Witsec

  • Ernest Pacaro died on April 12, 1975, in the garage of his Las Vegas house after inhaling his car’s exhaust fumes, the panel said. The Clark County coroner’s office decided his death was a suicide, but the Las Vegas Police Department listed it as a “possible murder.” The police were leery because Pacaro’s body had been found next to the open door of his car and his head was resting on the driver’s seat. Police theorized that Pacaro had been locked in the garage by his killers, and when he couldn’t open the overhead door, he had crawled to the car, opened its door, switched off the engine, and passed out. However, there was no evidence to support this theory.

  • Armando Zatarin’s death also had been identified as a “suspicious suicide.” He was believed to have shot himself in the head in 1977 while he was talking on the telephone with a DEA agent. The coroner’s report said the wound was consistent with a “close-range, self-inflicted gunshot,” and the DEA agent said Zatarin had been threatening to shoot himself during their conversation. But police believed someone had been with Zatarin at the time of the shooting, and they refused to rule out the possibility that this unknown person might have pulled the trigger.

  In its final report to Shur, the panel concluded that there was absolutely no evidence that witnesses in WITSEC were not being adequately protected by the Marshals Service. The panel wrote:

  Even if the two suspicious cases [Pacaro and Zatarin] are accepted as security failures, the WITSEC program failure rate is still two in 2,225 witnesses over a period of almost eight years, against organized criminal elements with extensive resources and presumably strong motivation to locate and destroy witnesses—both as matters of personal vengeance and organizational discipline.

  Even though the panel’s study had been conducted before Safir had become WITSEC chief and no one had reviewed deaths in WITSEC that had occurred within the past two years, Shur was confident that witnesses were being well protected by Safir and his inspectors. “If anything, security had improved after Howard Safir arrived in 1978,” Shur said later. “Complaints from witnesses had dropped ninety percent since he had taken charge, and I knew of no instances where any witnesses who had been following the rules had been murdered. Absolutely none! The Calimano case was tragic, and yes, there had been other suicides in the program. Every suicide concerned me, but I had my analysts compare the number of suicides in WITSEC to the number of suicides in the general population, and WITSEC was not out of line.”

  Nonetheless, Rivera’s 20/20 broadcast prompted Senator Sam Nunn to call Shur and Safir before another investigative congressional subcommittee in December 1980 to defend WITSEC. Following Rivera’s example, the Georgia Democrat opened the three days of televised hearings by calling Vivian Calimano as the subcommittee’s first witness.

  “I do not want anyone to go in this program the way it is now,” she testified. “I do not want anybody to have to suffer this.”

  Despite that emotional start, Nunn’s investigation turned up few surprises and uncovered no evidence that supported Rivera’s claim that witnesses were being slaughtered. What Nunn did discover was that witnesses were still having trouble getting new documents from the Marshals Service despite Safir’s reforms. Some nine hundred witnesses were waiting, some as long as two years, for their paperwork. Despite this, a survey by the subcommittee of fifty-seven witnesses and eighty-nine of their family members found that three-fourths of them were satisfied with how they had been treated. They credited WITSEC with having saved their lives.

  After Nunn’s hearing, WITSEC fell from the front pages and Safir went back to focusing his full-time attention on trying to capture missing spy Christopher Boyce. “It was a very difficult time for Howard,” said a close friend and WITSEC inspector. “He believed he had done a fantastic job in rebuilding WITSEC, and he was proud of what he was accomplishing in arresting fugitives. And then Geraldo goes on television and busts his chops, and others in the media begin criticizing him because Christopher Boyce was still running around loose a year after his escape. I remember running into Howard in the hallways and saying something about how I felt bad about the pressure he was under. Safir seemed offended. ‘If you can’t stand the heat, then you get out of the kitchen,’ he said. Then he added, ‘I’m not even feeling warm yet.’ ”

  It was about to get hotter.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Charles Sonny Pearson sauntered into the Sandoval County sheriff’s office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April 1981 and said he thought an unidentified, badly burned corpse that had been found in the desert a few days earlier might be his wife, Michelle. He had reported her missing six weeks earlier. Then, as if it were an afterthought, he added: “I’m a protected government witness and so was she. Maybe someone got to her.”

