Witsec (19 page)

And that is exactly what happened to Blake’s partner when he refused to answer the grand jury’s questions. He was locked up. The prosecutor then cut a deal with Blake. Like many elements in this case, there would later be an angry dispute about what was said during the meeting between Blake, two prosecutors, and two IRS agents, but this is how Blake recalled that meeting. The prosecutors and IRS agents promised him that he and his family would be enrolled in the WITSEC program. They said the Marshals Service would relocate him to a new community, pay all his living expenses until he got on his feet, reimburse him for any out-of-pocket expenses he incurred, buy him a house, and set him up in another landscaping business comparable to the one he owned.

Blake signed up and testified before the grand jury. His partner, meanwhile, was released from jail and fled town after selling his share of the landscaping business to Blake. The
Chicago Tribune
somehow learned about Blake’s testimony and disclosed in a front-page story that forty contractors and more than a dozen corrupt politicians were about to be arrested. While the newspaper didn’t name him, it gave enough hints for death threats to begin arriving that same day. When he called federal prosecutors and the IRS for advice about what to do, they urged him to get out of Chicago as fast as he could.

Blake, his wife, and their five children drove to Bozeman, Montana, a town they chose at random, and checked into a motel. They expected WITSEC to call them within a few days, but no one did. After waiting for two weeks, they decided to put down a $2,000 deposit on a house and look for a landscaping business to buy. A month later, two IRS agents and a deputy marshal contacted them and confirmed that the family had been accepted into WITSEC. However, the deputy said that they had to leave Bozeman immediately; since they had moved there on their own, the Marshals Service couldn’t be sure they hadn’t been followed. Then he dropped another bomb. There would be no reimbursement for their expenses or for the $2,000 down payment on the house because they had gone to Bozeman before being accepted into WITSEC. Protests to the IRS agents and prosecutors in Chicago who had urged Blake to leave town were unavailing. He was out more than $4,000.

More bad news followed. By now Chicago newspapers had identified him as the IRS’s chief informant, and prospective buyers of his landscaping business
pulled out for fear of mob retribution. The business folded, and he lost another $300,000.

Relocated to Spokane, Washington, the family lodged for six weeks in a motel waiting to hear from the Marshals Service—seven people in two rooms with nothing to do. Finally a frustrated Blake rented a house, paying the first six months’ rent in advance because he had no references. At last he called the U.S. Marshals Service office in Spokane. No one knew anything about him. The Chicago deputy had failed to notify them the family was being relocated there.

It got worse. A Spokane deputy told them to choose between the motel or the rented house; WITSEC rules forbade paying for both. But Blake pointed out they were still waiting for their furniture to arrive from Chicago, and they couldn’t live in an empty house. “You should have thought of that when you rented the house without checking with us,” the deputy replied. For almost a month, which included Christmas and New Year’s, the Blakes and their children slept on the floor of the rented house until their furniture arrived—some pieces missing, others damaged.

The disasters kept piling up. The Marshals Service refused to set Blake up in a new business, despite the promises made by the IRS and federal prosecutors in Chicago. “If they made you those promises, then it’s up to them to buy you a business, not us,” said the deputy. Even the monthly subsistence of $1,300 the family was entitled to under WITSEC rules stopped after two months; the deputy blamed it on a paperwork glitch. The children couldn’t enter school because the Marshals Service hadn’t given them records with their new names on them, and there was such a huge backlog of such requests that it could take as long as a year for
Washington, D.C., to produce them. Even a new Social Security card for Blake would take another six months—if he was lucky. Since he could not look for a job without it, the family survived on their dwindling savings until, four months later, they were broke. Then Blake discovered that back in Chicago, the IRS had put a lien on the money from the sale of his house there for back taxes it claimed he owed. The tax agents had tried to notify him, but the Marshals Service refused to reveal where he was being hidden. He now owed nearly eight months’ worth of fines and penalties. The IRS suggested he fly to Chicago to resolve the dispute, but the Marshals Service threatened to boot him out of WITSEC if he returned to “the danger area.” In the course of their heated argument, Blake brought up the subject of his subsistence pay.

He would later claim he was told that his monthly stipend had been stopped two months after he arrived in Spokane because of all the complaints he had made about the way he was being treated. He was then offered a thousand dollars in cash to voluntarily drop out of WITSEC. Blake agreed, and in April 1974 used part of the money to fly to Chicago to meet with the IRS. He was there only briefly before he was arrested and jailed. One of the local officials indicted by the grand jury because of Blake’s testimony had been tipped off that he was back in town. He accused Blake of making a threatening phone call, and the judge, a friend of the official, set bail at $100,000. Terrified that he was being set up to be murdered in the Cook County jail, the frantic Blake telephoned his wife. She went to the Marshals Service in Spokane, but officials there professed to be helpless because Blake had dropped out of WITSEC voluntarily.

“We’re starving,” she said.

They suggested she apply for welfare.

“I’ve tried,” she replied, “but they turned me down because you’ve never given me a Social Security card, so I don’t qualify.”

Two months later, a different Chicago judge lowered Blake’s bail to $5,000, and his wife sold all their furniture and their car to post it. It had been nearly two years since he had testified before the grand jury, and during that time he had lost his landscaping business, been slapped with an IRS tax lien, depleted his savings, been jailed for sixty-three days, and was now unemployed and humiliated. With money borrowed from relatives, he hired a lawyer and threatened to sue the government. It was at this point that the IRS sent William J. DePugh, an assistant chief from its Chicago office, to investigate. In his August 1974 final report, DePugh confirmed that Blake’s complaints, in his opinion, were factual and accurate. The government’s actions, DePugh wrote, had been “unconscionable.”

