Witsec

by Pete Earley

  We did fine for several years and then one day when Marie was a senior in high school she came home really, really angry. She had figured out Sal was her daddy. She had gotten her birth certificate from my drawer without telling me because she needed to show it at school for some reason to be on this sports team and she had seen Sal’s name listed as her father. She knew I’d lied to her. Marie had gone to the school library because I’d told her that her uncle Sal was hiding from the mob and she looked through indexes for The New York Times on microfilm, and sure enough, she finds Sal’s name and reads all about how he testified against Tony and his crew. She was a smart little detective. Well, she comes home and she tells me I had no right to lie to her about Sal. I told her he was no good and then I told her about how Sal had showed up in Phoenix and how that was the real reason we moved.

  She exploded. She screams at me, “You’re a liar. I had a dad and you lied to me. You should’ve let me decide if I wanted to know him. You had no right to make that choice for me. He’s my father!” She called Anna and asked her about Sal. She wanted to find him. No one knew where he was. She wouldn’t talk to me for a week. She slept over at her best friend’s house. I didn’t know what to say. She told me she used to have dreams about her father—not Sal, but the father I made up, the pilot who died in the air force. She used to dream about him coming to see her. She wondered what he looked like. She convinced herself he loved her. Now she knew he didn’t exist and it was almost like a death to her. She was really, really angry. She felt cheated, confused. One night she asked me if I thought she was going to become a criminal—if that was why I never told her about Sal. She asked me, “Do you think it’s in the blood?” She said she used to be afraid when we first moved to California of men coming after her, taking her away. She was so upset I took her to see a psychologist. He helped but it really bothered her that Sal was out there somewhere and she didn’t know where and she didn’t know if he wanted to find her or if he was even looking. She felt different from other kids, like she didn’t really have any past.

  Marie fussed so much I called my deputy friend in Phoenix and told him what was going on. He says, “I thought you knew. Sal’s dead.” He’d been shot in Queens a couple of years earlier. The cops didn’t think Tony was involved but how could anyone be sure? Sal was stupid to go back but I wasn’t surprised. I told Marie Sal was dead but she didn’t believe me. She said, “You’re lying again. You don’t want me to talk to him. You’re afraid I’ll like him better than you.” We had a big fight and I gave her the deputy’s number and she called him and he told her, but she didn’t believe him, either. She says, “You lied so much, you don’t know what the truth is anymore.”

  I thought about moving back to Phoenix and contacting Ted after Marie graduated from high school and decided to go to college, but I was too scared. If Marie hated me for lying, how was he going to feel? I got my real estate license during Marie’s freshman year in college. She lived on campus and was going to join a sorority so I was all alone now. I was selling real estate in the L.A. area. Funny, when the state checked into my background, they didn’t find anything suspicious. This man was looking for a condo to buy and we didn’t bother with condos because they weren’t worth our time but he was a friend of my boss so I helped him out. He lived in New York but came out to L.A. all the time on business. He asked me out and during the next few months we got together whenever he was in town. He was my boyfriend. L.A. is a difficult place for any woman older than thirty. Everyone wants to date girls.

  I was happy. Marie was doing great and I didn’t have to worry about Sal anymore. I finally felt my life was falling into place and then I’m at work and I get this call. Marie is dead. She had been with another student in a small airplane. She loved to fly and wanted to get her pilot’s license and something went wrong and the airplane crashed and she was gone—just like that. I had lost John in Rapid City and now Marie. Why did God take her? Why not me? I had to stop going into work. My boyfriend stuck with me. I lived for the days when he came into town. I needed to be with him all the time, so when he came to L.A., I said to him, “I’m going to tell you a story you aren’t going to believe but I want you to know everything.” I told him about Sal and Tony and the old neighborhood. I told him about Rapid City and John, and Phoenix and Ted, and how me and Marie moved to L.A. I told him every lie I had ever told. It was like a dam bursting open. The first thing he asked me was “Are you still in danger—are you still hiding?” I told him I was safe and I was happy he thought about me first. It felt good to finally be honest with someone. I felt this weight off my shoulders. I didn’t have to worry about him finding a paper with my old name on it or me bumping into someone I knew from Phoenix or Rapid City or Brooklyn. I didn’t have to worry every time the phone rang.

