Authors: Pete Earley
Shur’s memo to Civiletti ended with an ominous warning: “WITSEC is being so poorly run that it is amazing no government witness has been killed. This success should not lead to the conclusion that we have been skillful at concealment. Instead it is the result of dumb luck and the savvy of the witnesses themselves.”
One of Civiletti’s special assistants, William J. Brady, reviewed Shur’s memo before it was given to Civiletti and attached a short summary to it, as well as his own recommendation. He proposed taking WITSEC away from the Marshals Service. “The marshals
were never set up to care for people such as these witnesses,” Brady noted. “The very education of a deputy marshal is repugnant to being kind and helpful to one who is an admitted accomplice in an organized crime case. Up to now, the program has survived
solely
because of the work of Gerry Shur.” Brady urged Civiletti to create a new office within the Justice Department exclusively for witness protection. It would have its own budget and own WITSEC officers, and would act independently of other federal law enforcement agencies to guarantee that all federal witnesses were treated equally. He recommended that Shur be put in charge.
Shur was flattered but dead set against Brady’s proposal. Instead, he urged Civiletti to appoint a panel of outside experts to review the WITSEC program. “No one was simply going to hand over more funds to the marshals,” Shur recalled, “but if a panel of experts said, ‘Okay, here is a problem, this is how we can fix it, and one of the solutions is that we need more money,’ then I felt the Justice Department hierarchy would give the Marshals Service the funding it needed to make WITSEC work.”
Civiletti backed Shur’s idea, and a panel of managers from other divisions inside the Justice Department began a two-year review of WITSEC. One of its recommendations was the creation of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), a document given to every WITSEC witness. It spelled out exactly what the Marshals Service would and wouldn’t do. “One of the key questions on the MOU was: ‘Have any promises been made to you?’ ” Shur recalled. “A witness would then write down exactly what he had been promised—maybe by a federal prosecutor or a federal agent—and either a deputy or I would read it and say, ‘Hey, no one is
going to do this for you’ or ‘Sure, we can do this for you.’ The MOU was designed to ensure that every witness had in writing exactly what he was getting into. We didn’t want another Blake case. Once we began using them, the number of witness complaints coming into my offices dropped dramatically.”
In appealing to Civiletti, Shur had unknowingly pinned his hopes on a rising star. By the time the panel of experts had finished writing its final report, Civiletti had been promoted to the job of deputy attorney general. “He was now the person to whom the panel was required to give its findings,” said Shur. “It was up to him to decide which of its recommendations would be forwarded to the attorney general.” Then, while his aides were scrutinizing the report, Civiletti was named U.S. attorney general. “All of this couldn’t have worked out better for me,” said Shur. “Civiletti was now the top guy, and he was reviewing recommendations that he himself had set in motion. I had someone in power who was keenly aware of the problems that WITSEC faced.”
Shur felt confident Civiletti would get WITSEC the money and manpower it needed, but that was still not going to be enough. The U.S. Marshals Service’s long-standing attitude of indifference had to be changed. The question now for Shur was how to pull that off.
I
n march 1978, Congress decided to jump in. Enough horror stories had surfaced about government witnesses being abandoned by the Marshals Service that a Senate Judiciary subcommittee decided to conduct three days of public hearings to investigate WITSEC. “I know some managers would have circled the wagons, thrown up their defenses, and tried to paint a rosy picture,” said Shur, “but I felt strongly that if the subcommittee truly understood the problems I was facing, then it could become my ally. I began meeting privately with the subcommittee staff and furnished them with detailed information about all the problems we faced. I was frank. It may sound strange, but by the time the hearings were scheduled to start, I was actually looking forward to the criticism that I knew we were going to get because I believed those criticisms would ultimately help me move WITSEC forward.”
Senator James Abourezk, the subcommittee chair, began by saying he had never heard of WITSEC until he read Fred Graham’s book,
The Alias Program
, published two years earlier. “Fred’s revelations prompted this subcommittee to launch an intensive nine-month investigation,” Abourezk declared. “Sadly, our investigators
found the problems in this program are as bad or even worse than what Mr. Graham suspected.”
