Authors: Pete Earley
On occasion, Shur went with witnesses on job interviews. At one, a corporate president eagerly shook hands with the witness but eyed Shur nervously. “I needed a shave, was overweight, and have never been known as a sharp dresser,” Shur said. “The witness was clean-cut, trim, and wearing an expensive suit. The president thought I was the criminal.”
In most cases, witnesses and their families were flown to Washington to be briefed by Shur and McDonald about the new background that had been created for them. “We’d meet in room 2730 of the Justice Department, a small office I used near the entrance of a corridor that was closed off from the public and protected by locked doors,” Shur recalled. “Big Mac and Betty Cleghorn, my secretary, and I would greet the witnesses there. By this time we had already spent days worrying and working out the logistics about the physical move: How would the family be moved to a new city, what about their furniture, cars, school records? We would have answered all of those questions. My approach in these meetings was completely clinical. I was intent on the process and technique of keeping these people alive. I treated this as if I were a heart surgeon sent in to do a job. There was no room for emotion because it might
cloud my judgment. But sometimes the human drama of what I was doing seeped in. I remember talking to a family early on and I turned to the son, who was probably six years old, and said, ‘Stephen, your father has done a great thing for his country, and because of that you’re going to have to move and you’re going to have to change your name. Do you think, if I gave you a new last name, you could remember it?’ As soon as the boy nodded, I said, ‘Okay, your new name is Stephen Robinson. Robinson. Got that?’ I talked awhile to his parents, then turned back to him and said, ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Robinson,’ he said. ‘That’s right, good job,’ I told him. I did this several times during the next hour, and every time, he said his new name right on cue. During one of our exchanges, I thought, ‘I am teaching this child to lie, teaching him that it’s okay.’ It bothered me but we had no choice. It was for the greater good.
“Now, this boy had an older sister, a teenager, and she told me she wanted to stay in touch with her boyfriend. When I told her she could never see him again, she burst into tears. I explained she could write to him but she would have to let her parents read her letters so they could be sure that she didn’t accidentally tell him where she had moved. Again, the magnitude of what I was doing hit me. I was wiping out an entire family here: no more visits with grandparents, no parties with cousins, no contact with old friends. If a relative died, they could not go to the funeral. They would have to celebrate holidays alone. We were taking away their pasts—good and bad. One witness asked, ‘Can’t we sneak home to attend funerals?’ I replied, ‘No, I will not be a party to your suicide.’ It was a phrase I would use over and over again as different witnesses told me
of the risks they were willing to accept to keep their family connections alive.
“I always worried the most about the children. I worried about them slipping up and telling someone who their father really was, and I worried about what we were doing to them. Later, critics would accuse us of doing too much for the criminals who testified for us. What few realized was there were usually innocent people behind each of these criminals. Their wives, children, parents, and other relatives all suffered, no matter how hard I tried to make them whole. This was a program of last resort. No matter how much we tried to do to make the transition easy, being relocated was always a painful event—a move that you made only because you knew it was the only way to stay alive.”
Although Shur was up to his neck in witnesses, there was no law on the books that specifically authorized the government to run a witness protection program. He was still financing the cost of relocating witnesses with cash that he withdrew from the Justice Department’s expert witness and witness travel fund. The blue-ribbon panel that President Johnson had created to study crime in America had included Shur’s ideas in its final report in 1967, but its findings had been recommendations, nothing more. Shur saw an opportunity to formalize the program when Senator John L. McClellan, of the famed McClellan Committee, introduced a massive crime bill in 1969 that was designed to implement President Nixon’s new law-and-order agenda. While McClellan’s name was listed as the bill’s author, much of it had been drafted by his staff, one of whom, G. Robert Blakey, proved to be a genius at finding effective new ways to assault the mob. His previous job had been working for Johnson’s blue-ribbon panel, where he’d helped Henry Ruth Jr. insert
Shur’s suggestions into its final report. Now Blakey took Shur’s ideas about witness protection from the panel’s report and inserted them into McClellan’s crime bill. He also wrote the bill’s language that established the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), another critical tool that would be used to devastate the mob.
