by Pete Earley
“While I deeply regret what Pruett did,” Shur said, “we are not to blame. Pruett is to blame for what he did.” Shur assured Cochran that the Pruett case was atypical. A recent study had found that fewer than 21 percent of protected witnesses had been arrested within two years after they were relocated (in later years this figure would fall to 18 percent). That meant 79 percent stayed out of trouble. “Given the criminal backgrounds of our witnesses,” he declared, “these are amazing statistics.”
Cochran’s hearing was conducted during the July 4 weekend at a local Ramada Inn in Jackson, and Cochran was the only senator who attended it. Moreover, none of Pruett’s victims was called to testify. While the hearing made front-page news in the local paper, no one in the national media paid any attention to it, and the Pruett scandal began to become yesterday’s news. It seemed as though WITSEC had ridden out the worst of the media storm. Better yet, six weeks later Safir and the Marshals Service found themselves being feted in the press and on television for a daring arrest that seemed to overshadow the bad press the Pruett rampage had spawned.
Acting on an informant’s tip, Safir’s fugitive-hunting deputies had finally tracked escaped spy Christopher Boyce to Port Angeles, Washington, a coastal town in the Pacific Northwest across the strait from Victoria, British Columbia. He had evaded them for nineteen months, but the deputies now felt confident that they were about to capture “the Falcon.” However, Boyce did not show up at the apartment where he had reportedly been living, and it looked as if they were about to fail once again. And then fate intervened. On impulse, two deputies pulled into the Pit Stop, a neighborhood hamburger joint, to show its carhops photographs of Boyce. As they were waiting for one of the carhops to roller-skate out to their car, the agents glanced at the driver in the car parked next to theirs. Sitting behind the steering wheel was Christopher Boyce. He was reading a book and eating a hamburger. Deputy Dave Neff slipped next to Boyce’s open car window and stuck a pistol next to the fugitive’s left ear. “Drop the hamburger!” he ordered. Minutes later, Safir’s phone rang at home. It was after midnight. “The Falcon is back in his cage,” a deputy told him. “It’s over.”
• • •
Geraldo Rivera was not about to let Shur and Safir off the hook when it came to Marion Pruett. The ABC newsman was convinced the case proved just how out of control and dangerous WITSEC was. He decided to interview Pruett and his victims’ family members, and in early 1983 ABC broadcast another segment on 20/20, this time called “A Deal with the Devil.”
“Two years ago we told you how a significant number of supposedly protected federal witnesses were turning up dead,” Rivera began. “Tonight’s report deals with another sometimes fatal defect in the witness program: the apparent lack of screening of potential witnesses.”
After describing Pruett’s rampage and showing viewers photographs of his murder victims, Rivera turned his camera on the victims’ families.
“It is unbelievable that a person like Pruett would be out—them knowing the type of person he is—and turning him loose on society,” said Ed Lowe of Jackson, Mississippi. “It’s unimaginable.”
“I want Pruett in the electric chair, the sooner the better,” said another relative.
The parents of the two college students murdered at the 7-Eleven stores in Colorado spoke angrily about WITSEC.
BETTY BALDERSON: The loss of our loved one was the first hurt, and the second hurt was when we found out the government had been involved in it through the witness protection program.
RIVERA: Do you think the federal witness protection program bears at least some responsibility in the murders of your sons?
BETTY BALDERSON: Oh yes.
FRANK BALDERSON: Definitely.
MARY TAITT: They have been co-conspirators.
A belligerent Marion Pruett appeared next on film.
RIVERA: Is it possible that people would be alive today if you were not on the witness protection program?
PRUETT (laughing loudly): I don’t think I need to answer that. It speaks for itself.
RIVERA: Do you think the government is a co-conspirator in your homicides because they let you out of prison, they let you go free?
PRUETT: Yeah, they most definitely did.
