Witsec

  Another change in WITSEC had evolved almost on its own. With the opening of WITSEC prison units, WITSEC had become a two-step program. Witnesses could no longer assume they would be automatically given new identities and be relocated after they were released from prison. Shur would decide whether they needed to be relocated or if they could simply be paroled, taking into consideration their conduct in the WITSEC unit and whether he felt they would still be in danger if they were released.

  In late 1983, yet another Senate subcommittee held public hearings to investigate WITSEC, the fourth set in five years, and this time, the hearings led to passage of the Witness Security Reform Act of 1984. Written primarily by Senator Thad Cochran, it formalized many of the internal procedures that Shur already had implemented. There was one practice the law toughened. Because of the Pruett murders, the law required Shur and his staff to prepare a formal, written “risk assessment” of every witness, prisoner or non-prisoner, entering WITSEC. As part of this evaluation, each witness was required to undergo a battery of psychological tests administered by a psychologist. The examiner would then try to predict in a report given to Shur whether or not the witness would pose a threat to the community if he was relocated. It was Cochran’s way of trying to keep WITSEC from turning another Pruett loose, and it quickly led to a disagreement between Shur and Howard Safir.

  Safir said he wanted to use psychologists from the private sector to evaluate potential witnesses. But Shur argued that federal Bureau of Prisons psychologists were better trained to evaluate criminals and were less likely to be fooled. When Safir dug in his heels, Shur sent a detailed memo to attorney general Benjamin Civiletti explaining the benefits of using BOP psychologists. In the end, the two men reached a friendly compromise: Safir retained the right to call in outside psychologists whenever he believed a witness was an obvious risk. Shur agreed to review the outsider’s opinion but not be obligated to accept its conclusions.

  But the two men were soon butting heads again when Safir announced that he wanted his WITSEC inspectors to decide who got in WITSEC and who was rejected. “My inspectors were the frontline troops,” Safir recalled. “They were the experts in the field who were actually dealing with these witnesses day in and day out, yet they had no input whatsoever in deciding whom Shur approved for relocation. That didn’t make sense to me. In my opinion, it was pretty easy to tell right out front that some of these witnesses were not going to make it, yet we had to spend our time and resources, and put our people at risk, because some prosecutor wanted to use them as a witness. I told Gerry Shur that we wanted the right to veto any witness who we didn’t think was a good candidate for relocation.”

  Shur was not about to surrender his power over who got into WITSEC. “This wasn’t about ego,” he explained later, “it was about giving the Marshals Service too much power. I couldn’t have inspectors telling a U.S. attorney that he couldn’t prosecute a mob case because the Marshals Service had decided it didn’t want to protect or relocate a key prosecution witness.”

  Some inside the Justice Department saw Safir’s move as an attempt to seize control of the entire program. “Howard had done a magnificent job revamping the WITSEC branch and getting his inspectors trained in how to handle witnesses,” a former top WITSEC inspector who worked in the Marshals Service headquarters said. “He didn’t think Shur needed to be calling the shots, and there were others inside the Marshals Service who were, quite frankly, sick and tired of getting the heat for relocating obvious killers like Pruett. The real problem was federal prosecutors. They only cared about racking up convictions. Some didn’t care what sort of filth they put on the stand as long as a witness could get them a conviction. Then the Marshals Service was stuck dealing with this riffraff after the prosecutors had closed their briefcases and gone home. It only made sense that the people who actually had to do the job should have power over who got in.”

  Another Marshals Service manager who worked at its headquarters at the time put it like this: “In the early days, Shur let too many witnesses into the program. He always erred on the side of safety when it came to protecting witnesses. If a U.S. attorney out there said a witness needed protection, it seemed that Shur automatically let him in, and some of these witnesses were dangerous and awful.” A WITSEC inspector would later recall how he picked up a witness, as ordered, from a U.S. attorney’s office one afternoon and had an ice pick held to his throat without warning minutes later while speeding down an interstate thoroughfare. Luckily, he talked the witness out of killing him.