  Sheriff Gennaro Ferrara was immediately suspicious. Pearson showed no emotion even when he identified the horribly battered corpse as Michelle. Nor did he ask any questions about how she had been killed. An autopsy showed she had been beaten with a blunt object, strangled, dumped in the desert, doused with gasoline, and set on fire. Her remains had been found by two gas company workers who had stumbled upon them while doing a land survey.

  Pearson’s story about the last time that he had seen Michelle also struck Ferrara as odd. He said they had argued and that she had bolted from the trailer they rented in a rural area north of the city at around 2 A.M. on March 2. The last he saw of her, she had started walking down the railroad tracks toward town.

  Why had Michelle walked along the railroad tracks rather than speeding away in their car? Ferrara asked. Pearson didn’t know. He was even more evasive when asked about his past. He wouldn’t divulge his former name or tell Ferrara who might be hunting him. All he would reveal was that he had once served time in the Atlanta federal penitentiary on a bank robbery conviction.

  The Marshals Service’s office in Albuquerque sent WITSEC inspector Ruben Chavez to confer with Ferrara, and Chavez confirmed that Charles and Michelle had been secretly relocated in New Mexico by WITSEC nearly three years earlier. But Chavez said federal regulations prohibited him from telling the sheriff anything more about the couple.

  “This is a homicide investigation!” Ferrara protested. “You’ve got to tell me something.” He needed basics: Where was Michelle from? How extensive was Pearson’s criminal background? Why had the couple been forced into hiding? And, most important of all, who was trying to kill them?

  But Chavez refused to give him any details. The fact that Michelle was dead didn’t change the constraints under WITSEC because the Marshals Service was still obligated to protect her husband. He could not breach Pearson’s security by revealing personal information about his wife. And then Chavez dropped a bombshell. He said Michelle had called him late on the night of March 1 and told him she was afraid of her husband. A friend had warned her that Pearson was planning on murdering her. Chavez said he urged Michelle to call the police, but she said she didn’t trust them. They agreed to meet the next morning, but just before their scheduled rendezvous, Pearson had called him and said that Michelle had run off at 2 A.M. and disappeared.

  Based on this scanty information, Ferrara had Pearson jailed as a material witness and sent his photograph and fingerprints to the FBI for identification. Under New Mexico law, he could keep Pearson locked up for three days; then he either had to charge him with a crime or release him. The sheriff hurried to find evidence.

  A customer at the Big Chief Truck Stop and Cafe, where the Pearsons frequently drank coffee, said he had overheard Pearson threatening to kill Michelle. But that was the only incriminating evidence Ferrara could find within the three-day deadline. A local judge ruled it wasn’t sufficient, and Pearson was released. When Ferrara checked a few days later, he discovered that Pearson had fled.

  A month later a friend of Pearson’s was arrested in an unrelated case, and he offered to tell Sheriff Ferrara what had really happened to Michelle in return for a plea bargain. He had been visiting the Pearsons in t
heir trailer on March 1 when they had started arguing. But Michelle had not run outside. She had gone to bed, and Pearson had waited until she was asleep and then attacked her with a claw hammer. When he discovered she was still breathing, he strangled her with his belt. And there was more: Charles Pearson’s former name was Marion Albert Pruett.

  Ferrara was furious when he ran a background check on Pruett and discovered he had a long criminal record. He had been admitted into WITSEC after he testified in a murder trial against Allen “Big Al” Benton, who had been accused of slashing the throat of snitch William Zambito in the Atlanta penitentiary in 1978. Sheriff Ferrara felt betrayed. The FBI had told him that a check of Charles Pearson’s fingerprints had found “no known criminal record.” Ferrara suspected the Marshals Service had tampered with the files to hide Pearson’s true identity. “Had I known what sort of criminal I was dealing with,” Ferrara said later, “I am certain I could have persuaded a local judge to keep him locked in my jail.”