Rivera quickly cited three other cases for viewers in which WITSEC witnesses had committed murders. Roy terHorst, whose daughter was one of the victims, charged that the government “gives more to a criminal, if they can get a nickel’s worth of testimony out of him, than they do for the citizen walking around the street.”
RIVERA: If you could speak directly to people who administer this program, what would you say?
TERHORST: Do away with it. You have done more harm than you have ever done any good.
With disgust building in his voice, Rivera told viewers that no one in the government had ever apologized or offered the injured families any financial compensation. Then he let the mother of one of the victims have the final word.
FLORENCE BEAULIEU: I pray to God that they change their rules. You cannot keep sending those people onto the street and saying that they are doing good. Somebody has got to have a conscience someday.
Now it was Shur’s turn to be angry. Rivera’s producer had asked to interview him for the show, but Shur had said he would only appear on 20/20 live so Rivera could not edit his remarks. ABC declined. Rivera then asked associate attorney general Rudolph Giuliani, who had been appointed by President Reagan in 1981 to be the third in command at the Justice Department, if he would grant 20/20 an interview, since he had oversight over the Marshals Service. But he, too, refused unless he could appear live. Having failed to get either official, Rivera had taken a clip from the network’s archives that had been filmed when Shur testified before Senator Cochran’s hearing in Mississippi. He spliced Shur’s testimony into the 20/20 broadcast.
“To the families of these victims and to the local cops sometimes frustrated by the witness program,” Rivera had told 20/20’s viewers, “Justice Department official Gerald Shur had this to say.”
SHUR: The one thing we share with your local law enforcement people is an oath to fight crime and, ah, we do have to strike sometimes difficult balances.
Placed as it was, Shur’s comment had come across as flippant when shown after the highly charged scenes of the victims’ suffering families. What Rivera never told viewers was that Shur had not been talking about Pruett. He had been answering Cochran’s totally unrelated question about witnesses who had refused to pay their debts after they were relocated.
SENATOR COCHRAN: … What about the cases that we have cited—the lady from Huntsville, Alabama, who has a judgment against a protected witness for $150,000? Basically, she’s out because of a swindle by a relocated witness. What can be done about these incidents?
SHUR: Under previous administrations we were prohibited from doing much more than cajoling and pleading and perhaps pleading some more, and perhaps threatening our relocated witnesses to honor their debts.… You would not do that in $400 or $500 cases, and it’s one of those things which we regret, because that $400 or $500 may be very meaningful to that individual, but the one thing we share with your local law enforcement people is an oath to fight crime, and we do have to strike, sometimes, a very difficult balance.
“In the first 20/20 broadcast, Rivera made Safir look like a liar, and in the second, he made me look callous about the people Pruett had murdered,” Shur recalled. “Millions of viewers saw the broadcast, and I couldn’t go out and tell every one of them how Geraldo had spliced together my answer. He made it look as if I didn’t care that people were harmed. Believe me, I cared. I felt terrible about what Pruett had done, and I resented what Rivera had now done to my words. To me, Rivera was the best example of the worst kind of journalist.”
Shur had another reason to be upset. The ABC newsman had tried to pressure Giuliani into granting him an interview by using an old reporter’s tactic. In a letter, Rivera had told Giuliani that Marion Pruett
had accused Shur of knowing that “Big Al” Benton was being framed and that he [Pruett] was the real killer. Rivera then wrote that if Giuliani did not come on television to refute Pruett’s charge and defend Shur, 20/20 would have no choice but to broadcast Pruett’s accusation unchallenged. Turning up the heat, Rivera had sent a copy of the letter to the U.S. attorney general.
The letter didn’t work. Giuliani did not grant him an interview, and Rivera never broadcast the accusation. Still, Shur felt used.
“Rivera was accusing me of sitting quietly by and doing nothing during a frame-up,” said Shur. “He was besmirching my reputation in an attempt to twist Rudy Giuliani’s arm and force him on camera. It was sleazy.”
