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  Praise for Pete Earley and Gerald Shur’s

  WITSEC

  “A thoughtful, well-reasoned assessment of [the WITSEC program].”

  —The New York Post

  “Plenty of drama and action to satisfy true-crime fans.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The story of a program that has changed the face of the modern American justice system, WITSEC is a compelling history of the program and of Shur’s role in it.”

  —BookPage

  “A fascinating story of a controversial and mysterious part of our justice system.”

  —Book Magazine

  “For all true-crime collections.”

  —Library Journal

  Praise for the works of Pete Earley

  SUPER CASINO

  INSIDE THE “NEW” LAS VEGAS

  “Truly the best book ever written about Las Vegas, and I think I’ve read them all.”

  —Nelson DeMille

  CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

  DEATH, LIFE, AND JUSTICE IN A SOUTHERN TOWN

  Winner of the Edgar Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

  “Mr. Earley tells the story skillfully.… Circumstantial Evidence leaves readers outraged.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  THE HOT HOUSE

  LIFE INSIDE LEAVENWORTH PRISON

  “The book is a large act of courage, its subject an important one, and … Earley does it justice.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  WITSEC: INSIDE THE FEDERAL WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published February 2002

  Bantam mass market edition / April 2003

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2002 by Pete Earley and Gerald Shur

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001043425

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-43143-1

  v3.1

  Start by doing what’s necessary,

  then what’s possible,

  and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

  —St. Francis of Assisi

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: A Deadly Silence

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two: Breaking Omertà

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three: Witness X—A Personal Story

  No Goodbyes

  A Fresh Start

  Starting Over Again

  Moving On

  Weaving Tangled Webs

  Closure

  Part Four: New Faces, Old Tricks

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Epilogue

  Photo Inserts

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  GERALD SHUR thought he was going to vomit. The black-and-white photograph in front of him showed a woman splayed on a tile floor with her throat slit. Not satisfied to simply kill her, the murderer had mutilated her body by cutting her open from throat to navel. He’d then yanked out several of her internal organs, leaving them displayed on her abdomen. The woman had been an informant helping federal agents in a mob case, and the gruesomeness of her murder had been meant as a crude warning: Those who spill their guts to the authorities risk having their own guts literally spilled out by the Mafia.

  Shur, a young attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section in Washington, D.C., slid the photograph into a file folder and slipped it into his desk drawer. No need to have his secretary stumble upon it. The murdered woman was the twenty-fifth government informant killed in the past five years. It was October 1961, and Shur was still new at his job. He hadn’t yet become accustomed to the viciousness that gangsters could unleash.

  An excited Internal Revenue Service agent telephoned him later that day. “We got a promising lead,” the agent declared. “How fast can you get here?” Shur caught the next flight to New York City. The IRS had learned that Johnny “Sonny” Franzese, a notorious member of the Colombo crime family, was extorting money from the owner of a trucking company. If the agents and Shur could convince the owner to testify against Franzese, the government would be able to put one of the city’s most violent gangsters in prison.

  “Two guys showed up at my business one day,” the owner explained after he welcomed Shur and the agents into his Long Island home. “These guys tell me Sonny Franzese wants to be my new business partner. I tell them, ‘Hey, I don’t need a business partner,’ and they look at each other and laugh, and say, ‘Oh yeah, you do.’ I told them to get out of my office.”

  The next morning, one of his new trucks wouldn’t start. Someone had poured sand in the carburetor. Still, he continued to ignore Franzese until four men attacked him with baseball bats. The last thing he remembered before being knocked unconscious was one of them telling him that Sonny wanted to see him. A few weeks after he was released from the hospital, he signed over half of his business to the mobster.

  “What happened ain’t right,” he told Shur. “You guys in the Justice Department should do something.”

  “If you testify,” Shur explained, “we can tie Franzese directly to extortion and send him to prison for a minimum of five to ten years.”

  “Testify?” the owner asked.

  Shur was taken aback. “Of course. We’ll need you to tell a jury what he did. We can’t make the case unless you testify.”

  “I thought just telling you would be enough,” he replied. “The mob will kill me and my entire family if I testify. No way am I speaking out against Sonny Franzese! I’d rather pull up stakes and move to Florida.”

  “Suppose we put him in jail right away—I mean tonight?”

  “What about tomorrow when he gets out?”

  “You don’t really have a choice,” Shur warned. “Sonny Franzese is going to bleed your business to death. He’ll destroy it and ruin your reputation.”

  But nothing Shur or the agents said could sway him. During the car ride back to Manhattan, Shur fumed. “There’s got to be a way to get witnesses to testify against the mob.”

