by Pete Earley
In most of the BOP prisons, Carlson tried to keep rival prison gangs and various hate groups separated from each other to prevent trouble, but that wasn’t possible inside the tiny WITSEC unit. “We had Ku Klux Klan members living in cells next to Black Panthers, the Aryan Brotherhood—with swastikas on their arms—sitting with Jews at the dinner table. All these groups who normally would not associate with each other were housed together in our unit,” Shur explained. “It worked because there was a common threat that kept them in line. They knew they’d be kicked out of the unit if they caused problems, and no one wanted to be sent into the main prison population because he’d have to check himself into an isolation cell to keep from being murdered.”
When it first opened, the WITSEC unit was a spartan affair. It had one communal television set, a pool table, table tennis equipment, some exercise equipment, and a small visiting room. At night, prisoners were taken up to the roof for fresh air and to exercise. Carlson assigned his most senior correctional officers to work there. “I needed strong, experienced officers because these inmates were sophisticated and conniving,” he recalled. He also wanted his staff to know that the WITSEC unit was a top priority.
The Manhattan unit was so successful that within months Shur and Carlson had opened two more in federal prisons in San Diego and Chicago. Two years later, a fourth unit opened in Otisville, New York. Together, these four housed a total of four hundred WITSEC witnesses, some serving sentences as long as life. “I felt bad for many of our WITSEC prisoners because they had helped the government,” said Shur, “and we were imprisoning them under harsher conditions than the criminals whom they had testified against. We didn’t have jobs in the WITSEC units that our witnesses could do to earn money. There was no vocational training, no recreation areas. Boredom was a real problem, and that concerned me because I knew that a bored, idle prisoner could be a dangerous person.”
Carlson tried to make life easier by having small color television sets installed in each cell, but, he recalled, “that was about all I could do.” Because there were only four units nationwide, relatives often had to travel across the country to visit, and when they arrived, correctional officers had to sneak them inside at odd hours to prevent other prison visitors and inmates in the main prison from seeing them. “We didn’t want anyone to discover who we had hidden in the unit based on the visitors coming to see them,” Shur explained. Arranging visits was such a nightmare that Shur arranged for witnesses to call home on government lines without charge once each week so they could keep in touch with their families.
Not every WITSEC witness was sent to one of the units. “If we thought it was safe,” Shur said, “we would hide witnesses in state prisons under an alias. It gave them a chance to take advantage of educational and vocational classes and live a more normal prison life.” But some witnesses were afraid to be housed anywhere except inside the units.
Shur now had to deal with two separate agencies: the BOP and Howard Safir’s WITSEC operations office at the Marshals Service. The BOP was responsible for keeping the witnesses safe while they did their time. As soon as they were paroled, the Marshals Service took over protecting them.
While the BOP ran the WITSEC units, Shur had the final say over who was housed in them. He visited each unit at least twice a year to hold “town meetings.” He always began by asking: “How are things going?” After listening to the witnesses’ complaints as a group, he met individually with anyone who wanted to speak to him in private. “A few inmates in the WITSEC unit tried to run cons on me,” said Shur, “and they were the most interesting to deal with because they’d lie, scheme, and try to manipulate me.”
At one town meeting, WITSEC inmates demanded that Shur complain to the BOP’s Carlson and get a correctional officer transferred out of the WITSEC unit because no one there liked him. But when Shur met separately with several inmates, they admitted the group meeting had been staged. One of the witnesses in the unit had a grudge against the officer and was trying to get him transferred. Everyone else had simply been going along. In a unit that housed only informants, Shur found it easy to keep track of what was happening. For instance, one afternoon a witness called Shur with a disturbing tip. He said a female BOP caseworker was periodically engaging in sex with a witness in the unit. Shur was skeptical, even when he went into the unit and confronted the witness who reportedly had seduced the woman.
“Yes, I’ve had sex with her,” he admitted. “Who told you?”
