Authors: Pete Earley
Graham’s reputation gave his book instant credibility, and—coming as it did shortly after
Washington Post
reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s best-selling exposé of Watergate—the book hit the stores at a time when the public’s distrust of the government was at a high. In the book, Graham questioned whether the government really needed a WITSEC program, and if so, whether it really needed to be giving criminals new identities. “Should the government officially adopt a program dedicated to telling lies?” he asked.
Graham also accused Shur of overstepping his bounds. He noted that the Nixon administration’s Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 had called only for the creation of safe houses where witnesses could be protected temporarily. It was Shur who had championed the extra wording added by the McClellan Committee that gave the Justice Department permission to spend funds “for the care and protection of such witnesses in whatever manner is deemed most useful under the special circumstances of each case.” He charged that Shur had used that vague language to justify relocations, aliases, and virtually anything else he wanted. Congress had been hoodwinked, Graham wrote, because it had never been told that the government was “getting involved in the wholesale business of creating false identities. Thus, there was never any debate on the legal and moral problems that might arise as the government undertook to wash away the past lives of hundreds of people—many of them hoodlums—and to infiltrate them back into society under false names.”
It was this revelation—that the government was
hiding killers and crooks under false names in unsuspecting neighborhoods—that rattled the public. Graham’s book prompted dozens of reporters to write stories about WITSEC. Most were critical, and nearly every one began by warning readers that they might have a Gerald Zelmanowitz living next door to them.
• • •
The third ghost from WITSEC’s past appeared in February 1976 on the streets of San Francisco, when Joseph Donait was killed by a shotgun blast in broad daylight while unlocking the door of his car on a public street. The killer fired from a passing van. The police found it abandoned a block away with the murder weapon on the backseat. The shotgun’s serial number had been burned off with acid, and detectives suspected the murder was a mob hit. What no one knew was why the mob would want to kill Donait, a man with no known police record. The answer came as soon as the FBI examined his fingerprints. They matched those of Joseph “the Animal” Barboza, the hit man who had been hidden on Thacher’s Island. The San Francisco detectives called deputy John Partington for help. “I know it sounds odd, but I felt funny as soon as the phone rang,” Partington said later, “as though I knew just then, for no reason, that Joe was dead. I just felt it.” He had mixed emotions. “I had a love-hate feeling for the guy. He was a killer, but still, we had gotten close.”
The recap of Barboza’s recent history Partington gave the detectives was a checkered one. In the six years since Barboza had been given a new identity, he had left a merchant marine job the Marshals Service had gotten him, after a fall that brought him $18,500 in workman’s compensation; used the money to traffic in
drugs; been divorced from his wife, who took their daughter with her; and tried unsuccessfully to fence $300,000 in stolen securities to, of all people, the Patriarca crime family in Providence. A few weeks later he killed a fellow drug dealer in what he claimed was self-defense, but there were witnesses to the killing, and Barboza was sentenced to five years in prison. But even from his cell, he managed to pull off a slick con, charging that he had proof Frank Sinatra was a puppet for the mob. He was persuasive enough to appear before a special House committee investigating organized crime in May 1972. Partington refused to protect him, telling him, “ ‘Shit, Joe, you don’t know nothing about Sinatra, you’re just making that shit up!’ But he just laughed. ‘It gets me out of the joint for a while, don’t it?’ he tells me.”
Barboza appeared before the committee wearing a disguise and accused Sinatra of being a front man for Patriarca in the ownership of the Sands casino in Las Vegas and the glitzy Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach. His charges, which were widely reported by the media, gave Sinatra no choice but to appear before the committee to defend himself. He accused Barboza of “character assassination” and called him a “bum … running off at the mouth.” When reporters revealed that Barboza’s accusations were based entirely on hearsay and rumors, a red-faced Congress refused to renew the committee’s funding, and it disbanded.