  Ferrara swore out a murder warrant for Pruett, but when he notified the FBI, he discovered he would have to get in line. Marion Pruett, a.k.a. Charles Pearson, had gone on an interstate crime spree.

  He had fled New Mexico in May, headed north, and robbed a bank in Seattle, Washington, less than two weeks later. In July, he robbed another bank, this time in Corpus Christi, Texas. In August, he hit a third bank, in Tallahassee, Florida. In September, he upped the ante. While robbing a bank in Jackson, Mississippi, Pruett took loan officer Peggy Lowe hostage. When they reached the Alabama state line, he shot the forty-two-year-old mother of two in the head and dumped her body beside a deserted road. She bled to death before anyone found her. Two weeks later, he robbed a bank in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, and then turned southwest, driving to Fort Smith, Arkansas, where he robbed a convenience store and took its clerk, Bobbie Robertson, hostage. He shot her and tossed her dead body out of his car as he left town. Thus far, he had killed two women and robbed six banks in a five-month period. And he wasn’t done. Pruett headed next to Colorado and on October 16 robbed two different 7-Eleven stores, one in Loveland, the other in Fort Collins, executing clerks in both. James Balderson and Anthony Taitt, both college students who had been working night shifts at the stores to earn money for tuition, were forced onto their knees by Pruett and executed. His combined take from the two robberies was $58. Seventeen hours later, Pruett’s crime spree came to an end when a Texas highway trooper stopped him for speeding. When he was interrogated later in jail, Pruett bragged that he had also killed a man outside a bar in New Orleans, then kidnapped the man’s girlfriend and killed her, too. That brought the total number of his victims to eight, but the New Orleans police were unable to find their bodies. Incredibly, Pruett insisted that he was not to blame for any of the robberies or killings. “I’ve become a mad dog killer,” he declared, “because I’ve done so much cocaine.” He said he had been robbing banks to feed his $2,000-per-week habit.

  Shur was appalled when he learned all this. “I knew when I first created the witness program that someday a protected witness might commit a crime, but I never, ever conceived that anyone would do what Pruett had done. I had gone into the Justice Department because I cared about helping people. My heart went out to his victims—to this day, I still think about them and grieve for them. But, as I usually did during crises, I moved into my clinical mode and immediately began examining our records to see what we could do to help the prosecutors. I wanted Pruett punished.”

  Shur’s records showed that the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta had asked him to admit Pruett into WITSEC after he agreed to testify against Benton. The Zambito murder case was the ninth killing at the penitentiary in eighteen months, so prosecutors had made the case a top priority. Benton had originally been charged with murder, but the jury refused to convict him of killing Zambito after a prison priest testified that at the time of the murder, he had seen Benton helping other inmates in the prison kitchen prepare the morning’s breakfast. Instead, the jury had found Benton guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, which carried an automatic life sentence.

  Fearing Pruett would be murdered in Atlanta, Shur had admitted him into WITSEC on May 3, 1978, and immediately had him moved to a different prison, where he was hidden under an alias. Pruett served another eighteen months of his bank robbery sentence, and during that time called Shur’s office and asked that his wife, Pamela Sue Canuteson, a.k.a. Michelle, also be protected because she was receiving death threats. The parole board voted to release Pruett eleven months early, after Pruett appealed to a congressman for help. A member of his staff had asked the board to release Pruett early because of his testimony against Benton. According to Shur’s file, one of Safir’s WITSEC inspectors had recommended against giving Pruett a new identity and relocating him. But Shur had disagreed. “I was focused on the number of murders that had happened in the Atlanta penitentiary, and I believed that if we successfully relocated Pruett, other inmates might come forward,” said Shur. “Yes, his record was of concern to me, but witnesses with even lengthier criminal records than his had successfully begun law-abiding lives after entering WITSEC, and the Marshals Service had objected to many of them, too.”

  The “Pearsons” had arrived in New Mexico on November 15, 1979, and were paid a monthly allowance for nine months, until Pruett had landed a job as a dump truck driver. At that point, they were terminated from the program. No one in WITSEC had heard from them again until Michelle’s panicky call to Deputy Chavez on March 1, 1981.

