Authors: Pete Earley
Without telling Shur, Gervais returned to New Orleans on his own and called a press conference to announce that the government had forced him to “frame” Garrison and then spirited him off to Canada to keep him quiet. He accused Shur of being “a professional liar” and castigated the deputies who had been assigned to help him, calling them stupid and incompetent. His defection made national headlines, and Shur’s uncle Samuel mailed him a clipping with Gervais’s accusation circled in ink. “I don’t believe this,” he wrote. “I know you are a very good boy.”
Because of Gervais’s flip-flop, the strike force lost its case against Garrison, although voters removed him from office the next year. He resurfaced a few years later when he was named to the state’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he served until 1991, when he was forced to retire at age seventy. He died a year later of a heart ailment, not long after the release of Oliver Stone’s controversial film
JFK
, which was loosely based on one of three books Garrison had written about the Kennedy assassination. In the film, Garrison was portrayed as a hero. Gervais, meanwhile, moved back to New Orleans without incident.
Although Shur was convinced that Gervais had been unhappy in Canada and was simply looking for an excuse to return home, the Marshals Service’s bungling of the case made him nervous. “I wondered if the U.S. Marshals Service was really ready for the job I was asking it to take on,” he recalled.
B
ecause of his experiences safeguarding Joseph Barboza, John Partington was one of the first deputy U.S. marshals to take charge of mob witnesses in WITSEC. Handling them proved to be an interminable task. One afternoon in 1971, Partington found himself running up and down a stairwell in a New York hotel where two different sets of WITSEC charges were stashed. Hidden in one room were a mobster’s wife, four children, and mother, all fearful about what was going to happen to them next. Two flights below, a different gangster’s girlfriend was sobbing uncontrollably because she was being forced to disappear, thanks to her married lover’s decision to testify against his former LCN pals. As Partington tried to calm them all, he got an emergency telephone call from Washington.
“We’ve got a hot one!” his boss said. “Go over right now and get this woman out.”
Partington scribbled down an address. It was a Friday afternoon. It was raining. New York traffic was already logjammed. But he left immediately for an apartment in the Bronx. He knew only the bare essentials: A woman employed at a used-car lot owned by a mobster had overheard her boss bragging about a murder. She had tipped off the FBI, and the mobster was
now going to silence her—permanently. Partington glanced at his wristwatch. Minutes mattered. He parked in an alley. He saw nothing suspicious, but if the mob had sent a pro, he wouldn’t. There was no backup. He was on his own.
“Who’s there?” a voice asked after he knocked on an apartment door.
“John Partington, U.S. deputy marshal,” he replied.
“How can I be sure?”
He held his badge up to the apartment’s peephole.
A woman cracked open the door. Partington noticed a girl clutching the woman’s dress. He guessed the child was ten. “Ready to go?” he asked them.
“We gotta take my daughter’s rabbit,” the woman replied, nodding toward a wire cage.
There wasn’t time to argue. Partington scooped up the cage, checked the hallway, and led the woman and her daughter into the alley. Moments later they were stuck in traffic, and the questions flew at him. “How will I get my furniture? How long will I be gone? What about my daughter’s homework? When can I call my parents? How am I going to support myself?”
“I can’t answer your questions,” Partington said. “What I can promise you is that I will keep you alive and safe. The other stuff will have to wait.”
During a recent trip outside New York City, he had spotted a motel that had struck him as a good spot to hide someone. It was a three-hour drive, and both of his passengers were asleep by the time he got there. Partington rented a room, carried the sleeping girl and the rabbit cage inside, and gave the woman a hundred dollars in cash for groceries, along with a list of emergency telephone numbers to call if she needed him. Someone would be in touch with her on Monday, he
said. He told her to lock the door after he left, and waited to hear the deadbolt click into place. Rather than leave the area immediately, he stopped across the road at a tavern and ordered a whiskey. Every five minutes or so, he glanced at the motel to make certain no one was bothering the woman. After an hour, he decided it was safe to go. He hadn’t been home in Providence for three weeks, so he drove there, hoping to salvage what was left of the weekend. He felt guilty. His son had recently accused him of caring more about mob witnesses than his own family because he was always gone. Partington had missed school events, even birthdays. His wife was beginning to feel as if she were a widow. Partington reached home just before daybreak, undressed, and was about to slip into bed when the telephone rang.
