Witsec (12 page)

While shocking, the transcripts actually had little to do with the charges against DeCarlo. Still, they turned a national spotlight on his trial, and Zelmanowitz became an instant celebrity. Without any hint of remorse, he told jurors that he had found an ingenious way to earn millions of dollars by buying and selling foreign stocks overseas without paying U.S. taxes on his profits. His business partner and good friend, Louis Saperstein, had wanted in on the action and had borrowed $115,000 from DeCarlo to get started. But the IRS had been watching Saperstein and froze his bank accounts before he could make any deals. When Saperstein couldn’t repay DeCarlo, the mobster threatened to kill him. For five months
Saperstein hid out; then he called Zelmanowitz for help in finding ways to pay off the debt. They agreed to meet in the lobby of a New York hotel, but Zelmanowitz, who was himself involved with DeCarlo in other mob deals, brought along two of DeCarlo’s thugs. They hustled a terrified Saperstein off to “the Barn,” DeCarlo’s term for his office.

“When I walked in,” Zelmanowitz testified, “Saperstein was already lying on the floor, purple, bloody, tongue hanging out, spit all over him. I thought he was dead. He was being kicked. Then he was lifted up off the floor, placed in a chair, hit again, knocked off the chair, picked up, and hit again.”

DeCarlo announced he was doubling the interest that Saperstein owed him, to $5,000 per week. Then he gave Saperstein two months to repay the entire debt. “If you don’t, you’ll be dead.” A few days before the deadline, Saperstein entered a hospital complaining of stomach cramps. He died the next day. Doctors thought he had suffered a heart attack brought on by gastrointestinal shock, but an autopsy showed he had been poisoned with “enough arsenic to kill a mule.”

Because there was no evidence that DeCarlo had poisoned Saperstein, federal prosecutors couldn’t charge him with murder. Instead, they accused him and three of his thugs of extortion. Zelmanowitz’s testimony helped convict all four, and DeCarlo was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Ironically, after the trial Zelmanowitz told reporters he thought Saperstein actually had committed suicide after taking out a large life insurance policy for his family. The day before he died, he had mailed a letter to the FBI accusing DeCarlo of plotting to kill him. It had been Saperstein’s way, Zelmanowitz theorized, of taking revenge.

The Zelmanowitzes turned out to be the family
from hell for Shur. Nothing satisfied them. Deputy Marshal McDonald found a spacious apartment in Maryland for them to live in while Shur arranged their new background, but Zelmanowitz’s wife, Lillian, rejected it because it was a high-rise and she didn’t like elevators. She also threw a fit over the fake history that Shur set up for Zelmanowitz; he was supposed to have retired as a sergeant from army intelligence, but she would
never
have married an enlisted man! This was especially ironic because Zelmanowitz had, in fact, been a private in the Marine Corps, which kicked him out after he punched an officer. When McDonald took the couple on a tour of Bowie, Maryland, to see the house that was supposed to have been their previous address, Lillian exclaimed: “What, me live in a house like that? Never!” McDonald didn’t tell them it was Shur’s. And it went on and on. Lillian’s daughter by a previous marriage, Cynthia, wanted to remain with her boyfriend, Norman, which meant he too would have to be given a new identity. Shur insisted they marry, and this triggered more headaches. Shur assumed he’d hustle the couple in front of a rabbi for a quickie ceremony, but the Zelmanowitzes demanded costly wedding clothes and flowers, a reception at an upscale hotel, the works.

McDonald, who had been assigned to protect the family while they were in Washington, noticed they paid cash with money taken from a safe-deposit box for all of the wedding supplies. This made Shur certain Zelmanowitz had hidden his true assets from the government. “I suddenly found myself facing a dilemma. Zelmanowitz was not like Rigo, who I was confident would do no wrong after he was relocated. With Zelmanowitz I had doubts, real doubts; in fact, I never
trusted him.” Shur urged the IRS to start a new investigation of Zelmanowitz, and deliberately stalled on relocating him. “I decided that for this program to work, I had to be able to conduct two sometimes competing activities at the same time—protection and investigation. I had him investigated with the same zeal I was using to keep him alive. In doing this I saw no conflict. I had to balance our obligation to keep him alive with our obligation to see that he didn’t commit crimes in his new community.”

