Witsec (39 page)

At a press conference the day after Seal was gunned down, Bardwell said his office had been trying to teach Seal a lesson by sending him to the halfway
house but had not wanted to see him murdered. Judge Polozola refused comment.

•   •   •

Even though Max Mermelstein had known Escobar was determined to kill Seal, the murder scared him. He was now the only American alive who could testify about the inner workings of the cartel—if the United States ever succeeded in getting Colombia to extradite its leaders. Knowing how little Escobar valued others’ lives, Mermelstein assumed it was only a matter of time before he too was murdered. He became even more spooked after his wife, Cristina, received a threatening telephone call from Rafael Cardona Salazar. “Max must not utter a word to the authorities or I will kill you and your whole family in Colombia,” he warned.

From his prison cell, Mermelstein sent word to federal prosecutors that he wanted to cooperate. His first priority was getting Cristina and their children out of Miami and into WITSEC. He also wanted her relatives in Cali, Colombia, protected. Extracting them was going to be tricky. The Marshals Service suspected the cartel was watching them. A few days later, when an assistant U.S. attorney accidentally leaked word that Mermelstein had become a government witness, WITSEC inspectors and Shur were forced into action. Working with the DEA, Shur secretly offered thirty-one of Mermelstein’s in-laws protection; sixteen accepted. The DEA swooped them up at four different public spots in Cali and hurried them to a private airfield, where a U.S. military flight whisked them out of Colombia. They were the largest group ever to enter WITSEC at one time, and few spoke English.

Having already lost Barry Seal to Colombian assassins,
the government hid Mermelstein in a cell known as the “submarine” because it was concealed in the basement of the federal courthouse in Miami. Ironically, one of the first prosecutors to interrogate him was Gerald Shur’s son, Ronald, who had become a federal prosecutor in 1983 and was working in the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force in the U.S. attorney’s Miami office. Mermelstein was now considered the United States’ most important drug witness.

Within days, the ramifications of his arrest began to rock the Medellín cartel. Because he had overseen its American operations, the FBI and DEA were able to close down the cartel’s distribution network and arrest several smugglers. Overnight, much of the cartel’s cash flow stopped. In Colombia, Rafael Cardona Salazar, who had brought Mermelstein into the cartel’s organization, was machine-gunned to death.

The cartel was in turmoil and seemed to be unraveling. In a move designed to win favor with Colombian officials, Escobar turned against fellow cartel member Carlos Ledher Rivas, perhaps the group’s most eccentric member. Half German and a rabid admirer of Adolf Hitler, Ledher had once bragged about how he was using cocaine like a “Latin American atom bomb” to destroy the United States from within. On February 4, 1987, Escobar tipped off the Colombian police about a party that Ledher was hosting. He was arrested and handed over to the DEA, which flew him from Bogotá to Tampa on board a DEA plane.

The Marshals Service was responsible for protecting both Ledher and his main accuser, Mermelstein, when Ledher became the first cartel member to be put on trial. They hid Ledher, who was reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, on a Florida military
base and flew him into Tampa in a fully armed Blackhawk helicopter for the trial. A jury convicted him of drug smuggling and the judge sentenced him to a prison term of life plus 135 years.

Furious that he had been betrayed by Escobar and the rest of the cartel, Ledher stewed in a prison cell and then contacted federal prosecutors. He announced that he was willing to testify against an even bigger fish in return for a reduction in his sentence and protection in a WITSEC unit.

The DEA had suspected for years that Manuel Noriega, known by his Latin enemies as “Pineapple Face,” had been providing Colombian drug smugglers with safe passage in Panama and access to banks there to launder money. But it didn’t have any direct evidence until Ledher began naming names. Working with Ledher and Mermelstein, DEA agents and federal prosecutors began putting together a case.

