by Pete Earley
CBS correspondent Fred Graham had been a close friend of the murder victim, and he editorialized on the air about Welch’s escape. “Gerald Shur … who accepted Welch into the Witness Protection Program … says it ‘disgusted’ him to accept Welch, but he did so because Welch gave important evidence to a grand jury,” Graham told viewers. “But this is a flaw that has plagued the Witness Protection Program: Government lawyers seeking more convictions make deals with criminals who sometimes con the prosecutors in ways that produce more crimes and more heartbreak for innocent citizens.… Michael Halberstam’s death has no meaning left at all.”
When Welch was caught four months later, police found a million dollars’ worth of stolen goods in his apartment and tied him to some forty burglaries, even though he had been on the loose for only four months. “I called David Halberstam and told him about Welch’s capture. It was the only thing I could do,” said Shur, “but while he thanked me, it clearly wasn’t enough.”
Shur knew from the statistical data available at the time that for every relocated witness who committed a new crime, there were three others who had not. He had testified so often about WITSEC that he could quote a slew of statistics that showed it had successfully removed thousands of criminals from the street, kept witnesses safe, and caused relatively little harm to the public. He could cite individual success stories—gangsters such as Pete “the Greek” Diapoulos, who had been Crazy Joe Gallo’s bodyguard on April 7, 1972, when a lone gunman had walked into Umberto’s Clam House in New York’s Little Italy and opened fire. Gallo had been murdered, Diapoulos wounded. Few had thought the tough mobster would reform, but he had. “WITSEC gave me a new life,” he recalled almost three decades after the shooting. “It gave me a chance to correct my life, and I never got into trouble again. Never.”
But when Shur had to deal with the Halberstams of the world and the families of victims of witnesses such as Marion Pruett and Arthur Kane, all of his statistics and success stories seemed hollow. “I knew what I was doing was for a greater good, but that still didn’t stop me from going home some nights heartbroken because of what had happened. I just didn’t have all the answers. That was frustrating.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
BY 1989, Shur was well-known inside the Justice Department as a problem solver who could maneuver through the bureaucracy and get complicated jobs done without bruising egos. Few were surprised when the Office of International Affairs (OIA) asked if he would take charge of the government’s international prisoner transfer program. Shur looked into it and was shocked by what he discovered. Prior to the 1970s, few U.S. citizens had been arrested overseas and sentenced to long terms in foreign prisons. But the spread and use of illegal drugs changed this. Hundreds of American prisoners were now languishing in foreign prisons, often in inhumane conditions, and little was being done to help them because of red tape, confusion, and cultural misunderstandings. He jumped right in.
The Americans were not going to be turned loose after they were returned to the United States. They were going to be sent to federal prisons to complete their sentences. Still, life in the worst federal prison here was considered better than being locked up in most foreign prisons, especially in poor countries where living conditions were brutal. The State Department was especially concerned about thirty-four prisoners being held in Thailand, including several young women. According to a State Department report published in 1989, many of these women had been “seduced, lied to, or conned into transporting more than one kilo of heroin into Thailand.”
Typically, a woman is approached overseas while traveling by a fast-talking man who offers her a free airplane ticket to anywhere she wants to go, in return for her delivering a package to “a friend” in Thailand. The man claims he can’t make the trip himself because he can’t get a visa or he comes up with some other believable excuse to appeal to her. Some women are told they will be carrying jewels. Others are told nothing and the illegal drugs are inserted in their luggage. They are stunned when the drugs are found and they are arrested.
The report warned that living conditions in Thai prisons were so harsh that few American women were expected to survive long sentences.
American women face numerous threats to their health. AIDS is rampant and is being passed along by male prison doctors, who routinely give gynecological examinations without ever changing their plastic gloves. Equally as dangerous is the … frequent non-availability of sanitary napkins for women during their menstrual cycle.… The women bleed on themselves and because of the extremely close sleeping quarters, frequently bleed on their neighbors.
“I had received letters from parents of several young people in Thai prisons for what I believed were often foolish mistakes, even though they were criminal acts,” said Shur, “and when I thought about the heartbreak that these parents must have felt—first in learning that their daughter had been arrested and then discovering that she was receiving in their eyes the equivalent of a death sentence—I felt compelled to do what I could. I wasn’t naive. I knew some of these women had known full well what they were doing. But I still didn’t think anyone should have to die because of horrible living conditions, especially if I could get them back to the United States, where they would still be in prison, only a much safer and more sanitary one. The question was how was I going to help when I had been warned that Thai officials were very hesitant even to talk about this problem and were extremely sensitive about the criticism they were getting.”
Shur mulled over the problem his first night in Bangkok. “I decided that I was not born to be a diplomat, that I couldn’t dance around the issues, and that surely I could be direct without being offensive,” he said. “I decided I had to be straightforward with the Thais.”
He first went to meet personally with all the U.S. prisoners in Thai prisons. “The living conditions were appalling, even worse than I had read about. There were more flies than inmates in the prison kitchens. Sanitation didn’t exist. But as I toured these prisons, I realized that U.S. prisoners were actually being treated better than Thai prisoners. The truth was that Thais just didn’t like criminals.”
