Witsec (40 page)

Both Keeney and Coon wanted Shur to be protected by deputies, but he didn’t think it necessary. No one could enter his office without passing through several security checkpoints and being buzzed into the WITSEC section. The only time he thought he would be vulnerable was when he was commuting in his car, so when he left work that night, two deputies followed him. After tailing him for fifteen minutes, one of the deputies called Shur on his cellular telephone and assured him that no one was tracking them. Nonetheless, Shur, who had a handgun within reach, decided to drive around for another hour before heading toward Baltimore. “I wanted to make certain I wasn’t leading anyone to Miriam. I spent more time with my eyes on
the rearview mirror than looking through the windshield.” Finally, when he was absolutely convinced that it was safe, he turned north. An hour later, the port city’s skyline came within his view, and he was struck by the irony of this moment. Shur had never gotten along well with Mermelstein, and he had been one of Shur’s harshest critics. Now Shur and Miriam were going into hiding to protect him.

•   •   •

Mermelstein was told about the kidnap plot a few hours after Shur. He had never heard of a hit man named Bersago, he said. Nor was he particularly concerned about Shur. He and Shur had gotten into a bitter dispute a year earlier, when the CBS news show
60 Minutes
had wanted to broadcast a segment about Mermelstein’s life as a cocaine cowboy. He had just written a book and was eager to promote it, but Shur had ordered him not to appear on the program. When sales of
The Man Who Made It Snow
were not as good as Mermelstein had hoped, he blamed Shur. Now the tables were turned. Gerald Shur was finally going to discover what it was like to be one of the hunted.

M
iriam Shur had been told not to open the door to her hotel room unless her husband knocked two times and then quickly gave three more raps. It was a signal that no one was holding a gun to his back. As soon as she heard the secret knock, she opened the door and Shur hustled inside.

“An informant has told us he was hired to kidnap either you or me and torture us to get me to tell him where a witness is hidden,” he explained. During the next several minutes, he told her everything he knew about the plot. Finally, he asked: “Do you want to leave town for a while?”

“Heavens, no!” she replied. “I have report cards to fill out.”

He had expected as much. Miriam did not frighten easily. Once she had looked outside their house and spotted two men parked in a car, suspiciously eyeing a neighbor’s home. Without thinking about the danger, she marched up and demanded to know what they were doing. “We’re cops, lady,” one replied gruffly, flashing a badge. “We’re on a stakeout. Now get out of here.” Miriam had always accepted the dangers that came with her husband’s job. “It is part of being married to a man in law enforcement,” she said. It was as simple as that.

Shur wondered sometimes if Miriam had gotten her grit from her great-grandmother, Sheema Heifetz, who had been forced to abandon her home in Russia and escape with her three grandchildren after their widowed father had been murdered during Cossack pogroms against the Jews. En route, Great-grandma Heifetz had prevented drunken soldiers from raping her granddaughter, foiled a border crossing guard’s attempt to hold one of the children hostage for ransom, survived a bubonic plague epidemic, and secured ship passage to America for the family even though she had almost no money. Miriam brought a deep steadiness to their marriage. She ran the home, reared the children, taught school, and accepted as part of the job the long hours that Shur spent at the Justice Department, his frequent trips, and the mysterious telephone calls at all hours from prosecutors and deputy marshals who demanded to speak to him immediately.

“Normally, we would have enjoyed spending a weekend sightseeing in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor,” Shur said later, “but knowing we were potential kidnap targets changed all that.” They found themselves being unusually cautious whenever they stepped outside the hotel room. They were suspicious of people walking behind them, especially if they were there for a long time. They stood back from the sidewalk curbs in case a car zoomed up and someone leaped out and tried to grab them. They felt suspended in time. Everyone around them was going about their normal routines, but they were in hiding, their lives on hold.

Shur and Howard Safir had once discussed what they would want the Justice Department to do if one of them was kidnapped. They had agreed that they wouldn’t want the government to negotiate for their release because if it did, it would encourage other kidnappings.
But that had been when Shur was talking to Safir. It had been hypothetical. Now it was real. And now it was Miriam who was in jeopardy. She was a civilian, an innocent bystander. No one had asked her to put her life on the line to fight crime. The idea of losing her terrified him. He decided to ask her how she felt, what she would want him to do if she was kidnapped.

