Authors: Pete Earley
A short time after he became the Marshals Service’s WITSEC chief, Safir announced that he no longer wanted his inspectors answering to the country’s ninety-four politically appointed U.S. marshals, many of whom he considered to be partisan hacks. He wanted the marshals cut out of the loop when it came to every aspect of WITSEC. His inspectors would be stationed in several key cities and would work in the U.S. Marshals Service offices there alongside other
deputies, but they would answer only to Safir. They would not be sent to serve arrest warrants or to fetch some judge’s laundry. He also declared that in the future, neither he nor his inspectors would inform the U.S. marshals when a mob witness was being relocated in their jurisdictions.
Safir’s declarations set off a firestorm. Dozens of U.S. marshals complained to Hall. They accused Safir of being arrogant and overstepping his bounds. But Hall backed up his feisty WITSEC chief, and Safir continued his reforms. “By cutting the U.S. marshals out of the process, Safir ended a lot of the politics when it came to where witnesses were being sent,” a deputy assigned to headquarters later recalled. “A marshal could no longer call up and tell the WITSEC chief not to put anyone from the LCN in his town.” Safir matched his inspectors with individual witnesses and their families. Witnesses no longer had to depend on local deputies, many of whom had never dealt with a mob witness, when they arrived in a new town. Now they dealt with trained WITSEC inspectors who oversaw their case from the moment they were accepted into the program until they left it. This made it difficult for them to con the Marshals Service, and it provided them with better support because the inspectors got to know them personally. “Howard was amazing to watch,” said Shur. “He made my job much easier. A U.S. attorney would call and say a witness needed protection. My staff at the OCRS would review the case and give me a recommendation. Then I would call Safir at the Marshals Service and tell him the witness had been approved. He then took care of everything—protecting the witness, giving him a new identity, and relocating him.”
Not surprisingly, Safir’s curt, ramrod style ruffled
feathers. He didn’t suffer fools, had little patience, and barked orders as if he were a general. He didn’t seem to care whose toes he stepped on. “What was the Marshals Service going to do to me?” he recalled later. “All anyone could do was send me back to the DEA, which would have been fine with me.” Ironically, the fact he was an outsider gave him more rather than less clout.
“Some people didn’t like Howard’s strong ego,” said Shur, “but he also had a very strong desire to be perceived as someone who was turning the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations around and really doing a good job, and that combination worked wonders.” Shur finally had a strong ally rather than an opponent as WITSEC chief, and the two men became a team. Safir could count on Shur to push WITSEC’s cause inside the rest of the Justice Department, and Shur could count on Safir to push it inside the Marshals Service. Their working relationship became even closer after Safir hired Marilyn Mode as his special assistant. She had started her government career working for Shur and both men trusted her judgment.
Safir and Shur shared similar backgrounds. Like Shur, Safir’s parents were Jewish immigrants who had settled in New York City and ingrained in their son an intense desire not only to succeed but to do something important with his life. Safir’s father had been a presser in the garment district, his mother a switchboard operator. His father had helped unionize the sweatshops of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a dangerous cause at the time. As a child, Safir had sat mesmerized at the family table listening to stories told by his uncle, Louis Weiner, a famed New York City detective who had helped arrest notorious bank robber Willie Sutton. After completing college in 1963, Safir joined the New
York State Police, but he quickly moved to the federal Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the DEA. At age twenty-three, during a time when some his age were demonstrating against the Vietnam War and experimenting with illegal drugs, Safir went undercover, posing as a hairy, toga-wearing, drug-buying hippie in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. From there, he served stints in Southeast Asia, Mexico, France, and Turkey.
