Witsec

by Pete Earley

  As expected, defense attorneys accused Fratianno of being a “mouth for hire,” willing to smear any defendant so he could continue hiding in WITSEC and pocketing rewards. “The truth is, we were buying his testimony to some degree,” said McPherson. “I know the Justice Department will deny it, but it was what we did. But how else would we ever get inside the LCN?”

  Despite the strict guidelines and policies that Safir implemented after he became WITSEC chief in 1978, Fratianno proved that all witnesses may be equal, but some were more equal than others. To this day, he remains the one who wrung more special favors out of the Marshals Service than any other known WITSEC witness. It paid all of his telephone bills for several years, sent monthly subsistence checks to his mother-in-law, and paid for a facelift, capped teeth, and even breast implants for Jean. “He was an expert at manipulating the system,” said McPherson. “I saw Fratianno turn U.S. marshals against one another, turn the Marshals Service against the Justice Department, turn the Justice Department against U.S. attorneys, turn FBI agents against prosecutors. He nearly always got what he wanted, and he made more money milking WITSEC than he ever did committing crimes.”

  Over the years, Shur received dozens of calls from Fratianno asking for money. “He’d ask for things I often felt were unreasonable,” he recalled. “You’ve got to keep in mind, he had been a crime boss, and now he was dependent on the government for assistance,” said Shur. “I believe that in his own mind, he felt he was no longer a free man and wanted to be compensated for his loss of freedom. It also was a game to him. He needed to believe that he was getting away with a scam, forcing us to cross a line.”

  Fratianno was so prickly to deal with that Safir assigned Marilyn Mode, his special assistant at the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations headquarters, to personally handle Fratianno’s demands. She and McPherson, who continued to deal with Fratianno in the field, worked as a tag team. “I used to refer to Fratianno’s calls as ‘Jimmy’s daily screams,’ ” Mode recalled. The fact that Safir had put a “broad” in charge of him irked the mobster, but the choice proved to be a smart move. Because of Fratianno’s macho attitude, he hated looking weak or dependent in front of Mode, and she was able to rein in his hysterics.

  McPherson saw Fratianno break down emotionally only once. The gangster’s first wife, Jewel Switzer, was dying of cancer in 1980, and Fratianno begged McPherson to let him visit her. Fratianno had first met Jewel when she was eighteen years old and working in Las Vegas as a hat check girl. They married a few weeks later, but he had been put in prison shortly after the ceremony, and her parents had forced her to divorce him even though she was pregnant with their baby. Seven years later, when Fratianno was released, he and Jewel were remarried. They had stayed together for sixteen years, until she wearied of his womanizing and divorced him. McPherson was convinced that Jewel was the only woman Fratianno had ever truly loved. But the timing of her illness couldn’t have been worse. He was about to testify in another big case. NBC News, 60 Minutes, and 20/20 had all scheduled posttrial interviews with him. Newsweek had paid him $2,500 for an exclusive interview, and his first book was about to be published. “The mob really wanted him dead,” McPherson said. “We knew of several hit men trying to find him, and when I asked Safir about letting Fratianno see her, he said, ‘No way!’ We couldn’t afford to have any slipups and end up with him being killed.”

  “You can’t go see Jewel,” McPherson told Fratianno. “Safir refuses to approve it.”

  “Fuck Safir,” Fratianno erupted. “Fuck this program. Fuck this whole deal. Bud, my wife is dying. She’s not going to make it. My daughter is hysterical. I haven’t seen my grandkids in years.” Fratianno became teary-eyed. “I really have to go. You got to let me go!”

  McPherson noticed that Fratianno had referred to Jewel as his “wife” even though they were divorced and he was now married to Jean. The next morning, McPherson arranged for an armored car to drive Fratianno to a private airfield, where an airplane took Fratianno to the city where Jewel was hospitalized. Another armored car drove him there. They were together about an hour, during which McPherson nervously paced the hallways. Four days later, she died. McPherson had risked his job to help Fratianno. He had not told Safir about the secret visit, but Fratianno never said a word of thanks.

