Witsec

by Pete Earley

  With two of Camarena’s murderers now in custody, the DEA and Marshals Service moved up the ladder by going after La Familia’s two godfathers. Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros had returned to his native Honduras, where he was one of the wealthiest residents of Tegucigalpa, with a personal fortune estimated at a billion dollars. The Honduran constitution forbade extraditions of any kind, regardless of the crime, so the DEA and Safir began lobbying military and Honduran police officials to find some excuse to expel Matta. They refused at first but under increased pressure finally agreed to cooperate in one of Safir’s black bag jobs.

  On April 5, 1988, a team of deputy marshals led a hundred Honduran police and military soldiers to Matta’s exclusive compound. They arrived at 5:30 A.M. and were poised to burst inside when someone pointed out that the Honduran constitution forbade the execution of search warrants before 6 A.M. Matta was not at home in any case. He had gone on his morning jog and was drinking coffee with his lawyer, who lived on the same street. Glancing outside, Matta’s sister noticed the troops and telephoned him. Since Matta had not broken any laws in Honduras, his lawyer urged him to return home and investigate the commotion. What happened next would later be hotly disputed. Matta would claim he was physically abducted, but Honduran police insisted that he had started swinging and kicking at them first. Under Honduran law, this gave them the right to arrest him and search his estate. The police would later claim they had found a bag of cocaine sitting in Matta’s kitchen. This conveniently gave them the authority they needed to expel him from Honduras. With two of Safir’s deputies riding in the car, Matta was whisked to the airport by two Honduran policemen. During the forty-minute ride, Matta offered the Hondurans a million dollars each if they would let him go and kill the deputies. When they didn’t respond, he began upping the price; by the time the car reached the airport he was offering them $20 million each. The Hondurans didn’t doubt Matta had the cash; they simply assumed that if they accepted it, he would kill them later without paying.

  Matta was physically forced onto a flight headed to the Dominican Republic. By “chance,” a deputy was sitting on either side of him. When the plane landed, Dominican customs officials refused to let him disembark because he didn’t have a passport. The Dominicans, who had been tipped off by Safir, escorted Matta to another flight—the next one scheduled to leave their country. It “happened” to be an airplane bound for Puerto Rico, and now Matta found himself surrounded by four of Safir’s deputies. Again, they “happened” to be sitting in the seats next to him. During the flight, he tried to bribe them, again offering as much as $20 million each, but they arrested him as soon as the flight entered U.S. airspace. When the flight touched down, he was taken immediately to a federal prison.

  Now only one Mexican godfather was still at large. The DEA knew Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo was living in a house in Guadalajara that was swarming with bodyguards. But when they staked out the compound, they noticed a curious fact: All the bodyguards left the house early in the morning to eat breakfast in a nearby cantina. It turned out that the drug lord’s young wife refused to cook for them. The DEA and a squad of Mexico’s state police pushed their way inside the house during breakfast and arrested him without firing a bullet. Inside his bedroom, the DEA found records showing that he owned fifty homes and two hundred ranches in Mexico, and was worth an estimated $3 billion.

  For more than five years, the DEA and the Marshals Service continued to track down other Mexicans suspected of being involved in the Camarena torture and murder. Whenever they ran into a problem getting help from Mexican authorities, they found a way around them. For instance, in April 1990 Mexican bounty hunters burst into the medical office of gynecologist Humberto Alvarez Machain in Guadalajara and forced him across the border to where DEA agents were waiting. He was accused of being the physician who had kept Camarena alive with injections while he was being tortured. His arrest set off another round of angry protests. Abducting drug dealers was one thing; snatching a prominent physician was another. Mexico’s president complained directly to the White House, and the nation’s top prosecutor filed criminal charges in Mexico City against the DEA agents who had engineered the arrest. The prosecutor then suggested that the Mexican government hire U.S. bounty hunters to kidnap the DEA agents and deliver them to Mexico for trial. In Los Angeles, defense attorneys demanded the physician be released. This time a U.S. district judge agreed with them and ruled his capture was illegal. The Justice Department appealed, and the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court at the same time that marijuana smuggler Verdugo’s appeal got there. Since both men were claiming they had been kidnapped, the court consolidated their petitions and issued its ruling in 1992. The justices said the U.S. Constitution did not prohibit federal agents from kidnapping fugitives living in foreign countries, nor did it prevent the government from paying or hiring others to kidnap them, even though the abductions might be “shocking” and violate international law. Ironically, when the physician was put on trial, a Los Angeles jury acquitted him, and he was sent back to Mexico after having spent three years in a U.S. prison.

  In the end, more than twenty Mexican citizens were arrested in the Camarena case. Verdugo, who was shoved across through the fence, was sentenced to life in prison plus 240 years. His boss, Rafael Caro Quintero, was tried in Mexico and given a forty-year sentence. Honduran drug kingpin Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros was sentenced in the United States to 225 years for drug trafficking, plus three life sentences for conspiracy in the death of Camarena. The last godfather captured, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, was sentenced by Mexican authorities to a forty-year prison term.