Congressional hearings, like television talk shows, thrive on drama, and Senator Abourezk began with a juicy case. He said the subcommittee had met the day before behind closed doors with a protected mob witness named Gerald Festa, who had almost been murdered because of bumbling by deputies. Senator Abourezk blamed the Marshals Service’s office in Newark, New Jersey, for mishandling Festa’s case from the start. After the gangster was hurried out of town, it had forgotten to protect his house and a Chicken Delight restaurant he owned. The house was looted, and vandals sprayed the words “Canary Delight” in yellow paint across the front windows of his fast-food restaurant. But it was what happened next that worried Abourezk.
Festa was being hidden by the FBI in a rural jail under an alias when two deputy marshals from Newark showed up unexpectedly and took him with them without notifying the FBI. They drove Festa to a jail in Newark where several mobsters who wanted him dead were being housed. When the deputies started to check Festa into the facility under his real name, he smelled a setup and began protesting. A sympathetic guard called the FBI, which quickly intervened, hustling Festa off to a new hiding spot—this time, an even more remote rural jail. The next day, two men dressed in hunting clothes and carrying shotguns arrived at the jail, claiming to be prison guards from another state. They tried to talk their way inside by asking questions about the jail’s kitchen facilities, which they asked to see, but the jailer refused to open the front door and spoke to them only through an intercom.
When the men persisted, the jailer called the local sheriff’s office and they fled.
Worried that someone inside the Newark Marshals Service’s office had leaked information about Festa to the mob, the FBI contacted William Hall, who had replaced Wayne Colburn in May 1976 as the Marshals Service’s director. A former FBI agent himself, Hall asked the FBI to investigate. Its probe failed to find sufficient evidence to make arrests, but several deputies abruptly resigned amid rumors they had been paid $5,000 each by the Mafia to locate Festa.
In his secret appearance before the subcommittee, Festa said he didn’t trust anyone in the Marshals Service except deputy John Partington. “Them others,” he testified, “can be bought off!”
When Senator Abourezk asked the subcommittee’s first public witness, Thomas C. Renner, what the biggest problem plaguing WITSEC was, the
Newsday
crime reporter, who had co-authored Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Teresa’s best-selling memoir, said it was the Marshals Service’s openly hostile attitude. “One deputy called witnesses ‘animals who should be chained and locked up.’ … Another bitterly complained to me that ‘these hoods are getting more from the government than I do,’ ” Renner testified. “Of the twenty WITSEC witnesses I have interviewed, not one would tell a friend to enter this program.”
Next, Senator Abourezk asked John Partington for his advice. “First of all, Senator,” the blunt deputy told him, “you got to understand we’re not dealing with Billy Graham churchgoers here. You’re talking about witnesses who are professional criminals. They know their business. We should know our business. I have handled over five hundred witnesses personally since 1967 and I can tell you that these witnesses look
at us like we’re airline pilots. If we make a mistake, they die.” Partington blamed the “suits” at headquarters for WITSEC’s problems. Most just didn’t give a damn about the program, he testified, so mob witnesses were being dumped in cities without new documents and somehow being expected to survive on their own.
Abourezk’s hearing didn’t lead to any new laws, but it accomplished what Shur had hoped. Faced with an ongoing internal Justice Department review and three days of criticism before a Senate subcommittee, Hall and his deputy director, John Twomey, began scouring their ranks to find someone who could clean up the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations. When they couldn’t find anyone they believed could handle the job, Twomey called Peter Bensinger, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who was a close friend. Bensinger had been director of the Illinois Department of Public Safety when Twomey was the warden at the state prison in Joliet. “We need a tough, solid manager,” Twomey told him. Bensinger had just the man. He called Howard Safir, one of his assistants, into his office.
“How’d you like to go to the Marshals Service for a year?” Bensinger asked.
“What’d I do wrong?” Safir answered, grinning.
