Witsec (10 page)

“My daughter put her arms out,” Shur recalled, “but I couldn’t see her. She touched me. I touched her. We locked arms and went out of the house and started walking down the block. I’d hear kids saying, ‘Hello, Mr. Shur,’ and I’d say hello back. Suddenly I’m thinking there’s a big world out there where it’s still Mr. Shur, it’s still Daddy. My daughter told me what the day was like. It was bright. I could feel that it was. The sun was on my face. Neighbors came over to say how nice it was to see me. That walk with my daughter got me going again.”

A week later, Shur returned to work. His secretary read his mail aloud to him because his vision was still blurry. Walking was difficult, so his boss and colleagues stopped by his office whenever they wanted to chat with him. After a couple of weeks, Henry Petersen asked Shur to attend a briefing with him at the Capitol. Petersen was a chief and had a government car at his disposal, so they rode to the meeting together. Shur knew, however, that Petersen usually walked between his office and the Capitol, a distance of about eleven blocks. “I wanted people to believe I was no different with MS than I had been before, so I suggested after the briefing that we skip the car ride and walk back.” Petersen moved briskly and Shur stayed with him, but a block before they reached the Justice Department his legs were ready to give out. He didn’t say a word.

“Nice walk,” Petersen said when they reached Shur’s second-floor office.

“Sure thing,” he replied, collapsing in his chair as soon as Petersen was gone. In the weeks that followed, he developed new symptoms, while others would disappear and then return. “It was a roller-coaster ride. I
never knew when I was on the bottom or top of the track.” He worried that his MS would flare up without warning and get even worse than it was. Miriam Ottenberg, the
Washington Star
reporter who had been the first to write about Joe Valachi, heard about his medical problems and telephoned to see if he would talk to her about MS for a book she was writing.

“Why are you interested in MS?” he asked.

“Because I have it, too,” she replied.

The Pulitzer prize–winning journalist explained that everything she had read about MS was negative. She was interviewing MS patients who were leading productive lives in spite of the disease, and was calling her book
Pursuit of Hope
. Having found himself making it through the physical and mental crisis that MS caused him, Shur was optimistic during their talks. “A good marriage gets better because you can dismiss the unimportant things,” Ottenberg quoted Shur as saying. “Miriam and I got over little garbage-type arguments. What was important was that we still loved each other; we still had our children; we could still communicate, could still give and feel love. Whether I was ten minutes late became less important, whether dinner wasn’t done well had no importance. We weren’t the least bit interested in what a neighbor thought or did—just in what we did and could do together.”

Ottenberg’s health took a turn for the worse, and when she could no longer drive, the Shurs gave her rides. She died four years later at age sixty-eight. “She inspired me,” Shur recalled. “I was damned if I’d surrender to MS. She hadn’t. I said to hell with it! And that’s how I decided to live my life.”

Shur threw himself into his job. There was plenty for him to do. He’d finally found a way to get the cumbersome OCRS index card system modernized. Congress
had recently passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA), a law that gave federal funds to police departments to spend on new equipment and training. Shur had asked LEAA officials for money to computerize the index card information, but they’d told him LEAA funds could only be awarded to state and local police departments. However, a sympathetic LEAA administrator had proposed a way for him to circumvent his own agency’s rules. With the administrator’s help, Shur persuaded officials in six states to hire him, without salary, to develop an “organized-crime intelligence system” for their police departments. The LEAA then awarded those six states a federal grant, and the officials there, in turn, sent the funds to Shur. “My plan was simple: After we got our system going, we would teach the states how to replicate it. This would ensure uniformity and help them avoid costly start-up mistakes. Eventually, I thought, we would have a national network—a computerized intelligence system in every state with information about LCN members.”

As soon as the LEAA money started flowing in, Shur told the Civil Service Commission, which helped federal agencies with hiring, that he wanted to find ten women to employ as criminal analysts. “I specifically asked for women because there weren’t a lot of them walking police beats back then, and there was a feeling that women couldn’t be criminal analysts because they’d never carried guns and therefore didn’t understand police work or crime. I thought this attitude was stupid, and I wanted to show that bright people, regardless of their gender, could do this sort of work.”

The commission gave Shur one thousand résumés to review. “I spent three days whittling that stack down to sixty. When I interviewed those women, I asked each one: ‘Do you like to argue?’ Their answer
was important. I wanted individually minded analysts, the kind of person who wouldn’t hesitate to tell me, ‘Hey, Gerry, this is a ridiculous request. I know a better way we can do this.’ I believed this free-speaking attitude would result in us coming up with better ideas, and the ten women I eventually hired certainly never had a problem telling me exactly what they thought!”

Shur was following an axiom his father had taught him: Stupid people surround themselves with smart people, and truly smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them. None of the women had any police experience or knew much about organized crime. But Shur didn’t care. After some rudimentary training, he put them to work on the index cards and incoming reports. “We had to work fast because the LEAA grant was only good for two years. We had to demonstrate that what we were doing was worth permanent funding.”

Shur had been in the midst of getting the intelligence system perfected when he was stricken by MS. By then, his analysts had fed information about four thousand racketeers into a computer. If a U.S. attorney in Chicago wanted to know whether a suspect was connected to the LCN, all the prosecutor had to do was call one of the analysts, who were jokingly known as “Gerry’s girls.” With a few keyboard strokes, they could provide him with a detailed printout. Their files contained information about LCN members’ aliases, home addresses, birthdays, business ventures, criminal records, sentences, prison release dates, marriages, divorces, relatives, best friends, even hobbies. For the first time, OCRS analysts were able to identify patterns in mob activities and links between various crime families. They discovered several mobsters who were related through marriage. “My analysts did such
an incredibly good job that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms began hiring women as criminal analysts, too.” His analysts even developed their own computer program, with help from the National Security Agency, called the Organized Crime and Racketeering Intelligence Language, for processing LCN data.

