Witsec (4 page)

News about the mob summit sparked national headlines. Under public pressure, Hoover sent seventy-five FBI agents to investigate, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower created a special task force to prosecute the gangsters. There was just one problem: It didn’t appear they had broken any laws by meeting. The government charged them with engaging in a “conspiracy to obstruct justice” because they had refused to tell a grand jury why they were meeting in Apalachin. At the end of their trial a jury convicted them, but the Second
Circuit Court of Appeals later threw out the conviction. It was out of this public relations disaster that a new mob buster arose: Robert F. Kennedy. As chief counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, better known as the McClellan Committee, Kennedy set out to outdo Senator Kefauver. During 270 days of hearings, Kennedy interrogated 800 witnesses about the mob, including a belligerent Jimmy Hoffa. Afterward, Kennedy published a best-selling book called
The Enemy Within
, and in it he called for the creation of a national commission to spearhead the government’s campaign against the Mafia and oversee the dozens of federal agencies that had jurisdiction over it. The FBI’s Hoover was dead set against giving up any of his power, so Kennedy’s recommendations didn’t get very far until John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960. When President Kennedy named his brother as the nation’s sixty-fourth U.S. attorney general, Robert Kennedy got his chance. Knowing that Hoover would try to stop him if he sought legislation for a national Mafia commission, Robert Kennedy looked inward and decided to turn the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section (OCRS) into a mob command post. The OCRS had been created by President Eisenhower to prosecute organized crime cases, but Hoover had kept it toothless. Kennedy began recruiting new attorneys for the OCRS office. He offered low pay, exhausting hours, dangerous assignments, and the thrill of investigating the biggest and most notorious mobsters in America.

Shur read about Kennedy’s call to arms in the
Dallas Morning News
, but he waited several days before mentioning it to Miriam. He assumed she wouldn’t want to move to Washington, D.C., because
all her relatives lived in Texas and Shur’s law practice was finally showing a profit. Miriam surprised him. “Why don’t you fly to Washington and apply?” she asked.

He called a friend from law school who knew someone in Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s office, and a few days later Shur was in Washington being interviewed by three of Johnson’s aides. When Shur said he wanted a job in the OCRS, they began laughing. They assumed Shur had come to town hoping to land a juicy political appointment, not a staff job. They sent Shur to see Edwyn Silberling, the newly hired chief of the OCRS, who had a well-deserved reputation as an anticorruption crusader in New York. He hired Shur that same day and ordered him to report to work ASAP. Back home, Shur closed his law practice, and he and Miriam sold their home, tucked their two children into the backseat of their aging Renault, and set off for Washington, D.C. The
Corpus Christi Times
published a beaming photograph of Shur, then twenty-seven years old, under the headline “Local Attorney Is Hired For Racket-Hunting Job.” Halfway to the nation’s capital, the Shurs’ car broke down. His old friends in New York City were not surprised when they heard that he was joining the Justice Department. Chasing mobsters, they agreed, was just the crazy sort of thing that Shur had always wanted to do.

G
erryShur,” said Henry Petersen, the deputy chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, running the names together, “tell me your views about organized crime.”

Shur began a windy answer based on his years of reading newspaper clippings. When he finished, Petersen said: “I disagree with every word you have just uttered. Now, go pull the files on Profaci, Oddo, and Carlino. We may be meeting with Bobby Kennedy tomorrow, and I want you to be ready to give him a status report on our investigations.”

Shur had read about Profaci but didn’t have a clue who Oddo and Carlino were. He stopped outside Petersen’s office at a pay phone and dialed Miriam. He’d been warned not to make personal calls on government lines. “I’ve only been at work fifteen minutes,” he muttered, “and I think I’m on the brink of being fired!”

Shur was among the first of forty-five new attorneys Robert Kennedy was hiring to revitalize the OCRS. Besides pumping in new blood, Kennedy was taking a fresh look at how the office operated. He asked William Hundley, who had run the office under President Eisenhower, to tell him what sort of problems needed to be fixed. Hundley said the biggest hurdle was getting federal agents to work together. At least
twenty-five separate government agencies investigated organized crime, but none shared its information. The FBI was the worst, Hundley warned. Kennedy met immediately with FBI director Hoover and the heads of other agencies and warned them that he expected a change in attitude. The OCRS was going to take charge of
all
organized crime cases. OCRS attorneys, such as Shur, would coordinate and in some cases run critical investigations. Kennedy had handpicked forty racketeers whom he personally wanted targeted. There would be no more bureaucratic nitpicking, no infighting. Everyone was going to be on the same team.

