Witsec (31 page)

Regardless, Safir took his suggestion directly to Attorney General Civiletti. Shur, meanwhile, dashed off a long memo explaining why it was a wretched idea. “Giving the Marshals Service the absolute right of rejection of a witness would be abrogating the Criminal Division’s responsibilities of determining what prosecutions should go forward,” he declared. “To give them such power would allow them to negate years of investigation and grand jury work.”

Once again, Shur and Safir compromised. Shur retained
the final say over who did and didn’t get into WITSEC, but he agreed to first consider written recommendations sent to his office by Safir’s inspectors. It was a move that gave WITSEC inspectors more clout, at least in appearance.

“I had to look at factors other than whether this witness was going to be easy or difficult to relocate,” Shur said later. Sometimes federal prosecutors needed to utilize criminals, including the likes of Thomas “Big Red” Bryant, for a larger purpose—bringing to justice criminals who were even more dangerous, he pointed out. This always entailed risks: Outcomes were not going to be predictable, compromises were inevitable, and some calls were going to prove wrong. It also meant he had to face the music when bad things happened, as well as become the whipping boy for those who could not acknowledge that complexity or uncertainty, or who had agendas of their own. Shur understood the buck stopped with him whenever WITSEC made a mistake. It was heat he was willing to take.

“Howard and I continued to have a friendly working relationship despite our disagreements,” said Shur. “I remember we disagreed about a specific witness whom I had decided to let into the program, and Howard didn’t think we should accept him. He felt so strongly, he decided to appeal my decision up the line. I had to leave town, but I trusted him so much that I suggested he present both sides of the argument. When I got back there was a message for me from Howard. It said: ‘You won.’ The same thing happened a second time when again I had to leave town. Once again Howard presented my side, and this time when I returned I had a message: ‘You won again. Next time stay in town and present your own argument.’ That says volumes about how much I trusted him.”

Although Safir had failed at winning his field inspectors veto power, he had won them the right to make a formal written recommendation to Shur. “I came to value these assessments and rely heavily on them,” said Shur. “Oftentimes, they were the first papers I read when my office received a packet from a U.S. attorney asking us to accept a witness into the program. Howard had actually created a new profession inside the Marshals Service, the WITSEC inspector, and I saw these specialists as a strong ally.”

•   •   •

Whenever WITSEC inspectors would get together for a beer or in later years at reunions, the war stories would start. Someone would bring up the witness who had demanded that Donald “Bud” McPherson move her Thoroughbred, or the exotic dancer who was furious when three of her five snakes froze to death while they were being transported by deputies through Chicago. There would be mention of James Cardinali, the four-time murderer kicked out of WITSEC because he told his girlfriend his real name, who protested by picketing the federal courthouse in Albuquerque wearing a sign bearing a red bull’s-eye and the words “Mob Star Witness.” Or someone would mention former New Jersey mobster John Johnson, who was relocated to Austin, Texas, and was earning a good living operating a hot-dog vending business until he decided one day to run for mayor. He announced his candidacy by handing out copies of his seven-page rap sheet and declaring that he had been a thief
before
seeking office, whereas others waited to turn crooked after they were elected. He got 496 votes. Miami businessman Joseph Teitelbaum’s name would occasionally surface, too. He was a “non-relocated” innocent WITSEC witness. The mob tried
to kill him after he spent eighteen months helping the FBI secretly collect evidence against the corrupt International Longshoremen’s Association. Despite death threats—a crane operator was offered $50,000 to drop a cargo container on him—Teitelbaum adamantly refused to abandon his relatives and his business to enter WITSEC, arguing that he shouldn’t have to go into hiding because he had done the right thing. Instead, Teitelbaum forced Safir to send inspectors to protect him at his home. They spent more than two years providing him with around-the-clock protection, at a cost of $3 million.