  I clung to him. I wanted him to love me and I thought my boyfriend could handle it because he had stuck by me when Marie was killed. But he started to back off. I could feel it. He didn’t call me from New York as much as he had. I thought it was all just too much for him and I got really, really depressed. One day he called and said he was in town and he took me to lunch and he told me he needed to tell me something. I thought, “He’s going to leave me.” He says to me, “I’m married.” He had a wife in New York and three grown kids. How could I have been so dumb? I told him I hoped his flight crashed on the way home. I said, “Don’t ever call me again.” Funny, huh? I was so busy trying to hide my own lies, I never thought about what lies other people were telling me. I should’ve been smarter. I had trusted him and he had lied to me.

  I thought about killing myself. I missed Marie so much. Now I was really alone. I heard a man on the radio say, “When your parents die, you lose your past. When your children die, you lose your future.” I had lost it all. I’d given up my past when I went into hiding, and without my children there was no future. None. For a long time I didn’t care about anything. I went to see Anna in Philadelphia and one afternoon for no reason I got on the train and went to New York and rode out to Brooklyn by myself and visited the old neighborhood. In my mind, it always looked exactly like it had on the day when Mrs. Bonavolonta asked me to bring her salt from the store. But when I got there, whew, it was weird, because the buildings were pretty much the same but everything else was different. All the people I knew were gone. I walked up to my old apartment building. No one recognized me. The steps and front door were the same but I didn’t know no one. I went to the building where the Captain had lived, where he was born and my mother, too. I knew what it looked like inside, every inch, but a young couple was living there now. I know this sounds melodramatic, but I felt like a ghost, only I was still alive.

  Just when I was going to leave, I saw a man who had been in high school with me. He still lived in the neighborhood. When he walked by me on the sidewalk, I introduced myself. He remembered me. He had had a crush on Anna when we were little but was too shy to tell her. He told me everyone thought we were dead. There were rumors Tony had us murdered. We had been cut up and dumped at sea. We laughed about that and he told me about some of the people from the neighborhood and what had happened to them. Some had gotten into trouble, others had gotten sick. I hadn’t thought about how their lives might have changed or their problems. I’d just thought about my own. But life had gone on for them, too. I didn’t ask about Tony. I was afraid to. But he brought him up. It was funny, really, but Tony was dead, too. He’d been killed not that long after Sal. All this time, I had thought he was still out there.

  When we said goodbye, I asked him not to mention seeing me. He says, “Why? Tony’s dead.” But I liked the idea that people thought we’d been dumped at sea. I went to the cemetery and visited the Captain’s grave. The marshals did okay by him. I told him about what had happened. I had hit bottom and I knew it. I either was going to kill myself or pick myself up.

  I went to see Marie at the cemetery when I got home and told her about the Captain. There was so much about her past she never knew. I told
her about how it was for me when I was a little girl growing up. I know she is dead but I think she heard me. I changed jobs and began going to a therapist. I signed up for classes at a community college at night. One of the teachers was divorced and he asked me out for coffee. I started reading poetry and when I read Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” I sat down and cried. You know, Sal was looking at fifteen to twenty years when he got pinched, but now I know he’d have only done one-third of that. What if he had kept his mouth shut? Maybe John would still be alive, maybe Marie too. I used to think about it a lot—what me and Marie and John and Sal would be like—what would’ve happened to us.

  It’s been twenty-five years since deputies knocked on my door in Brooklyn. If there is anything I regret, it’s all the lies. I don’t care if people feel sorry for me when they read this. I told my story because of John and Marie. I wanted something in print about them. I used to feel there was a deputy following me with a broom sweeping up any evidence I was here. I hated that. Memories matter to me because in the end, memories are all any of us have. So I have told you my story for little John and my beautiful daughter, Marie. I’ve not forgotten them. They mattered.

