Witsec (46 page)

It was one of the very first Mafia witnesses whom he had put into the WITSEC program. Shur had not seen him for nearly twenty years and had no idea that he was in the Bahamian prison. “This is a frame-up,” the prisoner said. “As soon as a new president is elected down here, I’ll be released.”

Shur returned home to file his report, and under U.S. pressure, the Bahamian government promised to improve conditions at the facility. A few months later, Shur learned the former WITSEC inmate had, in fact, talked his way out of prison after the presidential election. He was not surprised.

T
he face of crime was changing once again in the early 1990s.

Having dealt with gangsters and drug traffickers, Shur faced two new enemies: inner-city gangs and international terrorists. Washington, D.C., was especially hard hit by gang violence, sparked largely by the spread of crack cocaine. It had a per capita murder rate three times higher than any other U.S. city. In 85 percent of all homicides, the police said they knew who the murderers were, but they could bring charges against only one-third of their suspects because witnesses were too scared to testify.

A gruesome example of the sort of intimidation the police were up against involved a Washington street gang that called itself the First Street Crew. The killing began after Arvell “Pork Chop” Williams, who was a friend of several gang members, volunteered to help police infiltrate an undercover narcotics officer into the gang. Word about his offer leaked out, and one afternoon while he was sitting in his parked car on a busy street, two gang members ran up next to the driver’s window and began firing. They shot a total of eighteen times and then casually walked away. When the police arrived, they spotted several gang members mingling with onlookers. They were sipping sodas,
munching on potato chips, and keeping track of whom the police were questioning. The first witness who agreed to testify was murdered two days after he was seen talking to the police. Three more were killed a week later. Despite the danger, other eyewitnesses identified the killers, and police charged two gang members with murder. For the next ten months there were no killings. Then, during a preliminary court hearing, a defense lawyer began grilling the chief detective in the case about his witnesses. To protect them, the detective referred to them only by numbers: W-2 and W-3. Age, sex, and address were not revealed, but within hours, a forty-one-year-old woman known to have information about the murder was shot as she walked home from a bus stop. As she lay bleeding on the sidewalk, her killer put his gun into her mouth and pulled the trigger again—a message to other potential witnesses. During the next four months, seven more witnesses were murdered, bringing the total dead to twelve. The gang seemed to be methodically eliminating potential witnesses within hours after each was questioned. Suspicious, the police began looking for possible leaks and discovered that a private detective had been hired by the gang to shadow them. By the time the trial started, forty witnesses were in hiding. Both of the murderers were found guilty.

Federal prosecutors, the D.C. police, and gang experts told Shur that the traditional WITSEC program was too harsh a solution for the witnesses in these cases. Many of them didn’t want to be permanently uprooted from their communities and cut off from their family and friends. Inner-city gangs usually consisted of only a few members and operated within a few blocks. They were not huge organizations such as the LCN. Often, a witness’s testimony would lead to
everyone in the gang being convicted and sent to prison, completely eliminating the threat. If the gang’s leaders were convicted, the gang itself often would disperse. Shur was told that 85 percent of all violent crime in Washington happened within six blocks of public-housing areas. “I was assured that we could protect most witnesses simply by moving them away from the housing projects until after they testified,” said Shur. “They could then return home and resume a normal life. I had my doubts, but I was asked to put a short-term protection program to the test.”

Between 1991 and 1994, 78 witnesses and 150 of their relatives in Washington were temporarily relocated outside of housing projects until after they had testified. None of the witnesses was murdered. Meanwhile, more than a hundred gang members were convicted.

While the short-term program was considered a success, Shur remained skeptical. “I never really liked it,” he said later. “I wanted as much certainty as possible that witnesses would be safe once we placed them in the program, and we could only get that if they entered the long-term program. The short-term program, in my opinion, allowed a higher-than-acceptable risk. We’ve been fortunate so far in that no one has been killed, but I’ve always felt it’s only a matter of time.” Despite Shur’s reservations, other cities began copying the short-term program. In New York, the city’s housing authority arranged for witnesses to be moved from one housing project to another to protect them temporarily while they were waiting to testify.

