Witsec (11 page)

When historians, politicians, journalists, and critics would later set out to find the origins of the Federal Witness Protection Program, the paper trail would lead them back to this moment and the thick, blue-bound presidential commission’s recommendations. Those who took the time to look behind the panel’s one-paragraph recommendation would find Gerald Shur. But what no one, including Shur, realized in 1967 was the significance of what had been started. Thousands of lives were about to change, many for the better, others for the worse, because of his seemingly straightforward suggestion.

H
aving never created a new identity or a false background for anyone, Gerald Shur sought advice from the experts. He contacted the Central Intelligence Agency but decided it did too good a job creating false histories. “I wasn’t going to send a witness to penetrate a foreign nation, and I didn’t need to give anyone a deep cover,” he said. “What I needed was just enough new documentation for someone to get a fresh start in a new community.” Shur was worried about helping witnesses too much. “Most of them would be criminals, and I didn’t want them using us to get away with new crimes.” He asked Marcy Edelman, one of his criminal intelligence analysts, what documents she thought a witness would need to start over. They agreed that each person would need a minimum of three records: a new birth certificate, driver’s license, and Social Security card. If the witness had children, school records would need to be produced.

Shur would later marvel at how much simpler it had been in the late 1960s and early 1970s to obtain documents and fabricate a new past than it is today. There were few computerized records and no Internet. Credit-reporting companies were in their infancy. Most birth and death records were kept in city or county courthouses scattered across the country, and
there was little or no effort to cross-index them. Many states had laws that prohibited insurance and credit card companies from requiring applicants to provide their Social Security numbers; they were considered private, only for use when filing taxes. This meant there was no standard universal identifier or number that followed a person for life, as there were in some European countries.

Shur turned to people he knew personally and trusted for help in getting documents. Several state’s attorneys arranged for him to get new birth certificates. He convinced the director of a motor vehicles department to provide him with new driver’s licenses. “Of course, I wouldn’t give anyone a driver’s license unless he already had a valid one.” Obtaining Social Security cards was more complicated. Initially, Shur had witnesses apply for a new number, but this meant each witness then had two different numbers—his original one and his new one. “My plan was that after a witness died, his family would send a letter to Social Security and explain that number A matches number B, and then Social Security would combine the two accounts,” Shur said, “but this created all sorts of problems. I eventually got officials at Social Security to create a new account for our witnesses and transfer their funds from their old number into the new one.” School officials in a Washington suburb agreed to help him with school transcripts. “We would get a child’s school records, black out the child’s name, and give those records to a school official. This official would then copy the child’s grades off their old transcript and onto a new transcript from a local school in the child’s new name. The grades were exactly the same, only the child’s name and the name of the school were different. We would even make sure any teachers’ comments
were faithfully copied. Later, some witnesses asked me to give their kids better grades than they had earned. I said no.”

There was one type of record Shur refused to provide witnesses. They were relocated without any financial documentation: no credit report, no prior banking records, nothing. They started clean. This made mundane tasks such as getting a telephone installed difficult because companies wanted to know their new customer’s payment history, but Shur felt it was too risky for the government to vouch for any witness’s fiscal past.

While he tried to keep rules to a minimum, there were two he established from the start. Every witness had to undergo a legal name change. “This was no different from what happened when an ordinary citizen petitioned the court to change his name, only we asked the judge to seal the court records so no one would know the witness’s old name or his new one.” Shur did not want witnesses lying when they signed their new names to legal documents, such as real estate contracts or loan papers. “Over the years, witnesses would complain about how long it took us to get them new documents. They’d tell us they could buy a new driver’s license or a fake birth certificate on the street in less than twenty-four hours, but I was not going to be part of any fraud.” There proved to be an unexpected psychological advantage to the name change as well. “It was a clear sign that the witness was starting over, getting a fresh start.”