“I wouldn’t want you to negotiate,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for more kidnappings.” Of course, she added jokingly, she hoped he would do whatever he could to save her. They laughed, and then Shur had told her that he didn’t have a clue where Max Mermelstein had been relocated. “This is great,” he said, trying, like her, to joke about the threat. “Me with a low pain threshold—and no useful information whatsoever for kidnappers. It’s not a good combination.”

Shur had lectured thousands of WITSEC witnesses in the past two decades about the sorts of problems they were likely to face once they entered the program. Now he was about to discover firsthand what it felt like to hide. Much to his surprise, he would learn that it was more difficult than even he had imagined.

On Sunday night, he called the hotel’s front desk to ask for a wake-up call. “What’s your name?” the desk clerk asked. Shur couldn’t remember. The WITSEC inspector had checked them in under a pseudonym. It was such a simple thing, but he didn’t have a clue. He began coughing, quickly covered the telephone receiver with his hand, and whispered to Miriam: “What’s our name?”

“Parker,” she whispered back. “Gerald Parker.”

Neither of them wanted to continue staying in Baltimore. To them, living in such a nice hotel was a
waste of taxpayers’ money. Plus, it was inconvenient. But WITSEC chief Coon said it was too risky for them to return home, especially since home was not a house but a boat. It had been Miriam’s idea to sell their Bowie home after their children had grown, and move onto a forty-two-foot trawler that they christened
Half-and-Half
. The name had come from the way Shur addressed Miriam in letters: “To one half from one half, together we make a whole.” Both enjoyed living on water. Their trawler had teak-capped beams, a spacious master stateroom, two heads, and a spare bedroom. They liked the romance of it, the ability to pick up and cruise across the bay on a whim. They kept their trawler docked at a family-owned marina near Annapolis, Maryland, and liked the fact they were the only live-aboards docked there.

At first, Shur had thought living on a boat would give them an advantage in evading kidnappers. But it turned out that finding where
Half-and-Half
was docked was easy. WITSEC inspector John Cleveland had made a few telephone calls to the U.S. Coast Guard and Maryland licensing officials posing as a high school chum of Shur’s, and they had not only told him where the trawler was docked, but offered him a floor plan of the craft when he asked what it looked like.

At Coon’s insistence, the Shurs moved into an all-suite hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, where their room came equipped with a kitchen and was rented by the month. It was about thirty miles from the marina where they lived. Because this was seen as a temporary relocation, the Shurs didn’t have to sever their contacts with their family and friends, but WITSEC arranged for Shur to get a driver’s license under the name of Gerald Parker for identification, since that was how he had been registered at the hotel. They had to stop and think
about what name to use when the phones in their new quarters rang. One phone was connected to the hotel, but WITSEC had arranged for calls made to their boat to be forwarded to a portable phone they kept in the hotel. On one line, they were the Parkers, on the other, the Shurs.

Coon insisted that Miriam be guarded at work. He assigned a young inspector named Wanda Watson Haynes to pick her up each morning at the hotel, drive her to school, and stay with her in the classroom until she finished and returned to their hotel quarters. Miriam told the school’s principal, Arlene Verge, about the threat, and Haynes assured her that the chances of a kidnapper bursting into the school and snatching up Miriam were slim. She was most vulnerable when traveling to and from school. Still, no one wanted to take chances. With Verge’s blessing, Miriam introduced Haynes to the other teachers as her new aide. Haynes told them she had just finished college and was trying to decide whether or not she really wanted to teach full time. “No one would have ever guessed, looking at her in that classroom, sitting on the floor reading a story to the children, that she had a handgun hidden under her jacket and was a tiger in sheep’s clothing,” said Shur.

Coon wanted to assign an inspector to watch over Shur, too, but he refused. Instead, two deputies met him each night when he was ready to leave the Justice Department and followed him until they were satisfied that he wasn’t being followed by anyone else.