In dealing with international terrorists, Shur faced a different challenge: How do you make a witness from a foreign country and different culture blend into the American landscape? The Marshals Service had
protected witnesses in terrorist cases before, including the 1988 Lockerbie, Scotland, airplane bombing and a 1989 bombing in Greece. But it was two attacks in New York that tested WITSEC. The February 26, 1993, bombing of New York’s World Trade Center led to the arrest of four men, all followers of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, an Islamic extremist who fled the country shortly after the blast killed six and tore a five-story hole in one of the twin towers. He was eventually caught in Pakistan and brought back for trial. Two years later, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine of his followers were convicted of plotting to blow up several Manhattan landmarks.

WITSEC relocated more than a dozen foreign-born witnesses after they testified in the two trials. “They were going to stick out in Boise, Idaho,” said Shur, “so just moving them out of Brooklyn wasn’t going to be good enough. We were also worried because they had testified against religious sects that had ties to other militant Islamic groups. Some of these groups were well-organized paramilitary operations, with access to large sums of dollars.”

WITSEC chief Eugene Coon brought in several experts in Middle Eastern culture to help his inspectors at the Safesite and Orientation Center prepare the witnesses for relocation. The FBI also provided him with intelligence reports about extremist groups and their supporters so WITSEC could make certain none of the witnesses was sent to a community where there were groups that supported the defendants and their sects. “It was unrealistic to have these people end all contact with their own culture,” Shur said. “We couldn’t expect them not to want to go to a mosque or a grocery store that catered to Middle Eastern customers.” Instead, WITSEC chose cities where there were large
numbers of immigrants, and Coon’s inspectors helped the witnesses come up with logical explanations they could use if they were questioned about their pasts.

Besides gangs and terrorists, WITSEC was being used again to attack an old adversary. In 1987, eighteen Mafia figures were convicted in New York’s infamous “Pizza Connection” trial of smuggling $1.6 billion of Turkish-bought and Sicilian-processed heroin into the United States. The mob used a string of pizza parlors throughout the East Coast and Midwest as fronts for its narcotics and money-laundering operations. While the seventeen-month trial put an end to the U.S. side of the case, more than two hundred Sicilian Mafia figures were still awaiting trial in Italy for supplying heroin to their New York counterparts. Several key witnesses, the most important a former Sicilian Mafioso named Tommaso Buscetta, were shuttled back and forth between Italy and the United States by WITSEC inspectors to testify. Buscetta was the first important mobster in Italy to break
omertà
. He would later be called the “most valuable Mafia informer on either side of the Atlantic” by federal and Italian prosecutors. He would spend eight years testifying in the United States and in Italy. In interviews, Buscetta said he would never have considered cooperating had it not been for WITSEC and the promise of a new identity and relocation in the United States. At the time he was recruited, he was hiding in Brazil, and he was offered WITSEC protection even though he was not a U.S. citizen and had not violated any U.S. laws. He was accepted into the program, and he died in April 2001 in an undisclosed location in the United States.

In the midst of handling these sensational cases, WITSEC came under attack within its own ranks. President Bush replaced Stanley J. Morris as director of
the Marshals Service with a former federal prosecutor, Michael Moore, in 1989. Moore had aspirations of becoming a federal judge and early on locked horns with Howard Safir, whose performance had brought him kudos but whose ego had earned him a slew of enemies. Safir resigned. Morale dropped, especially in WITSEC. Moore served only fourteen months before he was appointed a judge. His replacement was another U.S. attorney, Henry Hudson, who soon left to become a state judge and later a federal judge. President Clinton’s pick in 1992 was Eduardo Gonzalez, the chief of police in Tampa, Florida. Although he had no federal law enforcement experience, he was initially welcomed because he saw the job as the pinnacle of his career, not a stepping-stone.