In meetings with Thai officials, Shur spoke candidly. “Despite what I had been told, the Thais were just as candid with me. No one was offended. One official said to me, ‘As with your government, our money is limited, and if we have a dollar to spend on a prisoner or a child, we are going to spend it on the child.’ I discovered that criminals in Thailand are seen as outcasts, an affront to the Thais’ gentle culture.”
On May 11, 1990, as a result of Shur’s trip, three American prisoners were released from the Bangkwang maximum-security prison and turned over to a federal Bureau of Prisons officer who escorted them back to the United States. “It was the first transfer in the world of a foreign prisoner out of Thailand,” Shur said later. During the next decade, Thailand would transfer 195 foreign prisoners back to their home countries, including forty-seven to the United States. But the problem of naive women being used as “mules” continued. In January 2000, there were eighty-eight U.S. prisoners being held in Thailand. Most were women, and only six were awaiting transfer.
In a 1993 memo, Shur noted that the number of Americans being held in foreign jails now totaled 2,500, most of them on drug-related charges. The biggest group—nearly 450—was in Mexico. Next, in order, were Germany, Canada, and Jamaica. “I was shocked when I discovered how many U.S. citizens were being beaten and tortured in Mexico,” Shur later recalled, “so I met with Mexican government officials to learn what could be done to stop this. They told me there wasn’t much they could do. Nearly all the beatings and torture were taking place in local jails, and the officials said they didn’t have any way to stop that. Once the Americans were sent to a regular prison, the torture ended. The officials assured me that it was not just Americans who were being tortured—the local Mexican police tortured everyone. It was easier getting a confession than investigating a case. But I didn’t find th
at comforting.”
After Janet Reno became U.S. attorney general, Shur was asked to oversee a large-scale prisoner transfer with Mexico, and in December 1993, one hundred Mexicans from United States prisons were swapped at the border for one hundred American prisoners. “Working on prisoner transfers appealed to my social-worker instincts,” said Shur. “I felt having prisoners serve their time in prisons where they could speak the language, get visits from their family and friends, and understand the culture was much more rehabilitative than having them stuck in a foreign country.”
• • •
A short time after Shur first began overseeing prisoner transfers, he was given yet another task that had nothing to do with WITSEC, and while he enjoyed his reputation for being a Justice Department pinch-hitter, this one turned his stomach.
In 1990, he was called before associate deputy attorney general Margaret Love and asked to draft a list of parole conditions for the release of Orlando Bosch, a militant anti-Castro activist who had become a hero to many Cuban-Americans. Bosch had been accused in the 1970s of helping plant a bomb on a Cuban-bound ship and of firing a bazooka at a freighter as part of an anti-Castro terrorism campaign. He had fled to Latin America but had been arrested in Venezuela and charged with masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airliner in October 1976 in which seventy-three people died. Bosch had spent eleven years in prison there while undergoing two trials, but he had been acquitted both times and finally released. When he returned to the United States in 1988, he was arrested by the INS and declared an undesirable alien since he was still a Cuban citizen. He was ordered deported. But no other country except Cuba would accept him, and the government was afraid that he would be executed if he was sent back. So Bosch had spent the last two years inside a federal prison.
“I didn’t understand why we were suddenly going to release an airplane bomber who had killed so many people,” Shur said later, “so I asked, ‘Why? Why are we now going to release him?’ Love told me that the White House had ordered the Justice Department to parole Bosch because President George Bush had received a call from his son Jeb, who had told his father that if he wanted to carry the Cuban vote in the next presidential election, he needed to release Orlando Bosch. I left that meeting hot, and on my way back to my office I thought about resigning. But then I decided that somebody else would just be given the job, so I decided I would draft the absolutely toughest rules possible for Bosch to follow. I was not going to make it easy on him.”
Shur and a colleague drafted fourteen strict rules. If Bosch broke them, his parole could be revoked and he could be returned to prison. “One of them,” Shur recalled, “was that he would be under house arrest.” Not long after he submitted the restrictions to Love, Bosch was released. He received a hero’s welcome from his supporters in Florida and held an immediate press conference in Coconut Grove, during which he condemned the restrictions that Shur had imposed. Even though he had been required by the restrictions to sever all connections with two militant anti-Castro groups, Bosch lauded both as “heroes of Cuba and heroes of mine” during his news conference and hinted that he would do whatever he could to support them.
Only one national newspaper saw politics at play. In an editorial, The New York Times questioned the timing of his release and speculated that Jeb Bush had pulled strings. It noted that the Justice Department, “under no legal compulsion, but conspicuous political pressure,” had freed Bosch because of lobbying by “President Bush’s son, Jeb,” and it ended with this comment: “In the name of fighting terrorism, the U.S. sent the Air Force to bomb Libya … yet now the Bush administration coddles one of the hemisphere’s most notorious terrorists. And for what reason? The only one evident is currying favor in South Florida.”
Shur was angry for weeks. “Releasing a guy who was blowing up airplanes with innocent people aboard in exchange for winning the Cuban-American vote, and then having him bitch about the conditions of his parole, was tough for me to swallow. I kept hoping for more of a public outcry, but there was none.”
