Witsec

by Pete Earley

  In dealing with international terrorists, Shur faced a different challenge: How do you make a witness from a foreign country and different culture blend into the American landscape? The Marshals Service had protected witnesses in terrorist cases before, including the 1988 Lockerbie, Scotland, airplane bombing and a 1989 bombing in Greece. But it was two attacks in New York that tested WITSEC. The February 26, 1993, bombing of New York’s World Trade Center led to the arrest of four men, all followers of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, an Islamic extremist who fled the country shortly after the blast killed six and tore a five-story hole in one of the twin towers. He was eventually caught in Pakistan and brought back for trial. Two years later, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine of his followers were convicted of plotting to blow up several Manhattan landmarks.

  WITSEC relocated more than a dozen foreign-born witnesses after they testified in the two trials. “They were going to stick out in Boise, Idaho,” said Shur, “so just moving them out of Brooklyn wasn’t going to be good enough. We were also worried because they had testified against religious sects that had ties to other militant Islamic groups. Some of these groups were well-organized paramilitary operations, with access to large sums of dollars.”

  WITSEC chief Eugene Coon brought in several experts in Middle Eastern culture to help his inspectors at the Safesite and Orientation Center prepare the witnesses for relocation. The FBI also provided him with intelligence reports about extremist groups and their supporters so WITSEC could make certain none of the witnesses was sent to a community where there were groups that supported the defendants and their sects. “It was unrealistic to have these people end all contact with their own culture,” Shur said. “We couldn’t expect them not to want to go to a mosque or a grocery store that catered to Middle Eastern customers.” Instead, WITSEC chose cities where there were large numbers of immigrants, and Coon’s inspectors helped the witnesses come up with logical explanations they could use if they were questioned about their pasts.

  Besides gangs and terrorists, WITSEC was being used again to attack an old adversary. In 1987, eighteen Mafia figures were convicted in New York’s infamous “Pizza Connection” trial of smuggling $1.6 billion of Turkish-bought and Sicilian-processed heroin into the United States. The mob used a string of pizza parlors throughout the East Coast and Midwest as fronts for its narcotics and money-laundering operations. While the seventeen-month trial put an end to the U.S. side of the case, more than two hundred Sicilian Mafia figures were still awaiting trial in Italy for supplying heroin to their New York counterparts. Several key witnesses, the most important a former Sicilian Mafioso named Tommaso Buscetta, were shuttled back and forth between Italy and the United States by WITSEC inspectors to testify. Buscetta was the first important mobster in Italy to break omertà. He would later be called the “most valuable Mafia informer on either side of the Atlantic” by federal and Italian prosecutors. He would spend eight years testifying in the United States and in Italy. In interviews, Buscetta said he would never have considered cooperating had it not been for WITSEC and the promise of a new identity and relocation in the United States. At the time he was recruited, he was hiding in Brazil, and he was offered WITSEC protection even though he was not a U.S. citizen and had not violated any U.S. laws. He was accepted into the program, and he died in April 2001 in an undisclosed location in the United States.

  In the midst of handling these sensational cases, WITSEC came under attack within its own ranks. President Bush replaced Stanley J. Morris as director of the Marshals Service with a former federal prosecutor, Michael Moore, in 1989. Moore had aspirations of becoming a federal judge and early on locked horns with Howard Safir, whose performance had brought him kudos but whose ego had earned him a slew of enemies. Safir resigned. Morale dropped, especially in WITSEC. Moore served only fourteen months before he was appointed a judge. His replacement was another U.S. attorney, Henry Hudson, who soon left to become a state judge and later a federal judge. President Clinton’s pick in 1992 was Eduardo Gonzalez, the chief of police in Tampa, Florida. Although he had no federal law enforcement experience, he was initially welcomed because he saw the job as the pinnacle of his career, not a stepping-stone.