  PART FOUR

  NEW FACES,

  OLD TRICKS

  It is as if everyone who came to the place were put into the witness protection program, furnished with a complete new public identity.… We are, most of us, much of the time in disguise. We present ourselves as we think we are meant to be.

  —Meg Greenfield, Washington, D.C.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  Gerald Shur’s left leg felt as if it had a fifty-pound weight attached to it, and now a familiar feeling of fatigue began to sweep over him. He swore to himself, twisting in the cramped seat of the TACA international flight, trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable. “Not now, not here.” The multiple sclerosis attack was beginning and there was nothing he could do to prevent it, no miracle medicines for him to swallow. He could feel bee stings. Hundreds of them, as if he had bumped into a hive and was under attack. He never knew how long the attack would last or how intense it would be. He glanced out the airplane’s window and peered through the clouds at the green volcanic mountains passing below him. He tried to focus on his trip rather than the pain. He also tried to quiet the doubts that were now beginning to gnaw away at him, the voice in his head asking him whether a fifty-year-old attorney with MS should be leading six deputy U.S. marshals on a dangerous mission. They would feel obligated to stay with him and protect him if the pain became so overwhelming that he couldn’t walk. He decided not to mention the attack to anyone. And then he wondered: “What am I doing here?”

  Three weeks earlier, in late June 1983, Shur had been called into a deputy assistant attorney general’s office and told the State Department needed help. It wanted a team of experts in courtroom security and witness protection to fly to El Salvador and help the government there prepare for a risky trial. “I’m not telling you it won’t be dangerous,” he had been told, “because it will—you could be murdered.”

  El Salvador was in the third year of a bloody civil war. The democratic government, which was being supported by the United States, was fighting the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, known by its Spanish acronym FMLN. The Reagan administration and the CIA were afraid the country was going to fall into the hands of Marxists, just as nearby Nicaragua had fallen to the Sandinistas. But the Salvadoran military’s and national guard’s campaign against the FMLN had turned into a human rights nightmare. Military death squads roamed the tiny country arresting suspected rebel supporters and anyone else who dared to criticize the government. More than forty thousand Salvadorans had been abducted by soldiers and taken into the jungle, where they had simply “disappeared.” Among those murdered was Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez, the archbishop of San Salvador, who was assassinated in front of churchgoers while celebrating a mass in March 1980. It would later be revealed that his death had been ordered by a major in the national guard. Nine months after the archbishop was killed, four American nuns were stopped and forced from their car while traveling along a dirt road near the village of Santiago Nonualco. They were raped and then executed, their bodies kicked into a ditch. The Salvadoran government and its military at first refused to cooperate when the U.S. embassy investigated, and with good reason. The suspects turned out to be five national guardsmen, who had reportedly celebrated the sexual assaults and killings by passing around a cheap bottle of rum. Only after Congress voted to withhold $19 million in military aid to El Salvador were the five soldiers arrested. It had been nearly two years since then but not one of the men had been put on trial. El Salvador’s prosecutors and judges were too afraid. Finally, a heroic judge named Bernardo Rauda Murcia agreed to schedule the case for trial in the city of Zacatecoluca. He was immediately threatened. The State Department was now sending Shur and the deputies to figure out how to protect the judge and his courtroom so the trial could finally begin.

  Howard Safir had handpicked the deputies on the flight: William Brookhart, Paul Brinson, Alfred Miller Jr., Paul Moreno, James Tafoya, and Charles Almanza, who would double as Shur’s interpreter. Along with their weapons, which included an Uzi submachine gun, they had packed survival equipment and maps in case they were forced to hide in the jungle. Also tucked inside the airplane’s cargo hold was a brand-new magnetometer, a metal detector, which they planned to install outside the judge’s courtroom. As the jet began its descent toward the capital city of San Salvador, the pain in Shur’s legs became more intense, but he kept silent and grabbed his carry-on bag from the overhead compartment after the plane landed.