Federal agents urged Barboza to leave California when he was paroled from prison in 1976, but he began shaking down San Francisco bookmakers instead. “He was going around saying, ‘You know who I am? I’m Joe Barboza, the mob hit man you’ve read about in the newspapers. You’d better pay me or else,’ ” Partington recalled. The police later determined that Barboza had
just finished extorting cash from a bookie when he was gunned down. Although his killers were never caught, they were believed to be mobsters from Providence.
The bad publicity caused by the Leonhard child custody dispute, the Zelmanowitz case, and the Barboza murder raised eyebrows in Congress about WITSEC. And then, just when it looked as if things couldn’t get worse for Shur, they did.
L
ike many teenage girls, the Shurs’ daughter, Ilene, scrambled to grab the telephone when it rang one evening, thinking it was one of her pals. But the menacing voice on the line was anything but friendly. “Have you ever thought about death?” a man asked. “It’s about time you did. Be sure to tell your father I called.” Then the line went dead.
The next morning Shur confronted the most likely suspect. “Congratulations,” he said when the witness entered his office. “You have just become my family’s personal insurer. If anything—and I do mean anything—happens to a member of my family, the entire weight of the Justice Department is going to come crashing down on you and everyone you know. There will be a hundred federal agents investigating your every move and they will make your life miserable.” Of course, the witness denied placing the phone call, but the more he talked, the guiltier he sounded.
Shur already carried a gun. An IRS agent had suggested he get one when he first began dealing with mob witnesses. “If you aren’t armed,” the agent explained, “then we have to worry about protecting you as well as the witness.” The U.S. Marshals Service had deputized him with limited authority, which meant he could carry a concealed weapon but could not make arrests.
After the scary phone call, Shur had his telephone number unlisted and an alarm system installed in his house. “Intellectually, I knew my job might put Miriam and the kids in danger, but I had been in emotional self-denial until Ilene got that call,” he said later. “For the first time, I felt real fear. People I loved were being put at risk because of me. That worried me, but I was not going to be intimidated. Instead I focused on the best way to eliminate the threats.”
Shur had lectured Miriam and his children for years about the need to be aware of what was happening around them. When they were riding in the car, Shur would often ask what the color and make of the car behind them was. Miriam and the kids were not allowed to glance back. They were supposed to already know.
Besides frightening telephone calls, Shur was dealing with another personal difficulty. His multiple sclerosis was becoming worse. Almost daily, he was experiencing painful attacks that would come on without warning. His legs would feel as if they were being jabbed by hundreds of sharp needles, his face would burn, and his skin would become so taut, it felt as if it might rip open. Along with these sensations would come an overwhelming feeling of fatigue. He had described it once to Miriam as water rushing down a bathtub drain. That’s how quickly the energy in his body seemed to be sucked away. “It was so overpowering that if there had been a fire in the Justice Department, I would not have been able to leave my chair,” he said later. Despite this, few of his colleagues ever knew when he was having an MS attack. “I never wanted them focusing on me or being concerned that I wasn’t up to doing my job,” he explained. “They all knew I had MS. I told them because I wanted them to understand that a person with MS
could keep on working. But I hid my attacks from them, mostly because I didn’t want any pity.” Still, there would be occasional signs. One day, a co-worker asked him why he was limping. Another time, Shur called several members of his staff into his office during the day to ask them questions; he normally walked down to their offices. But usually only his special assistant, Diane Reid, who had worked closely with him for more than a decade, could tell when he was being hit by a severe attack. She would look for simple ways to help him without making a display of it. She’d also try to boost his ego. At home, Shur tried to disguise the attacks, too, but Miriam knew him too well to be fooled.
Miriam Ottenberg’s book about MS,
Pursuit of Hope
, was popular with members of MS support groups, and because Shur was quoted throughout it, he soon was being asked to speak at local MS gatherings. Even though he was hard-pressed for time, he rarely refused. When he saw how MS had ravaged others, he realized he was lucky. He began his speeches by removing his jacket so everyone could see the semiautomatic attached to his belt. “You think you’ve got problems,” he’d declare. “Just think about the guy on the opposite end of this gun. How’s he going to feel when he learns the man with his finger on the trigger is suffering from MS?”