  Gonzalez was told during briefings at the White House that the U.S. Marshals Service was a “troubled” organization that had grown too big for its mission. Some of Vice President Al Gore’s aides, who were pushing his “Reinventing Government” program, complained that Safir’s elite squads were duplicating jobs already being done by the FBI. When Gonzalez took control he began to streamline the service, and one of his first efforts was to combine its WITSEC operations with its court security program. It made sense to him because both protected people: WITSEC took care of witnesses and court security protected judges. Gonzalez told his underlings that WITSEC deputies were being “underutilized.” The number of witnesses entering the program had dropped to around a hundred per year. Under Gonzalez, WITSEC was no longer the service’s favored child; in fact, it fell to the bottom of the heap.

  “I was baffled by his actions,” Shur recalled. “If we had learned anything, it was that you needed a special type of deputy to work with witnesses. I felt Gonzalez was trying to turn back the clock.” Shur warned Gonzalez privately and in memos that protecting federal judges and their families was “vastly different” from protecting and relocating witnesses and their families. “Judges do not need the panoply of additional services that criminal witnesses entering WITSEC require,” he wrote in a memo. “It is therefore imperative that the Service maintain two specialized staffs.” But Gonzalez was unconvinced. He told his aides that WITSEC inspectors were “crybabies” who thought they were better than other deputies and were “too secretive.” In his eyes, the real heroes of the Marshals Service were the “PODs,” the “poor old deputies” in the field, who didn’t operate out of headquarters or belong to any of Safir’s “alphabet special teams,” such as WITSEC and FIST. “Despite Gene Coon’s best efforts to keep everything going,” said Shur, “this efficient and highly disciplined witness protection unit was slowly torn apart.”

  By 1994 Shur was beginning his thirty-fourth year as a Justice Department attorney and was about to turn sixty-one. He announced that he was going to retire at year’s end. But he barely slowed down. He appeared before the Dutch parliament to describe how witness protection programs worked, met with Hong Kong officials who had asked him for permission to begin relocating their protected witnesses in the United States because their city was too small to hide them, and fought a 48 percent cut in the Marshals Service’s budget request that had hit WITSEC especially hard. In one instance, WITSEC inspectors did not have enough money to purchase gasoline for their government cars because of cutbacks. But it was a call from an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York that brought his career full circle. “You can’t leave yet. I’m going to get a court injunction against you leaving,” she announced in jest, and then she turned serious. “We have a witness here who is reluctant to enter the program, and you’re the only one I know who can reason with him and get him in. We simply can’t afford to have him turn up dead. He’s too important.”

  Shur had never before seen the security precautions put into place when “Sammy the Bull” Gravano was brought in to see him. “There were guards guarding guards guarding guards,” he recalled. Gravano was already serving his prison sentence in a WITSEC unit, but he didn’t want to enter the relocation phase of the program after he was paroled.

  “I don’t need you guys,” he told Shur.

  Shur talked about other Mafia tough guys who had thought they could take care of themselves. Gravano recognized most of them. All had been murdered. The problem was that he didn’t want to be confined by Shur’s rules. He was planning on writing a book, and he wanted to go on television and publicize it. Shur didn’t argue with him. “What you have to consider is the long run and how we can help you,” Shur explained. Where was Gravano going to live? What kind of work was he going
to do? What about his family? In WITSEC, he could get a new name and a fresh start. If he really hated it, he could drop out voluntarily. That was something no one had told him before.

  Shur fed Gravano’s ego. There was a lot at stake here for the government. Gravano was being touted as the most important mob witness ever. He was historically important. The Justice Department couldn’t afford to have him murdered. It would scare other witnesses. Suddenly Shur realized he was slipping into the same speech he had given Jimmy the Weasel nearly twenty years earlier. Knowing Gravano didn’t give a damn if anyone else ever joined WITSEC, Shur emphasized how much the government needed him, wanted him, was eager to get him. He wanted not only to appeal to Gravano’s vanity but to give him a sense of control. He also knew Gravano would be tempted to see how much he could get out of the deal. It was all part of the game. By the time the two men finished talking, Gravano was ready to sign the papers. He was Shur’s last mafioso.