Not long after Rivera’s broadcast, the parents of one of Pruett’s murder victims sued Shur, Safir, Chavez, and the Marshals Service, claiming each was responsible for their son’s murder because they had helped relocate Pruett. But a federal appeals court rejected the case after ruling that the defendants were not responsible.
Meanwhile, Safir won a key ruling in his still unresolved $10 million slander suit against Rivera and ABC over the first 20/20 show, “Hostages of Fear.” A Virginia judge rejected ABC’s attempt to remove the case from a state court to a federal court, and set a date for the case to go before a jury.
Safir was convinced that if ABC got the case transferred into a federal court, he’d lose. On the morning the trial was scheduled to start, the network paid Safir an undisclosed cash settlement. The court record was sealed and both parties were barred from discussing how much Safir had received.
“I wanted to be fair in this book,” Shur said as these pages were being written, “so I decided to give Rivera a chance to respond to my written account of what happened.” This is Rivera’s reply exactly as he gave it to us to print:
I have no clear recollection of the gory details of what happened in the Shur controversy, other than to suggest that he sounds from this account like a crybaby who could dish it out but not take it. As to his charge of “sleazy,” what was really sleazy was the way promises made to program participants were allegedly not honored. Insofar as Mr. Safir is concerned, what I remember very clearly is how, under his reign as New York’s police commissioner, many minority mothers felt they had more to fear from cops than crooks when their kids went out at night. I fiercely opposed settlement of the lawsuit he so cleverly insisted on bringing in his hometown Virginia state court, rather than in the more appropriate, First Amendment–sensitive federal courts. Our strategic legal mistake was countersuing his agency. That made the federal government his co-defendant, and allowed his lawyer to benefit from all the taxpayer-funded discovery that took place. I angrily and publicly objected to the imposed settlement with Mr. Safir precisely because it could allow a one-sided accounting and explanation of the widely publicized problems within WITSEC. The settlement was forced on me by ABC and the insurance company, and didn’t cost me a dime; although, as I said at the time I was informed of the settlement, I took a long, hot shower to clean off the stench of it. [Note: Rivera is referring here to Howard Safir’s tenure as the police commissioner of New York City, a job he took after he left the Marshals Service.]
“I found Rivera’s reply ironic,” Shur continued. “What does Howard Safir’s later role as New York City police commissioner have to do with the fact that Rivera substituted my answer to a question about debt collection into his report about victims of a horrible crime? When I was in law school, a lecturer told us that if the facts are on your side, yell facts; when the law is on your side, yell law; and when nothing is on your side, just yell like hell. That’s Geraldo Rivera.”
Pruett was sentenced to four life terms for the murders of his wife, bank clerk Peggy Lowe, and the two 7-Eleven clerks in Colorado. An Arkansas judge sentenced him to death for killing Bobbie Robertson. Seventeen years later, a federal judge set aside Pruett’s death sentence, ruling that pretrial publicity had prevented him from receiving a fair trial, but a higher court overturned the judge’s ruling. It said Pruett had generated much of the publicity himself when he bragged on camera about his “mad dog” rampage. In April 1999, Pruett was executed by lethal injection in Arkansas.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Afew months after Marion Pruett’s rampage, WITSEC came under attack again, and Shur found himself being criticized about the sort of criminals he was letting into the program. Thomas “Big Red” Bryant, a self-admitted murderer, who had once casually cooked himself scrambled eggs while his crime partner beat and terrorized an eighty-six-year-old man during a house burglary, was one reason why.
A former motorcyle gang member, Bryant was one of seventeen government witnesses called to testify by federal prosecutors in San Francisco in 1982 against the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club. They had accused thirty members of the notorious biker club of conspiring to manufacture and distribute narcotics. They were charged under the RICO statute in an effort to disband the entire club. Like Bryant, most of the other witnesses were former Hell’s Angels themselves, and when the government paraded them through the courtroom, they sickened the jury.