As soon as Shur had been told about the kidnap threat, he arranged for Félix Bersago to be moved into the BOP’s Valachi Suite and for the FBI to give him a polygraph. The results showed he was “not being deceptive” about the kidnap plot. It was real. However,
the examiner suspected from his answers that he was also holding back information. When the FBI bore down, Bersago revealed the cartel had given him a telephone number in Medellín to call after he sneaked into the United States. He was supposed to receive further instructions about how to go about finding and kidnapping Shur. The number seemed to be the FBI’s best lead, so its agents dialed it and put Bersago on the line. But the man who answered claimed he had never heard of Shur, Mermelstein, or a kidnapping plot. He referred Bersago to an attorney in Miami known for representing drug dealers. The FBI called him, but that call, too, went nowhere. The attorney said he didn’t have a clue who Bersago was or what he wanted. Obviously, the cartel had somehow figured out that Bersago had been caught. But how? The most likely explanation was that someone had been watching Bersago, perhaps another potential kidnapper. Shur was told to remain in hiding.

When the Shurs’ trawler was moved to a nearby military base for safekeeping, no one paid much attention. After a few days of feeling uneasy, they tried to get back to their normal routines. They couldn’t. When the hotel’s fire alarm went off one night and the other tenants rushed outside, Shur suspected it might be a ruse to lure Miriam and him from their room. He held her back until they were fully dressed and he had stashed his pistol under his jacket. While everyone outside was watching the firefighters who came to the hotel, Shur nervously scanned the crowd. It turned out that another tenant had started a grease fire.

“I had told witnesses when they entered WITSEC that the best thing I could do was to relocate them someplace far away from their home so they didn’t have to keep looking over their shoulders,” Shur recalled.
“But now I was someplace different and I was still looking.”

Other lessons quickly followed. Their first weekend, they went grocery shopping at a store near the hotel and were about to push their cart into the checkout line when one of Miriam’s cousins came inside. She lived miles away and had decided to stop there by chance. Neither of the Shurs wanted her to spot them and ask why they were shopping so far from their boat, so they abandoned the grocery cart and dashed down an aisle. They played keep-away from her until they could slip unnoticed out an exit. “I’d had witnesses tell me stories about running into persons from their pasts in completely unexpected places—during vacations, in elevators, walking through airports,” said Shur. “I suddenly realized those stories weren’t as odd as I had thought.”

Shur was surprised how impatient he was becoming with the kidnapping case. There wasn’t much Félix Bersago could add to his story. The FBI continued pressing him for facts, and it sent a daily progress report to one of Shur’s top analysts, who had been assigned to monitor the case. But there were no new leads. The best the FBI could offer Shur was simply to keep hiding and be patient.

A frustrated Shur, meanwhile, was learning that one of the worst parts of hiding was lying. “After a while, you got used to the idea that someone might be watching you or be after you,” he explained. “You convinced yourself that you were safe, that they couldn’t find you. But the lying was something that neither of us ever got used to doing, especially to people we loved.”

They had to beg off sitting with the family at their granddaughter Adena’s high school graduation so they
wouldn’t endanger anyone else. They said Shur had to work late, then they rushed into the ceremony after it started, sat by themselves, and left early. They gave their children the same excuse on Father’s Day, arranging for a picnic inside the Justice Department’s courtyard, where guards were on duty, instead of gathering at home. Family events just weren’t the same. The isolation was beginning to take a toll. The Shurs were being cheated out of memories.

About five weeks after they first went into hiding, Shur was scheduled to speak at a wardens’ conference outside Philadelphia, and since he was going to be inspecting a WITSEC prison unit in Phoenix prior to it, he decided to fly directly to the Philadelphia airport from Arizona rather than returning home first. Miriam and Wanda Watson Haynes were supposed to meet him at the gate, but they were delayed in traffic and when they reached the terminal, they couldn’t find a parking spot. Haynes double-parked, stuck the car’s red police beacon on top of the roof, and telephoned the office to ask if the flight had already landed while Miriam dashed inside. Shur wasn’t at the gate and Miriam became suspicious when a man who had been waiting there stood up suddenly and fell into step behind her. Thinking that she was overreacting, she stepped inside an airport souvenir shop and began surveying the magazines. A few seconds later, she glanced to her left and spotted the man again. He was watching her from outside the store’s window. She turned back to the magazines and then glanced over again. He was gone. Hurrying to a pay phone, she dialed her husband’s pager number. As she waited for him to return her call, she looked around. The man from the gate was watching her from some fifty feet away. Unsure what to do, Miriam left the phone and began walking toward the
gate. If he followed, she would know for certain that he was stalking her.