  The fact that a relocated WITSEC witness had gone on a multistate murder spree brought an immediate public outcry. Pruett fanned the flames when he bragged to reporters from the Denver Post that he had lied to get into the protection program.

  “I actually killed William Zambito,” he declared. “I framed an innocent man and I got rewarded for doing it.”

  Pruett now described the murder this way: “Big Al [Benton] said he’d pay me to kill Zambito when he found out they’d put the snitch in my cell. I took my shank [homemade knife] and started stabbing him in the morning while he was sleeping. He stuck his hand up to block the blows. I cut his hand real bad. Then I stabbed him in the face about three or four times. I hit him in his throat and he suddenly bolted up and was gurgling and I spit on him and said, ‘Die, you motherfucker!’ Then he fell back and stopped gurgling.”

  Pruett said he had turned against Benton after the murder when he reneged on paying him, and instead hired another inmate to kill him. In a written statement, the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta said it did not believe Pruett’s newest version of the killing. But even if it were true, Benton still was guilty of conspiring to kill Zambito, and that made reopening the Zambito case pointless.

  “People were really furious at WITSEC,” recalled Shur.

  They got even angrier when Sheriff Ferrara accused WITSEC of tampering with Pruett’s fingerprint records to help hide his true identity. “When I read the sheriff’s accusation, I immediately called up the FBI and asked it to check on what had happened,” said Shur, “because I knew it wasn’t going to lie to protect a WITSEC witness and neither was I.”

  Shur and the FBI had worked out a simple procedure for keeping track of WITSEC witnesses’ fingerprints. Shur’s staff gave the FBI the name of every criminal enrolled in WITSEC, and their fingerprint records were flagged. If fingerprints were sent to the FBI for review and they matched the prints of a WITSEC witness, the FBI examiners would spot the flag and immediately notify Shur’s office and the Marshals Service. At least, that was how the system was supposed to work. “I was worried that maybe someone had made a mistake,” said Shur, “and someone had—but it wasn’t my staff or the FBI.” The FBI told Shur that Pruett’s fingerprints had arrived smudged, which caused an FBI examiner to misread them. They had been smudged, the FBI added, at Ferrara’s jail. “There was nothing devious about any of this,” said Shur. “There was no WITSEC cover-up, no conspiracy or secret scandal.” However, there was another ironic
bit to the story. The FBI said Ferrara had mailed Pruett’s fingerprints to Washington by regular mail. “Even if they had not been smudged and an examiner had identified them as matching Pruett’s, there still was no way the FBI’s report would have gotten back to the sheriff within the three-day time limit; it had taken three days for the prints to reach the FBI in the first place. The crimes were horrible, but I still felt we were being made a scapegoat.”

  Senator Thad Cochran, whose hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, had been the site of Pruett’s first hostage murder, held a special congressional subcommittee hearing to investigate WITSEC’s handling of Pruett. “As I had done before,” Shur said, “I met in advance with Cochran’s staff and told them everything we knew.” At the hearing, he explained that the Marshals Service did not routinely notify local law enforcement when it relocated a witness within its borders because that would have been prejudicial to witnesses who were trying to make a fresh start. WITSEC inspectors were also concerned that dishonest cops might tip off the mob. Howard Safir told Cochran that Inspector Chavez had been following WITSEC procedures when he had refused to tell Ferrara about Pruett’s past. His decision to tell him about Michelle’s call had been correct because it did not reveal anything about her new identity.

  Shur reminded Cochran that Pruett was out of WITSEC when he murdered his wife, having been terminated from it eight months earlier. Finally he hammered home what he believed was a critical point. Yes, Pruett had been paroled eleven months early, apparently because he had testified against Benton. But he would have been released from prison in eleven months even if he hadn’t been granted an early parole or relocated because he would have finished serving his sentence. Who was to say that he would not have killed Michelle and gone on a rampage then, even if the government had not helped him?