Shur and McDonald were dragged into helping arrange the wedding. Security was a nightmare. Guests were told the wedding would take place in a Virginia hotel, but after they arrived, they were taken out the hotel’s back door to buses that carried them to a different hotel, where the bride and groom were waiting. “The rabbi gave me a civil certificate with the couple’s new name on it,” Shur recalled, “but he refused to put their new name on a religious certificate. He didn’t mind fooling civil authorities, but he wasn’t going to take any chances with God.”

Five months after the family had first arrived in Washington, Shur finally agreed to settle them in San Francisco. No sooner had they arrived there than they complained they had been betrayed. They had been receiving a per diem of $60 for their living expenses, but Shur stopped paying it as soon as they reached San Francisco. The IRS had asked him to cut off the funds so it could see if Zelmanowitz would fly overseas to replenish his cash from money it suspected he had hidden there. Furious that he wasn’t receiving any financial support, as he’d been promised, Zelmanowitz complained to the U.S. attorney who had prosecuted DeCarlo, and he in turn protested to the Justice Department. In a memo, Shur defended his actions,
noting that the Zelmanowitzes already had received more than their fair share of subsistence pay, $55,000, during the time they had lived in Washington. Yet they had constantly complained they were “penniless,” even though the average salary for most couples in 1970 was less than $10,000 per year. Shur added that the Zelmanowitzes were wealthy, owning such extras as a $45,000 Chagall painting, $25,000 in jewelry, and his-and-hers mink coats. Shur didn’t mention the ongoing IRS probe, but his memo was enough for the attorney general to go along with the freeze on Zelmanowitz’s payments. The bickering over subsistence checks ended when Zelmanowitz called Shur at his home one night and dramatically declared that his rent was two months overdue and he was about to be evicted. “When I informed Mr. Zelmanowitz that I could not give him an answer about his subsistence pay,” Shur wrote in a memo the next morning, “he said the government and I could go fuck ourselves, and if I wanted his identity papers back he would mail them and I could stick them up my fat ass.”

A few days later, Shur offered Zelmanowitz a payment of $5,000 if he would sign a statement that “forever released” the government from “any further responsibility” for protecting him. Zelmanowitz agreed, and Shur breathed a huge sigh of relief. He thought he was done with Gerald Zelmanowitz. But he was wrong.

G
erald Shur felt like a doctor in an emergency room during a war. By the start of 1970, an average of one mob witness a week was seeking protection. So much for Shur’s original estimate of ten witnesses, at most, per year. He and Deputy Marshal Hugh McDonald couldn’t keep up, even after Shur waylaid two of the women who worked for him as criminal intelligence analysts and got them to help. Fighting crime was back in fashion. Richard Nixon had made it a major campaign issue in the 1968 presidential race, and his attorney general, John Mitchell, had juiced up the OCRS, doubling the number of attorneys working there to 125. He had also created new strike forces. Based on the success of the Buffalo strike force, the OCRS had already dispatched teams into Philadelphia, Chicago, Brooklyn, Detroit, Miami, and Newark. Mitchell sent new ones after mob targets in Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Kansas City, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and San Francisco. (Shur would later recall that the strike force concept was so popular that when President Nixon incorrectly stated in a speech that there were eighteen strike forces—there were only seventeen—the Justice Department created another one instead of correcting him. The new one was based in Washington, D.C.) By
1970, the strike forces had indicted the heads of six crime families, and the number of criminal cases brought against LCN members had jumped from 1,166 indictments in 1968 to 2,122. The mob was under a relentless attack, and a growing number of its deserters were turning to Shur’s fledgling operation for protection. Shur was feeling the pressure, too. He was spending all of his time at work and several hours after he got home dealing with witnesses and their problems. A late-night telephone call from a panicked witness in early 1970 was typical of the daily melodramas he faced.

“Mr. Shur, there’s a guy holding a gun on me,” the witness declared. “You got to come quick!”

“Why’s someone holding a gun on you?” Shur asked.