“You better get out here fast,” the motel owner said. “The woman you checked in woke us up. There’s blood everywhere!”
It was a four-hour trip. The woman had a gash on the side of her head. She had slipped in the tub while taking a shower and hit a towel rod. He took her to a local emergency room, where she was treated under a false name. On the ride back to the motel, she complained: “What if it had been a real emergency? Why did it take you so long to get there?” Partington didn’t reply.
“The demands placed on the Marshals Service when we began the program were spinning out of control,” he said later. “There just wasn’t enough time in a twenty-four-hour day to do everything we had to get done.”
• • •
The U.S. Marshals Service has a history of being stuck with jobs that no one else in the government wants to do, so it was no surprise when it was pressured into
taking on Shur’s mobster witnesses. During the two centuries since its creation, the Marshals Service has proven at various times to be both a heroic operation and a horrible embarrassment.
Initially, U.S. marshals were in charge of protecting judges, serving federal warrants, making certain that witnesses and defendants showed up in court, keeping order during trials, and paying the prosecuting attorneys, court clerks, jurors, and witnesses. They were personally appointed by the president, and in later years a few presidents would treat them as their own private police force.
The first test of the U.S. marshals’ power came in 1791, when Congress imposed a tax on whiskey to raise cash to pay its Revolutionary War debts. In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, sixteen whiskey distillers kidnapped a federal tax collector, tarred and feathered him, and stole his horse. The U.S. marshal in Philadelphia was ordered to serve warrants on the distillers but didn’t want to do it, so he gave the job to a deputy, who hired a dim-witted cattle driver to serve the warrants, without telling him what they were. The distillers beat the cattle driver, tarred and feathered him, stole his horse, and left him tied to a tree. President George Washington replaced the cowardly marshal with a new one: David Lenox, who rode off personally to serve warrants on seventy-five whiskey makers. Lenox got U.S. Army general John Neville to help him, but before they could complete the job, five hundred angry protesters chased them back to Neville’s farm, took them hostage, and then looted and burned his house. President Washington sent a thirteen-thousand-man militia, raised by four states, into the county to end the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. Marshal Lenox made the arrests.
Over the coming years, presidents had marshals conduct the national census, catch counterfeiters, return escaped slaves to the South, supervise congressional elections, and track down moonshiners. But it was in the Old West where they became famous. Deputy Marshal Pat Garrett killed Henry McCarty, better known as Billy the Kid. Marshal Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Virgil and Morgan, along with Dr. John “Doc” Holliday, gunned down suspected cattle rustlers and armed robbers Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers outside the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Between 1872 and 1896, 103 deputy U.S. marshals were murdered in what was known as Indian Territory—present-day Oklahoma—and a northern fifty-mile strip adjacent to it called No Man’s Land. Justice was dispensed by Judge Isaac Charles Parker, known as the “hanging judge,” in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The gallows he personally designed could accommodate twelve at a time. He depended on two hundred deputy marshals to track down lawbreakers. The most famous was Heck Thomas, who, along with his wife, Matty, was the model for Rooster Cogburn and Little Matty in the book and movie
True Grit
.
With the settling of the frontier came local, county, and state police forces, and the need for marshals and their deputies waned. In the 1890s, the government used them to disperse railroad strikers. In one incident, five thousand thugs, mostly billy-club-swinging ruffians already working for the railroads, were deputized and unleashed on the men, women, and children who were picketing because of unfair working conditions. It was a grim period for the marshals. The FBI was created in 1908 and soon became the country’s most prestigious federal law enforcement
agency, making the U.S. marshal seem even more of a relic.