  Shur would later dispute claims that he had been lax about letting witnesses into WITSEC. “Howard’s inspectors often assumed that I approved every request I received from a prosecutor and that I never told them no. That was simply not the case. I often rejected a proposed witness for any number of reasons, such as the witness’s testimony not being sufficiently significant, or we already had too many witnesses in a case, or in my mind the witness posed too great a threat of future violence. Naturally, I wouldn’t notify the Marshals Service of the cases they were not going to be involved in, and since they didn’t see the denials, they assumed I was approving everyone.”

  Regardless, Safir took his suggestion directly to Attorney General Civiletti. Shur, meanwhile, dashed off a long memo explaining why it was a wretched idea. “Giving the Marshals Service the absolute right of rejection of a witness would be abrogating the Criminal Division’s responsibilities of determining what prosecutions should go forward,” he declared. “To give them such power would allow them to negate years of investigation and grand jury work.”

  Once again, Shur and Safir compromised. Shur retained the final say over who did and didn’t get into WITSEC, but he agreed to first consider written recommendations sent to his office by Safir’s inspectors. It was a move that gave WITSEC inspectors more clout, at least in appearance.

  “I had to look at factors other than whether this witness was going to be easy or difficult to relocate,” Shur said later. Sometimes federal prosecutors needed to utilize criminals, including the likes of Thomas “Big Red” Bryant, for a larger purpose—bringing to justice criminals who were even more dangerous, he pointed out. This always entailed risks: Outcomes were not going to be predictable, compromises were inevitable, and some calls were going to prove wrong. It also meant he had to face the music when bad things happened, as well as become the whipping boy for those who could not acknowledge that complexity or uncertainty, or who had agendas of their own. Shur understood the buck stopped with him whenever WITSEC made a mistake. It was heat he was willing to take.

  “Howard and I continued to have a friendly working relationship despite our disagreements,” said Shur. “I remember we disagreed about a specific witness whom I had decided to let into the program, and Howard didn’t think we should accept him. He felt so strongly, he decided to appeal my decision up the line. I had to leave town, but I trusted him so much that I suggested he present both sides of the argument. When I got back there was a message for me from Howard. It said: ‘You won.’ The same thing happened a second time when again I had to leave town. Once again Howard presented my side, and this time when I returned I had a message: ‘You won again. Next time stay in town and present your own argument.’ That says volumes about how much I trusted him.”

  Although Safir had failed at winning his field inspectors veto power, he had won them the right to make a formal written recommendation to Shur. “I came to value these assessments and rely heavily on them,” said Shur. “Oftentimes, they were the first papers I read when my office received a packet from a U.S. attorney asking us to accept a witness into the program. Howard had actually created a new profession inside the Marshals Service, the WITSEC inspector, and I saw these specialists as a strong ally.”

  • • •

  Whenever WITSEC inspectors would get together for a beer or in later years at reunions, the war stories would start. Someone would bring up the witness who had demanded that Donald “Bud” McPherson move
her Thoroughbred, or the exotic dancer who was furious when three of her five snakes froze to death while they were being transported by deputies through Chicago. There would be mention of James Cardinali, the four-time murderer kicked out of WITSEC because he told his girlfriend his real name, who protested by picketing the federal courthouse in Albuquerque wearing a sign bearing a red bull’s-eye and the words “Mob Star Witness.” Or someone would mention former New Jersey mobster John Johnson, who was relocated to Austin, Texas, and was earning a good living operating a hot-dog vending business until he decided one day to run for mayor. He announced his candidacy by handing out copies of his seven-page rap sheet and declaring that he had been a thief before seeking office, whereas others waited to turn crooked after they were elected. He got 496 votes. Miami businessman Joseph Teitelbaum’s name would occasionally surface, too. He was a “non-relocated” innocent WITSEC witness. The mob tried to kill him after he spent eighteen months helping the FBI secretly collect evidence against the corrupt International Longshoremen’s Association. Despite death threats—a crane operator was offered $50,000 to drop a cargo container on him—Teitelbaum adamantly refused to abandon his relatives and his business to enter WITSEC, arguing that he shouldn’t have to go into hiding because he had done the right thing. Instead, Teitelbaum forced Safir to send inspectors to protect him at his home. They spent more than two years providing him with around-the-clock protection, at a cost of $3 million.