  “Would you?” asked one of the agents in the car.

  The question made him think. What if he had been the trucking company owner? What if his wife and his family had been the ones at risk? He thought about the photograph of the dead woman and the frozen look of terror on her face. What would—what could—the government do that would convince him to risk h
is life and the lives of his wife, his son, and his daughter to testify against the mob?

  • • •

  At exactly 7:30 A.M. on April 19, 1995, a black helicopter swooped over the guard towers at the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix, Arizona, and hovered above the Mesa Unit, a two-story concrete structure. The unit was an isolated “prison inside a prison,” surrounded by its own fence topped with razor wire. At the same moment the helicopter appeared, an armored personnel carrier roared across the prison yard into the Mesa Unit complex and six burly men wearing black jumpsuits burst out. Each carried an automatic weapon and wore a black hood to conceal his identity. A sharpshooter in the helicopter flying overhead watched as the commandos hustled inside. Ignoring the other inmates locked in their cells, the squad went directly to where a solitary federal prisoner was waiting. They ordered him to put on a bulletproof vest and hustled him outside. Four cars were waiting for the APC after it exited the prison. They raced alongside it toward a heavily guarded military airfield where a Learjet stood ready, its engines already burning. The commandos formed a human shield around the inmate as he stepped from the APC and onto the jet. It lifted off seconds later, its destination a secret so well guarded that only four government officials knew where he was being taken.

  The inmate now sitting comfortably in the jet was a cold-blooded killer. By his own admission, he had committed nineteen murders. But the armed guards with him were not there to prevent him from killing again. They were protecting him from harm. Salvatore Gravano, better known as “Sammy the Bull,” reportedly had a $2 million price tag on his head. His testimony had helped the Justice Department send thirty-six of his former Mafia pals to prison. The biggest prize had been John Gotti, the “boss of bosses” in New York City. The government had tried twice to convict him, but juries had found the country’s best-known racketeer innocent, prompting the media to dub him the “Teflon Don.” He had seemed invincible until his closest friend had betrayed him.

  Federal prosecutors had gotten Gravano to testify by making him an offer that he couldn’t refuse. They had evidence he had killed a fellow gangster. Gravano could go to trial, be convicted, and spend the rest of his life in a maximum-security penitentiary, or he could testify against Gotti and win himself a reduced sentence: in his case, twenty years. Better yet, he’d only have to actually serve five years of it in prison—the rest would be suspended—and all of his previous crimes, including eighteen other murders, would be forgiven.

  John Gotti was convicted in 1992 and sent to the nation’s toughest prison for life. Gravano, meanwhile, took up residency in the heavily guarded but much more relaxed Mesa Unit. Just before his release, he was flown to Washington, D.C., for a private meeting at the Justice Department. The government wanted to offer him another deal. He had become too famous for it to risk losing him. If the mob murdered him, other gangsters would be scared to testify. So Gravano was offered lifetime protection in the federal Witness Security Program, commonly called WITSEC. His name would be legally and secretly changed. He’d get a new social security number and other vital documents, and he’d be relocated along with his family in a new community. The government would pay all his moving costs and provide him with a house, a car, and a monthly check for living expenses until he could find a legitimate job. Best of all, if he ever suspected he was in danger, all he would need to do was call a special telephone number and a squad of deputy U.S. marshals would hurry to his front door. Because WITSEC was completely voluntary, Gravano could drop out at any time, no strings attached.

  Sammy the Bull signed up.

  Gerald Shur was the Justice Department official who made the WITSEC spiel to Gravano. Getting him into the WITSEC program was his last official act before he retired. It seemed fitting. Three decades earlier, Shur had failed to convince the owner of a trucking company to testify against Sonny Franzese. Now he was ending his career by reeling in Gravano, a Mafia underboss, the second in command. What better proof was there that the much-feared Mafia code of omertà had been broken?

  • • •

  Gerald Shur, relatively unknown to the public, played a major role in the government’s war against organized crime. His official title when he retired was senior associate director of the Office of Enforcement Operations in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, but he was better known as the “father of WITSEC.” He was the program’s creator and for thirty-four years the driving force behind it. No witnesses got protection in WITSEC without his personal attention. He wrote nearly all of the program’s rules, shaped it based on his own personal philosophical views, and guided it with a steady but iron hand. During his tenure, WITSEC protected 6,416 witnesses and 14,468 of their dependents, including wives, children, and lovers. None of the witnesses who followed his rules was murdered. He was involved with every major Mafia witness in recent history, starting with Joseph Valachi, considered the first to tell the mob’s secrets. The other gangsters form a who’s who of organized crime: Joseph “the Animal” Barboza, Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Teresa, Aladena “Jimmy the Weasel” Fratianno, Joseph “Joe Dogs” Iannuzzi, and Henry Hill of the best-selling book Wiseguy and the popular movie Goodfellas. Name a mafioso who turned against the mob, and in one way or another Shur dealt with him.

