperstein hid out; then he called Zelmanowitz for help in finding ways to pay off the debt. They agreed to meet in the lobby of a New York hotel, but Zelmanowitz, who was himself involved with DeCarlo in other mob deals, brought along two of DeCarlo’s thugs. They hustled a terrified Saperstein off to “the Barn,” DeCarlo’s term for his office.
“When I walked in,” Zelmanowitz testified, “Saperstein was already lying on the floor, purple, bloody, tongue hanging out, spit all over him. I thought he was dead. He was being kicked. Then he was lifted up off the floor, placed in a chair, hit again, knocked off the chair, picked up, and hit again.”
DeCarlo announced he was doubling the interest that Saperstein owed him, to $5,000 per week. Then he gave Saperstein two months to repay the entire debt. “If you don’t, you’ll be dead.” A few days before the deadline, Saperstein entered a hospital complaining of stomach cramps. He died the next day. Doctors thought he had suffered a heart attack brought on by gastrointestinal shock, but an autopsy showed he had been poisoned with “enough arsenic to kill a mule.”
Because there was no evidence that DeCarlo had poisoned Saperstein, federal prosecutors couldn’t charge him with murder. Instead, they accused him and three of his thugs of extortion. Zelmanowitz’s testimony helped convict all four, and DeCarlo was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Ironically, after the trial Zelmanowitz told reporters he thought Saperstein actually had committed suicide after taking out a large life insurance policy for his family. The day before he died, he had mailed a letter to the FBI accusing DeCarlo of plotting to kill him. It had been Saperstein’s way, Zelmanowitz theorized, of taking revenge.
The Zelmanowitzes turned out to be the family from hell for Shur. Nothing satisfied them. Deputy Marshal McDonald found a spacious apartment in Maryland for them to live in while Shur arranged their new background, but Zelmanowitz’s wife, Lillian, rejected it because it was a high-rise and she didn’t like elevators. She also threw a fit over the fake history that Shur set up for Zelmanowitz; he was supposed to have retired as a sergeant from army intelligence, but she would never have married an enlisted man! This was especially ironic because Zelmanowitz had, in fact, been a private in the Marine Corps, which kicked him out after he punched an officer. When McDonald took the couple on a tour of Bowie, Maryland, to see the house that was supposed to have been their previous address, Lillian exclaimed: “What, me live in a house like that? Never!” McDonald didn’t tell them it was Shur’s. And it went on and on. Lillian’s daughter by a previous marriage, Cynthia, wanted to remain with her boyfriend, Norman, which meant he too would have to be given a new identity. Shur insisted they marry, and this triggered more headaches. Shur assumed he’d hustle the couple in front of a rabbi for a quickie ceremony, but the Zelmanowitzes demanded costly wedding clothes and flowers, a reception at an upscale hotel, the works.
McDonald, who had been assigned to protect the family while they were in Washington, noticed they paid cash with money taken from a safe-deposit box for all of the wedding supplies. This made Shur certain Zelmanowitz had hidden his true assets from the government. “I suddenly found myself facing a dilemma. Zelmanowitz was not like Rigo, who I was confident would do no wrong after he was relocated. With Zelmanowitz I had doubts, real doubts; in fact, I never trusted him.” Shur urged the IRS to start a new investigation of Zelmanowitz, and deliberately stalled on relocating him. “I decided that for this program to work, I had to be able to conduct two sometimes competing activities at the same time—protection and investigation. I had him investigated with the same zeal I was using to keep him alive. In doing this I saw no conflict. I had to balance our obligation to keep him alive with our obligation to see that he didn’t commit crimes in his new community.”
Shur and McDonald were dragged into helping arrange the wedding. Security was a nightmare. Guests were told the wedding would take place in a Virginia hotel, but after they arrived, they were taken out the hotel’s back door to buses that carried them to a different hotel, where the bride and groom were waiting. “The rabbi gave me a civil certificate with the couple’s new name on it,” Shur recalled, “but he refused to put their new name on a religious certificate. He didn’t mind fooling civil authorities, but he wasn’t going to take any chances with God.”