Shur, who knew the woman personally, decided to see if he could catch the witness in a lie.
“If you had sex with her, I assume you have seen her nude,” Shur said.
“Yep,” the witness replied, grinning.
“Then you must have noticed the scar she has on her left leg?” he continued.
“Ah, no,” the witness said after a few awkward moments. “I don’t remember a scar.”
“Well, you had to have noticed that she had a breast removed because of cancer?”
“She did?” the witness asked, seeming genuinely confused. “No, I guess it’s possible I missed that. We did it real quick and I didn’t always look at her breasts, but I thought for sure she had both of them.”
Shur had made up the scar and cancer stories, hoping to trick the witness into confirming them.
“When was the last time you had sex with her?” he asked.
“The twenty-fifth of the month.”
At that moment, Shur was called away to answer an emergency phone call. He took it in a tiny office. As he was talking on the phone, he glanced down and noticed that someone had drawn a heart in red ink on the desk calendar. It was on the twenty-fifth. “Whose office is this?” Shur asked a correctional officer. “It’s our caseworker’s,” he replied.
“I had been absolutely convinced the witness had been lying to me,” Shur said later, “but seeing that heart had made me suspicious enough to confront the woman, and she admitted having sex with him. She had to resign.” The incident reminded Shur of how treacherous witnesses could be. “I warned my staff constantly never to meet alone with a witness in a WITSEC unit, no matter how much they liked them or thought they were a friend,” said Shur. “You didn’t want to put yourself in a position where it was your word against theirs.”
Whenever Shur found himself wondering if a witness was lying, he’d look for corroborating evidence and motive. “That was what prosecutors were supposed to do when they dealt with these guys, too. I’d ask myself, ‘Okay, what’s this guy’s motivation? What’s he trying to get out of me?’ Then I’d look for other evidence. If everything else failed, I’d go with my gut, but that was extremely risky.”
As the years passed, Shur watched some witnesses grow old. “Time was frozen for them. They were stuck in the same WITSEC unit year after year, and a lot of them, especially witnesses in the Mafia, were filled with self-loathing because they had testified against their former friends. I had one witness who tried to kill himself by eating a hundred paper clips.”
Shur met with another witness after he had tried to commit suicide because he had tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. “I violated my own rule and saw him alone,” Shur recalled. “He was angry and upset and desperate. He was not only afraid of dying from AIDS, he was terrified other inmates in the unit would think he was homosexual.” Shur tried to reassure him, but he got nowhere.
“What the hell do you know?” the inmate snapped. “I could die tomorrow! You don’t know what it feels like—not knowing if you are going to wake up in the morning!”
“Can you read?” Shur asked.
As the inmate glared, Shur lifted his wrist, revealing the Medic Alert bracelet that identified him as suffering from multiple sclerosis. “I know what it’s like to live with that same uncertainty,” Shur explained, “so if you want to talk about it, we’ll talk. If you want to pray about it, we’ll pray. But if you want to feel sorry for yourself and feel pity for yourself, we are both wasting what time we have left
here.”
Shur made certain word spread through the unit that the witness had contracted AIDS from a contaminated needle. Later, Shur had mixed feelings about their confrontation. “Here was a man responsible for killing innocent people. Society considered him to be evil, but I was there trying to keep him from killing himself, telling him that his life was worth saving. I discovered my feelings about these witnesses were complicated. As I got to know many of them, things were less black and white. I remember an arsonist whom I got to know well. This man always made certain the buildings he was going to torch were uninhabited, but he made a mistake one day and a pregnant woman was burned to death. He couldn’t talk about his crime without breaking down in tears—not tears to arouse pity, but tears of real remorse. He was truly haunted by what he had done. I saw that as a sign that there was a spark of redemption in him.”
Other witnesses were not as easy to stomach. When a warden told Shur that a WITSEC inmate had been caught using a pay phone to make sexually explicit calls to children while he masturbated, Shur told the warden to immediately kick him out of the unit.