As a courtesy, major pieces of legislation are sent for comment to federal agencies that are going to be affected by them. When Attorney General Mitchell received McClellan’s bill, he sent the few paragraphs that dealt with protecting witnesses to Shur for review. In effect, Shur was now being asked to comment on his own ideas. By this point, he had been helping witnesses for almost two years and had refined his thoughts. He suggested that McClellan add another sentence to the wording in the bill. Attorney General Mitchell forwarded the recommendation to Senator McClellan, who sent it, in turn, to Blakey.
On October 15, 1970, the Organized Crime Control Act became law. Tucked deep inside it was a short section entitled “Title V: Protected Facilities for Housing Government Witnesses.” Not surprisingly, it spelled out exactly what Shur needed to finally have his program authorized by statute. The key line was the sentence that Shur had added. It read: “The Attorney General shall provide for the care and protection of witnesses in whatever manner is deemed most useful under the special circumstances of each case.” That was it. As simple and as vague as it sounds, that sentence was enough to justify the creation of the modern-day witness protection program and everything that came with it: a multimillion-dollar budget, giving witnesses new names, drafting false documents,
and relocating known criminals to unsuspecting communities. Now that Shur finally had the legal authority from Congress that he needed, he moved quickly.
“I had serious misgivings about my role in the handling of witnesses,” he explained, “especially when it came to my giving them money. Here I was, on the prosecution team, paying their living expenses and helping them go into hiding and get new jobs. It wasn’t going to be long before a shrewd defense attorney accused me of buying testimony, which is illegal.”
Shur needed someone else to take charge of the day-to-day handling of witnesses, a buffer between federal prosecutors and witnesses. “The U.S. Marshals Service was already protecting and relocating witnesses for me through Hugh McDonald, and it seemed like the perfect agency for the job.” Shur proposed in a memo that the Marshals Service take over responsibility for protecting, hiding, documenting, and relocating witnesses and that it begin paying the costs of those tasks from its own budget. Shur would continue on as the witness program’s overseer and deal with the U.S. Attorneys and federal investigators when it came to deciding who needed protection. But once a witness was approved, he’d be handed over to the Marshals Service. This way, Shur could argue that federal prosecutors had an arm’s-length arrangement with the witnesses. “The Marshals Service’s priority would be keeping a witness alive, not rewarding him for his testimony, and this was a distinction I wanted jurors to understand. That was one reason why I was eager for the Marshals Service to handle witnesses: because at that time it wasn’t an investigative agency in competition with the FBI, IRS, or DEA. It wouldn’t have a stake in getting a conviction. At the same time, I knew once I turned over the relocation functions, I would be giving up
some control. The Marshals Service was a separate agency in the Justice Department answerable only to the attorney general. I was working out of the Criminal Division with no line authority over the Marshals Service, so whatever I was to accomplish would have to be solely by persuasion.”
Under pressure from Attorney General Mitchell, the director of the Marshals Service agreed to Shur’s plan four days after McClellan’s crime bill became law. The director’s staff estimated that the Marshals Service would need a minimum of a hundred additional deputies to efficiently handle the number of witnesses now pouring into the program, and a hefty increase in its budget. In keeping with the program’s secretive nature, neither Shur nor the Marshals Service gave it an official name, although the service toyed with several acronyms, including WISPER, short for Witness Intelligence, Security, Protection, Enforcement, and Regulation. It would eventually become known as witness protection or WITSEC, shorthand for Witness Security.
While Shur was eager to see the Marshals Service take charge of witnesses, its deputies got off to a disastrous start when they were called into New Orleans to handle their first big assignment. Legendary crime boss Carlos Marcello was considered untouchable in Louisiana because of the legions of corrupt public officials on his payroll. So when the IRS recruited an informant in 1970 who said he could prove that famed New Orleans district attorney James “Big Jim” Garrison was one of Marcello’s stooges, Justice Department officials got excited. The informant claimed he delivered a bag of mob cash each month to Garrison, who shared it with nine New Orleans policemen. In return for the bribe, they made certain Marcello’s local gambling halls
were not raided. Garrison had become a national figure in 1969, when he prosecuted a local businessman on charges that he had helped the CIA arrange the assassination of President Kennedy. While jurors didn’t believe this, the trial made Garrison a cult hero among conspiracy buffs.