At Marshals Service headquarters, Safir gained a reputation for rewarding loyalists and crushing dissent. To the surprise of no one, he and John Partington clashed. As capable as he was, Partington had never been a team player, nor had he ever paid much attention to his bosses in headquarters. “John Partington was a cowboy and exactly what this program needed in its early days,” said a friend of both men. “With the help of a handful of other cowboy deputies, Partington literally held WITSEC together, flying across the country putting out fires, handling all of the most important witnesses. He did things his way, by the seat of his pants, because he had to. No one in headquarters really wanted to know what was going on; they just wanted John to handle it. When Safir came in, the entire playing field changed. Howard was intent on building a well-disciplined, well-trained squad of inspectors who answered to him and him alone. There wasn’t a place in WITSEC any longer for the cowboys.”
After Partington testified before Abourezk’s subcommittee, he was transferred from Providence to Washington headquarters. Senator Abourezk had warned him that his candor might get him in trouble, but Partington had shrugged it off. “Director Bill Hall called me in after the hearing,” Partington recalled later, “and told me: ‘Partington, you’re always coming down here to
Washington complaining; it’s time that you paid your dues. Let’s see if you can do things better.’ I went stir-crazy the first week in Washington because I was used to being on the street, not sitting shuffling papers. It was horrible.”
Partington had been at his new desk job for only a few weeks when Safir took charge. “There was an immediate rivalry,” Partington remembered. Deputies began identifying themselves as “Partingtonites” and “Safirites.” One of Safir’s first acts was to review the status of every witness in the program, and he discovered that several mobsters were still being paid monthly subsistence even though they were no longer testifying for the government and had been told months before that they needed to find legitimate jobs and begin supporting themselves. Safir ordered an end to their monthly checks. Several called Partington, who already had a reputation inside the Marshals Service for being too close to witnesses, and he confronted his new boss. “I have lived with many of these wiseguys,” he declared. “I know everything about them, their wives, their kids, and these are good guys who have done a lot for this government. You can’t just terminate them like this. It’s disrespectful.” Safir, who wasn’t about to receive a lecture from Partington, was irked.
He
was running WITSEC, he declared, not Partington. While the mobsters were entitled to lifetime protection, which meant they could call at any time and ask for deputies to come and protect them, they’d never been promised a free ride on the government’s back. Despite Partington’s outburst, the mobsters were booted off the subsistence rolls.
“Safir saw these witnesses as old cases,” Partington said later. “He was focusing on the dollars. I saw them as people. You know, I didn’t spend Christmas
and New Year’s at my home with my family; I spent those holidays with wiseguys. I stayed up all night one New Year’s Eve keeping a witness from killing himself because he was so depressed because now he saw himself as a rat. This had never been just a job to me. People said I had gotten too close to witnesses, and they were right. I cared about these wiseguys. They were my friends.”
One afternoon Partington got a call from a WITSEC inspector who was bringing a gangster into town to testify before a congressional hearing. The mobster, who had been relocated by Partington a few years earlier, had specifically asked to have Partington at his side when he testified. The day after the hearing, newspapers printed photographs of the witness wearing a black hood over his face to conceal his identity as he testified. Sitting nearby was Partington, watching the crowd for trouble. Neither the inspector nor Partington had told Safir about the hearing. He was furious. He had the inspector transferred out of WITSEC operations, and he had Partington sent back to the Providence office. “I was told I would never handle another witness,” Partington said later. “I was given a desk and I sat there and sat there and sat there with nothing to do. I had wiseguys from all over the country calling me. ‘John, what’s happening? We need you.’ I told them I was being terminated from the program—just like they had been.”
Partington called in several favors, and in 1979 President Jimmy Carter appointed him the U.S. marshal in Providence. He was now in charge of that office, but his career as a presidential appointee was short-lived. Although he had been assured by one of Rhode Island’s U.S. senators that his job would be protected, he was replaced when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.
After nineteen years in the Marshals Service, he was out. “I was determined not to be bitter, but I was hurt. I had given my life to my job, and I felt the way witnesses did when the government didn’t need them anymore: thrown away like garbage.” Partington went to work as a police officer in his hometown and then later became the public safety commissioner in Providence.
