Witsec (41 page)

Suddenly Shur appeared from nowhere, but her feeling of relief turned to fear when she saw there were two men walking next to him. “Oh God,” she thought, “he’s being kidnapped! It’s really happening!” In that instant, she decided to ignore him when they passed. She would try to hurry outside and get Haynes.

“Miriam!” Shur called out. “We couldn’t find you!”

The two men with him were deputy marshals. When he had landed and had not seen Haynes and Miriam, he telephoned the WITSEC office and by chance discovered that two deputies happened to be putting a witness on a flight near his gate. They had hurried over to protect him. Miriam looked around, but the man following her was gone. Although they would laugh about it later and decide the incident had been innocent, both of them had been frightened at the time. The line between caution and paranoia was easy to blur.

“I thought about all the times witnesses had told me how they had landed in an airport and were supposed to be met by deputies but no one was there,” said Shur. “Once again, I was getting a taste of what it felt like to feel vulnerable.”

They also realized they were becoming attached to Wanda Watson Haynes. She was becoming one of the family. She went with Miriam when she visited her mother or had to shop. Shur knew WITSEC inspectors were warned not to become too friendly with persons they guarded. Some inspectors called it “the Partington syndrome.” But staying at arm’s length was tough. “There was no doubt in my mind that Wanda would
have taken a bullet for Miriam,” Shur said later. “How could we not care about her?”

After two months they were sick of hiding. They ached for old routines, felt they had no privacy. When Shur’s first boss, Henry Petersen, died unexpectedly, Shur had to be escorted to the funeral by WITSEC inspectors. “It was obvious that I was being protected, but not one of my colleagues asked why. They knew I couldn’t talk about it, but it was strange. It was as if all of us accepted the idea that we could someday be targets.”

After one more week, Shur had had enough of hotel life. It was beginning to affect his health. Three years earlier he had been diagnosed with a hiatal hernia. But when his condition didn’t improve, he decided to get a second opinion. The doctor called in a cardiologist, who found a serious heart problem and immediately put him in the hospital. “I’m concerned that you may not live through the night,” he warned. The next morning, Shur underwent double bypass surgery. He left the hospital determined to watch his diet, and he had shed forty pounds since then. “I got down to a weight of one-sixty, which was good for a five-foot ten-inch man,” he said, “but I started gaining immediately after we moved into the hotel. I was totally out of my exercise and food routine. Before I knew it, I was back to two hundred. I told Miriam, ‘We have to get home or this hiding out is going to kill me!’ ”

WITSEC chief Coon reluctantly agreed to let them move back aboard their trawler, but only after a night-vision video camera was installed on the topmast and monitors put in every room. They were thrilled to go home. Because of the kidnap threat, they had stopped going out at night and had canceled their
vacation plans. The
Half-and-Half
gave them back their base.

There was one outing they refused to cancel. Each summer they took members of a local multiple sclerosis support group on their trawler across the Chesapeake Bay to visit a maritime museum. They were scheduled to make two trips, one on a Saturday, another on a Sunday, taking twenty guests on each day trip. “Some of these people had been looking forward to this for months,” said Shur. But there was more to it than that. They were tired of changing their plans because of the threat. Their decision to go ahead was a defiant gesture, a way to strike back at an unseen foe. Inspector Haynes and another WITSEC specialist, Joe Simon, volunteered to give up their weekend to protect them during the rides.

In late July the FBI finally got a break in its investigation. An informant in Florida told DEA agents that the Medellín cartel had hired a private detective in Miami to find Max Mermelstein. The FBI wanted to know if he also had been asked to find the Shurs. The cartel had used private detectives before to locate people it wanted to kill. It was a practice the FBI wanted to stop. It sent two agents to question the detective and warn him that if he helped the cartel locate Mermelstein and the witness was murdered, the government would arrest him as an accessory.

The detective admitted he had been hired to find Mermelstein, but claimed his clients were television reporters who wanted to interview Mermelstein, not drug dealers. When the agents asked for the reporters’ names so they could verify the detective’s story, he refused to say anything more, citing client privilege. He told them, however, that he had never heard of Gerald Shur.

Back in Maryland, the Shurs were beginning to
relax. Then one night they were jarred awake by the sound of motorcycles entering the marina parking lot. From the trawler’s master stateroom, Shur trained the night-vision video camera on the shoreline, and the image of six bikers appeared on the monitor. They were looking directly at
Half-and-Half
. Shur knew that drug dealers frequently used motorcycle gangs to do their hits. He prepared for the worst. He laid his Glock nine-millimeter automatic, a Ruger Mini-14 autoloading rifle, and a shotgun on a table next to him. “I took out several clips of ammunition and shotgun shells,” he recalled later. “I wanted to make sure I had enough rounds to stop all six of them if they began boarding the trawler. I had the phone, too, and was ready to call the local police. Miriam and I watched the monitor and waited.”

It was a surreal moment: the two of them sitting in the dark on their boat, surrounded by guns, their eyes glued to the black-and-white monitor, and the six bikers seated on their Harleys, calmly watching the trawler from the dock. It was like a twisted scene from
High Noon
. Shur had always been an outspoken critic of the death penalty. To him, life was sacred, all lives worth saving. But this was different. “I had never shot anyone, and you always wonder what you’d do in a situation like this one,” he said later. As he sat there his doubts disappeared. “When it looks like it is going to finally happen to you, you don’t wonder at all. I was ready to open fire if they came through that door.”

Moments later, a biker reached into a saddlebag and began to pull something from it. Shur zoomed the camera in just as the biker removed a bottle of whiskey. They passed it around and then rode off. Neither of the Shurs slept that night.

It never ended. A few days later, Miriam spotted
two men near her car over by the dock, and when one of them crawled underneath it, she dialed 911. The local police had been told about the kidnap threat and were there within minutes. Shur raced home. The pair turned out to be mechanics from a local garage who had been sent to pick up a car that a boat owner had asked them to service while he was out of town. He’d told them the keys would be behind a back wheel, which is why they had crawled under Miriam’s car. They had mistaken it for his.

“I’d reached the limit. The investigation was going nowhere and there were no more leads,” Shur said. Even though the FBI, DEA, and Marshals Service urged him not to do it, Shur flew to New Mexico to confront Félix Bersago face-to-face.

“I’m Gerald Shur,” he declared when he stepped into the Valachi Suite. “I’m the man you were supposed to kidnap.”

“No, you’re not,” said Bersago. “You’re too old. Shur’s in his forties.”

Bersago had never seen a photograph of Shur, but he’d been given a description by the cartel and it didn’t match. “I began interrogating him,” Shur said, “and I began to suspect from his answers that the cartel had not been after me. It had been after Gene Coon, the WITSEC chief.” Bersago’s notebook had contained the words “Gerald Shur” and “WITSEC,” but the address in the book had been Arlington, Virginia, which was where the Marshals Service WITSEC offices were headquartered and where Coon worked. “I decided the cartel had given Bersago the wrong name.” Shur hurried from the cell and telephoned Coon’s office, but he was out of the country on an assignment. A WITSEC inspector was sent to warn Coon’s wife, Lynn. “The Marshals Service had insisted I be protected,” Shur
recalled, “but Gene was one of their own and the threat to him and his family was seen as an occupational hazard. I thought it was outrageous, but they refused to take any extra steps to protect him. None. The feeling was that he had been trained to deal with these threats.”

Shur finally began to relax when he got back to Miriam and
Half-and-Half
. Not long after that, he received word that the Medellín cartel had finally crumbled. The Ochoa brothers had agreed to plead guilty in Colombia to cocaine smuggling charges to avoid being extradited to the United States. They were now cooperating with Colombian prosecutors, turning against the assassins and others in their own organization who had made them rich. Pablo Escobar had also surrendered to avoid being turned over to the United States. But he had not been sent to one of Colombia’s overcrowded prisons. He was serving his sentence in a “prison” that he had built for himself in Medellín. When the United States investigated, it discovered the walled compound was actually a luxury villa, and it began pressuring the Colombians to move Escobar into a real prison. More than a hundred troops went to forcibly evict him one morning, but he had been tipped off and had escaped into the jungle. From there he launched yet another bloody campaign, killing fifteen persons. But this time his
plata o plomo
actions backfired. Vigilantes, who called themselves Los Pepes, an acronym for
perseguidos por Pablo Escobar
—“people persecuted by Pablo Escobar”—burned and looted his mansion, broke into a warehouse and destroyed all his luxury cars, and began methodically killing bankers, money launderers, and lawyers who had helped him operate his cocaine empire. At one point, Los Pepes was killing as many as five people a day without interference
from the police. When the assassinations grew to more than three hundred, including several of Escobar’s relatives, he tried to send his wife and children to Europe, but no country would grant them visas. On December 2, 1993, a special team created specifically to hunt down Escobar traced a telephone call that he had made to a local radio station to protest how his family had been forced into hiding. His bodyguards were killed in the gun battle that followed, and he was wounded trying to escape. A team member stepped up to him as he lay bleeding on the roof of a building and shot him point-blank in the ear.

Max Mermelstein learned about Escobar’s death on a newscast. He had voluntarily left WITSEC and moved to a new city, where he changed his name and found work completely on his own. Only a handful of federal agents knew how to reach him. While the death of Escobar meant an end to the cartel, Mermelstein still was listed as a potential witness in several unresolved drug prosecutions. Most of the accused had not been captured. “It’s still not safe for me to surface,” Mermelstein explained during a telephone call from an unknown location. “It may never be. I suspect I will be in hiding the rest of my life.”

The INS, meanwhile, rejected Félix Bersago’s request for asylum once the FBI decided it was pointless to continue questioning him about the kidnap plot. He was put on an international flight and expelled from the country. A few weeks later, he telephoned Shur to see if he would help him become an undercover operative for the DEA overseas. Shur said no. To this day, no one is certain whom Bersago was supposed to kidnap: Shur, Coon, or some other WITSEC official.

“Over the years, Howard Safir and I had warned witnesses that WITSEC was a program of last resort,”
said Shur. “Miriam and I had only been forced to hide for a few months—we did not have to endure the drastic changes most witnesses face—but I now knew firsthand that what we were saying was right on target. Being relocated was something I would not wish on anyone. The only reason to do it was if it was your only hope to stay alive.”

I
nside the Marshals Service, they were known as Howard Safir’s “black bag jobs”—special missions that usually involved WITSEC, were dangerous, and almost always had the potential for scandal. In December 1985, a delegation of DEA agents met secretly with Safir to discuss just such an operation. As soon as he heard why they needed his help, he agreed.

A month later, four deputies handpicked by Safir slipped across the U.S. border into Mexico, where they rendezvoused with six state judicial police officers the DEA had said they could trust. Safir’s men had no legal authority in Mexico, a fact that was historically so well known it was often dramatized in old Wild West movies by having outlaws race across the Rio Grande on horseback and then thumb their noses at deputy marshals stuck on the American side. Officially, the deputies were advisers, there simply to watch what was happening, and for ten days that is exactly what they did. Then on January 24, the deputies and Mexican officers followed Rene Martin Verdugo Urquidez, a known drug dealer, and his family to a birthday party that he was hosting in the resort town of San Felipe for one of his sons. Midway through the festivities, Verdugo left the party to drive to a nearby liquor store to buy ice and beer. The deputies and Mexicans
swooped down. Using three rental cars the deputies had driven into Mexico, the lawmen shot in front of and behind Verdugo, pinning in his vehicle. The Mexican policemen jerked him from his car, handcuffed and blindfolded him, and pushed him into the backseat of one of their cars. With the Americans trailing them, the Mexicans raced toward the border. Verdugo’s wife, who had witnessed the abduction, telephoned his attorney and notified the local police. Verdugo had several of them on his drug payroll, and they immediately threw up roadblocks and began searching for him. To avoid being caught, the deputies and Mexicans careened off the highway, shooting across the desert. It was now night, but they kept their headlights off, traveling blindly at eighty miles an hour until they reached the chain-link fence that separated the two countries. At that point, the car carrying the deputies shot ahead, flipping on its headlights. “Here it is!” the driver declared, slamming on his brakes, as he pulled toward a hole that had been cut into the fence. The Mexicans dragged Verdugo from their car and shoved him toward it. Deputy Tony Perez, who was in charge of the operation, crawled through the opening. The Mexicans shoved the still blindfolded Verdugo after him through the opening into Perez’s waiting arms.