Witsec

by Pete Earley

  WITSEC chief Coon reluctantly agreed to let them move back aboard their trawler, but only after a night-vision video camera was installed on the topmast and monitors put in every room. They were thrilled to go home. Because of the kidnap threat, they had stopped going out at night and had canceled their vacation plans. The Half-and-Half gave them back their base.

  There was one outing they refused to cancel. Each summer they took members of a local multiple sclerosis support group on their trawler across the Chesapeake Bay to visit a maritime museum. They were scheduled to make two trips, one on a Saturday, another on a Sunday, taking twenty guests on each day trip. “Some of these people had been looking forward to this for months,” said Shur. But there was more to it than that. They were tired of changing their plans because of the threat. Their decision to go ahead was a defiant gesture, a way to strike back at an unseen foe. Inspector Haynes and another WITSEC specialist, Joe Simon, volunteered to give up their weekend to protect them during the rides.

  In late July the FBI finally got a break in its investigation. An informant in Florida told DEA agents that the Medellín cartel had hired a private detective in Miami to find Max Mermelstein. The FBI wanted to know if he also had been asked to find the Shurs. The cartel had used private detectives before to locate people it wanted to kill. It was a practice the FBI wanted to stop. It sent two agents to question the detective and warn him that if he helped the cartel locate Mermelstein and the witness was murdered, the government would arrest him as an accessory.

  The detective admitted he had been hired to find Mermelstein, but claimed his clients were television reporters who wanted to interview Mermelstein, not drug dealers. When the agents asked for the reporters’ names so they could verify the detective’s story, he refused to say anything more, citing client privilege. He told them, however, that he had never heard of Gerald Shur.

  Back in Maryland, the Shurs were beginning to relax. Then one night they were jarred awake by the sound of motorcycles entering the marina parking lot. From the trawler’s master stateroom, Shur trained the night-vision video camera on the shoreline, and the image of six bikers appeared on the monitor. They were looking directly at Half-and-Half. Shur knew that drug dealers frequently used motorcycle gangs to do their hits. He prepared for the worst. He laid his Glock nine-millimeter automatic, a Ruger Mini-14 autoloading rifle, and a shotgun on a table next to him. “I took out several clips of ammunition and shotgun shells,” he recalled later. “I wanted to make sure I had enough rounds to stop all six of them if they began boarding the trawler. I had the phone, too, and was ready to call the local police. Miriam and I watched the monitor and waited.”

  It was a surreal moment: the two of them sitting in the dark on their boat, surrounded by guns, their eyes glued to the black-and-white monitor, and the six bikers seated on their Harleys, calmly watching the trawler from the dock. It was like a twisted scene from High Noon. Shur had always been an outspoken critic of the death penalty. To him, life was sacred, all lives worth saving. But this was different. “I had never shot anyone, and you always wonder what you’d do in a situation like this one,” he said later. As he sat there his doubts disappeared. “When it looks like it is going to finally happen to you, you don’t wonder at all. I was ready to open fire if they came through that door.”

  Moments later, a biker reached into a saddlebag and began to pull something from it. Shur zoomed the camera in just as the biker removed a bottle of whiskey. They passed it around and then rode off. Neither of the Shurs slept that night.

  It never ended. A few days later, Miriam spotted two men near her car over by the dock, and when one of them crawled underneath it, she dialed 911. The local police had been told about the kidnap threat and were there within minutes. Shur raced home. The pair turned out to be mechanics from a local garage who had been sent to pick up a car that a boat owner had asked them to service while he was out of town. He’d told them the keys would be behind a back wheel, which is why they had crawled under Miriam’s car. They had mistaken it for his.

  “I’d reached the limit. The investigation was going nowhere and there were no more leads,” Shur said. Even though the FBI, DEA, and Marshals Service urged him not to do it, Shur flew to New Mexico to confront Félix Bersago face-to-face.

  “I’m Gerald Shur,” he declared when he stepped into the Valachi Suite. “I’m the man you were supposed to kidnap.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Bersago. “You’re too old. Shur’s in his forties.”

  Bersago had never seen a photograph of Shur, but he’d been given a description by the cartel and it didn’t match. “I began interrogating him,” Shur said, “and I began to suspect from his answers that the cartel had not been after me. It had been after Gene Coon, the WITSEC chief.” Bersago’s notebook had contained the words “Gerald Shur” and “WITSEC,” but the address in the book had been Arlington, Virginia, which was where the Marshals Service WITSEC offices were headquartered and where Coon worked. “I decided the cartel had given Bersago the wrong name.” Shur hurried from the cell and telephoned Coon’s office, but he was out of the country on an assignment. A WITSEC inspector was sent to warn Coon’s wife, Lynn. “The Marshals Service had insisted I be protected,” Shur recalled, “but Gene was one of their own and the threat to him and his family was seen as an occupational hazard. I thought it was outrageous, but they refused to take any extra steps to protect him. None. The feeling was that he had been trained to deal with these threats.”