  The period between 1983 and 1989 would later be described by many as the U.S. Marshals Service’s golden years. Safir would be credited with helping turn the service into a professional and highly specialized law enforcement operation. But much credit would also be given to Stanley E. Morris, who became the Marshals Service’s director in 1983, replacing William Hall. Morris was not a cop. Instead, he was a skilled administrator who had served stints at the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Health and Human Services. He understood how the Washington bureaucracy worked. Under his guidance, the Marshals Service was modernized and professionalized. It was Morris who established the National Asset Seizure and Forfeiture Program, which put deputies in charge of selling millions of dollars of property seized from drug dealers and other criminals under the RICO Act. He started a comprehensive Court Security Officers Program that trained deputies how to protect judges and federal courthouses. He began “Con Air,” the service’s private airline operation that shuttles some eighty thousand federal inmates each year across the country for court appearances or for prison transfers. He got Congress to increase his budget each year, and he used the extra funds to hire a third more deputies, purchase long-needed equipment, and build better facilities. He revamped the Marshals Service’s pay structure, a move that gave deputies hefty raises and attracted better-qualified recruits. Under Morris, the Marshals Service adopted an unofficial slogan: “When a job needs to be done and you don’t know who to give it to—give it to the U.S. Marshals.”

  The WITSEC branch thrived under Morris. It became one of the most envied assignments in the service. Its 160 inspectors were the top of the heap. In 1988, the Marshals Service opened a WITSEC Safesite and Orientation Center in a secret location in a Washington suburb. It was Howard Safir’s brainchild, but it was Morris who had gotten the federal funds to build it. The center was created to operate as an Ellis Island for witnesses.

  “The purpose of the center was to give WITSEC one voice,” explained one WITSEC inspector who asked not to be named but who was responsible for designing it and oversaw its construction. “We were still having problems with consistency despite the use of MOUs [Memorandums of Understanding] that spelled out exactly what was going to be done for each witness. One inspector in the field might explain the program and MOU one way, another would highlight different things, and this l
ed to some confusion. Mr. Safir thought if we brought every witness into one location and had a core of inspectors, who had been trained to say the exact same thing, explain to the witness what was going to happen, then we could be certain of consistency. The complaints dropped dramatically once we got the center operating.”

  Each witness and his family arrived at the center in an armored vehicle with blacked-out windows so they couldn’t see where they were being taken. Once the vehicle had driven inside an underground garage, the witness and his family were directed down a hallway into hotel-like accommodations. “We had psychologists give them tests, and we had both psychologists and psychiatrists available to help them deal with the trauma of what, in effect, was being reborn. The fact that we had these professionals available showed the witnesses that we cared about them,” the inspector said. “We also discovered that while many of these people had money from their criminal activities, they hadn’t spent it on medical care, and many of them had medical problems that needed attention.” During their stay at the center, they were given complete physical exams. “Many of them didn’t really have the skills they needed to take care of a family in a normal society,” the inspector recalled, “so we had people come in and help them learn how to take better care of their children. We were preparing them to go out into the legitimate world.” The WITSEC analysts responsible for providing them with new documents also met with them. “One reason for past delays in getting new documents was mistakes that were made in filling out forms. If a paperwork mistake was made in the field, when that paperwork got to Washington it had to be sent back, and that meant delays.” The analysts at the orientation center went over each form with the witnesses to ensure they were correctly and completely filled out. Inspectors also discussed job placement with each witness.

  When all of the testing and various health exams were completed and paperwork done, each witness and his family were teamed with a WITSEC inspector who found them a suitable city to be relocated in. Before leaving the center, the witnesses would be shown videotapes of where they were being sent.

  Movement inside the center was carefully controlled, much as it was in a prison. Doors were electronically bolted and could be opened only by inspectors in the center’s control room. Hallways were monitored with video cameras and motion detectors. Inspectors were told about witnesses on a need-to-know basis, which meant that inspectors working with one witness would not know that another witness was in the center. “Witnesses never saw each other,” the inspector said. The center could hold up to six families of five, and six prisoners in more-spartan rooms. It was designed to withstand an outside attack. Several fences kept the curious away. The center itself had an exterior wall and another completely separate interior wall to withstand bomb blasts. There were also vehicle barriers to prevent cars filled with explosives from being crashed into the building.

  The typical orientation process lasted about two weeks. The witness and his family would then be driven in a vehicle with blacked-out windows to an airport and sent to where they were being resettled. A WITSEC field inspector would meet them at the airport and take them to an apartment, where they would live until they could move to a house and find a full-time job.

  “You could often tell by the problems that you heard a witness or former witnesses complain about when they had been relocated in WITSEC,” explained WITSEC chief Eugene Coon. “There were the pre-Safir days, the Safir days, and the orientation center days.”

  Another veteran WITSEC inspector described it more bluntly. “In the early days of the program, witnesses were dumped in motels, given a hundred bucks, and told to wait there until the local U.S. marshal sent one of his deputies to ‘help’ them. There were a few improvements between 1970 and 1978, but not many. In truth, most of the witnesses whom we helped got minimal services, and most of them had valid complaints about how they were treated. They simply weren’t a priority. After Safir arrived, things got significantly better, but there were still problems. We were struggling to fix the mistakes from the past and catch up. The number of complaints slowly dropped, but we still had a lot of problems in the field from 1978 until 1988. There were misunderstandings and there were still long delays in getting documents. But after 1988, we had the relocation process down pat. The program was running as smoothly as possible, given that it was a people program and that meant there would always be unusual circumstances and unforeseen issues and problems.”