In December 1989 the U.S. military invaded the Panama Canal Zone and arrested the Panamanian president on money-laundering charges. Never before had the United States invaded a country and seized its leader on drug-related charges. The invasion alone cost taxpayers $164 million. The trial that followed lasted twenty-seven months. Some sixty-one witnesses testified against Noriega, and many of them were put under WITSEC protection. As always, defense attorneys accused the government of buying testimony because of the plea bargains that the Justice Department struck with some witnesses. Richardo Bilonick, who faced a sixty-year prison sentence for selling $400 million worth of cocaine, was allowed to keep all of his drug earnings in return for his testimony, defense attorneys claimed, and was given a new identity and relocated
after serving four years in a WITSEC unit. Noriega was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

The fact that the United States would pluck a foreign leader from his own country outraged Escobar, who feared he might be next. Once again he began unleashing his assassins, trying as he had in the past to intimidate the Colombian courts and government. Three of the five candidates running for president were killed when they said they supported turning over narco kingpins to the United States. There were daily reports in the newspaper about bombings.

Still thirsty for revenge, Escobar also sent out word that he wanted Max Mermelstein dead.

•   •   •

By this point, Max Mermelstein was a free man. The DEA and federal prosecutors had recommended that he be treated leniently when he was taken before a judge for sentencing in June 1987, two years after he had first been arrested. The judge let him off with time already served. WITSEC inspectors had immediately reunited him with his wife, Cristina, and their children, who had been relocated under new names. But his bliss didn’t last long.

“I used to bring a couple thousand keys [kilos] a week into Florida,” Mermelstein recalled. “I was used to excitement, being on the move, not sitting around. My adrenaline would be pumping all the time when I smuggled drugs. Then, when I flipped over, I used to get just as excited bringing down those assholes who I was testifying against. Then suddenly I was vegetating, with absolutely nothing to do.” He and Cristina began arguing. “No couple can be together twenty-four/seven without getting on each other’s nerves.” She was angry because she blamed him for ruining her family.

“Colombian families are extremely close,” Mermelstein explained. “You don’t separate them like Gerry Shur and the Marshals Service did, sending them to different cities in the United States and ordering them not to communicate with each other. I tried to explain this to Shur, but he refused to listen. He thought he knew what was best for everyone, and his refusal to be flexible cost my brother-in-law his life.”

Arturo Jaramillo, Cristina’s brother, was one of the family members spirited out of Cali and brought to the United States by the DEA and Shur. WITSEC inspectors had relocated him in Memphis, Tennessee, together with his wife and young son, but since none of them spoke English, they felt isolated. WITSEC inspectors arranged for Mermelstein and Cristina to talk to Jaramillo over the telephone because he was so depressed. Afterward, the Mermelsteins urged the WITSEC inspector handling Jaramillo to get him immediate psychiatric help. The deputy agreed but was scheduled to leave on vacation the next morning and couldn’t find a Spanish-speaking therapist before leaving town. The next morning, Jaramillo hanged himself.

Family members learned about the suicide by calling each other through the WITSEC switchboard, since none of them was allowed to know where the others were located. At first WITSEC inspectors said the family couldn’t attend Jaramillo’s funeral, but when Mermelstein threatened to stop cooperating with prosecutors, they relented. The relatives were flown at WITSEC expense to Flushing, New York, for a private funeral. The church was patrolled by guards, and family members were driven to the cemetery in bulletproof limousines. As soon as the casket was lowered into the plot, they were whisked away. “We were all very
bitter about what had happened,” said Mermelstein, “especially Cristina.”

The suicide, being cut off from her relatives, and having Mermelstein underfoot all day proved to be too much. Within a year, the couple separated, and each was relocated in different cities and given new names.

Lonely and bored, Mermelstein tried to find work, but he wasn’t happy with the jobs that WITSEC found for him. “They want witnesses to become anonymous, so they offer you meaningless work like flipping burgers and scraping barnacles off the bottoms of boats in shipyards.” He felt potential employers were afraid to hire him.

Mermelstein wasn’t surprised when he was told that Escobar was trying to kill him. “Pablo was not the forgiving kind,” he said. He went over all the steps the Marshals Service had taken to protect him, but “I was uneasy,” he said. “After they fucked up with my brother-in-law, I was worried, but there were a couple of inspectors whom I had complete confidence in. I was glad to put my life in their hands.” Just the same, he found himself glancing more and more over his shoulder.

