Witsec

by Pete Earley

  Congressional hearings, like television talk shows, thrive on drama, and Senator Abourezk began with a juicy case. He said the subcommittee had met the day before behind closed doors with a protected mob witness named Gerald Festa, who had almost been murdered because of bumbling by deputies. Senator Abourezk blamed the Marshals Service’s office in Newark, New Jersey, for mishandling Festa’s case from the start. After the gangster was hurried out of town, it had forgotten to protect his house and a Chicken Delight restaurant he owned. The house was looted, and vandals sprayed the words “Canary Delight” in yellow paint across the front windows of his fast-food restaurant. But it was what happened next that worried Abourezk.

  Festa was being hidden by the FBI in a rural jail under an alias when two deputy marshals from Newark showed up unexpectedly and took him with them without notifying the FBI. They drove Festa to a jail in Newark where several mobsters who wanted him dead were being housed. When the deputies started to check Festa into the facility under his real name, he smelled a setup and began protesting. A sympathetic guard called the FBI, which quickly intervened, hustling Festa off to a new hiding spot—this time, an even more remote rural jail. The next day, two men dressed in hunting clothes and carrying shotguns arrived at the jail, claiming to be prison guards from another state. They tried to talk their way inside by asking questions about the jail’s kitchen facilities, which they asked to see, but the jailer refused to open the front door and spoke to them only through an intercom. When the men persisted, the jailer called the local sheriff’s office and they fled.

  Worried that someone inside the Newark Marshals Service’s office had leaked information about Festa to the mob, the FBI contacted William Hall, who had replaced Wayne Colburn in May 1976 as the Marshals Service’s director. A former FBI agent himself, Hall asked the FBI to investigate. Its probe failed to find sufficient evidence to make arrests, but several deputies abruptly resigned amid rumors they had been paid $5,000 each by the Mafia to locate Festa.

  In his secret appearance before the subcommittee, Festa said he didn’t trust anyone in the Marshals Service except deputy John Partington. “Them others,” he testified, “can be bought off!”

  When Senator Abourezk asked the subcommittee’s first public witness, Thomas C. Renner, what the biggest problem plaguing WITSEC was, the Newsday crime reporter, who had co-authored Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Teresa’s best-selling memoir, said it was the Marshals Service’s openly hostile attitude. “One deputy called witnesses ‘animals who should be chained and locked up.’ … Another bitterly complained to me that ‘these hoods are getting more from the government than I do,’ ” Renner testified. “Of the twenty WITSEC witnesses I have interviewed, not one would tell a friend to enter this program.”

  Next, Senator Abourezk asked John Partington for his advice. “First of all, Senator,” the blunt deputy told him, “you got to understand we’re not dealing with Billy Graham churchgoers here. You’re talking about witnesses who are professional criminals. They know their business. We should know our business. I have handled over five hundred witnesses personally since 1967 and I can tell you that these witnesses look at us like we’re airline pilots. If we make a mistake, they die.” Partington blamed the “suits” at headquarters for WITSEC’s problems. Most just didn’t give a damn about the program, he testified, so mob witnesses were being dumped in cities without new documents and somehow being expected to survive on their own.

  Abourezk’s hearing didn’t lead to any new laws, but it accomplished what Shur had hoped. Faced with an ongoing internal Justice Department review and three days of criticism before a Senate subcommittee, Hall and his deputy director, John Twomey, began scouring their ranks to find someone who could clean up the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations. When they couldn’t find anyone they believed could handle the job, Twomey called Peter Bensinger, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who was a close friend. Bensinger had been director of the Illinois Department of Public Safety when Twomey was the warden at the state prison in Joliet. “We need a tough, solid manager,” Twomey told him. Bensinger had just the man. He called Howard Safir, one of his assistants, into his office.

  “How’d you like to go to the Marshals Service for a year?” Bensinger asked.

  “What’d I do wrong?” Safir answered, grinning.

  Bensinger offered Safir a promotion and a pay raise if he would agree to spend one year on loan to the Marshals Service. A few days later, Safir reported to work at his new job. The Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations office, which was located in a suite above a grocery store in downtown Washington, D.C., was so messy, it looked to him as if “someone had set off a bomb inside it.” Security was appalling. Anyone could have walked inside from the street. Desks were left at night stacked with confidential reports about mob witnesses. The office files didn’t have locks on them. “Most of the employees didn’t want to be there,” Safir recalled. “One told me, ‘I hate baby-sitting these goddamn criminals.’ I said to myself, ‘How in the hell can you operate a program with people who don’t want to be here and don’t like their clients?’ It was clear to me that if you screwed up in the Marshals, this is where they sent you.”

  Safir was so embarrassed by his new assignment that he wore his DEA identification badge to work. He didn’t want anyone he met to think he was employed by the Marshals Service. During his first day on the job, he asked his secretary what he thought was a routine question: How much subsistence was WITSEC paying a specific witness each month?

  “I can have that information for you in about a week,” she replied.

  “A week? Can’t you just look it up on your computer?”

  “Sir, I have trouble getting ribbons for our manual typewriters. No one here has a computer.”

