Witsec (47 page)

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.

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 Godfather
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.

Some of the most interesting times in my career were spent talking to hundreds of criminals, almost all of whom were witnesses. I had no illusions why they were helping the government. Some had cut themselves a deal. Most knew it was their only chance to stay alive. Others wanted to take revenge on their former pals. They did not fool me, yet I genuinely felt there was some good in most of them, perhaps buried down deep, but still there. I recall going into a prison unit in which we kept the most difficult WITSEC inmates, only to find several of them sitting on the floor hooking rugs with designs of cartoon characters for kids in hospitals. Most of these men were killers, yet they took pride in their work for the kids. They had lived wasted lives and caused unbelievable pain to others. I often wondered what they could have accomplished if they had not chosen crime as a career.

There were many times while Pete and I were working on this book when I would become frustrated because it seemed that all we were doing was focusing on the failures, such as Marion “Mad Dog” Pruett. WITSEC has, in fact, changed thousands of people’s
lives for the better. Criminals have given up crime. Children whose parents were murderers, thieves, or robbers have grown up in traditional law-abiding homes. WITSEC is a program that grew and changed because of its mistakes. After Pruett, we began giving witnesses psychological tests. Obviously, I wished we had done that before. I spent many sleepless nights tormented because of what he had done; I racked my brain trying to think of ways we could have stopped him. We didn’t implement the change until Pruett showed us we needed new safeguards. The history of WITSEC is not a history of failures, however. It is a history of problems encountered and problems resolved. I also firmly believe that the thousands of witnesses and their families who have made a successful transition and are now leading ordinary lives should be allowed to maintain their privacy. I have often described a successful relocation as one in which the witness forgets he and his family have been relocated, forgets about us, and, most importantly, doesn’t feel the need to look over his shoulder.

Studies undertaken during my tenure showed that WITSEC had a higher rehabilitation rate than any other government program. I believe there are several reasons why tough criminals changed after they were relocated. Obviously, many felt they would be killed, and the threat was such a deterrent that they gave up crime. But I also know from meeting thousands of witnesses that many of them jumped at the chance of a fresh start in a program that gave them a
real
opportunity to begin life over and improve themselves. They were moved into new surroundings, they were forced to cut their ties with their old associates, they were given comfortable housing and monthly subsistence,
and we helped them find a job. We provided psychological support when needed, too. In short, we did all we could to help them succeed. Compare that to a convict who is released from prison. If he is lucky, he is sent to a halfway house. Because of his criminal record, his chances of finding a good job are slim. Worse, he has no money, may not have a home, and often ends up running with the same criminal friends that he left behind when he went to prison.

Not only did WITSEC help criminals change their lives, but it helped remove more than ten thousand criminals from the streets. This is another aspect of the program that is often overlooked. Yes, Sammy Gravano killed nineteen people. Yes, he is a gangster who did horrible things, and I put him into WITSEC. But Gravano also was responsible for putting LCN crime boss John Gotti and thirty-six other gangsters in prison. How many people’s lives were saved because Gotti and his crew were put behind bars?