  WITSEC’s all-inclusive service wasn’t cheap. In 1988 it cost $75,000 to relocate a family of four. But at the Safesite and Orientation Center’s opening ceremony, Morris insisted the price was well worth it. The director cited a long list of sensational criminal cases that could not have been successfully prosecuted without protected witnesses. In cases where WITSEC witnesses testified, he added, prosecutors had almost an 80 percent conviction rate. Later, in a report to Congress, Morris cited examples of the defendants in 1988 alone who had been convicted in cases where WITSEC witnesses were used. They included:

  • Seven corrupt Miami police officers charged with killing and stealing money from cocaine dealers in the so-called Miami River Cop case

  • Nine members of the Outlaws, a motorcycle gang in Fort Lauderdale, accused of drug trafficking, white slavery, and contract murder

  • Four members of the White Patriot Party, a white supremacy group in Raleigh, North Carolina, accused of stealing explosives from a military base

  • Ten members of an extremely violent Irish gang in New York known as the Westies, whose specialty was chopping up their murder victims

  Shur had developed an especially good working relationship with Eugene Coon after the latter took charge of the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations in 1987. “I felt Gene was simply a top-notch chief,” Shur recalled. “When it comes to egos, on a scale of one to ten, Gene Coon clocked in at zero. He had none. His only interest was in doing the best possible job. He was imaginative and solid and solution-oriented.”

  Coon came from a law enforcement background. His father and grandfather had both been county sheriffs, and his uncle had been a top DEA official. He’d joined the Marshals Service in 1972, and risen through the ranks, doing a variety of assignments. His first was escorting prisoners between the jail and courts in the District of Columbia, a job that often involved daily fistfights with angry prisoners. Like most deputies at the time, he received almost no special training. From there he had been sent to rural West Virginia, where he won praise by capturing a fugitive without firing a shot, even though the suspect had barricaded himself inside a trailer and bragged he would never be taken alive. Coon had surprised him by crashing through the front door and tackling him before he could grab his pistol. Coon was then sent to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where he helped hunt for the murderers of two FBI agents. He also escorted nuclear missiles between military bases, another job done by federal marshals. At one point he was assigned to help protect Jimmy the Weasel Fratianno in the basement of a Cleveland courthouse, where the mobster was scheduled to testify. “Fratianno got out of his cot one morning,” Coon said later, “and while he was eating his breakfast, he looks up and says to me, ‘Hey kid, make up my bed, will ya?’ I looked at him and said, ‘Hey old man, make it yourself.’ You had to let him know up front that he couldn’t push you around, otherwise he’d never respect you.” In 1978 Coon became a WITSEC inspector and was stationed in Connecticut, where he helped hide New York mobsters while they were waiting to testify.

  Beginning in the 1980s, more than a dozen countries sent delegations to the United States to learn about WITSEC. They patterned their own programs after it. “We had reached the point,” Shur said later, “where we had become the absolute best witness protection program in the world.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  On an october afternoon in 1987, Arthur Kane walked into the local office of Merrill Lynch in Miami and began shooting. He critically wounded his stockbroker, Lloyd Kolokoff; murder
ed the office manager, Jose Argilagos; and then killed himself. Detectives said later he had recently lost $6 million in the stock market. Shur was stunned.

  “If you had asked me to pick from the thousands of witnesses I knew, the most docile criminal I had ever encountered,” he recalled, “I would have instantly named Arthur H. Kane. I would have sworn he was as safe a choice as I could have possibly made when it came to putting a criminal into the program.”

  Shur had personally persuaded Kane and his wife to enter WITSEC in 1977, and until the shooting he had considered their relocation a success story. He flew to Miami to meet with Kane’s widow. “I asked her if she wanted to be relocated since her husband’s past had been revealed,” Shur recalled, “but she felt safe. I told her I just didn’t understand what had happened. Neither did she.”

  When he returned to Washington, Shur combed through his records for some clue that would have warned him that Kane had a violent streak. There was none. “I had never seen anything but politeness and a calmness about him,” said Shur. “The violence of the shooting was totally out of character.”

  Shur could still remember the Saturday afternoon when he had Kane and his wife brought from Kansas City to Washington to meet with him and his staff. On the surface, the Kanes appeared to have a wonderful life. Kane was a respected attorney; he and his wife lived in an exclusive Kansas City neighborhood, had healthy and talented children, and were socially prominent. But Kane had a secret. He was stealing more than $100,000 per year through his law firm by filing phony insurance claims and lawsuits. A Kansas City mobster was running the scam. He would arrange car accidents, file bogus medical claims, and have Kane file lawsuits on the victims’ behalf. Eight doctors were also in on the ruse. Kane was so embarrassed when he was arrested that he immediately agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in order to avoid a trial.