At headquarters, his departure barely caused a ripple. In less than a year, Safir had restructured and energized its WITSEC operations. The inspectors working there were loyal to him. Their focus was on the future, not Partington and past wiseguys. None of them had to wait long to cut their teeth. The highest-ranking Mafia witness ever to testify for the government was entering WITSEC. His name was Aladena Fratianno, better known as “Jimmy the Weasel,” and the mob wanted him dead.
T
he strike force chief asked Shur to personally fly to California to explain WITSEC to Aladena Fratianno. During the flight, he thought about what he would say. “Jimmy the Weasel was precisely the sort of mob witness I hoped we could get when we first created WITSEC,” he recalled. “He knew it all. He’d been a made member more than thirty years, knew every crime boss in the country, and had the potential to be the most important witness we had ever recruited. But I had had enough experience to know I had to be tough; otherwise a wiseguy like Fratianno would eat me alive. The trick was making him understand that I was there to help him, that I had something he desperately needed, that he was going to be a dead man unless I saved him. Then I would have the upper hand in our talks, not him.”
The sixty-three-year-old mobster looked like someone from central casting when Shur met him in a San Diego prison. With his dyed pompadour, cigar clenched in his teeth, and scrambled syntax punctuated by profanity and mob lingo, he could change in a heartbeat from a charming rogue into a stone-cold killer. Fratianno had contacted the FBI on his own several months earlier, in August 1977, after he had gotten into a tough predicament with the cops and the
mob. He was being indicted for murder and was convinced that Los Angeles crime boss Dominic Brooklier had put a contract out on him. Brooklier had named Fratianno as his temporary replacement when he was sent to prison for a short stint, and Fratianno had used the opportunity to make several lucrative deals with other crime families back east for himself. That had made Brooklier suspect that Fratianno might attempt to take over the L.A. mob permanently. At least that was the reason why Fratianno believed Brooklier was trying to have him killed. Only later would he discover that the FBI had deliberately stirred up the mistrust between him and Brooklier, at one point making Fratianno believe he was being pursued by a Las Vegas hit man when, in fact, he was being followed by an FBI agent.
Fratianno knew all about mob hits. He was known in the media as the “Mafia’s executioner on the West Coast” even though no one had ever been able to make a murder case against him stick. He’d later admit he had killed five mobsters with his own hands and helped murder six others. His specialty was the “Italian rope trick,” which he used to silence fellow gangster Frank Niccoli one afternoon when the two of them were sipping beers in Fratianno’s living room. After four men burst in and overpowered Niccoli, Fratianno looped a rope around his guest’s neck and announced matter-of-factly, “Frankie, your time’s up.” He handed one end of the rope to one of his goons and began pulling on the other end, choking Niccoli to death.
Fratianno was currently negotiating a plea agreement with FBI agents and federal prosecutors, but he had not yet signed anything. Shur was being brought in to help persuade Fratianno that he should become a
witness and enter WITSEC. While he was eager to cooperate, Shur was against using WITSEC as a reward program, and he didn’t think Fratianno was entitled to any special favors.
“We will keep you alive and see to it that you do your sentence in a safe prison atmosphere,” Shur told the mobster. Fratianno’s attorney, Dennis McDonald, quickly interrupted. Why would Fratianno need to be sent to a federal prison? he asked. Since he was such an important witness, couldn’t he be confined by WITSEC deputies in a hotel or on a military base?
“Mr. Fratianno is going to prison,” Shur replied firmly. “That is not negotiable.” Years later, he would recall why he had been so adamant. “I knew that each time Fratianno testified in court, some defense attorney was going to suggest he had gotten a sweetheart deal. So I took the exact opposite position that his attorney took: I felt it was crucial that Fratianno go to prison because he
was
so important. I wanted juries to know he was being punished.”
Continuing, Shur told Fratianno that even after he was paroled, he wouldn’t have an easy time in WITSEC. “We’re not offering you a glamorous life and certainly nothing compared to what you’re used to. The only thing we’re guaranteeing is to keep you alive on our terms. That means we’ll choose a place to relocate you, feed you, and cover your basic needs until you start making a living. That’s it.”