  Safir marched in to see Hall and Twomey. “I can fix this program,” he said, “but I am going to need money and I am going to have to get rid of nearly every deputy assigned to the office.” A few days later Safir returned to the director’s office and outlined his plans. “I intend to transform the witness protection unit into an elite squad of deputies capable of protecting not only mob witnesses, but foreign dignitaries and government officials as well. To start, I want to create a new job classification inside the Marshals Service. I want to call it ‘witness security inspectors,’ and I want them to be paid more than other deputies. This will be a way for us to begin attracting the best rather than the worst deputies into this program.”

  Not only was Safir the right man for the job, but he came at the right time. Weary of complaints, Hall and Twomey were eager to back him up inside the Marshals Service, and he had the immediate support of Shur in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Justice Department and the backing of U.S. attorney general Civiletti. “Howard Safir was the first real advocate the witness program ever had inside the Marshals Service,” Shur recalled. “He didn’t mind pounding on people’s desks, making demands, shaking things up. He was a determined Mr. Fix-it, and once he put his mind to it, he was impossible to stop.”

  Safir was given a free hand, and he immediately got rid of almost every deputy assigned to WITSEC, replacing them with fifty-three new hires, most of whom he handpicked. Several were Vietnam veterans eager to prove themselves. “I wanted young people who could be good cops, but who also could say, ‘Okay, yesterday you were a scumbag criminal but today you are a witness, so we are going to treat you the way a human being should be treated.’ ” As part of his plan to turn the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations into an exclusive unit, he stopped the agency’s practice of having deputies rotate in and out of witness protection details—a move the deputies’ union unsuccessfully tried to block because it meant less overtime pay. In the coming months, Safir hired secretarial staff and replaced the old training manual that Reis Kash had drafted with a more modern and demanding one that spelled out exactly how Safir expected his new witness security inspectors to operate. He began upgrading training, too. He even designed
several specialized training courses exclusively for his inspectors. “Most witnesses can never be happy in this program,” he told them, “but we can make them content. There is a difference. You must learn to do what’s reasonable, compassionate, and right. The witness himself may have been an ax murderer, but his wife and children weren’t.”

  Under Safir, no one got inside the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations office without first being cleared by a uniformed guard. Information about witnesses was shared on a need-to-know basis. Files were kept locked. Safir got the DEA to set up a computer system in the operations office. He didn’t tolerate sloppy desks, poorly written reports, screw-ups with witnesses.

  Safir would later recall that he succeeded where others had failed because he established a “winner’s attitude” in his troops. He told his inspectors that he was going to mold them into “the best personal protective service in the world, with a reputation for never losing anyone.” Any deputies who didn’t measure up would be booted out. He arranged for the best among them to be sent to New York City each year to help protect foreign diplomats when the United Nations General Assembly was in session, an assignment that helped instill pride and gave them experience working with other agencies, as well as bonus pay.

  A short time after he became the Marshals Service’s WITSEC chief, Safir announced that he no longer wanted his inspectors answering to the country’s ninety-four politically appointed U.S. marshals, many of whom he considered to be partisan hacks. He wanted the marshals cut out of the loop when it came to every aspect of WITSEC. His inspectors would be stationed in several key cities and would work in the U.S. Marshals Service offices there alongside other deputies, but they would answer only to Safir. They would not be sent to serve arrest warrants or to fetch some judge’s laundry. He also declared that in the future, neither he nor his inspectors would inform the U.S. marshals when a mob witness was being relocated in their jurisdictions.

  Safir’s declarations set off a firestorm. Dozens of U.S. marshals complained to Hall. They accused Safir of being arrogant and overstepping his bounds. But Hall backed up his feisty WITSEC chief, and Safir continued his reforms. “By cutting the U.S. marshals out of the process, Safir ended a lot of the politics when it came to where witnesses were being sent,” a deputy assigned to headquarters later recalled. “A marshal could no longer call up and tell the WITSEC chief not to put anyone from the LCN in his town.” Safir matched his inspectors with individual witnesses and their families. Witnesses no longer had to depend on local deputies, many of whom had never dealt with a mob witness, when they arrived in a new town. Now they dealt with trained WITSEC inspectors who oversaw their case from the moment they were accepted into the program until they left it. This made it difficult for them to con the Marshals Service, and it provided them with better support because the inspectors got to know them personally. “Howard was amazing to watch,” said Shur. “He made my job much easier. A U.S. attorney would call and say a witness needed protection. My staff at the OCRS would review the case and give me a recommendation. Then I would call Safir at the Marshals Service and tell him the witness had been approved. He then took care of everything—protecting the witness, giving him a new identity, and relocating him.”

  Not surprisingly, Safir’s curt, ramrod style ruffled feathers. He didn’t suffer fools, had little patience, and barked orders as if he were a general. He didn’t seem to care whose toes he stepped on. “What was the Marshals Service going to do to me?” he recalled later. “All anyone could do was send me back to the DEA, which would have been fine with me.” Ironically, the fact he was an outsider gave him more rather than less clout.