  On July 18, 1994, attorney general Janet Reno presented Shur with one of the Justice Department’s highest awards: the Attorney General’s Award for Lifetime Achievement. She thanked him for creating WITSEC and being a pioneer when it came to introducing women into law enforcement as intelligence analysts and later helping them be promoted into jobs that historically had been held only by men. On a lesser note, she added that he had been the first to introduce fax machines at the Justice Department and had been in charge of such diverse jobs as deciding when U.S. attorneys could hypnotize federal witnesses.

  The U.S. Marshals Service named Shur its Law Enforcement Officer of the Year and gave him a plaque with this inscription: “In recognition of your insight and dedication in developing WITSEC: a prosecutor’s dream and a gangster’s nightmare.” At his retirement dinner in December 1994, he received accolades from a series of federal officials and foreign dignitaries. One admirer recalled that he had been a champion of civil rights. When a Mafia wiseguy in WITSEC had said, “Don’t assign no niggers to protect me,” Shur had delivered an antiracist sermon inches from the guy’s nose. The next day, the mobster had several black deputies protecting him. Shur had ample accomplishments worth bragging about, but they weren’t what he spoke about when he took the podium. Instead, he told the audience that the most satisfying moments of his career had been when he saw young people whom he had hired develop into highly skilled public servants.

  Three years after Shur retired, Gonzalez asked him to review the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations. Shur was shocked because he had been openly critical of the new director’s streamlining plans. For two months he interviewed WITSEC inspectors, reviewed cases, and talked to prosecutors, and in early 1999, he gave Gonzalez a grim nineteen-page report. Morale among WITSEC inspectors was as low as he had ever seen it, even worse than when the program began. The camaraderie that Safir and Coon had developed within the unit was gone. Shur wrote that WITSEC had fallen from being the most efficient witness protection program in the world to an operation that was stumbling along without direction, with no support from Gonzalez or other top administrators. Veteran inspectors were leaving the program, and many of those replacing them had not been carefully screened. Shur recommended a number of specific changes and urged immediate action, but Gonzalez left office in November 2000 without implementing any of the recommendations. He was succeeded by John Marshal, who stayed less than two years. He too left WITSEC unchanged.

  Sammy the Bull didn’t stay straight long. He was arrested on drug-selling charges in February 2000 in Arizona, together with his wife, son, daughter, and son-in-law. He had undergone plastic surgery at his own expense and WITSEC had hidden him near Phoenix, where the government had helped him buy a half-million-dollar home and open a business called Creative Pools. But he had dropped out of WITSEC in 1997, hired a publicist, and started granting interviews on television and to newspapers and magazines. “For such a New York wiseguy, he was not so wise,” an Arizona prosecutor told reporters. Even though his business built only two swimming pools in a yearlong period, he was seen driving expensive cars and flashing money around, causing authorities to suspect he was earning cash illegally. In May 2001, he was to plead guilty to running a drug ring, and was scheduled to be sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

  Shur read about Gravano’s arrest in the morning newspaper. The story described him as the latest in a long line of WITSEC witnesses who had escaped punishment by testifying and then disappearing with the government’s help, only to get into trouble again. The names were all too familiar: Joseph Barboza, Vincent Teresa, Marion “Mad Dog” Pruett. Shur noted there was no mention in the article that the most recent study by the U.S. Marshals Service had found that less than 10 percent of the ninety relocated witnesses put into the program in one year had gotten in trouble.

  Shur’s friend Eugene Coon had recently retired, and one of the gifts that he had been given was a plaque that showed a phoenix rising from the ashes. It was the unofficial symbol of WITSEC. It represented witnesses being reborn, rising from their pasts to live honest lives. As Shur sat drinking a diet Coke and scanning the headlines, his thoughts turned to them.