“I can’t do that,” the warden replied. BOP rules required that he hold a disciplinary hearing first before punishing an inmate, he explained.
“Maybe the BOP has to hold a disciplinary hearing,” Shur replied, “but I don’t have to hold a hearing to remove someone from the WITSEC program. If I say he’s out of WITSEC, he’s out. And if he’s out of WITSEC, then he can’t live in the WITSEC unit.” Within the hour, the witness had been put into solitary confinement and transferred. “I wanted him out of the unit so other witnesses there would know that conduct like his was totally unacceptable,” said Shur.
Shur eventually developed his own philosophy about witnesses in the units. “I decided the world is not made up of good people and bad people. Rather, I chose to believe it is made up of people who are not by definition either good or bad, but simply people, some of whom do good things and some of whom do bad things, and most of whom do some of each. I encountered men who had done horrible and unspeakable crimes, yet I saw them perform extraordinarily decent acts in prison. I used to give speeches to various groups and I would say, ‘To concede that there is a group of “bad” people by definition would be an admission that there is no hope for any of them. That means any effort I put forth to help them is going to be futile, and I refuse to believe that.’ ” The BOP’s Carlson began referring to Shur as the Criminal Division’s “social worker.”
In 1979, the Justice Department reorganized its Criminal Division, and Shur was named senior associate director of a new section, called the Office of Enforcement Operations (OEO). It was being formed to oversee the department’s use of “sophisticated investigative tools,” a bureaucratic catchall term that covered such things as the WITSEC program, requests for federal wiretaps, and secret operations that the FBI, DEA, and other agencies occasionally ran. Philip Wilens, another former Organized Crime and Racketeering Section attorney and close friend of Shur’s—they had eaten lunch together at work almost daily since 1961—took over supervision of federal wiretaps, leaving WITSEC and whatever other matters arose for Shur to oversee. One afternoon the BOP’s Carlson called Shur with a request that seemed to fit his new responsibilities. Carlson explained that federal statutes gave him the authority as BOP director to grant prisoners a furlough from prison for up to thirty days. Historically, furloughs had been given to prisoners so they could attend family funerals. The prisoners weren’t turned loose. They were escorted to the memorial service by armed guards. Carlson was calling because federal prosecutors and various FBI and DEA agents had begun asking him to grant furloughs to inmates so they could be used in undercover sting operations. Carlson didn’t know the U.S. attorneys or the federal agents as well as Shur did, so he asked if he would review their requests and decide which ones were worth pursuing. “Here’s how it worked,” Shur recalled. “A DEA agent would ask the BOP to furlough an inmate because he knew a drug dealer in Miami. Obviously, the dealer didn’t know the inmate had been put in prison. If I agreed with the plan, Carlson would grant the inmate a furlough and the DEA would set up a meeting between the inmate and the drug dealer. These usually took place in a motel room that had been rigged with video cameras. As soon as the inmate bought drugs from the dealer, the DEA would move in and make the arrest. The inmate would then be brought back to prison.” In return for his help, the inmate hoped time would be taken off his sentence.
Shur agreed to begin screening requests, and soon he was reviewing an average of 150 furlough requests each year. He recommended that Carlson release prisoners in about half of those cases. Today, prison furloughs are still being used, although they are rarely discussed by the government.
“I had to weigh three factors when I reviewed a furlough request,” said Shur. “Was this inmate an escape risk, was there a chance the inmate might be murdered or murder someone else, and what would be gained by furloughing him?” Because the agents who had asked for the furlough were responsible for making certain the inmate was returned to prison, an inmate was rarely left unguarded when he was on the streets. A common trick that the agents used to foil escapes was to lie to the inmates about when they would be sent back to prison. The prisoner would be told a specific date, but actually be hustled back behind bars several days earlier. Only two prisoners escaped during the two decades that Shur oversaw the program, and both were recaptured before they had a chance to commit new crimes.