Of all the war stories, however, few could equal the case of the flaccid penis. A mobster became so depressed after he entered WITSEC that a psychologist warned an inspector that unless the witness’s self-esteem was restored, he might not be able to testify. The psychologist suggested a penile implant because the gangster was having trouble getting an erection. The inspector put in the request, Shur approved it, the government paid for it, and afterward the witness’s mental health improved dramatically. There was only one problem. One night the WITSEC inspector got a call from the mobster. “They put a button under my skin next to my navel,” he explained. “You push it and your dick gets stiff, right? Now, here’s the problem. When I lean forward while I’m eating, my gut hits the kitchen table right where this button is located, so boom, the little general shoots to attention. It’s uncomfortable and can be very embarrassing.”

“Buy a shorter chair or a table,” the inspector suggested.

Jerry Lyda, who relocated several hundred WITSEC witnesses before retiring in late 2000, always
enjoyed the war stories, but it was a panicked call from an informant in Chicago that he would later remember when asked to describe his thirty-year career as a deputy marshal. Two hit men were on their way to kill a relocated witness, the caller told him. Lyda telephoned a fellow inspector in a nearby city where the witness and his family were hiding. “He got them out less than an hour before the mob showed up to murder them,” Lyda said. “It was an extremely close call.”

Lyda was one of the first to volunteer to become a WITSEC inspector in 1978, after Safir began revamping the WITSEC operations. “He made the job something you had to volunteer for, a job that you had to want to get into, and he began pulling a different breed of inspectors into the job. Inspectors had a different mentality. You had to get satisfaction out of helping someone rather than arresting them. You had to turn your collar around, because as an inspector, you ended up doing a lot of jobs that were part deputy, part social worker.”

Inspectors in the field had two assignments: protecting and producing witnesses in court within their jurisdictions, and successfully relocating them, a task that required finding a witness a new city to live in, making sure he received all of the assistance that was due him and his family, and then helping them become self-sustaining. If the inspector did his job well, no one would notice. Only his failures ever made headlines.

“During my career, I saw two major changes that really improved how we relocated witnesses. The first was the use of MOUs [Memorandums of Understanding], because everything was put down in black and white so there wouldn’t be any confusion, or at least not as much as there had been,” said Lyda. “The next big change was Howard Safir. He took a job few wanted
and gave inspectors more clout, more say, and more respect.”

What many witnesses didn’t realize, said Lyda, was just how important a WITSEC inspector was going to become in their lives. “Every witness who came into the program would tell you, ‘Hey, I’m the most important witness who’s ever been in WITSEC.’ ” They believed that, in part, because federal prosecutors and agents had often fed their egos to get their cooperation. If they had a problem, they simply called the U.S. attorney and said they wouldn’t testify unless their demand was met. But after they stepped off the witness stand, the WITSEC inspector was the only official there to help them.

“There were two keys to helping witnesses make the transition from the criminal to the legitimate world: attitude and trust. You couldn’t force a witness to go straight, but you could help provide him the tools if he wanted to make the change. That’s where the trust came into play. You had to win a witness’s trust. Protecting him and his family was the first step to getting close to a witness. Then you helped him relocate. Hopefully by that time you had developed a close enough relationship that he would believe you when you said, ‘Okay, when it comes to a job, you’ll have to start at the bottom. It’s not great, but it’s a start. It will help you establish a work history and then we can move on to something better. But you will have to be patient.’ A witness had to be able to believe you had his best interests at heart, and that was difficult for many of these guys because they were used to only watching out for themselves. It required a big leap of faith. What made the inspector’s job different from other jobs in law enforcement was that it often required you to make a long-term commitment to these people and
play a unique role in their lives. You ended up investing a lot of your time, your energy, and much of your personal career in helping them succeed.”

The first problem in relocating witnesses was always money. “Few knew how to budget, and many of them were used to making hundreds of thousands of dollars through crime,” said Lyda. “Now they had to scale back, and they didn’t know how. You had to teach them a lot of basic living skills.”