•   •   •

In May 1991 Shur was asked to report to the Justice Department’s command center, the most secure room in the majestic Constitution Avenue building. Heavily insulated and frequently swept for listening devices, the center is where a United States court meets to review sensitive requests by the FBI to use wiretaps in national security cases. Shur was greeted by a somber group of deputy marshals and FBI, DEA, and Justice Department officials.

“Gerry,” said his boss and friend, deputy assistant
attorney general Jack Keeney, “we have reason to believe you and Miriam are in danger.”

A foreign criminal named Félix Bersago had been caught by Immigration and Naturalization service agents three weeks earlier as he tried to cross the Mexican border and enter Texas using a fake passport. He had once served time in prison for murder and was suspected of being a freelance hit man. When the border guards searched him, they found a spiral-bound address book that contained the names and telephone numbers of half a dozen Colombian drug traffickers, including members of the Ochoa family and business partners of Pablo Escobar. Near the back of it they’d also found these cryptic notes: “WITSEC—Gerald Shur, Arlington, Va.—Max Mermelstein.”

At first, Bersago had refused to answer questions about why he was sneaking into the United States, but then he began offering bits and pieces in an effort to cut a deal. He wanted the INS to grant him asylum in return for telling them what they wanted to know. The agency had refused and turned his notebook over to the DEA. Its agents had gone through it with Bersago page by page, asking him questions about his Colombian contacts. When they finally got to the page that contained Shur’s name, Bersago dropped a bombshell. The cartel had offered him $250,000 to abduct one of the Shurs in a plot to flush out Max Mermelstein. If Miriam was taken hostage, Shur would be told that she would be murdered unless he revealed where Mermelstein was hiding. If he was kidnapped, the cartel would send someone to torture him until he gave up Mermelstein’s location.

“This guy might not be the only kidnapper the cartel has sent after you,” Shur was warned. “The Colombians usually send more than one hit man when
they put out a contract, so there’s a good chance they’ve sent someone else to kidnap you or Miriam.”

Shur’s face betrayed no emotion. He had once been given a series of psychological tests as part of a federal management training program and the results had shown that whenever he was put under stress, he shoved his emotions aside and focused on gathering facts so he could make the best decision possible. “I had three thoughts,” Shur said later. “I wished I had known about the threat earlier, since the suspect had already been in jail for three weeks before they asked why my name was in the book. But I still felt the odds of Miriam and me being found were slim as long as we stayed away from our home. I also knew the Marshals Service was very good at keeping people alive and its people would do whatever needed to be done to protect us.”

Shur began asking questions: Where was Bersago now? Did the agents believe he was telling the truth? What did he know about him and his family? Did the DEA think the Medellín cartel knew Bersago had been detained?

Keeney was the first to suggest that Shur needed to leave town. “Why don’t you take a vacation at government expense?” he offered, but Shur would have none of it. “I don’t want protection. I think I can get around okay on my own, but I want Miriam protected.” He wasn’t trying to be macho or foolhardy. “One of my jobs, besides running WITSEC, was investigating threats made against U.S. attorneys and deciding whether or not they needed protection,” he said later. “We didn’t put U.S. attorneys into WITSEC, but we did send deputies to protect them whenever it was necessary. If my life was going to be on the line, I didn’t want to turn over the investigation to anyone with less
experience in the department. I wanted to be aware of everything that was being said and done.”

Shur’s first priority was Miriam, who was at that very moment teaching a first-grade class at Rockledge Elementary School in Bowie, Maryland. Shur asked Eugene L. Coon, who had been recently appointed by Howard Safir to be WITSEC chief, to send a WITSEC inspector to the school to protect her. Since it was a Friday afternoon, Coon ordered the inspector to stick close to Miriam and then, after she finished teaching for the day, drive her home so she could pack enough clothing for a weekend outing. The inspector was then to drive her to a hotel in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, where Shur would join her later that night.

Shur didn’t think his children needed to be protected or told about the kidnap threat. His son, Ronald, had resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami and was now working for a private law firm in another state. His daughter, Ilene, had married and taken her husband’s last name.