  Of all the war stories, however, few could equal the case of the flaccid penis. A mobster became so depressed after he entered WITSEC that a psychologist warned an inspector that unless the witness’s self-esteem was restored, he might not be able to testify. The psychologist suggested a penile implant because the gangster was having trouble getting an erection. The inspector put in the request, Shur approved it, the government paid for it, and afterward the witness’s mental health improved dramatically. There was only one problem. One night the WITSEC inspector got a call from the mobster. “They put a button under my skin next to my navel,” he explained. “You push it and your dick gets stiff, right? Now, here’s the problem. When I lean forward while I’m eating, my gut hits the kitchen table right where this button is located, so boom, the little general shoots to attention. It’s uncomfortable and can be very embarrassing.”

  “Buy a shorter chair or a table,” the inspector suggested.

  Jerry Lyda, who relocated several hundred WITSEC witnesses before retiring in late 2000, always enjoyed the war stories, but it was a panicked call from an informant in Chicago that he would later remember when asked to describe his thirty-year career as a deputy marshal. Two hit men were on their way to kill a relocated witness, the caller told him. Lyda telephoned a fellow inspector in a nearby city where the witness and his family were hiding. “He got them out less than an hour before the mob showed up to murder them,” Lyda said. “It was an extremely close call.”

  Lyda was one of the first to volunteer to become a WITSEC inspector in 1978, after Safir began revamping the WITSEC operations. “He made the job something you had to volunteer for, a job that you had to want to get into, and he began pulling a different breed of inspectors into the job. Inspectors had a different mentality. You had to get satisfaction out of helping someone rather than arresting them. You had to turn your collar around, because as an inspector, you ended up doing a lot of jobs that were part deputy, part social worker.”

  Inspectors in the field had two assignments: protecting and producing witnesses in court within their jurisdictions, and successfully relocating them, a task that required finding a witness a new city to live in, making sure he received all of the assistance that was due him and his family, and then helping them become self-sustaining. If the inspector did his job well, no one would notice. Only his failures ever made headlines.

  “During my career, I saw two major changes that really improved how we relocated witnesses. The first was the use of MOUs [Memorandums of Understanding], because everything was put down in black and white so there wouldn’t be any confusion, or at least not as much as there had been,” said Lyda. “The next big change was Howard Safir. He took a job few wanted and gave inspectors more clout, more say, and more respect.”

  What many witnesses didn’t realize, said Lyda, was just how important a WITSEC inspector was going to become in their lives. “Every witness who came into the program would tell you, ‘Hey, I’m the most important witness who’s ever been in WITSEC.’ ” They believed that, in part, because federal prosecutors and agents had often fed their egos to get their cooperation. If they had a problem, they simply called the U.S. attorney and said they wouldn’t testify unless their demand was met. But after they stepped off the witness stand, the WITSEC inspector was the only official there to help them.

  “There were two keys to helping witnesses make the transition from the criminal to the legitimate world: attitude and trust. You couldn’t force a witness to go straight, but you could help provide him the tools if he wanted to make the change. That’s where the trust came into play. You had to win a witness’s trust. Protecting him and his family was the first step to getting close to a witness. Then you helped him relocate. Hopefully by that time you had developed a close enough relationship that he would believe you when you said, ‘Okay, when it comes to a job, you’ll have to start at the bottom. It’s not great, but it’s a start. It will help you establish a work history and then we can move on to something better. But you will have to be patient.’ A witness had to be able to believe you had his best interests at heart, and that was difficult for many of these guys because they were used to only watching out for themselves. It required a big leap of faith. What made the inspector’s job different from other jobs in law enforcement was that it often required you to make a long-term commitment to these people and play a unique role in their lives. You ended up investing a lot of your time, your energy, and much of your personal career in helping them succeed.”