Bensinger offered Safir a promotion and a pay raise if he would agree to spend one year on loan to the Marshals Service. A few days later, Safir reported to work at his new job. The Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations office, which was located in a suite above a grocery store in downtown Washington, D.C., was so messy, it looked to him as if “someone had set off a bomb inside it.” Security was appalling. Anyone could have walked inside from the street. Desks were left at
night stacked with confidential reports about mob witnesses. The office files didn’t have locks on them. “Most of the employees didn’t want to be there,” Safir recalled. “One told me, ‘I hate baby-sitting these goddamn criminals.’ I said to myself, ‘How in the hell can you operate a program with people who don’t want to be here and don’t like their clients?’ It was clear to me that if you screwed up in the Marshals, this is where they sent you.”
Safir was so embarrassed by his new assignment that he wore his DEA identification badge to work. He didn’t want anyone he met to think he was employed by the Marshals Service. During his first day on the job, he asked his secretary what he thought was a routine question: How much subsistence was WITSEC paying a specific witness each month?
“I can have that information for you in about a week,” she replied.
“A week? Can’t you just look it up on your computer?”
“Sir, I have trouble getting ribbons for our manual typewriters. No one here has a computer.”
Safir marched in to see Hall and Twomey. “I can fix this program,” he said, “but I am going to need money and I am going to have to get rid of nearly every deputy assigned to the office.” A few days later Safir returned to the director’s office and outlined his plans. “I intend to transform the witness protection unit into an elite squad of deputies capable of protecting not only mob witnesses, but foreign dignitaries and government officials as well. To start, I want to create a new job classification inside the Marshals Service. I want to call it ‘witness security inspectors,’ and I want them to be paid more than other deputies. This will be a way
for us to begin attracting the best rather than the worst deputies into this program.”
Not only was Safir the right man for the job, but he came at the right time. Weary of complaints, Hall and Twomey were eager to back him up inside the Marshals Service, and he had the immediate support of Shur in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Justice Department and the backing of U.S. attorney general Civiletti. “Howard Safir was the first real advocate the witness program ever had inside the Marshals Service,” Shur recalled. “He didn’t mind pounding on people’s desks, making demands, shaking things up. He was a determined Mr. Fix-it, and once he put his mind to it, he was impossible to stop.”
Safir was given a free hand, and he immediately got rid of almost every deputy assigned to WITSEC, replacing them with fifty-three new hires, most of whom he handpicked. Several were Vietnam veterans eager to prove themselves. “I wanted young people who could be good cops, but who also could say, ‘Okay, yesterday you were a scumbag criminal but today you are a witness, so we are going to treat you the way a human being should be treated.’ ” As part of his plan to turn the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations into an exclusive unit, he stopped the agency’s practice of having deputies rotate in and out of witness protection details—a move the deputies’ union unsuccessfully tried to block because it meant less overtime pay. In the coming months, Safir hired secretarial staff and replaced the old training manual that Reis Kash had drafted with a more modern and demanding one that spelled out exactly how Safir expected his new witness security inspectors to operate. He began upgrading training, too. He even designed several specialized training courses exclusively for his inspectors. “Most
witnesses can never be happy in this program,” he told them, “but we can make them content. There is a difference. You must learn to do what’s reasonable, compassionate, and right. The witness himself may have been an ax murderer, but his wife and children weren’t.”
Under Safir, no one got inside the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations office without first being cleared by a uniformed guard. Information about witnesses was shared on a need-to-know basis. Files were kept locked. Safir got the DEA to set up a computer system in the operations office. He didn’t tolerate sloppy desks, poorly written reports, screw-ups with witnesses.
Safir would later recall that he succeeded where others had failed because he established a “winner’s attitude” in his troops. He told his inspectors that he was going to mold them into “the best personal protective service in the world, with a reputation for never losing anyone.” Any deputies who didn’t measure up would be booted out. He arranged for the best among them to be sent to New York City each year to help protect foreign diplomats when the United Nations General Assembly was in session, an assignment that helped instill pride and gave them experience working with other agencies, as well as bonus pay.