For security reasons, Shur also required witnesses to keep their new identity and relocation a secret from their relatives and friends from their past. “We didn’t want the mob torturing someone’s grandparents to discover where a witness was hiding.” This was by far the
most difficult rule for witnesses to follow. “They could mail letters to one another and talk on the telephone through calls that we arranged through our switchboard, but that was the only contact we allowed them to have.” The criminal intelligence analysts in Shur’s office took charge of handling the mail. Witnesses sent their letters to Shur’s office, where they were put into new envelopes and forwarded. Relatives wrote back in care of Shur’s office, which passed those letters along.

When it came to choosing new names for witnesses, Shur followed advice that he’d been given by an IRS agent who had created fake backgrounds for undercover agents sent to Las Vegas to infiltrate mob-run casinos. “He said I should let witnesses keep their same initials or their same first name. This way, if they had to write their name, they might be able to catch themselves if they started writing their old name by mistake. It was easier on everyone involved, especially family members, if Bob remained Bob and didn’t suddenly become Charlie.”

There would later be a dispute about who was Shur’s first witness to get a new identity and to be relocated. This is because two big cases landed in his lap almost simultaneously. In his mind, they would come to represent everything that could go right and go wrong.

Paul Rigo was terrified when Shur first saw him fidgeting in a leather chair in a Justice Department office in 1969. The wealthy New Jersey engineer, who was in his late forties, had asked for the meeting, and he got right to the point: He was tangled up with the mob in Newark, and now the IRS was closing in on him. He wanted to cooperate but was afraid he’d be murdered. He was looking to cut a deal.

Rigo gingerly explained that the mob had first
contacted him after his engineering company was awarded a lucrative city contract. Two men who represented Anthony “Tony Boy” Boiardo came into his office and demanded a 10 percent kickback for throwing the city contract his way. Rigo knew Tony Boy was the son of Ruggiero “Richie the Boot” Boiardo, one of New Jersey’s most feared gangsters, but he’d never met either of the Boiardos or asked for any favors. When he refused to pay, the thugs forced him into a car and drove to the Boiardo family estate, where Tony Boy personally threatened to break both of his legs with a baseball bat.

“You got to understand,” Rigo said, “I really didn’t have any choice. He was ready to bust my legs right there. He said if I went to the cops, he’d kill my wife and kids.”

After Rigo paid the kickback, his engineering firm began getting more and more city contracts, and he learned the Boiardos were bribing city officials to hire his firm. It was at this point in his story that Rigo dropped a big name. “Mayor Addonizio is part of this,” he declared, “and I can prove it.” Hugh J. Addonizio was a nationally recognized Democratic figure who had served seven terms in Congress. He had given up his seat in 1962 to become Newark’s mayor after the city suffered one of the worst race riots in the nation. In the seven years since then, he’d rebuilt Newark, and there were rumors he’d be his party’s next vice presidential candidate.

Shur and Thomas Kennelly, who was also in the meeting with Rigo, hid their excitement. They didn’t want to appear overeager because they suspected Rigo was much more involved than he was admitting. They asked him to meet with them again the next morning,
and when he arrived, they fell into good cop/bad cop roles.

“You haven’t told us anything we didn’t already know,” Shur snapped. “Why should we help you? You could’ve stopped taking city contracts if you really didn’t want to get into bed with the mob. Instead you got rich, and now the IRS is coming down on you, so you want us to bail you out. Forget it!”

Rigo appeared genuinely shocked. A sympathetic Kennelly quickly offered him an out. “I think we can help,” he volunteered, “but you’re going to have to help us by testifying against these people.”

“Testifying? They’ll kill me.”

“We can protect you,” Shur added, “and we can help you get a new start, but only if you testify.”