  EPILOGUE

  Some Personal Observations by Gerald Shur

  I am a very lucky person. I can honestly say that I couldn’t have been happier going in to work each day at the U.S. Department of Justice. I felt privileged to be able to serve the public, and I enjoyed working in an office where we faced complex problems that had very real life-and-death consequences. It was a stressful environment, and decisions had to be made quickly; yet it was the pressure, the problem solving, the finding of the elusive successful solution that kept me going. When it came time for me to retire, I felt torn. Miriam was retiring after twenty-eight years of teaching first and second grade, and I wanted to spend the rest of my life full-time with her. At the same time, it was hard for me to walk away from a job that I had done for thirty-four years, and even more difficult to leave my co-workers and friends. It was seeing how well they performed that made it clear to me that although I was called the “father of WITSEC,” it would function quite well without me.

  I always liked the term “father” because WITSEC really had been like my child, and I liked to think, maybe sentimentally, that WITSEC was like a family. The program was fraught with problems in the early years. At times it seemed impossible to manage because of the number of different agencies involved and the huge number of witnesses coming into it. Like any parent, I took the brunt of criticism and attacks for its failings. But when it reached maturity, it had developed into an effective tool in our government’s arsenal. The fact that WITSEC has never had one of its witnesses killed is a remarkable achievement that says much about the U.S. Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Every single day WITSEC inspectors put their lives on the line protecting witnesses, knowing that the first shots fired will be at them. They do it because they are professionals. I admire, respect, and applaud that. They are brave and dedicated.

  There are some concerns I have had over the years, and now seems a fitting time to address them. First, many people today don’t realize just how powerful organized crime was in our country when I arrived at the Justice Department in 1961, and how behind we were in fighting it. As we have chronicled in this book, the first major investigation of La Cosa Nostra was done by Senator Estes Kefauver a decade earlier. I remember watching Frank Costello, known as the “prime minister of the underworld,” testify. He had refused to allow his face to be shown on television, so cameras focused on his sweaty palms as he was questioned by chief counsel Rudolph Halley. Kefauver had discovered that every major city—every one—had been corrupted by the mob. In New York City, mobsters brazenly handed thousands of dollars’ worth of bribes to Mayor William O’Dwyer in unmarked envelopes, and in New Orleans, the chief of detectives admitted spending $150,000 per year even though his salary was only $186 a month. Today’s generation has become enamored with the mob, based on Hollywood’s portrayal of it in movies such as The Godfat
her and television’s The Sopranos. But believe me, there was nothing admirable about it when I was a kid listening to my father describe how people in the garment district were being cheated, threatened, and physically abused by mobsters.

  Which brings me to another point. Under the highest counts I have ever seen, the Mafia has always numbered under five thousand members. That is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the more than five million Italian immigrants who came to this country and helped make it what it is today. Yet even today anyone with an Italian name is still suspect. I find this prejudice repugnant. The mob was and is an evil and twisted criminal force run by a small element, and it is very important to remember this.

  All of us who came in under Robert Kennedy to fight the mob were passionate about what we were doing. We didn’t go to work for the Justice Department because of some desire for security or riches. I honestly believe we were answering John F. Kennedy’s call. I remember my colleagues showing up to work on Saturdays and Sundays because they were committed to ridding the nation of organized crime. To all of us the mob was an enemy that had to be stopped but was untouchable because of omertà. WITSEC broke the code of silence, and once witnesses began talking, the mob’s house of fear collapsed.

  As horrible as the mob was, the gangsters I dealt with in the 1960s were in some ways a better breed of criminal than the thugs who took their places. In the early days, if Vinnie Teresa or Jimmy the Weasel made a promise to me, I could trust them to keep that promise. It was what they didn’t say I had to worry about! I noticed that as the government began to have an effect on traditional organized crime, drug dealers, motorcycle gangs, and street gangs rushed in to fill the void. These were undisciplined and promiscuously violent groups that put the average citizen at greater personal risk. The mob had a criminal code of conduct, albeit a perverted one. The emerging groups had none—everyone was a potential target of their violence. I recall being taken aside by an elderly mobster who had spent years in prison and was in one of our WITSEC units. “Gerry, I have to warn you,” he whispered to me. “You’re not putting the same class of criminal into the program as you used to. These guys, they kill innocent people for no reason at all.” He was right.