  “When Fratianno’s role as a witness began to come to an end,” Shur recalled, “I let it be known that I expected him to be terminated from subsistence. He didn’t take the news well.” McPherson had tried to prepare him, but the mobster didn’t believe the government would ever stop giving him money for his rent and food. “None of the really major witnesses ever believed we’d let them go,” said McPherson. “They thought they were so important they’d get checks forever. I’d seen the same thing happen with Vinnie Teresa. I used to whisper in his ear all the time: ‘Vinnie, when you get off that witness stand and the government doesn’t need you anymore, you aren’t going to have as many friends as you do now.’ I told him we had to begin thinking about his future, but he was just like Jimmy. They all think they are indispensable.”

  Fratianno had been in WITSEC for five years when Shur and Safir first tried to ease him out. Fratianno reacted by flying with his attorney to Washington, D.C., and going over both men’s heads by appealing directly to Stephen Trott, an assistant attorney general.

  “We’re not treating you any differently from any other witness,” Shur told Fratianno during a hastily called meeting.

  “Well, you should treat me different,” he replied, “because I am not like ninety-eight percent of the bums in your program. I’m too old to get a job, and I don’t want to go on welfare.”

  Shur tried to point out that WITSEC subsistence was akin to a welfare program, but the gangster didn’t buy it. “I have given you plenty for my help,” he declared. “You owe me!” By the time the meeting ended, Trott decided that Fratianno would be kept on subsistence for two more years. In effect, Fratianno had negotiated himself a yearly salary of $33,477 tax-free, plus a lump-sum payment of $11,300 to help pay a wide range of his personal expenses, including his auto insurance, real estate taxes, and the cost of gasoline for his car. The Justice Department also agreed to resettle him anywhere inside the United States as long as the Marshals Service and Shur felt it safe. Fratianno chose a hillside outside the tiny Montana town of Bellingham. He built a $190,000 house there, with a 55-by-20-foot grand hall. Every room had a color TV hooked to a satellite dish because Fratianno loved to watch professional football games. There was a huge crystal chandelier in the grand hall and original artwork. He got the government to pay the $400 sewer connection. Fratianno asked McPherson to move Jean to Montana from Brunswick, Georgia, where she had been in hiding. Fratianno was now seventy-three and beginning to show early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. It finally looked as if he was settling down. But McPherson knew better. “Jimmy was going to be hustling until the day he dropped dead.”

  Sure enough, Fratianno was back in the news in a matter of weeks. Without telling WITSEC, he had given an exclusive interview to Thames Television in Britain in exchange for a hefty cash payment and a promise that the show would never be broadcast in the United States. He didn’t think anyone would find out, but the Thames network sold the show to a Canadian network, and on Thanksgiving Day in 1985 Fratianno got top billing on a segment called “Murder Inc.” Many of Fratianno’s Montana neighbors watched Canadian channels because they lived close to the border, and his alias was blown. A furious Safir sent McPherson to haul Fratianno into Washington for a dressing-down.

  “We’re going to have to move you again, Jimmy,” Safir snapped. “Only this time, we’re cutting back your subsistence because you violated the rules.”

  “You can’t do that!” Fratianno yelled. “I won’t be able to make my house payments.” Fratianno demanded to see Trott again, but his secretary told the gangster that Safir was now calling the shots. For two weeks, Fratianno holed up in a hotel, calling FBI agents and federal prosecuto
rs for support, but it didn’t do any good. He returned to Montana depressed, and on December 31, 1985, Safir sent McPherson to tell him that the checks were finally coming to an end. McPherson assured him that he would be okay financially. He was being paid book royalties and had invested wisely.

  Jean left him a week later. She had quietly contacted Safir and arranged to be relocated. Fratianno had no clue she was leaving nor where she had gone. Now alone, he called McPherson. “This ain’t over, Bud. Trust me, I’m just starting to fight.” During the next few weeks, he waged a one-man telephone campaign to get back onto WITSEC’s subsistence rolls, and he finally won. Shur and Safir were told to take him back for two more years after Fratianno persuaded an assistant U.S. attorney in New York to add his name to the list of witnesses scheduled to testify against Carmine “the Snake” Persico, who by then had become the boss of the Colombo crime family.