One reason federal law enforcement agencies viewed marshals as inferior was because of their political status. There are currently ninety-four judicial districts in the United States, and each has its own marshal. Because they are political appointees, even today no qualifications are necessary. A florist, a funeral director, and even a Baptist preacher have been marshals. For more than 150 years, there was no national headquarters, no training, no uniformity, and few standards. In 1956, the Justice Department tried to professionalize the marshals by making them answer to a newly created executive office in Washington. The attorney general selected its director, but most marshals refused to cooperate. Why did they have to listen to a director who was appointed by the attorney general? As one put it: “The president of the United States appointed me, and I don’t have to answer to anyone but him.”
President John F. Kennedy turned to James J. P. McShane for help in changing this attitude. A former New York City homicide detective and Golden Gloves boxer, McShane was a tough Irish cop who had first met the Kennedy clan while moonlighting on weekends as a chauffeur for Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s children. The Kennedys put McShane in charge of the Marshals Service’s executive office, and even though he had no more legal authority than his predecessors, he declared himself chief of all ninety-four marshals and began bullying them into line. He turned to the Kennedys whenever he needed political muscle. Neither John nor Robert Kennedy trusted J. Edgar Hoover or his loyal FBI agents, and McShane used that mistrust to his advantage. The Kennedys, in turn, relied on
McShane to enforce federal desegregation laws in the Deep South, where local police often turned a blind eye to racism. Southern states had continued to defy the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine, and tried to bar black students from white-only public schools. In 1957 President Eisenhower had sent paratroopers to Little Rock to control the rioting that ensued when nine black students tried to enter the high school, and in 1960 he sent federal marshals into New Orleans to protect black students enrolling in previously white-only public schools.
Jesse Grider was one of those deputies. He escorted Ruby Mae Bridges, a black first-grader, into a classroom as angry whites spit racial slurs at her. Norman Rockwell’s painting
Problems We All Live With
shows Grider, who was from Kentucky, and three other deputies forming a shield around Bridges, although the deputies’ faces are not shown. Grider was later assigned to help protect Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1961 when an angry mob circled the Baptist church where he was preaching. “You could see pickup trucks arriving loaded with pieces of concrete for the demonstrators to throw at us,” he later recalled. The deputies wore surplus World War II steel helmets painted white, with the words “U.S. Marshal” stenciled on the front. Each deputy supplied his own riot baton; many were homemade. Few had any training in crowd control. Nearly all the deputies guarding King were from other states. McShane had brought them into Alabama because he wasn’t confident the local deputies would protect civil rights leaders. When the mob began throwing rocks, the deputies charged, swinging their batons. One protestor slashed at Grider’s throat with a knife. Grider
whacked him hard with a nightstick. Afterward, a deputy from Mississippi berated Grider. “You shouldn’t hit a white man over a nigger,” he said.
“Hey,” replied Grider, “I’m hitting him over me.”
The showdown for Chief McShane and a pivotal moment for the Marshals Service came in September 1962, when James Meredith, a black man, was refused entry to the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Robert Kennedy ordered McShane to seize control of the Lyceum, the university’s antebellum administration building, where the school’s registrar was housed. McShane’s force, which included 123 deputies augmented by 316 border patrolmen and 97 prison guards, moved onto the campus late on a Sunday night, taking control of the Lyceum without incident. But the next morning, three thousand protesters gathered outside and began throwing rocks and acid stolen from the university’s chemistry lab. McShane had his men spray the crowd with tear gas. Gunshots broke out. One deputy was hit in the neck, but there was no way for an ambulance to pass through the mob. The deputies would crouch behind the white bullet-marked columns of the Lyceum, fire a volley of tear gas grenades, and rush into the mob swinging nightsticks. A French news reporter was murdered by the demonstrators; another man was killed by a stray bullet. McShane asked the Kennedys for permission to let his men draw their weapons, but they refused. By ten o’clock the next morning, with the situation still out of control, the president sent in U.S. Army troops. One hundred sixty deputies had been injured during the fighting, twenty-eight seriously. McShane took a brick in the head; his dented helmet later rested on Robert Kennedy’s desk as a reminder of the confrontation.