Shortly after Bosch was freed, several Cuban hotels were bombed and the Castro government blamed “the followers of activist Orlando Bosch” for the explosions. In Florida, Bosch denied it, but added that he was not unhappy it had happened.
• • •
The Justice Department had yet another prison-related assignment for Shur. He was asked to lead a delegation to the Bahamas to investigate complaints by U.S. prisoners who claimed the living conditions in the islands’ Foxhill Penitentiary were barbaric. “Conditions there were worse than what I had seen in Thailand,” he said later. “Prisoners who couldn’t afford to bribe their guards were getting little food and not being allowed out of their cells to exercise.”
When it came time for Shur to meet privately with American prisoners, he was led to a table and chair in a small dark room. A few minutes later, the door opened, but because there was a bright light behind the inmate standing there, Shur could see only his silhouette.
“Hello, Gerry,” the inmate said. “What the hell did you do to get sent down to this hellhole?”
It was one of the very first Mafia witnesses whom he had put into the WITSEC program. Shur had not seen him for nearly twenty years and had no idea that he was in the Bahamian prison. “This is a frame-up,” the prisoner said. “As soon as a new president is elected down here, I’ll be released.”
Shur returned home to file his report, and under U.S. pressure, the Bahamian government promised to improve conditions at the facility. A few months later, Shur learned the former WITSEC inmate had, in fact, talked his way out of prison after the presidential election. He was not surprised.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
The face of crime was changing once again in the early 1990s.
Having dealt with gangsters and drug traffickers, Shur faced two new enemies: inner-city gangs and international terrorists. Washington, D.C., was especially hard hit by gang violence, sparked largely by the spread of crack cocaine. It had a per capita murder rate three times higher than any other U.S. city. In 85 percent of all homicides, the police said they knew who the murderers were, but they could bring charges against only one-third of their suspects because witnesses were too scared to testify.
A gruesome example of the sort of intimidation the police were up against involved a Washington street gang that called itself the First Street Crew. The killing began after Arvell “Pork Chop” Williams, who was a friend of several gang members, volunteered to help police infiltrate an undercover narcotics officer into the gang. Word about his offer leaked out, and one afternoon while he was sitting in his parked car on a busy street, two gang members ran up next to the driver’s window and began firing. They shot a total of eighteen times and then casually walked away. When the police arrived, they spotted several gang members mingling with onlookers. They were sipping sodas, munching on potato chips, and keeping track of whom the police were questioning. The first witness who agreed to testify was murdered two days after he was seen talking to the police. Three more were killed a week later. Despite the danger, other eyewitnesses identified the killers, and police charged two gang members with murder. For the next ten months there were no killings. Then, during a preliminary court hearing, a defense lawyer began grilling the chief detective in the case about his witnesses. To protect them, the detective referred to them only by numbers: W-2 and W-3. Age, sex, and address were not revealed, but within hours, a forty-one-year-old woman known to have information about the murder was shot as she walked home from a bus stop. As she lay bleeding on the sidewalk, her killer put his gun into her mouth and pulled the trigger again—a message to other potential witnesses. During the next four months, seven more witnesses were murdered, bringing the total dead to twelve. The gang seemed to be methodically eliminating potential witnesses within hours after each was questioned. Suspicious, the police began looking for possible leaks and discovered that a private detective had been hired by the gang to shadow them.
By the time the trial started, forty witnesses were in hiding. Both of the murderers were found guilty.
Federal prosecutors, the D.C. police, and gang experts told Shur that the traditional WITSEC program was too harsh a solution for the witnesses in these cases. Many of them didn’t want to be permanently uprooted from their communities and cut off from their family and friends. Inner-city gangs usually consisted of only a few members and operated within a few blocks. They were not huge organizations such as the LCN. Often, a witness’s testimony would lead to everyone in the gang being convicted and sent to prison, completely eliminating the threat. If the gang’s leaders were convicted, the gang itself often would disperse. Shur was told that 85 percent of all violent crime in Washington happened within six blocks of public-housing areas. “I was assured that we could protect most witnesses simply by moving them away from the housing projects until after they testified,” said Shur. “They could then return home and resume a normal life. I had my doubts, but I was asked to put a short-term protection program to the test.”
Between 1991 and 1994, 78 witnesses and 150 of their relatives in Washington were temporarily relocated outside of housing projects until after they had testified. None of the witnesses was murdered. Meanwhile, more than a hundred gang members were convicted.
While the short-term program was considered a success, Shur remained skeptical. “I never really liked it,” he said later. “I wanted as much certainty as possible that witnesses would be safe once we placed them in the program, and we could only get that if they entered the long-term program. The short-term program, in my opinion, allowed a higher-than-acceptable risk. We’ve been fortunate so far in that no one has been killed, but I’ve always felt it’s only a matter of time.” Despite Shur’s reservations, other cities began copying the short-term program. In New York, the city’s housing authority arranged for witnesses to be moved from one housing project to another to protect them temporarily while they were waiting to testify.