  Safir ordered McPherson to relocate Fratianno in a place where no one would know him, so McPherson chose the U.S. Virgin Islands. Fratianno lasted there only one month. He complained there was nothing to watch on television because the island had only one channel. McPherson resettled him in Corpus Christi, Texas. As before, when Fratianno’s two-year extension was near an end, McPherson was sent to cut him loose.

  “Jimmy, you’ve had ten years in the program, more than anyone else,” McPherson said. “It’s been a good long ride, but it is over.” Fratianno called a reporter at the Los Angeles Times to complain. “The government threw me out on the street,” he said. “I put thirty guys away, six of them bosses, and now the whole world’s looking for me. They just get finished using you and they throw you out on the street.” A Justice Department spokesman responded that Fratianno had received nearly a million dollars in support payments during his ten years as a witness.

  “It was sad, but it was over for him,” McPherson said. Three years later, McPherson retired, and two years after that, in 1993, Fratianno died alone in his sleep inside his Montana house. The government had told reporters Fratianno had sold the house, but he hadn’t. He had been living there almost as a hermit.

  “When Fratianno’s first book, The Last Mafioso, came out, he sent me a copy as a gift,” Shur recalled. “To make sure he knew where I stood, I sent him a money order for the fifteen-dollar price of the book. It may seem like a small thing, but I didn’t want to be indebted to him, even for fifteen bucks. You had to understand that when you dealt with someone like Jimmy, there were no idle conversations, no real gifts, no free favors, and that was true up to the moment he died. A racketeer said to me once, ‘Shur, I don’t always like what you say, but I know what you say is so.’ When you dealt with a witness like Jimmy, you had to understand that it was your reputation for integrity that made him respect you, even though he was trying to corrupt you every step of the way.”

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Around the same time that Jimmy the Weasel first began to cooperate with FBI agents, a vicious murder inside a federal penitentiary prompted Shur to expand the WITSEC program in a new direction. The change was set into motion one afternoon in 1978, when a bus carrying William Zambito and twenty-one other prisoners arrived at the maximum-security penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. Zambito was a state prisoner who had provided information to Miami prosecutors about Florida drug dealers. In exchange, his own prison sentence for drug peddling had been shortened. Although he was not a federal prisoner, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had agreed to hide him in one of its facilities because inmates in state prisons in Florida were threatening to kill him. He was en route to a federal facility in the southwest when the bus stopped for the night.

  As he was being led into the prison wearing leg irons and handcuffs attached to a belly chain, Zambito briefly considered asking to be put in the “hole,” the nickname inmates used for isolation cells. He would be safe there overnight and sent on his way in the morning. But he was worried that other prisoners riding on the bus with him would notice he had been afraid to stay in a regular cell block and correctly surmise that he was a snitch. That wasn’t a label Zambito wanted following him to his final destination, so he kept quiet and trudged along with the others into an area called A&O, shorthand for Admissions and Orientation, where prisoners in transit were housed with other newly arrived inmates not yet assigned permanent cells. Zambito had reason to be worried. Allen “Big Al” Benton, one of the drug dealers whom he had helped convict, was also in the Atlanta prison.

  Zambito was taken to a six-man cell, which was kept unlocked so inmates inside it could move freely around the tier. He had two cellmates: a Hispanic inmate, who didn’t speak much English, and Marion Albert Pruett, a bank robber who had arrived a few days earlier, having been sent to Atlanta because he needed surgery on his left leg that could only be done there. Pruett would later tell investigators that Zambito had been jittery from the moment he entered the cell. “He said to me, ‘Hey, what’s the hole like?’ which I thought was an odd question,” Pruett recalled. “And I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ and he says, ‘I just don’t like it here on this compound.’ That’s when I knew something was going on.”

  Pruett would later testify that he had been sleeping in his bunk when he was awakened by a noise shortly after 4 A.M. “I had my eyes closed,” he said, “but I could see what was coming down.” What he saw, he said, was Big Al Benton slashing a knife across Zambito’s throat and repeatedly stabbing him. Afraid Benton might kill him, too, Pruett said, he pretended to be asleep.