Five months after the family had first arrived in Washington, Shur finally agreed to settle them in San Francisco. No sooner had they arrived there than they complained they had been betrayed. They had been receiving a per diem of $60 for their living expenses, but Shur stopped paying it as soon as they reached San Francisco. The IRS had asked him to cut off the funds so it could see if Zelmanowitz would fly overseas to replenish his cash from money it suspected he had hidden there. Furious that he wasn’t receiving any financial support, as he’d been promised, Zelmanowitz complained to the U.S. attorney who had prosecuted DeCarlo, and he in turn protested to the Justice Department. In a memo, Shur defended his actions, noting that the Zelmanowitzes already had received more than their fair share of subsistence pay, $55,000, during the time they had lived in Washington. Yet they had constantly complained they were “penniless,” even though the average salary for most couples in 1970 was less than $10,000 per year. Shur added that the Zelmanowitzes were wealthy, owning such extras as a $45,000 Chagall painting, $25,000 in jewelry, and his-and-hers mink coats. Shur didn’t mention the ongoing IRS probe, but his memo was enough for the attorney general to go along with the freeze on Zelmanowitz’s payments. The bickering over subsistence checks ended when Zelmanowitz called Shur at his home one night and dramatically declared that his rent was two months overdue and he was about to be evicted. “When I informed Mr. Zelmanowitz that I could not give him an answer about his subsistence pay,” Shur wrote in a memo the next morning, “he said the government and I could go fuck ourselves, and if I wanted his identity papers back he would mail them and I could stick them up my fat ass.”
A few days later, Shur offered Zelmanowitz a payment of $5,000 if he would sign a statement that “forever released” the government from “any further responsibility” for protecting him. Zelmanowitz agreed, and Shur breathed a huge sigh of relief. He thought he was done with Gerald Zelmanowitz. But he was wrong.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Gerald Shur felt like a doctor in an emergency room during a war. By the start of 1970, an average of one mob witness a week was seeking protection. So much for Shur’s original estimate of ten witnesses, at most, per year. He and Deputy Marshal Hugh McDonald couldn’t keep up, even after Shur waylaid two of the women who worked for him as criminal intelligence analysts and got them to help. Fighting crime was back in fashion. Richard Nixon had made it a major campaign issue in the 1968 presidential race, and his attorney general, John Mitchell, had juiced up the OCRS, doubling the number of attorneys working there to 125. He had also created new strike forces. Based on the success of the Buffalo strike force, the OCRS had already dispatched teams into Philadelphia, Chicago, Brooklyn, Detroit, Miami, and Newark. Mitchell sent new ones after mob targets in Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Kansas City, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and San Francisco. (Shur would later recall that the strike force concept was so popular that when President Nixon incorrectly stated in a speech that there were eighteen strike forces—there were only seventeen—the Justice Depart
ment created another one instead of correcting him. The new one was based in Washington, D.C.) By 1970, the strike forces had indicted the heads of six crime families, and the number of criminal cases brought against LCN members had jumped from 1,166 indictments in 1968 to 2,122. The mob was under a relentless attack, and a growing number of its deserters were turning to Shur’s fledgling operation for protection. Shur was feeling the pressure, too. He was spending all of his time at work and several hours after he got home dealing with witnesses and their problems. A late-night telephone call from a panicked witness in early 1970 was typical of the daily melodramas he faced.
“Mr. Shur, there’s a guy holding a gun on me,” the witness declared. “You got to come quick!”
“Why’s someone holding a gun on you?” Shur asked.
“He says I was peeping through his window at his wife. I mean, I was, but I didn’t do anything. He’s called the cops. They’re on their way!”
Twenty minutes later, Shur and McDonald were in a Maryland police substation. “Are you charging him?” Shur asked the desk sergeant.
“Naw, this is minor stuff. You can take him.”
Shur scolded the Peeping Tom as they rode back to the hotel they had housed him in. One more screw-up and his parole would be revoked and he’d be sent back to prison. A few days later, a federal prosecutor in Boston called Shur to ask a favor. The Peeping Tom’s girlfriend wanted to move to Washington from Boston and live with him. Shur didn’t like the idea, but after repeated pleas from the prosecutor, the girlfriend, and the witness, he paid for her airplane ticket. “She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen,” he recalled, “and I wondered how a creep like this witness could’ve attracted her.” A month later, the girlfriend was waiting for Shur when he got to work. She had tried to break off the romance, and now the witness was stalking her. “Please help me,” she begged. “I’m afraid of him!”