During the next several hours, Rigo admitted that he’d been the Boiardo crime family’s “bag man,” responsible for collecting kickbacks from other contractors. He also began naming names. Shur and Kennelly called the U.S. attorney in Newark, who agreed to grant Rigo immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony. Now it was up to Shur to keep him safe. He called the U.S. Marshals Service, and it sent over Deputy Marshal Hugh McDonald, known as “Big Mac” because of his hulking size. “I called the marshals because they protected judges in court and handled witnesses.” McDonald and Shur drove to New Jersey a few days later to confer with Rigo and his wife. “I couldn’t believe his house when we pulled up,” Shur recalled. “It was a mansion. He owned a yacht and his own helicopter. The family had a full-time maid and butler. Rigo and his wife offered us cocktails, which we declined, and then gave us a tour. They had thousands of dollars’ worth of antique furniture they wanted us to
move. I kept asking myself, ‘What in the world have I gotten into here?’ ”

McDonald arranged for the Rigos to go into hiding just before the FBI swooped into Newark with arrest warrants. The couple lived in hotels for more than three months, moving every few days, while they waited for the trials to begin. “Rigo was impatient because he was used to picking up the telephone and telling someone to have his yacht or his helicopter ready and we just didn’t operate that way,” said Shur, “but he was always very polite. Deep down, he knew we were keeping him alive, and he appreciated that.”

The Rigos’ antiques and other household goods were crated by a moving company and delivered to a warehouse on a military base. Several weeks later their belongings were unpacked inside the warehouse and put into new crates by a different moving company. A third company would be hired once the trials ended to deliver the crates to their new home. Deputy McDonald felt confident these precautions would keep the mob from tracking them to the Rigos.

Mayor Addonizio, Tony Boy Boiardo, and thirteen city officials and contractors were convicted because of Rigo’s testimony. After the trials, Rigo flew into Washington to receive his new identity and be relocated. “I asked him where he wanted to live,” Shur recalled, “and when he told me, I said, ‘Well, that’s the last place we will be sending you.’ If a witness told me he wanted to move to San Diego, California, for instance, there was a good chance he’d mentioned how much he liked that city to someone in his past. We couldn’t take a chance and move him there.” The Rigos’ relocation went smoothly. After he and his wife settled into their new home, he started a new engineering firm. Shur liked him. He reminded Shur of his
own father. “He was a decent man who felt he had to do business with the mob in order to survive. I disagreed, but I understood it.” Rigo died in the 1980s. “I am convinced people who were close to him knew about his past and knew his old name, but the mob never found him. He was our first real success story.”

Witness Gerald Zelmanowitz was not. Flashy, brash, and arrogant, Zelmanowitz would later claim he was the first important witness Shur had ever helped relocate. Like Rigo, Zelmanowitz was granted immunity by federal prosecutors in 1969 after he agreed to testify against a New Jersey crime boss. The defendant was Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo and the trial sparked national headlines, not because of who DeCarlo was, but because of a tactical blunder by the defense that inadvertently gave the public a never-before-seen look into Mafia operations. During the discovery phase of the trial, prosecutors revealed the FBI had bugged DeCarlo’s office between 1961 and 1965, transcribing 2,300 pages of conversations between him and other gangsters. The wiretap had been ordered by Robert Kennedy but had been discontinued when President Lyndon Johnson ordered an end to all federal wiretaps. In 1968 Congress passed legislation that permitted federal agencies to begin using wiretaps once again, but only if they followed rigid guidelines. Meanwhile, all information gleaned from pre-1968 wiretaps was deemed inadmissible in federal courts. DeCarlo’s defense demanded to see the 2,300 pages of transcripts because they suspected the FBI had used information from them to make its case against DeCarlo. If they could prove that, they could argue the charges against him should be thrown out. But the defense’s legal strategy backfired. It turned out the FBI had not used any of the earlier information. Even worse for DeCarlo, Judge
Robert Shaw ruled that the 2,300 pages had become part of the court record once the defense had been given a copy of them, and that meant the public could now read them, too. Their release set off a media frenzy. In the transcripts, DeCarlo bragged about having dozens of New Jersey police chiefs, politicians, local judges, and prosecutors on his payroll. But the juiciest tidbits were about contract killings. Typical was this brief exchange: