Witsec (45 page)

“I felt Halberstam had a right to be angry and, if necessary, to scream at the person responsible for moving Welch,” said Shur, “so I took the call, and when I got on the line, Halberstam asked me why someone such as Welch had been put into WITSEC. I explained why I had let him into a WITSEC prison unit. I assured him Welch was never going to be given a new identity or relocated. We had simply moved him from one prison to another to protect him from other inmates. Then I told him how sorry I was that Welch had escaped. He was angry at the loss of his brother and the escape, but polite. I felt awful afterward. I always did in these situations.”

CBS correspondent Fred Graham had been a close friend of the murder victim, and he editorialized on the air about Welch’s escape. “Gerald Shur … who accepted Welch into the Witness Protection Program … says it ‘disgusted’ him to accept Welch, but he did so because Welch gave important evidence to a grand jury,” Graham told viewers. “But this is a flaw that has plagued the Witness Protection Program: Government lawyers seeking more convictions make deals with criminals who sometimes con the prosecutors in ways that produce more crimes and more heartbreak for innocent citizens.… Michael Halberstam’s death has no meaning left at all.”

When Welch was caught four months later, police found a million dollars’ worth of stolen goods in his
apartment and tied him to some forty burglaries, even though he had been on the loose for only four months. “I called David Halberstam and told him about Welch’s capture. It was the only thing I could do,” said Shur, “but while he thanked me, it clearly wasn’t enough.”

Shur knew from the statistical data available at the time that for every relocated witness who committed a new crime, there were three others who had not. He had testified so often about WITSEC that he could quote a slew of statistics that showed it had successfully removed thousands of criminals from the street, kept witnesses safe, and caused relatively little harm to the public. He could cite individual success stories—gangsters such as Pete “the Greek” Diapoulos, who had been Crazy Joe Gallo’s bodyguard on April 7, 1972, when a lone gunman had walked into Umberto’s Clam House in New York’s Little Italy and opened fire. Gallo had been murdered, Diapoulos wounded. Few had thought the tough mobster would reform, but he had. “WITSEC gave me a new life,” he recalled almost three decades after the shooting. “It gave me a chance to correct my life, and I never got into trouble again. Never.”

But when Shur had to deal with the Halberstams of the world and the families of victims of witnesses such as Marion Pruett and Arthur Kane, all of his statistics and success stories seemed hollow. “I knew what I was doing was for a greater good, but that still didn’t stop me from going home some nights heartbroken because of what had happened. I just didn’t have all the answers. That was frustrating.”

B
Y 1989, Shur was well-known inside the Justice Department as a problem solver who could maneuver through the bureaucracy and get complicated jobs done without bruising egos. Few were surprised when the Office of International Affairs (OIA) asked if he would take charge of the government’s international prisoner transfer program. Shur looked into it and was shocked by what he discovered. Prior to the 1970s, few U.S. citizens had been arrested overseas and sentenced to long terms in foreign prisons. But the spread and use of illegal drugs changed this. Hundreds of American prisoners were now languishing in foreign prisons, often in inhumane conditions, and little was being done to help them because of red tape, confusion, and cultural misunderstandings. He jumped right in.

The Americans were not going to be turned loose after they were returned to the United States. They were going to be sent to federal prisons to complete their sentences. Still, life in the worst federal prison here was considered better than being locked up in most foreign prisons, especially in poor countries where living conditions were brutal. The State Department was especially concerned about thirty-four prisoners being held in Thailand, including several young
women. According to a State Department report published in 1989, many of these women had been “seduced, lied to, or conned into transporting more than one kilo of heroin into Thailand.”

The report warned that living conditions in Thai prisons were so harsh that few American women were expected to survive long sentences.

“I had received letters from parents of several young people in Thai prisons for what I believed were
often foolish mistakes, even though they were criminal acts,” said Shur, “and when I thought about the heartbreak that these parents must have felt—first in learning that their daughter had been arrested and then discovering that she was receiving in their eyes the equivalent of a death sentence—I felt compelled to do what I could. I wasn’t naive. I knew some of these women had known full well what they were doing. But I still didn’t think anyone should have to die because of horrible living conditions, especially if I could get them back to the United States, where they would still be in prison, only a much safer and more sanitary one. The question was how was I going to help when I had been warned that Thai officials were very hesitant even to talk about this problem and were extremely sensitive about the criticism they were getting.”

Shur mulled over the problem his first night in Bangkok. “I decided that I was not born to be a diplomat, that I couldn’t dance around the issues, and that surely I could be direct without being offensive,” he said. “I decided I had to be straightforward with the Thais.”

He first went to meet personally with all the U.S. prisoners in Thai prisons. “The living conditions were appalling, even worse than I had read about. There were more flies than inmates in the prison kitchens. Sanitation didn’t exist. But as I toured these prisons, I realized that U.S. prisoners were actually being treated better than Thai prisoners. The truth was that Thais just didn’t like criminals.”

In meetings with Thai officials, Shur spoke candidly. “Despite what I had been told, the Thais were just as candid with me. No one was offended. One official said to me, ‘As with your government, our money is limited, and if we have a dollar to spend on a prisoner
or a child, we are going to spend it on the child.’ I discovered that criminals in Thailand are seen as outcasts, an affront to the Thais’ gentle culture.”