The second problem was secrecy. “I preached to every witness: ‘Don’t tell anyone where you have been relocated,’ and then I added, ‘I mean
anyone
,’ because the problem is that everyone trusts someone. A witness would tell me, ‘I only told my mother. I can trust my mother,’ and then I’d talk to the mother and she would say, ‘I only told my sister. I can trust my sister.’ Then the sister would say, ‘I only told my husband. I can trust my husband.’ And on it went. I had a witness who told a U.S. attorney where he had been relocated. Now, that sounds completely safe, but the attorney told a federal agent, and the agent was sitting in a courtroom one day and he told another agent within earshot of some defendants. Suddenly we had an emergency on our hands.”

Lyda and other WITSEC inspectors warned relocated witnesses who had been given new identities not to tell anyone they met that they were witnesses, including people they dated or later even married. “Security was the top priority. You had to look down the road: What if there was a divorce and the spouse went running to the mob for revenge? It wasn’t uncommon for an angry spouse to be furious at us because we hadn’t told them about a witness’s past. But we could not risk jeopardizing a witness’s security.”

The third problem was keeping witnesses from
going home. “As time passed, they would begin to lose sight of why they had first entered WITSEC. The desire to go home and get back in touch with one’s family and friends would become overwhelming. At the same time, they would convince themselves the risk had passed or there wasn’t really that much risk at all. Psychologically, it made them feel safer, too, thinking that no one was really looking for them.”

Witnesses would hear stories about other witnesses who had not been harmed when they returned home. One famous tale was about Herbert Itkin, whose testimony had sent Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, a New York mob boss, to prison. After Corallo was paroled, the two men happened to come face-to-face one day outside the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. After several awkward seconds, they both said hello.

“You did a hell of a job on us,” Corallo said, and then he walked on.

Lyda warned his witnesses that the risks were too great. While the mob might not have bothered to send a hit man after a witness hiding in Iowa, it wouldn’t hesitate to kill him if he was only a few blocks away. But his warnings were often ignored. One day a witness announced he was voluntarily dropping out of WITSEC. He said he had sent out feelers and been assured that the mob boss whom he had turned against was willing to forgive him. Lyda pleaded with him not to return, but the witness ignored him. He was murdered a few days later. “Being cut off from your family was simply intolerable for many of these witnesses,” said Lyda. “As the months passed, it became very difficult for many of them not to at least try to sneak back. The inspector, of course, didn’t have any way of knowing if a witness was going home, because after we relocated them, we didn’t watch them twenty-four/seven.”
One afternoon Lyda was putting a WITSEC witness on a flight leaving Chicago when he spotted another witness strolling into the terminal from an aircraft that had just landed. He was returning from his “danger area.”

“If you are going to survive as a WITSEC inspector, you learn quickly not to completely trust any witness,” he recalled, “or you learn to know there are certain things you can trust and others that you can’t trust.” Another insight: “It seemed to me every one of these guys held something back from prosecutors. They knew if they ever got into trouble later, they could use it as a bargaining chip. They never told you everything they knew.” Still another: “No matter how close you got to these guys, you always had to remember they had testified against their very closest friends. I remember getting along great with a witness and then the day came when I told him no. Instantly, he turned completely against me.”

The trick was knowing how to walk the fine line that enabled an inspector to get close enough to win a witness’s trust but not become a friend. Lyda knew inspectors who went to prison because they had gotten mired in business deals with witnesses. One inspector quit his job to marry a witness. “It was difficult because you put so much time and energy into helping them that you were heavily invested in their lives,” said Lyda. Before Safir, deputies gave their home phone numbers to witnesses. Safir issued pagers to his WITSEC inspectors. It was a symbolic but important change.

Despite his years of experience, when he first interviewed a witness, Lyda could not predict whether or not he would make a good candidate for relocation. “No one had a crystal ball and you couldn’t always tell
from reading about a person’s past or the crimes they had committed. There was no way to know when someone was finally ready to change their life. I had a motorcycle gang member who was so cold-blooded that he and another biker murdered this woman, then cut her open and put charcoal inside her to use as a grill. But when I relocated him, he was easy to deal with and really worked hard at going straight. He was a success story, but only for a while. He got a job in a bar and ended up shooting someone during an argument. He was sent back to prison. A lot of them were like that. They could go either way, and you didn’t know which way they would choose.”