  He also dealt with their problems. At various times, he served as a mob marriage counselor, substitute father, even priest. He helped create false backgrounds for witnesses, arranged secret weddings, oversaw funerals, and personally persuaded corporate executives to hire former mob hit men as delivery route drivers. Once he arranged for the wife of a Los Angeles killer to have breast enlargement surgery to keep her husband happy. In return, WITSEC witnesses helped topple the heads of every major crime family in every major city in the nation. Some ten thousand criminals were convicted in large part because of WITSEC witnesses during Shur’s tenure. Today WITSEC is considered one of three tools essential in combating organized crime. The others are federal wiretaps and the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, known as RICO. Ask any federal prosecutor and the answer will be the same: A good eyewitness can almost always guarantee a conviction. Fingerprints, murder weapons, forensic findings—all are helpful, but none is as convincing as a credible witness who takes the witness stand and swears under oath: “I was there and I saw the defendant do it.”

  The John Gottis of the world are not the only criminals whom WITSEC has helped imprison. Colombian drug dealers, outlaw motorcycle gang members, white-collar con men, and, more recently, international terrorists have also been convicted because of WITSEC witnesses. It is difficult to find a major criminal case, whether it be the Watergate scandal or the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, where WITSEC witnesses have not played a pivotal role.

  Without the WITSEC program, few witnesses involved in major crimes would step forward. It not only keeps them alive before, during, and after a trial, it gives them a fresh start. A recent Justice Department study found that 82 percent of criminals who entered WITSEC never committed another crime after they were given new identities and relocated. By comparison, only 60 percent of criminals paroled from prison stay out of trouble. That makes WITSEC one of the most successful rehabilitation programs in the country.

  Not everyone who enters WITSEC becomes rehabilitated, however, and those who do not are the main reason it remains a controversial and hotly criticized program. In its first decade of operation, witnesses in WITSEC committed twelve murders after they were relocated in unsuspecting towns. Others used their new WITSEC identities to dodge creditors and pilfer millions of dollars by operating new scams. Sammy the Bull was accused of running an illegal drug ring less than five years after he was relocated by WITSEC near Phoenix, Arizona. Witnesses protected by WITSEC are often as vicious and deadly as the defendants whom they help convict. A former U.S. attorney once complained that about half of the witnesses whom Shur put into WITSEC didn’t belong there. “They needed protection before and during trials, but after that, they could
have been sent home,” he explained. “There was no reason for Shur to change their names and unleash them in new communities.” A U.S. Senate subcommittee investigator accused Shur’s program in the 1980s of being the worst-run in the government, quipping it was “like a body without a brain.”

  • • •

  This book has been written jointly, but it began as two completely separate books about WITSEC. After Gerald Shur retired in 1995, he started writing an account of his career for his grandchildren to read. He decided to turn it into a book after several of his former colleagues heard what he was doing and encouraged him to expand it around the same time I was researching my own book about WITSEC, a program that I had first become interested in while writing an earlier book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, which describes everyday life inside a maximum-security federal penitentiary. Dozens of convicts had told me that WITSEC witnesses had lied about them in court in order to cut themselves sweetheart deals with federal prosecutors. I was told that WITSEC witnesses were rumored to receive special perks in prison, from being allowed to order lobster dinners from local restaurants to conjugal visits with prostitutes. I set out to learn more and immediately began hearing stories about Gerald Shur. Some witnesses described him as a saint who had personally saved them from lives of crime and violence. Others attacked him viciously. In a magazine article published in 1991, a disgruntled WITSEC witness described Shur as a “small man with a small mind and a God complex.” In that same story, Shur was called “WITSEC’s biggest administrative problem—he is known as something of a monomaniac in the J. Edgar Hoover mold and his decision-making process has been called dictatorial and capricious.” A fellow journalist who had written extensively about WITSEC after interviewing more than a hundred relocated witnesses warned me that Shur was a “master bullshitter with an extremely vengeful attitude.” Although Shur had granted a few interviews during his career, he’d never really told anyone about his experiences running WITSEC or revealed the behind-the-scenes dramas in the program. When I first asked to interview him, he declined, saying he was busy working on his own book. But after several lengthy conversations, we decided to join forces, and it soon became clear, at least to us, that it was a good merger.