On May 11, 1990, as a result of Shur’s trip, three American prisoners were released from the Bangkwang maximum-security prison and turned over to a federal Bureau of Prisons officer who escorted them back to the United States. “It was the first transfer in the world of a foreign prisoner out of Thailand,” Shur said later. During the next decade, Thailand would transfer 195 foreign prisoners back to their home countries, including forty-seven to the United States. But the problem of naive women being used as “mules” continued. In January 2000, there were eighty-eight U.S. prisoners being held in Thailand. Most were women, and only six were awaiting transfer.

In a 1993 memo, Shur noted that the number of Americans being held in foreign jails now totaled 2,500, most of them on drug-related charges. The biggest group—nearly 450—was in Mexico. Next, in order, were Germany, Canada, and Jamaica. “I was shocked when I discovered how many U.S. citizens were being beaten and tortured in Mexico,” Shur later recalled, “so I met with Mexican government officials to learn what could be done to stop this. They told me there wasn’t much they could do. Nearly all the beatings and torture were taking place in local jails, and the officials said they didn’t have any way to stop that. Once the Americans were sent to a regular prison, the torture ended. The officials assured me that it was not just Americans who were being tortured—the local Mexican police tortured everyone. It was easier getting a confession than investigating a case. But I didn’t find that comforting.”

After Janet Reno became U.S. attorney general,
Shur was asked to oversee a large-scale prisoner transfer with Mexico, and in December 1993, one hundred Mexicans from United States prisons were swapped at the border for one hundred American prisoners. “Working on prisoner transfers appealed to my social-worker instincts,” said Shur. “I felt having prisoners serve their time in prisons where they could speak the language, get visits from their family and friends, and understand the culture was much more rehabilitative than having them stuck in a foreign country.”

•   •   •

A short time after Shur first began overseeing prisoner transfers, he was given yet another task that had nothing to do with WITSEC, and while he enjoyed his reputation for being a Justice Department pinch-hitter, this one turned his stomach.

In 1990, he was called before associate deputy attorney general Margaret Love and asked to draft a list of parole conditions for the release of Orlando Bosch, a militant anti-Castro activist who had become a hero to many Cuban-Americans. Bosch had been accused in the 1970s of helping plant a bomb on a Cuban-bound ship and of firing a bazooka at a freighter as part of an anti-Castro terrorism campaign. He had fled to Latin America but had been arrested in Venezuela and charged with masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airliner in October 1976 in which seventy-three people died. Bosch had spent eleven years in prison there while undergoing two trials, but he had been acquitted both times and finally released. When he returned to the United States in 1988, he was arrested by the INS and declared an undesirable alien since he was still a Cuban citizen. He was ordered deported. But no other country except Cuba would accept him, and the government
was afraid that he would be executed if he was sent back. So Bosch had spent the last two years inside a federal prison.

“I didn’t understand why we were suddenly going to release an airplane bomber who had killed so many people,” Shur said later, “so I asked, ‘Why? Why are we now going to release him?’ Love told me that the White House had ordered the Justice Department to parole Bosch because President George Bush had received a call from his son Jeb, who had told his father that if he wanted to carry the Cuban vote in the next presidential election, he needed to release Orlando Bosch. I left that meeting
hot
, and on my way back to my office I thought about resigning. But then I decided that somebody else would just be given the job, so I decided I would draft the absolutely toughest rules possible for Bosch to follow. I was not going to make it easy on him.”

Shur and a colleague drafted fourteen strict rules. If Bosch broke them, his parole could be revoked and he could be returned to prison. “One of them,” Shur recalled, “was that he would be under house arrest.” Not long after he submitted the restrictions to Love, Bosch was released. He received a hero’s welcome from his supporters in Florida and held an immediate press conference in Coconut Grove, during which he condemned the restrictions that Shur had imposed. Even though he had been required by the restrictions to sever all connections with two militant anti-Castro groups, Bosch lauded both as “heroes of Cuba and heroes of mine” during his news conference and hinted that he would do whatever he could to support them.

Only one national newspaper saw politics at play. In an editorial,
The New York Times
questioned the timing of his release and speculated that Jeb Bush had
pulled strings. It noted that the Justice Department, “under no legal compulsion, but conspicuous political pressure,” had freed Bosch because of lobbying by “President Bush’s son, Jeb,” and it ended with this comment: “In the name of fighting terrorism, the U.S. sent the Air Force to bomb Libya … yet now the Bush administration coddles one of the hemisphere’s most notorious terrorists. And for what reason? The only one evident is currying favor in South Florida.”

Shur was angry for weeks. “Releasing a guy who was blowing up airplanes with innocent people aboard in exchange for winning the Cuban-American vote, and then having him bitch about the conditions of his parole, was tough for me to swallow. I kept hoping for more of a public outcry, but there was none.”

Shortly after Bosch was freed, several Cuban hotels were bombed and the Castro government blamed “the followers of activist Orlando Bosch” for the explosions. In Florida, Bosch denied it, but added that he was not unhappy it had happened.

•   •   •

The Justice Department had yet another prison-related assignment for Shur. He was asked to lead a delegation to the Bahamas to investigate complaints by U.S. prisoners who claimed the living conditions in the islands’ Foxhill Penitentiary were barbaric. “Conditions there were worse than what I had seen in Thailand,” he said later. “Prisoners who couldn’t afford to bribe their guards were getting little food and not being allowed out of their cells to exercise.”

When it came time for Shur to meet privately with American prisoners, he was led to a table and chair in a small dark room. A few minutes later, the door opened, but because there was a bright light behind
the inmate standing there, Shur could see only his silhouette.

“Hello, Gerry,” the inmate said. “What the hell did you do to get sent down to this hellhole?”