  When Miami prosecutors heard that Zambito had been murdered, they accused prison officials of being both incompetent and stupid. But an internal investigation by BOP director Norman Carlson showed his officers were not to blame. “The warden in Atlanta had not been told anything about Zambito, and there was nothing on his case jacket that identified him as a government informer or witness,” Carlson said. “The prosecutors had simply assumed we would know who Zambito was and would take precautions to protect him. It was a total lack of communication.” A jury convicted Benton, and Pruett, who was the star witness against him, was hustled off to a different prison under an alias.

  The Zambito killing was not the first time the BOP had run into problems because of prison inmates who needed special handling because they were government informants and witnesses. “For years,” BOP director Carlson later explained, “I had been getting calls, mostly from FBI special agents but sometimes from FBI headquarters or from U.S. attorneys all across the country, asking me to do favors for their witnesses. They felt these witnesses had really helped them and deserved special privileges. Unfortunately, they would often make unrealistic promises to them and then expect us to carry them out. One prosecutor told me, ‘By the way, I told this witness he could have a conjugal visit with his wife now and then. You don’t mind, do you?’ Conjugal visits were totally against our policy, and I was stuck being the bad guy because I’d be the one who had to tell these witnesses we were not going to follow through.” Carlson decided something had to be done, so he contacted Shur.

  Looking back later, Shur would note that a natural evolution had occurred. Before WITSEC, there weren’t many government witnesses, and when the program began in 1970, federal prosecutors had been so eager to recruit mobsters that many of them were granted full immunity and didn’t have to spend a day in prison. But as more and more LCN members agreed to testify, prosecutors and judges became more selective about who was let off without being punished, and by 1974, almost every criminal who entered WITSEC had to serve some time in prison before he was paroled and relocated. This created a new problem: where to house them. The Marshals Service initially let LCN witnesses do their time in safe houses. It also tried military brigs and county jails. But none of these facilities proved to be suitable. Safe houses weren’t designed to hold prisoners for long periods, mobsters objected to the rigid regimen of military prisons, and witnesses didn’t feel secure in county jails.

  Working together, Shur and BOP director Carlson came
up with a solution. They decided to build a special prison exclusively for government witnesses. Carlson already had a location in mind. He had his architects reconfigure the third floor of the high-rise Metropolitan Corrections Center the BOP was constructing in New York City, and when the prison opened in mid-1978, Shur moved twenty-one government witnesses into the new WITSEC prison unit.

  Not everyone liked Shur and Carlson’s “prison within a prison.” Prosecutors in New Jersey and New York were afraid that putting witnesses in the same prison as the mobsters who wanted to kill them was foolhardy. But Shur felt confident. “I considered Norman Carlson one of the best administrators in the federal government. He was not going to let a witness be poisoned, stabbed, or harmed.”

  Carlson used strict security guidelines to keep the third-floor unit separate from the rest of the prison. It had its own secure entrance, and every witness in the unit was given an alias to prevent other inmates in the prison from knowing who was being housed there. The only prison official who was told the inmate’s actual name was the warden. Each witness was assigned a one-man cell, and if he wished, he could ask for his cell door to be locked when other witnesses were free to watch television or play pool in the unit’s common area. Before any visitors were permitted to enter the unit, they were required to stand in front of a two-way mirror so the WITSEC witness they were coming to see could verify that the visitor was actually who he said he was. To prevent witnesses from being poisoned, a BOP lieutenant selected trays of food at random from the prison’s mess hall and locked them inside a cart that was then taken into the WITSEC unit.

  Carlson required every witness to pass an FBI-administered lie detector test before he was allowed to be housed in the WITSEC unit. Carlson wasn’t trying to discover whether or not he had testified truthfully in court. He wanted to be certain no one was trying to sneak himself into the unit to kill another witness. And even after a witness passed the test, he wasn’t automatically admitted into the unit. First, a photograph of him was distributed to everyone already housed there so they could tell correctional officers if they were afraid of the prospective new arrival. “In some Mafia cases,” Shur explained, “we would get a low-ranking guy to testify against his gangster boss. Then that gangster would testify against someone higher up in the organization, and up the chain we would go. This meant there were a lot of WITSEC witnesses who had grudges against each other and couldn’t be housed together.”