  Shur finally began to relax when he got back to Miriam and Half-and-Half. Not long after that, he received word that the Medellín cartel had finally crumbled. The Ochoa brothers had agreed to plead guilty in Colombia to cocaine smuggling charges to avoid being extradited to the United States. They were now cooperating with Colombian prosecutors, turning against the assassins and others in their own organization who had made them rich. Pablo Escobar had also surrendered to avoid being turned over to the United States. But he had not been sent to one of Colombia’s overcrowded prisons. He was serving his sentence in a “prison” that he had built for himself in Medellín. When the United States investigated, it discovered the walled compound was actually a luxury villa, and it began pressuring the Colombians to move Escobar into a real prison. More than a hundred troops went to forcibly evict him one morning, but he had been tipped off and had escaped into the jungle. From there he launched yet another bloody campaign, killing fifteen persons. But this time his plata o plomo actions backfired. Vigilantes, who called themselves Los Pepes, an acronym for perseguidos por Pablo Escobar—“people persecuted by Pablo Escobar”—burned and looted his mansion, broke into a warehouse and destroyed all his luxury cars, and began methodically killing bankers, money launderers, and lawyers who had helped him operate his cocaine empire. At one point, Los Pepes was killing as many as five people a day without interference from the police. When the assassinations grew to more than three hundred, including several of Escobar’s relatives, he tried to send his wife and children to Europe, but no country would grant them visas. On December 2, 1993, a special team created specifically to hunt down Escobar traced a telephone call that he had made to a local radio station to protest how his family had been forced into hiding. His bodyguards were killed in the gun battle that followed, and he was wounded trying to escape. A team member stepped up to him as he lay bleeding on the roof of a building and shot him point-blank in the ear.

  Max Mermelstein learned about Escobar’s death on a newscast. He had voluntarily left WITSEC and moved to a new city, where he changed his name and found work completely on his own. Only a handful of federal agents knew how to reach him. While the death of Escobar meant an end to the cartel, Mermelstein still was listed as a potential witness in several unresolved drug prosecutions. Most of the accused had not been captured. “It’s still not safe for me to surface,” Mermelstein explained during a telephone call from an unknown location. “It may never be. I suspect I will be in hiding the rest of my life.”r />
  The INS, meanwhile, rejected Félix Bersago’s request for asylum once the FBI decided it was pointless to continue questioning him about the kidnap plot. He was put on an international flight and expelled from the country. A few weeks later, he telephoned Shur to see if he would help him become an undercover operative for the DEA overseas. Shur said no. To this day, no one is certain whom Bersago was supposed to kidnap: Shur, Coon, or some other WITSEC official.

  “Over the years, Howard Safir and I had warned witnesses that WITSEC was a program of last resort,” said Shur. “Miriam and I had only been forced to hide for a few months—we did not have to endure the drastic changes most witnesses face—but I now knew firsthand that what we were saying was right on target. Being relocated was something I would not wish on anyone. The only reason to do it was if it was your only hope to stay alive.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  Inside the Marshals Service, they were known as Howard Safir’s “black bag jobs”—special missions that usually involved WITSEC, were dangerous, and almost always had the potential for scandal. In December 1985, a delegation of DEA agents met secretly with Safir to discuss just such an operation. As soon as he heard why they needed his help, he agreed.

  A month later, four deputies handpicked by Safir slipped across the U.S. border into Mexico, where they rendezvoused with six state judicial police officers the DEA had said they could trust. Safir’s men had no legal authority in Mexico, a fact that was historically so well known it was often dramatized in old Wild West movies by having outlaws race across the Rio Grande on horseback and then thumb their noses at deputy marshals stuck on the American side. Officially, the deputies were advisers, there simply to watch what was happening, and for ten days that is exactly what they did. Then on January 24, the deputies and Mexican officers followed Rene Martin Verdugo Urquidez, a known drug dealer, and his family to a birthday party that he was hosting in the resort town of San Felipe for one of his sons. Midway through the festivities, Verdugo left the party to drive to a nearby liquor store to buy ice and beer. The deputies and Mexicans swooped down. Using three rental cars the deputies had driven into Mexico, the lawmen shot in front of and behind Verdugo, pinning in his vehicle. The Mexican policemen jerked him from his car, handcuffed and blindfolded him, and pushed him into the backseat of one of their cars. With the Americans trailing them, the Mexicans raced toward the border. Verdugo’s wife, who had witnessed the abduction, telephoned his attorney and notified the local police. Verdugo had several of them on his drug payroll, and they immediately threw up roadblocks and began searching for him. To avoid being caught, the deputies and Mexicans careened off the highway, shooting across the desert. It was now night, but they kept their headlights off, traveling blindly at eighty miles an hour until they reached the chain-link fence that separated the two countries. At that point, the car carrying the deputies shot ahead, flipping on its headlights. “Here it is!” the driver declared, slamming on his brakes, as he pulled toward a hole that had been cut into the fence. The Mexicans dragged Verdugo from their car and shoved him toward it. Deputy Tony Perez, who was in charge of the operation, crawled through the opening. The Mexicans shoved the still blindfolded Verdugo after him through the opening into Perez’s waiting arms.

  “You’re under arrest,” he declared.