A turning point in the trial came when Bryant admitted during his testimony that a DEA agent had visited him the night before to give him a briefcase stuffed with $30,000 in small bills. The cash, Bryant said, was a reward paid to him in return for his testimony. That admission stunned defense attorneys, who quickly accused the DEA of buying testimony. When the defense grilled each of the other prosecution witnesses, it discovered that every one of them had been paid, too. The DEA had shelled out a total of $280,000 in “rewards.” The witnesses were also receiving other “inducements.” Several said federal prosecutors had agreed to reduce or dismiss criminal charges pending against them. Nearly all had been accepted by Shur into WITSEC and were being given new identities and relocated.
The first Hell’s Angels trial ended in a hung jury. In a second trial, the jury refused to convict any of the accused. Instead, jurors lashed out at the prosecutors after the trial for depending on such loathsome witnesses to make their case. The jury foreman called Bryant and the others “despicable and beneath contempt.” Even the judge said he had been offended by the DEA’s cash payments. As expected, defense attorneys were blunt. “This is a case,” said one, “where the government simply went out and bought the testimony it wanted to use.” A newspaper article described WITSEC as a “carrot” used to recruit witnesses.
Shur had not been told about the rewards in advance and was furious. He wasn’t opposed to the government using rewards, but he felt the DEA had been out of line. “Giving rewards before someone testifies is outrageous and wrong,” he explained. “Rewards should only be awarded after someone testifies and under strict conditions: A witness should never be told in advance he is definitely going to receive one, and he should never be told before he testifies what amount he will be awarded.”
Shur knew jurors were naturally suspicious of criminals who changed sides and were now testifying against their friends. Studies showed most jurors were predisposed to distrust criminal witnesses, especially if they appeared to be profiting from deals made with prosecutors. At the same time, as a Justice Department attorney, he understood that prosecutors sometimes had little choice but to reach down into the gutter to recruit criminal witnesses. Notorious cases such as those of hippie-cult leader Charles Manson and the serial killer known as the Hillside Strangler never would have ended in conviction if prosecutors in California had not cut deals.
“The fact that most WITSEC witnesses weren’t Boy Scouts,” Shur said later, “did not mean they automatically lied for the government. The same was true about witnesses who were murderers or extremely violent. When I first joined the Justice Department, an old-time narcotics investigator told me the best case he had ever made was based on eyewitness testimony by a schizophrenic. He said, ‘Shur, don’t ever throw a nut out of your office.’ Jimmy the Weasel had been a hit man and he could be violent, but that didn’t ha
ve anything to do with whether or not he was telling the truth on the witness stand.” The question always boiled down in Shur’s mind to corroboration, preferably from wiretaps or from other witnesses who weren’t criminals.
After the failed Hell’s Angels case, Shur decided federal prosecutors and agents had to disclose in advance if a witness seeking WITSEC protection had been promised or paid a reward. He also required them to disclose to his office the details of plea bargains.
Shur moved to tighten WITSEC in other ways. He announced that relocated witnesses could no longer be used in undercover operations or as informants without his specific permission. “We discovered we were moving some witnesses two or three times because they were getting involved in new cases after they were relocated,” he said. “We would move a witness from Brooklyn to Minneapolis, and an agent in Brooklyn would call a buddy of his in Minneapolis and tell him that he had just sent him a great guy to use undercover. The next thing you knew, the Minneapolis agent was using this witness to make cases. Here we were, trying to get a witness’s kids into school and find him a job, only to have him call us saying he was being threatened again and needed to be moved because of some local case.” Not only was it dangerous to keep using WITSEC witnesses, it was expensive. By the early 1980s, it cost WITSEC an average of $40,000 each time it relocated a witness.
“Some witnesses loved the excitement of helping prosecutors,” said Shur. “I think it gave them the same exhilaration they felt when they committed crimes. I’d hear a witness talk about ‘our case’ and say things such as ‘we got to get this guy.’ One witness told me he had his own desk and his own secretary in a U.S. attorney’s office.”