  The first problem in relocating witnesses was always money. “Few knew how to budget, and many of them were used to making hundreds of thousands of dollars through crime,” said Lyda. “Now they had to scale back, and they didn’t know how. You had to teach them a lot of basic living skills.”

  The second problem was secrecy. “I preached to every witness: ‘Don’t tell anyone where you have been relocated,’ and then I added, ‘I mean anyone,’ because the problem is that everyone trusts someone. A witness would tell me, ‘I only told my mother. I can trust my mother,’ and then I’d talk to the mother and she would say, ‘I only told my sister. I can trust my sister.’ Then the sister would say, ‘I only told my husband. I can trust my husband.’ And on it went. I had a witness who told a U.S. attorney where he had been relocated. Now, that sounds completely safe, but the attorney told a federal agent, and the agent was sitting in a courtroom one day and he told another agent within earshot of some defendants. Suddenly we had an emergency on our hands.”

  Lyda and other WITSEC inspectors warned relocated witnesses who had been given new identities not to tell anyone they met that they were witnesses, including people they dated or later even married. “Security was the top priority. You had to look down the road: What if there was a divorce and the spouse went running to the mob for revenge? It wasn’t uncommon for an angry spouse to be furious at us because we hadn’t told them about a witness’s past. But we could not risk jeopardizing a witness’s security.”

  The third problem was keeping witnesses from going home. “As time passed, they would begin to lose sight of why they had first entered WITSEC. The desire to go home and get back in touch with one’s family and friends would become overwhelming. At the same time, they would convince themselves the risk had passed or there wasn’t really that much risk at all. Psychologically, it made them feel safer, too, thinking that no one was really looking for them.”

  Witnesses would hear stories about other witnesses who had not been harmed when they returned home. One famous tale was about H
erbert Itkin, whose testimony had sent Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, a New York mob boss, to prison. After Corallo was paroled, the two men happened to come face-to-face one day outside the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. After several awkward seconds, they both said hello.

  “You did a hell of a job on us,” Corallo said, and then he walked on.

  Lyda warned his witnesses that the risks were too great. While the mob might not have bothered to send a hit man after a witness hiding in Iowa, it wouldn’t hesitate to kill him if he was only a few blocks away. But his warnings were often ignored. One day a witness announced he was voluntarily dropping out of WITSEC. He said he had sent out feelers and been assured that the mob boss whom he had turned against was willing to forgive him. Lyda pleaded with him not to return, but the witness ignored him. He was murdered a few days later. “Being cut off from your family was simply intolerable for many of these witnesses,” said Lyda. “As the months passed, it became very difficult for many of them not to at least try to sneak back. The inspector, of course, didn’t have any way of knowing if a witness was going home, because after we relocated them, we didn’t watch them twenty-four/seven.” One afternoon Lyda was putting a WITSEC witness on a flight leaving Chicago when he spotted another witness strolling into the terminal from an aircraft that had just landed. He was returning from his “danger area.”

  “If you are going to survive as a WITSEC inspector, you learn quickly not to completely trust any witness,” he recalled, “or you learn to know there are certain things you can trust and others that you can’t trust.” Another insight: “It seemed to me every one of these guys held something back from prosecutors. They knew if they ever got into trouble later, they could use it as a bargaining chip. They never told you everything they knew.” Still another: “No matter how close you got to these guys, you always had to remember they had testified against their very closest friends. I remember getting along great with a witness and then the day came when I told him no. Instantly, he turned completely against me.”