  The State Department had warned them not to trust anyone except U.S. embassy personnel. The Salvadoran military didn’t want the national guardsmen prosecuted, and killing Shur’s squad would be an effective way to intimidate the judge and stop the trial. The FMLN might also try to harm Shur and the deputies and then blame the attack on the government to stir up trouble between their country’s politicians and the U.S. Congress. As Shur entered the terminal, he spotted a tall American dressed in a business suit standing near the gate. “Justice Department security team!” the man called out, waving an arm in the air. “Anyone on board from the Justice Department security team?”

  “Keep walking,” Shur whispered to the deputies.

  They passed the man and strolled around the terminal for several minutes until they felt confident no one was lurking nearby. Returning to the gate, Shur introduced himself.

  “I’m here to drive you to the embassy,” the man explained. “Whew! I thought I’d lost you.”

  “Another stupid move like this one and you will lose us, permanently,” Shur thought.

  The deputies discovered their magnetometer had been stolen during the trip. “How’s that possible?” Shur asked. It was a heavy piece of equipment, and the only stop the jet had made after leaving the United States was a brief layover in Guatemala for refueling. Deputy Al Miller began making calls and learned the missing metal detector had been “confiscated” by Guatemalan customs officers when they rummaged through the plane’s hold during refueling. It was already being used at a Guatemalan airport to screen passengers.

  Shur and the deputies were driven to the El Presidente Hotel, where the U.S. embassy kept a block of rooms reserved. It wasn’t going to be difficult for the national security forces or the rebels to find them here, Shur thought, since they were staying in the same hotel where the embassy usually boarded Americans. So much for security.

  They asked for adjoining rooms so if one of them was attacked, the others could come to his aid. Once inside, they began looking for electronic bugs. They found plenty. It didn’t matter. They’d already agreed they wouldn’t discuss anything about their mission unless they were in the U.S. embassy or on the streets walking together. “We were doing what John Gotti and other gangsters did back home,” Shur recalled later. “Gotti would walk up and down the si
dewalk in front of his social club to avoid FBI bugs.”

  By now an exhausted Shur was ready for bed, but the pain in his legs kept him from sleeping. The MS attack had not yet subsided. Around 10:30 P.M. his room shook with a loud explosion. All six deputies came bursting in, guns drawn. The rebels had set off a bomb near the hotel, but the blast had nothing to do with their visit.

  The embassy expected Shur and the deputies to spend their first day meeting various Salvadoran politicos and court officials, and although Shur was still feeling as if he were being stung by bees, he greeted each dignitary and questioned them about the nation’s judiciary. He was told the government couldn’t control its own national security force, and that corruption and threats were so widespread that only 5 percent of the defendants arrested for crimes were ever brought to trial. Having dispensed with the diplomatic and political formalities, Shur and his team planned to fly by helicopter the next morning to Zacatecoluca, where they would inspect the courtroom for the trial. Flying was safer than driving because of land mines along the jungle highway. That night Shur again had trouble sleeping, so just before dawn he took his camera and went outside to take a few snapshots. It was a clear, beautiful morning, and as he walked, his legs began to feel better. He noticed that men with guns were standing in the doorways of downtown buildings. They were guards, and most of them were carrying weapons so ancient that Shur wondered if they would explode in their hands if fired. “I suddenly realized that these men were actually human alarms,” he said later. “If anyone was going to attack, the guards would be the first ones shot, and when the persons inside heard the shot, they’d have time to grab their own guns or hide.”

  As he returned to the hotel, an older man carrying a World War I–vintage carbine stepped in front of him. “It’s okay,” said Shur. “I’m a guest here.” But the guard refused to move, barking out a stern order in Spanish. Shur didn’t understand. The guard nodded toward the camera and spoke again. Shur thought he might have inadvertently photographed some government building in violation of the law, especially when the guard swung his rifle off his shoulder and cradled it in his arms as if he were preparing to shoot it. Finally Shur understood. He snapped the guard’s photograph as he stood at attention. Less than a month later, the man would be dead, the victim of a sniper.