  The Mexican government was enraged when it learned what had happened. The nation’s top prosecutor said Verdugo had been the victim of an illegal kidnapping and issued arrest warrants for the six Mexican officers who had helped the deputies. But they had already fled the country, along with twenty-four of their family members. Safir had arranged for them to enter the United States, and Shur had accepted them into WITSEC. They would be given new identities, relocated, and paid $32,000 in rewards. Verdugo, meanwhile, was driven to a jail in Los Angeles to await trial on marijuana trafficking charges. As expected, the Los Angeles defense attorneys hired to defend him said they were aghast at the deputies’ actions and argued that his arrest had been illegal. “The U.S. Marshals Service has no right to storm into a sovereign country and kidnap one of its citizens,” Verdugo’s attorneys protested in a court motion demanding his immediate release. But the Justice Department cited several long-standing court rulings that said it did not matter how international fugitives ended up on American soil, as long as their capture did not involve torture that “shocks the conscience.” A judge concurred, and Verdugo remained locked up.

  Although Verdugo was a major marijuana trafficker, that was not the main reason why Safir had agreed to help the DEA abduct him. He had taken part in the gruesome 1985 torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar, known to his friends as Kiki, and Safir and Shur were eager to do whatever they could to catch and punish Camarena’s murderers. “I told my staff I would accept anyone into WITSEC who had any information about the Kiki murder, regardless of whether or not they would later be used as witnesses to testify,” Shur recalled. “I was lowering our normal standards for admission because I was sickened by how he had been killed. In my eyes, the Camarena case had become the most important case in our office.” As a former DEA agent himself, Safir had worried that other DEA agents would be slaughtered if the United States didn’t act quickly to punish Camarena’s killers. “Of course there was going to be political fallout,” he said later. “But I felt what we did was justified. I was not going to stand by and watch a DEA agent’s brutal murder go unavenged.”

  Camarena had been sent to Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1981 to help the local Mexican and state police combat an increase in drug smuggling there. He quickly ran afoul of two powerful drug lords. When their efforts to bribe him failed, they decided to abduct him. On February 7, 1985, Camarena left the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara, where the DEA had its office, to meet his wife for lunch. Five men forced him at gunpoint into a car. They drove him to a mansion less than ten minutes away and for the next thirty hours tortured him. Burning cigarettes were pressed against his flesh and he was struck repeatedly with a lead pipe. A nail was pounded into his head. At one point, his tormentors brought in a local doctor to inject him with lidocaine, to stabilize his heart rate and prolong his life so they could continue beating him. Incredibly, his kidnappers tape-recorded the torture, and Camarena would later be heard screaming in pain on the tapes. A Mexican airplane pilot, Alfredo Zavala, was being tortured at the same time in the same house. The drug lords were convinced Zavala was one of Camarena’s sources and had been tipping him off whenever drug-laden flights took off or landed at the Guadalajara airport. Some thirty people visited the walled compound during the time the torture was being administered, but none did anything to help rescue the men. Their bodies were found a month later. They had been stripped to their shorts, eyes taped shut, and hands tied behind their backs. An autopsy showed Camarena had a broken jaw, two broken cheekbones, a broken nose, a crushed windpipe, and two skull fractures in addition to the nail driven into his head.

  The Mexican government tried to downplay the murder. It dragged its feet in the investigation and then Mexican officials speculated that Camarena had been killed because he was accepting bribes. The United States reacted by ordering a trunk-by-trunk search of every northbound car crossing the Mexican border, paralyzing traffic and putting a chokehold on Mexico’s $2 billion-per-year tourist business. Finally, the state police arrested nine small-time dope dealers, but the DEA knew the real culprits were going unpunished. Camarena had been overseeing Operation Padrino, which means “godfather” in Spanish, and its prime target had been Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. He and another godfather, Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, had transformed Mexico’s drug trade from a cottage industry in the late 1970s into a billion-dollar conglomerate known as La Familia. Their ties reached into the highest offices in the Mexican government, and they were protected by Mexico’s business community, where La Familia laundered millions of dollars in drug profits through three hundred different firms, including resort hotels, fancy restaurants, and large ca
r dealerships. The DEA learned from informants that Gallardo had assigned one of his top lieutenants, Rafael Caro Quintero, to kidnap and interrogate Camarena. Caro had a personal grudge against him. A few months earlier, the DEA agent had overseen a police raid at a six-thousand-acre farm that Caro owned where thousands of laborers openly grew and harvested marijuana. The raid had cost him an estimated $50 million in lost profits.

  When it became clear that Mexican officials were not going to help them go after the drug lords, the DEA decided to go after them on their own, starting at the bottom and working up, which is where Safir’s black bag job had come into play. One of Caro’s most trusted associates in the drug business was Verdugo, the smuggler shoved through the chain-link fence into the United States.

  Worried that Safir would send his deputies after him next, Caro fled to Costa Rica, taking seven bodyguards and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend with him. There he bought a four-acre estate from an Iranian exile for $800,000 in cash, but three weeks later, acting on a tip from the DEA, Costa Rican commandos raided the villa and forced him to return to Mexico. He was arrested by Mexican authorities as soon as he crossed the border. They were worried that if they didn’t put him in jail, Safir’s deputies would snatch him up.