One night while Shur was working late, he noticed that Thomas Kennelly, the Buffalo strike force chief, also was laboring over paperwork in a nearby office. Shur stopped to say hello, and Kennelly mentioned that he was filling out a requisition form so he could give cash to two witnesses stashed in a motel. They had agreed to testify in a Utica, New York, mob case, and they needed to buy groceries.

“Tom,” Shur said, “you’ve got better things to do with your time than to fill out these forms. Why don’t you let me handle this for you? I’ll take care of them so you can focus on getting ready for the case.”

Kennelly was delighted.

“Tom thought I was doing him a favor that night,” Shur recalled later, “but it was pure selfishness on my part. I was looking for an excuse to jump in and take charge of his witnesses. I’d been telling people for a long time that we needed a uniform way to protect our witnesses. Otherwise, every U.S. attorney was going to be starting from scratch each time a witness came forward. I had been in the Justice Department long enough to realize that if I could get control of the money, by volunteering to be the person in OCRS who handled the paperwork, I could begin to establish procedures about how our witnesses would be protected.”

After Kennelly turned the day-to-day handling of his two witnesses over to him, Shur became the
OCRS’s de facto witness manager. The Justice Department had a small fund, called Fees and Expenses for Witnesses, that it used whenever a U.S. attorney needed to bring in an expert—usually a psychiatrist or other medical specialist—to testify at a trial or to reimburse witnesses for their travel, meal, and housing expenses. Shur began tapping into that fund to pay the cost of hiding mob witnesses. There weren’t many—in 1966, only six in the entire nation—and Shur estimated the number would never total more than ten per year. “I didn’t see this as a big operation, but I had been thinking about it for several years and I had developed some ideas about how we needed to proceed, based on my experiences in Brooklyn and the Valachi, Calabrese, and Barboza cases.”

Shur was convinced that the most efficient way for the government to protect a mob witness was by giving him a new identity and relocating him to a new community. “Protecting someone with guards, the way the government had done in the Barboza case, was expensive and dangerous,” Shur later explained. “It also caused a witness problems in the long run. You couldn’t afford to have guards protect him for the rest of his life, so he’d always be looking over his shoulder. During the 1960s, I was also very aware of the threat of assassinations. President Kennedy was on my mind. If we couldn’t keep a president alive, with the very best agents in the world and unlimited funds, how were we going to protect a mob witness from assassination? The solution was protection through anonymity. The best way to keep a witness safe was by moving him away from the danger area, moving him to a place where no one knew who he was. We weren’t dealing with sophisticated KGB spies here, we were dealing mainly with New York metropolitan area mobsters,
and many of them had never stepped outside the city. The United States is a big country with plenty of cities where people could be hidden. Of course, if we were going to relocate someone, we then had to give them a new identity so they couldn’t be followed.”

At about the same time that Shur took charge of the OCRS’s mob witnesses, Charles Rogovin knocked on his office door. Rogovin, a professor at Temple University Law School in Philadelphia, was a member of a blue-ribbon panel that President Johnson had appointed in 1965 after the Republican Party accused him of being soft on crime. The panel, formally known as the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, was in the midst of a two-year nationwide study of crime in America. It planned to conduct five national surveys and had started interviewing thousands of prosecutors, police, attorneys, judges, criminals, and crime victims for their views about how the government could better fight crime. Rogovin had been questioning Justice Department officials, and one of them had suggested he talk to Shur.

“I’m looking for fresh ideas,” Rogovin told him, “and I was told that you had some.”

Shur described the OCRS’s computerized intelligence system for organized crime and how the ten analysts running it were all women. “We need to bring more women into law enforcement,” Shur said, “if for no other reason than to perform desk jobs so we can get more gun-carrying officers onto the streets.” He talked about the need for more computerization and sharing of information between agencies. Near the end of their meeting, Shur also said the government needed to establish a witness protection program. “We need government safe houses,” he explained, “places where we
can hide these people temporarily until we can relocate them.”

Rogovin was impressed when he left Shur’s office. “Here was a man who I thought had a number of very interesting ideas,” he said later. “Everyone else seemed to assume that witnesses who testified against organized crime were going to be whacked. But Gerry was saying that it didn’t have to be that way. It was clear to Gerry that there was a need to do something in a much more sophisticated way to help witnesses than simply handing them a bus ticket to Toledo.”

Rogovin relayed Shur’s ideas to Henry Ruth Jr., the presidential commission’s deputy director, and Ruth put them into writing for the full panel to review. Its final report was presented to President Johnson at a White House ceremony in February 1967, and two of Shur’s ideas were included in it. The panel recommended that local and state police departments begin using computers to collect and share information about the LCN. And then it addressed Shur’s idea about witness protection.

The panel’s endorsement had an immediate impact. “Now it was not just Gerald Shur who was running around the Justice Department talking about how the government needed a formal witness protection program,” Shur recalled. “A presidential commission had recommended that we begin protecting witnesses, and this gave the idea credibility and tremendous political clout. I jumped on that report. It was exactly what I needed to really get the ball rolling.”