“It will be very hard to convince anyone that the Blake family situation could be used by the government as an example of how we take care of people who cooperate with us,” he wrote.

The Marshals Service objected to DePugh’s findings, and federal prosecutors in Chicago also denied that they had ever misled Blake. “This was a case where everyone, and I mean everyone—the federal prosecutors, the IRS agents, the Marshals Service, and the Blakes—each had their own version of what had happened and who was to blame,” Shur recalled. “It was a mess. What happened in cases such as this, when I wasn’t certain whom to believe, was that I said, ‘Okay, it’s time to make things right. Let’s forget about what has happened and start over. Let’s give the witness exactly what he would be due if he were entering
the program for the first time. Nothing more, nothing less.’ ”

The IRS, however, rebuffed Shur’s solution. Instead, it worked out a deal completely on its own with Blake and his attorney. Under it, Blake was relocated by the IRS to a new community and reimbursed several thousand dollars for his earlier expenses. Although Shur couldn’t prevent the IRS from relocating Blake, he was afraid its actions would set a dangerous precedent. And he was correct. Tired of the deplorable way the Marshals Service was handling witnesses, DEA and FBI agents in the field began lobbying their bosses for permission to relocate witnesses on their own, without help from the Marshals Service. Shur moved quickly to stop the coup. “We couldn’t have agencies acting independently,” he explained later. “What if the DEA gave their witnesses more than the FBI gave theirs? Not only would that look suspicious in court, it would lead to witnesses shopping around for the best offers. It was a horrible idea.”

Shur urged his bosses to give him more time to make WITSEC work, and they backed him. “It was decided that agencies could relocate their own informants,” he said later, “but only the Marshals Service could relocate government witnesses.”

Incredibly, Shur found that he was defending an agency that didn’t want or appreciate his efforts. “Most deputies wanted nothing to do with witnesses,” Shur said. “They didn’t like WITSEC, and several of them really didn’t want the program to succeed.”

Shur decided it was time to confront the Marshals Service’s director, Wayne Colburn, who had been busy dealing with other programs besides WITSEC. In a long memo, Shur summarized the major complaints that he had heard. Not wanting to be completely negative, he
ended his memo by complimenting Hugh “Big Mac” McDonald, the deputy who had been the liaison between the Justice Department’s OCRS office and the Marshals Service since WITSEC’s start.

“Right after I sent that memo,” Shur recalled, “Big Mac told me that he was being assigned to a job in Puerto Rico. The Marshals Service knew Mac’s extended family all lived in the Washington metropolitan area, and an assignment to Puerto Rico would be devastating to his wife and family. It was clear to me this was simply a matter of petty politics. I suspected that Colburn had sent my memo down the chain of command, and someone there had decided that McDonald had sold out the Marshals Service and joined my side. That was ridiculous. If anything, McDonald was the linchpin who was helping keep the witness program going. But they wanted to punish him. It made me furious.”

Shur protested to Colburn’s deputy, William Hall, who assured him that McDonald would not be reassigned. “I trusted Bill Hall. He was an honorable man, so I knew McDonald was safe.” Still, the transfer attempt sent Shur a chilling message. “It was clear to me that in some circles inside the Marshals Service, I was the enemy.”

Shur decided to try a different approach to getting Colburn to make WITSEC a higher priority inside the Marshals Service. He asked Kenneth W. Rath, who was in charge of the Justice Department’s management and budget office, to launch a departmental review of the WITSEC program. Shur rode in the same carpool as Rath, and they were friends. Departmental reviews were done to pick apart a program’s weaknesses. This was information Shur already had, but he felt a formal review would send Colburn and his staff a message:
The Justice Department is concerned about WITSEC. No federal bureaucrat would want his career linked to a troubled program.

Shur’s plan worked. Shortly after Rath’s office announced it was going to investigate WITSEC, Colburn sent out a memo that said he “had not been aware of the gravity of the problems in WITSEC.” He told Shur that the Marshals Service would seek an additional $3.76 million in its next budget request specifically for WITSEC, to pay for new equipment and to hire two hundred more deputies.

But Shur’s delight didn’t last long. Colburn’s budget request didn’t make it through the Justice Department’s review process. “The sad truth is that witness security was about as important as a mosquito on a gnat’s ass when it came to getting money in the federal budget,” WITSEC’s deputy director, William Hall, recalled later. “Gerry Shur cared about this program, but no one else in the Justice Department really did.”

Shur began snooping around to find out exactly who in the Justice Department had killed Colburn’s request. “I learned there was a very strong feeling in the department’s hierarchy that the Marshals Service was an inefficient operation,” Shur said later. “There was a strong feeling that enough deputies were already on board to handle the WITSEC caseload. I wrote a number of memos challenging this view, but I couldn’t change this negative attitude.” It was now painfully obvious that Shur had to gain support from within his own ranks for WITSEC if he hoped to win it more money. He decided that Benjamin Civiletti, then an assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, was the most likely to listen to his plea. In a twenty-two-page memo, Shur
warned Civiletti that WITSEC was on the verge of collapsing. “I cannot conceive that seven years after WITSEC began, we would be less organized than at any time in our program’s operation,” Shur wrote, “but simply put, the current system doesn’t work.”

Shur cited examples of dangerous situations that had happened because of a lack of funds and deputies, and shoddy work.