Shur discovered the best way for him to endure MS attacks was by focusing on his job. “On my worst days, I couldn’t wait to get to work because it took my mind off the pain.” WITSEC provided him with plenty of distractions.
By the mid-1970s prosecutors, federal investigators, and witnesses were inundating him with complaints about how the Marshals Service was handling—most would say mishandling—WITSEC cases. In its defense,
the service insisted it was being unfairly blamed because it had never been given the staff or the funding it needed to do the job right. In 1976 alone, Shur sent the Marshals Service 486 new witnesses to relocate, the highest number ever admitted in a single year.
While Shur sympathized with its difficulties, he knew the program was being undercut by problems other than growing numbers and a dearth of resources. Simply put, WITSEC was still not a priority in the Marshals Service. The job of WITSEC chief had become a revolving door in the four years since Reis Kash had stepped aside. Fourteen different deputies had been put in charge of the program, some lasting less than two months. Morale was terrible. Being assigned to WITSEC was akin to being banished to Siberia. A frustrated Shur found himself writing memos almost daily to the marshals’ WITSEC chief of the moment about careless blunders. A typical November 1975 memo listed nine complaints. In one instance, a deputy had “terminated” a witness from the program because the former mobster hadn’t landed a legitimate job within six months after relocation. That was the maximum time Shur felt a witness needed to become self-supporting, and the deputy stopped paying the witness’s rent and per diem allowance. But when Shur inquired, he discovered the witness hadn’t been able to apply for jobs because the Marshals Service had never given him a new Social Security card, and without it, no one would hire him. In another case, Shur discovered that deputies in Newark, New Jersey, had delivered the wrong witness to a trial to testify.
“A witness called me upset by how he was being protected,” Shur recalled. “The deputies guarding him kept their guns in holsters hidden under their suit
coats, which they kept buttoned. It was winter, so they were wearing heavy overcoats, which they also kept buttoned, and some were wearing gloves. By the time these deputies got their gloves off and undid their coats and suit jackets to reach for their guns, the witness said he’d be dead.”
The mistakes overshadowed the times when the Marshals Service did an exceptional job. When prosecutors in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, warned Shur at the last minute that the FBI was about to arrest members of a Mafia-run drug and prostitution ring, he told the Marshals Service that it had only forty-eight hours to locate and protect thirty-five persons, mostly pimps, prostitutes, and local bar owners. “They sent in extra deputies and got the job done,” Shur recalled. “It was an incredible feat because they had to grab all thirty-five witnesses at the same moment to keep from tipping off the mob.”
But for every success story, there were a dozen tales about botched jobs. It didn’t help that several federal investigators and prosecutors frequently made outlandish promises to witnesses that the deputies couldn’t fulfill. The handling of Richard J. Blake Sr. and his family was an example of a case gone shockingly bad.
In 1970 Blake and his partner in a landscaping business bid on a lucrative contract to remove dead trees from public parks in the Chicago suburbs. After they agreed to pay kickbacks to a gaggle of corrupt city managers and council members, they were awarded the job. A year later, an IRS auditor discovered the payoffs. To save themselves, Blake and his partner went to work as “IRS confidential sources,” which meant that they helped IRS agents gather evidence in return for a promise that their role in the investigation would
never be revealed and they would not be charged with any crimes. When the IRS turned its findings over to the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago for prosecution, both men assumed their obligation had been fulfilled. But the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case thought otherwise. He insisted that Blake and his partner tell a federal grand jury how the scam worked. When they reminded him that the IRS had promised them anonymity, he replied that grand jury testimony was secret, so technically he was not breaking the IRS’s confidentiality promise. Terrified that they would be killed if they testified, Blake and his partner hired attorneys and threatened to plead the Fifth Amendment if they were subpoenaed. That prompted the prosecutor to ask a federal judge to give both men limited immunity. This meant nothing they said in front of the grand jury could be used to incriminate them, so they could no longer hide behind the Fifth Amendment. If they didn’t testify, they would be held in contempt and tossed in jail.