The IRS turned over its informant, who was known as Witness 14, to the federal strike force in New Orleans, and it began pressuring him to testify against Garrison. He refused, explaining that the mob would kill him if he did. “After all the fanfare and excitement, after all the flags waving and the bugles blowing, after all that is over,” Witness 14 said, “I have to go home
alone
.” After months of prodding, Witness 14 finally agreed, but only after Shur went to Louisiana for a secret meeting with him to work out a deal. Witness 14 was promised a new identity, guaranteed a job that would allow him “to retain the standard of living to which he is accustomed,” and told he would be relocated in a foreign country. “He wanted to move to Australia,” Shur recalled, “so I contacted its embassy.” It took Shur several weeks to get permission from the Aussies, and as soon as he did, the witness changed his mind. Now he wanted to go to Germany. A few days later, he switched again, this time choosing Canada. Shur got Canadian officials to agree and also lined up a job for him with Gulf Oil in Canada at a salary of $22,000 per year.
“None of us knew how deep the corruption ran in the New Orleans D.A.’s office or the police department, so we had to be extremely careful when it came time to arrest Garrison,” Shur remembered. The strike force was worried Garrison might discover what it was planning and have Witness 14 arrested and put in a local jail, where federal agents couldn’t protect him.
They feared Garrison might have assigned men to watch the strike force offices. “The deputies needed a safe staging area to use on the morning of the arrest,” Shur explained, “somewhere they could congregate without drawing attention and tipping off Garrison.” He volunteered his twenty-nine-foot-long Airstream trailer. He was scheduled to drive it to Texas on a family vacation but could easily detour to New Orleans first.
Shur didn’t tell Miriam or their children why he was changing their itinerary. “I always thought it would be safer for Miriam if she didn’t know any details about my job,” he explained, “and she understood this and didn’t ask me questions.” On the morning of the arrest, Shur towed his trailer to a parking lot outside a shopping center near where Garrison lived, and suggested that Miriam and the children go window-shopping. As soon as they were gone, deputy U.S. marshals began arriving. The strike force’s plan was simple: Witness 14 would make the mob payoff to Garrison at his house and then be driven by IRS agents to Shur’s trailer, where deputy marshals would be waiting to whisk him to a private airfield. “I thought Garrison would try to have Witness 14 arrested, and if that didn’t work, he’d come after us out of spite.” Minutes before Witness 14 was scheduled to make the payoff, a nosy shopping center security guard rapped on the trailer door. Why, he asked, were Miriam and the Shur children walking around the shopping center four hours before it opened?
“They wanted some exercise,” Shur replied. “We’re just taking a break.”
The guard tried to peek inside the trailer as the heavily armed deputies ducked for cover, but Shur blocked his view. He was afraid the security guard
would call the police, but a few minutes later Witness 14 arrived. Everything had gone according to plan. Witness 14 had handed Garrison the payoff and signaled agents waiting outside. They’d rushed in and arrested him.
“Witness 14 was taken to the airfield where Hugh McDonald was waiting to put him on a private plane. Meanwhile, I began driving with my family toward the Texas border,” Shur said. “I kept glancing in my rearview mirror waiting for some corrupt sheriff who’d been tipped off by Garrison to stop us and toss me in jail.” Just before they crossed the border, Shur heard over the radio that Garrison had been arrested. Miriam shot her husband a “so that’s what was going on” look.
Shur’s well-crafted plans for relocating Witness 14, who was identified in the media as Pershing Gervais, a top Garrison aide, started to unravel within days after the arrest. Gulf Oil, fearful of bad publicity, withdrew its job offer as Gervais was en route to Vancouver, sending Shur scrambling to find him another suitable job. This was only the beginning. The Marshals Service had housed show dogs owned by Gervais together in a kennel, and one was killed during a dog fight. A moving truck carrying the family’s furniture to Canada was burglarized when its driver stopped overnight at a motel. The sale of Gervais’s house in New Orleans was taking longer than expected because potential buyers were scared off by the gun-toting deputy marshals assigned to protect the property. The complaints kept pouring in. Because of delays caused by the Marshals Service, none of the Gervais children could enroll in Canadian schools. Tempers flared. Gervais became so incensed at the Marshals Service that he threatened to change his mind about testifying, and the strike force, afraid that it might lose its case, began firing
off heated complaints to Shur. After several frustrating months, Gervais warned Shur, “Get ready for a war!”