“Getting prisoners out of prison wasn’t as easy as you might think,” said Shur. “We had to make certain that other inmates didn’t know what was actually going on because they would have killed inmates who helped us.” Sometimes inmates were taken out of prison in ambulances under the guise of needing special medical care. Others would “disappear” while they were being moved from one prison to another.
“I was once asked to recommend a furlough for an inmate who knew the ringleaders of a gang that had stolen military weapons,” said Shur. “Agents were going to send him to make a buy and then follow him to where the guns were being stashed. The catch was that we were going to have to put this inmate in a car by himself, because he was supposed to meet the gun traffickers by himself at a fast-food restaurant and then follow them to where the weapons were hidden. The agents were going to follow him and the traffickers, and move in as soon as the deal went down. I talked it over with my staff, and one of them suggested we give him a car with just enough gas in the tank to drive about five miles, so he couldn’t run too far if he tried to escape. But the more I thought about it, the more I decided it was just too dangerous. We knew he was going to have access to a car and also weapons. What if he grabbed one of the guns and opened fire on the agents? Or double-crossed them in some way? I was getting a lot of pressure to approve the request because it was a major operation, but I said no. The problem with furloughs was that the agents’ priority was making an arrest, so they were more willing to take risks than I was. Not only did I have to balance the risks, I had my firm belief that a prisoner ought to serve his time in prison, not on the streets. Sometimes agents would ask me to get Carlson to extend a furlough for another thirty days. I knew these agents were simply keeping a prisoner they liked from going back to prison. The stupidest reasoning for a request I ever got was from a U.S. attorney who wanted me to recommend a furlough for a prisoner with a very long sentence. He told me he could tell by looking into the inmate’s eyes that he wasn’t going to run away. I rejected that request.”
Shur soon began getting other tasks in his new job. He became the Criminal Division’s liaison with the federal parole board, an assignment that gave him even more clout when it came to the board’s deciding which federal prisoners would be paroled and which would stay behind bars. Shur also advised it about organized crime figures who were being considered for parole, and about relocated WITSEC witnesses who had committed new crimes and been sent back to prison. By 1980 he had become an even more powerful figure when it came to
determining the fate of federal witnesses. Not only did he decide who got into the WITSEC program, but also whether they would be protected in a WITSEC prison unit or sent to a state prison to be hidden under an alias. He could single-handedly remove a witness from the safety of a WITSEC unit, forcing him to be sent back into the regular prison population, where he’d have to hide in the hole to survive. Because of his federal parole board contacts, Shur was in a position to influence whether a WITSEC witness was released early or had to serve all of his prison sentence. Finally, he alone decided whether a witness was turned over to the Marshals Service after he was paroled and given a new identity, or simply shown out the front prison gate.
It was not surprising that some WITSEC witnesses began referring to him behind his back, not always kindly, as “the little god.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Howard Safir was having too good a time as WITSEC chief to return to the DEA, as he had originally planned, after his year “on loan” ended in 1979. Nor did the Marshals Service’s director, William Hall, and its deputy director, John Twomey, want him to go. They offered to make him an assistant director for operations if he would join the Marshals Service, a promotion that would give him more pay and power. He accepted.
Twomey already had a new assignment in mind. When he was a prison warden in Illinois, he had noticed the Marshals Service was still responsible for capturing escaped convicts and other federal criminals on the loose, just as it had in the old Wild West days. But over the years, the FBI had taken over the task of tracking down federal criminals. While it had done a great job of catching the notorious felons on its Most Wanted List, it hadn’t had the time or funds to go after the smaller fish, or much interest in doing so. By 1979, there were fifteen thousand federal fugitives free on the streets with no one actively pursuing them. Twomey asked Safir if he was interested in helping the Marshals Service reclaim its turf, and he jumped at the chance.