Although Hoover and the others promised to cooperate, Shur got a chilly reception when he flew to New York City to meet with Brooklyn’s federal prosecutors and investigators. U.S. attorney Joseph Hoey told aides that Shur wasn’t welcome, and the local chiefs of the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Bureau of Narcotics were just as unfriendly. “None of them really understood what our role in the OCRS was,” Shur recalled. “They just wanted me to stay the hell out of their way.” Shur had never prosecuted a mobster, overseen an investigation, or worked on the streets. And these were only some of the reasons the investigators didn’t want him around. “A lot of the agents in New York couldn’t stand one another,” Shur recalled. “The head of the U.S. Secret Service would not attend any meetings if the special agent in charge of the FBI office was there, and vice versa. These two men hated each other’s guts—and I was supposed to bring them all together.”

Shur knew he had to prove himself. When he learned several FBI agents were being pulled off sensitive mob investigations to handle routine matters, he got his bosses in the Justice Department to contact
Hoover and free the agents from such chores. “The agents suddenly realized I could be useful to them, so they began working with me.” Shur’s next challenge was finding a way to maneuver around U.S. attorney Hoey, who was worried that Shur was going to steal the spotlight from him. “Hoey had assigned one of his assistants, Bill Kelly, to accompany me everywhere I went in Brooklyn. The agents working with me didn’t feel comfortable with Kelly because he was a political appointee they believed loyal to Hoey, so they wouldn’t talk freely about cases if he was around.” Shur noticed one afternoon that Kelly left his side promptly at 4:30
P.M
. “We simply began holding two sets of meetings.” In the morning, Shur and the agents discussed routine problems in front of Kelly. After Kelly had gone, they delved into sensitive matters.

Shur loved what he was doing. At least three days a week he would board a 6
A.M
. flight to New York City, where he’d work until ten in the evening. Then he’d fly back to Washington exhausted. He got his first big break when an IRS agent told him an armed robber using the alias Danny wanted to give him information about Sonny Franzese. There was a catch, though. In exchange, Danny, who was accused of committing three armed robberies, wanted the charges against him reduced and a visit with his wife and daughter. Shur agreed to help him but quickly discovered he was being played for a fool. When they met, Danny didn’t tell him anything useful. Disgusted, Shur stood up and headed for the door.

“Whatcha doin’?” Danny called after him.

“Something you can’t,” Shur replied. “Walking out this door.”

“You anti-Semites are always picking on us Jews,” Danny snarled.

Up to this point, no one had mentioned religion. Shur spun around. “Go to hell!” he spat in Yiddish. “It’s Jews like you that make the rest of us look bad!”

Danny hadn’t realized Shur was Jewish.

“You tell me something I can sink my teeth into right now,” an angry Shur threatened, “or I’m leaving you here to rot in jail.”

“How about a murder?” Danny volunteered. In the next few minutes, he revealed that the mob was planning to kill John Mosler, the president of the Mosler Safe Company, and his wife, Sheila. “I was supposed to do it, but since I got pinched, they’re looking for someone else.”

The Moslers, wealthy New York socialites, had been robbed by three armed men a few weeks earlier. The crime had made a splash in the city’s newspapers and the police had arrested the robbers, but they were now free on bond awaiting trial. They had offered Danny $35,000 to kill the couple to keep them from testifying.

Shur hustled Danny into the office of Manhattan assistant district attorney Burton Roberts, but the meeting quickly turned ugly. Roberts wanted Danny to testify in court, a demand that surprised Shur. “Danny had come to me as an informant, and there’s a big difference between an informant and a witness,” he later explained. “An informant’s name always is kept secret. Witnesses are people who testify in public, so everyone knows who they are. Back in the sixties, we had lots of informants, but criminals rarely testified, especially against the Mob.” Roberts began yelling profanities at Danny, and the two men were still butting heads when Shur returned to Washington hours later. Around 3
A.M
. Shur was jarred awake by his telephone. “Great
news, Gerry!” Roberts declared. “Your man has agreed to testify.” Shur felt sick.