“He says I was peeping through his window at his wife. I mean, I was, but I didn’t do anything. He’s called the cops. They’re on their way!”

Twenty minutes later, Shur and McDonald were in a Maryland police substation. “Are you charging him?” Shur asked the desk sergeant.

“Naw, this is minor stuff. You can take him.”

Shur scolded the Peeping Tom as they rode back to the hotel they had housed him in. One more screw-up and his parole would be revoked and he’d be sent back to prison. A few days later, a federal prosecutor in Boston called Shur to ask a favor. The Peeping Tom’s girlfriend wanted to move to Washington from Boston and live with him. Shur didn’t like the idea, but after repeated pleas from the prosecutor, the girlfriend, and the witness, he paid for her airplane ticket. “She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen,” he recalled, “and I wondered how a creep like this witness could’ve attracted her.” A month later, the girlfriend
was waiting for Shur when he got to work. She had tried to break off the romance, and now the witness was stalking her. “Please help me,” she begged. “I’m afraid of him!”

Shur called in the witness that same afternoon: “Leave her alone or you’re going back to prison.”

“Okay, okay,” he replied, “but I can’t do anything about the photographs.”

“What photographs?”

He’d taken snapshots of her nude when they were living together and sent them to a friend in Boston to deliver anonymously to the woman’s mother. “I mailed them yesterday.” Shur had the photographs intercepted and moved the witness to another city. He also suggested the girlfriend leave Washington.

Helping witnesses was proving to be much more complicated than he had imagined. He found himself making up procedures as he went along. “It was clear that we needed to protect other people besides the witness who was testifying. We had to keep the mob from going after a witness’s parents or his brother or sister. My criteria was: Is this person someone whom the mob might try to harm in order to intimidate a witness? If the answer was yes, then we had to protect them.” One day, a married mobster said he wanted his girlfriend protected. “A lot of these Mafia guys had mistresses,” said Shur. “I couldn’t let the mob harm her to retaliate against him, so I gave her a new identity. Then we got a witness who was gay, and she wanted her lover relocated with her. I approved it. The one time I was really concerned was when a witness asked me to protect his mistress but not his wife. I protected his wife anyway.”

When the mother-in-law of a protected witness needed a hysterectomy, Shur had to find a surgeon because he couldn’t risk sending the woman, who also
was under protection, back into her old mob-infested neighborhood. Shur contacted the U.S. surgeon general, and he agreed to provide witnesses with free medical care through Public Health Service hospitals. If a doctor needed to review a witness’s medical history, Shur arranged a conference call with the patient’s former doctor. The two physicians would discuss the case without mentioning names or locations.

But Shur’s biggest headache was finding jobs for witnesses. “I never saw this as a program where a witness received subsistence payments for life,” he explained. “This was a protection program, not a welfare program.” He gave most of them three months to become self-sufficient after they were relocated. “It was tough because many of them had never worked at legitimate jobs.” Shur asked Wayne Hopkins, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official with an interest in organized crime, for help.

“Do your witnesses have any special skills?” Hopkins asked.

“Well, they can kill, steal, embezzle, and sell drugs, and most of them are members of the Cosa Nostra,” Shur replied.

“Is that all?” Hopkins said, laughing.

Hopkins arranged for Shur to have lunch with the heads of seven U.S. corporations. “You should know that I will not tell you the real name of a witness or where he is from if you hire him,” Shur warned them, “but I will tell you about his crimes and work skills. Even then, I can’t really vouch for what skills he might actually have.” He added that his plea for help was one-sided. “I will not tell anyone in the Justice Department that you are helping us, so if you are having troubles with the antitrust division or the IRS, don’t think hiring a witness will help you out.” Shur was stunned
when all seven corporate officials said they were willing to help. Buoyed by that meeting, Shur flew to twenty-five cities and signed up more than two hundred companies. “An executive from a manufacturing company in North Carolina asked me not to send him anyone who had hijacked trucks, so I sent him a counterfeiter,” Shur said. A few weeks later, the owner called to say the witness had been arrested for felony theft. “But I have good news,” he added. “The stuff he stole wasn’t ours, so you can send down another witness to take his place.”