  “Some people didn’t like Howard’s strong ego,” said Shur, “but he also had a very strong desire to be perceived as someone who was turning the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations around and really doing a good job, and that combination worked wonders.” Shur finally had a strong ally rather than an opponent as WITSEC chief, and the two men became a team. Safir could count on Shur to push WITSEC’s cause inside the rest of the Justice Department, and Shur could count on Safir to push it inside the Marshals Service. Their working relationship became even closer after Safir hired Marilyn Mode as his special assistant. She had started her government career working for Shur and both men trusted her judgment.

  Safir and Shur shared similar backgrounds. Like Shur, Safir’s parents were Jewish immigrants who had settled in New York City and ingrained in their son an intense desire not only to succeed but to do something important with his life. Safir’s father had been a presser in the garment district, his mother a switchboard operator. His father had helped unionize the sweatshops of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a dangerous cause at the time. As a child, Safir had sat mesmerized at the family table listening to stories told by his uncle, Louis Weiner, a famed New York City detective who had helped arrest notorious bank robber Willie Sutton. After completing college in 1963, Safir joined the New York State Police, but he quickly moved to the federal Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the DEA. At age twenty-three, during a time when some his age were demonstrating against the Vietnam War and experimenting with illegal drugs, Safir went undercover, posing as a hairy, toga-wearing, drug-buying hippie in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. From there, he served stints in Southeast Asia, Mexico, France, and Turkey.

  At Marshals Service headquarters, Safir gained a reputation for rewarding loyalists and crushing dissent. To the surprise of no one, he and John Partington clashed. As capable as he was, Partington had never been a team player, nor had he ever paid much attention to his bosses in headquarters. “John Partington was a cowboy and exactly what this program needed in its early days,” said a friend of both men. “With the help of a handful of other cowboy deputies, Partington literally held WITSEC together, flying across the country putting out fires, handling all of the most important witnesses. He did things his way, by the seat of his pants, because he had to. No one in headquarters really wanted to know what was going on; they just wanted John to handle it. When Safir came in, the entire playing field changed. Howard was intent on building a well-disciplined, well-trained squad of inspectors who answered to him and him alone. There wasn’t a place in WITSEC any longer for the cowboys.”

  After Partington testified before Abourezk’s subcommittee, he was transferred from Providence to Washington headquarters. Senator Abourezk had warned him that his candor might get him in trouble, but Partington had shrugged it off. “Director Bill Hall called me in after the hearing,” Partington recalled later, “and told me: ‘Partington, you’re always coming down here to Washington complaining; it’s time that you paid your dues. Let’s see if you can do things better.’ I went stir-crazy the first week in Washington because I was used to being on the street, not sitting shuffling papers. It was horrible.”

  Partington had been at his new desk job for only a few weeks when Safir took charge. “There was an immediate rivalry,” Partington remembered. Deputies began identifying themselves as “Partingtonites” and “Safirites.” One of Safir’s first acts was to review the status of every witness in the program, and he discovered that several mobsters were still being paid monthly subsistence even though they were no longer testifying for the government and had been told months before that they needed to find legitimate jobs and begin supporting themselves. Safir ordered an end to their monthly checks. Several called Partington, who already had a reputation inside the Marshals Service for being too close to witnesses, and he confronted his new boss. “I have lived with many of these wiseguys,” he declared. “I know everything about them, their wives, their kids, and these are good guys who have done a lot for this government. You can’t just terminate them like this. It’s disrespectful.” Safir, who wasn’t about to receive a lecture from Partington, was irked. He was running WITSEC, he declared, not Partington. While the mobsters were entitled to lifetime protection, which meant they could call at any time and ask for deputies to come and protect them, they�
�d never been promised a free ride on the government’s back. Despite Partington’s outburst, the mobsters were booted off the subsistence rolls.

  “Safir saw these witnesses as old cases,” Partington said later. “He was focusing on the dollars. I saw them as people. You know, I didn’t spend Christmas and New Year’s at my home with my family; I spent those holidays with wiseguys. I stayed up all night one New Year’s Eve keeping a witness from killing himself because he was so depressed because now he saw himself as a rat. This had never been just a job to me. People said I had gotten too close to witnesses, and they were right. I cared about these wiseguys. They were my friends.”

  One afternoon Partington got a call from a WITSEC inspector who was bringing a gangster into town to testify before a congressional hearing. The mobster, who had been relocated by Partington a few years earlier, had specifically asked to have Partington at his side when he testified. The day after the hearing, newspapers printed photographs of the witness wearing a black hood over his face to conceal his identity as he testified. Sitting nearby was Partington, watching the crowd for trouble. Neither the inspector nor Partington had told Safir about the hearing. He was furious. He had the inspector transferred out of WITSEC operations, and he had Partington sent back to the Providence office. “I was told I would never handle another witness,” Partington said later. “I was given a desk and I sat there and sat there and sat there with nothing to do. I had wiseguys from all over the country calling me. ‘John, what’s happening? We need you.’ I told them I was being terminated from the program—just like they had been.”

  Partington called in several favors, and in 1979 President Jimmy Carter appointed him the U.S. marshal in Providence. He was now in charge of that office, but his career as a presidential appointee was short-lived. Although he had been assured by one of Rhode Island’s U.S. senators that his job would be protected, he was replaced when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.