Gonzalez was told during briefings at the White House that the U.S. Marshals Service was a “troubled” organization that had grown too big for its mission. Some of Vice President Al Gore’s aides, who were pushing his “Reinventing Government” program, complained that Safir’s elite squads were duplicating jobs already being done by the FBI. When Gonzalez took control he began to streamline the service, and one of his first efforts was to combine its WITSEC operations with its court security program. It made sense to him because both protected people: WITSEC took care of witnesses and court security protected judges. Gonzalez told his underlings that WITSEC deputies were being “underutilized.” The number of witnesses entering the program had dropped to around a hundred per year. Under Gonzalez, WITSEC was no longer the service’s favored child; in fact, it fell to the bottom of the heap.

“I was baffled by his actions,” Shur recalled. “If we had learned anything, it was that you needed a special
type of deputy to work with witnesses. I felt Gonzalez was trying to turn back the clock.” Shur warned Gonzalez privately and in memos that protecting federal judges and their families was “vastly different” from protecting and relocating witnesses and their families. “Judges do not need the panoply of additional services that criminal witnesses entering WITSEC require,” he wrote in a memo. “It is therefore imperative that the Service maintain two specialized staffs.” But Gonzalez was unconvinced. He told his aides that WITSEC inspectors were “crybabies” who thought they were better than other deputies and were “too secretive.” In his eyes, the real heroes of the Marshals Service were the “PODs,” the “poor old deputies” in the field, who didn’t operate out of headquarters or belong to any of Safir’s “alphabet special teams,” such as WITSEC and FIST. “Despite Gene Coon’s best efforts to keep everything going,” said Shur, “this efficient and highly disciplined witness protection unit was slowly torn apart.”

By 1994 Shur was beginning his thirty-fourth year as a Justice Department attorney and was about to turn sixty-one. He announced that he was going to retire at year’s end. But he barely slowed down. He appeared before the Dutch parliament to describe how witness protection programs worked, met with Hong Kong officials who had asked him for permission to begin relocating their protected witnesses in the United States because their city was too small to hide them, and fought a 48 percent cut in the Marshals Service’s budget request that had hit WITSEC especially hard. In one instance, WITSEC inspectors did not have enough money to purchase gasoline for their government cars because of cutbacks. But it was a call from an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York that
brought his career full circle. “You can’t leave yet. I’m going to get a court injunction against you leaving,” she announced in jest, and then she turned serious. “We have a witness here who is reluctant to enter the program, and you’re the only one I know who can reason with him and get him in. We simply can’t afford to have him turn up dead. He’s too important.”

Shur had never before seen the security precautions put into place when “Sammy the Bull” Gravano was brought in to see him. “There were guards guarding guards guarding guards,” he recalled. Gravano was already serving his prison sentence in a WITSEC unit, but he didn’t want to enter the relocation phase of the program after he was paroled.

“I don’t need you guys,” he told Shur.

Shur talked about other Mafia tough guys who had thought they could take care of themselves. Gravano recognized most of them. All had been murdered. The problem was that he didn’t want to be confined by Shur’s rules. He was planning on writing a book, and he wanted to go on television and publicize it. Shur didn’t argue with him. “What you have to consider is the long run and how we can help you,” Shur explained. Where was Gravano going to live? What kind of work was he going to do? What about his family? In WITSEC, he could get a new name and a fresh start. If he really hated it, he could drop out voluntarily. That was something no one had told him before.

Shur fed Gravano’s ego. There was a lot at stake here for the government. Gravano was being touted as the most important mob witness ever. He was historically important. The Justice Department couldn’t afford to have him murdered. It would scare other witnesses. Suddenly Shur realized he was slipping into the same speech he had given Jimmy the Weasel nearly
twenty years earlier. Knowing Gravano didn’t give a damn if anyone else ever joined WITSEC, Shur emphasized how much the government needed him, wanted him, was eager to get him. He wanted not only to appeal to Gravano’s vanity but to give him a sense of control. He also knew Gravano would be tempted to see how much he could get out of the deal. It was all part of the game. By the time the two men finished talking, Gravano was ready to sign the papers. He was Shur’s last mafioso.