“What’s wrong?” Miriam asked.

“I might just have set a guy up for a beating by the police.”

When Shur returned to New York City, he checked on Danny. “I was afraid you’d been beaten,” he told him.

“They ain’t that stupid,” Danny replied. “Besides, they got other ways to make you talk.” Danny would later claim that two cops had held him out an upstairs window by his feet and threatened to drop him to his death unless he testified.
The New York Times
published a flattering story that described how prosecutor Roberts, with the help of a Justice Department attorney, had uncovered a plot to kill the Moslers. When the case came to trial, the robbers were sentenced to twenty years in prison and the charges against Danny were dropped.

Shur’s education as a Justice Department crime fighter was just beginning. His next big case plunged him into a mob war being fought between Joseph Profaci, the head of a New York crime family, and the Gallo brothers, Albert, Joseph, and Larry, who had once been loyal to Profaci but were now trying to topple him. This was heady stuff for Shur because Profaci was one of the crime bosses on Kennedy’s personal hit list for immediate prosecution. He was also one of the richest Mafia godfathers in America. He lived in a mansion on a 328-acre Long Island estate that had its own hunting lodge and private airfield. Kennedy had a personal interest in the Gallo brothers, too. “He had subpoenaed them to testify before the McClellan committee,” Shur recalled, “and when they arrived in the Senate committee’s offices to meet Kennedy, they began frisking
everyone there. As soon as Kennedy heard what they were doing, he rushed into the lobby and stopped them. At that point, one of them mentioned that he was a big fan of John Kennedy and asked if there was anything he and his brothers could do to help get him elected as president. Robert Kennedy replied: ‘Campaign for Nixon.’ ”

Thus far, a half-dozen gangsters had been murdered and ten wounded in what the New York tabloids were calling the Gallo-Profaci “mattress war”—a reference to the mob term “hitting the mattresses.” During a gang war, mobsters slept together on mattresses in their hideout at night and stacked them against the doors and windows for protection from bullets during the day. The Gallos were holed up on their home turf in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. Early on, Profaci had been forced to flee his mansion during a surprise attack. He’d escaped through a back door still wearing his silk pajamas and was now commanding his troops from a secret hideaway in Florida. The mattress war had started after Profaci had convinced the Gallos to murder one of their closest friends, a Brooklyn bookie. Profaci had promised to cut them in on the bookie’s lucrative numbers racket after the killing. Instead, he had kept the racket for himself, sparking the war.

Shur got involved when an IRS agent told him that a gangster wanted to talk in exchange for help. By the time Shur got to the hotel where the gangster was being hidden, the Brooklyn chief of the IRS and his assistant were already interrogating him. He was introduced to Shur only by the initials R.B. He claimed a Profaci capo had offered him $30,000 to murder Larry Gallo, but he had turned down the contract because he was trying to avoid being dragged into the war. The
next day, two armed men had grabbed R.B. and forced him to drive to Staten Island. Along the way they picked up two more goons, and when they reached a beach, the four men began beating him: “They told me Larry Gallo was giving me a present.” When the thugs took a heavy chain and several cement blocks from the car trunk, R.B. knew he was about to be killed and dumped in the water, so he broke free. His attackers began shooting, but he ducked under a pier and eluded them. Desperate, he’d called an IRS agent who had investigated him, and asked for help.

For several hours, Shur and several IRS officials questioned R.B. about the maneuvering going on in the mattress war. It was well after midnight by the time they let him go to bed. Although R.B. had contacted the IRS, Shur said he wanted the FBI to take charge of him because its agents were investigating several gang murders and R.B. might be able to help solve them. None of the IRS agents complained, but Shur could tell by their faces that they weren’t happy about turning their informant over to another agency. They left the hotel room a few minutes later, leaving Shur and two IRS agents behind to protect R.B. Exhausted, Shur lay down on the other bed. His head had just hit the pillow when someone pounded on the door. The agents sprang toward the door, guns drawn, while Shur hit the floor: “We thought Larry Gallo was going to come busting in, guns blazing.” But nothing happened. Finally an agent peeked outside. A drunk had passed out while trying to get into the wrong room. “You know,” one of the agents told Shur, “you really need to start carrying a gun.”