Authors: Pete Earley
As he was being led into the prison wearing leg irons and handcuffs attached to a belly chain, Zambito briefly considered asking to be put in the “hole,” the nickname inmates used for isolation cells. He would be safe there overnight and sent on his way in the morning. But he was worried that other prisoners riding on the bus with him would notice he had been afraid to stay in a regular cell block and correctly surmise
that he was a snitch. That wasn’t a label Zambito wanted following him to his final destination, so he kept quiet and trudged along with the others into an area called A&O, shorthand for Admissions and Orientation, where prisoners in transit were housed with other newly arrived inmates not yet assigned permanent cells. Zambito had reason to be worried. Allen “Big Al” Benton, one of the drug dealers whom he had helped convict, was also in the Atlanta prison.
Zambito was taken to a six-man cell, which was kept unlocked so inmates inside it could move freely around the tier. He had two cellmates: a Hispanic inmate, who didn’t speak much English, and Marion Albert Pruett, a bank robber who had arrived a few days earlier, having been sent to Atlanta because he needed surgery on his left leg that could only be done there. Pruett would later tell investigators that Zambito had been jittery from the moment he entered the cell. “He said to me, ‘Hey, what’s the hole like?’ which I thought was an odd question,” Pruett recalled. “And I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ and he says, ‘I just don’t like it here on this compound.’ That’s when I knew something was going on.”
Pruett would later testify that he had been sleeping in his bunk when he was awakened by a noise shortly after 4
A.M.
“I had my eyes closed,” he said, “but I could see what was coming down.” What he saw, he said, was Big Al Benton slashing a knife across Zambito’s throat and repeatedly stabbing him. Afraid Benton might kill him, too, Pruett said, he pretended to be asleep.
When Miami prosecutors heard that Zambito had been murdered, they accused prison officials of being both incompetent and stupid. But an internal investigation by BOP director Norman Carlson showed his
officers were not to blame. “The warden in Atlanta had not been told anything about Zambito, and there was nothing on his case jacket that identified him as a government informer or witness,” Carlson said. “The prosecutors had simply assumed we would know who Zambito was and would take precautions to protect him. It was a total lack of communication.” A jury convicted Benton, and Pruett, who was the star witness against him, was hustled off to a different prison under an alias.
The Zambito killing was not the first time the BOP had run into problems because of prison inmates who needed special handling because they were government informants and witnesses. “For years,” BOP director Carlson later explained, “I had been getting calls, mostly from FBI special agents but sometimes from FBI headquarters or from U.S. attorneys all across the country, asking me to do favors for their witnesses. They felt these witnesses had really helped them and deserved special privileges. Unfortunately, they would often make unrealistic promises to them and then expect us to carry them out. One prosecutor told me, ‘By the way, I told this witness he could have a conjugal visit with his wife now and then. You don’t mind, do you?’ Conjugal visits were totally against our policy, and I was stuck being the bad guy because I’d be the one who had to tell these witnesses we were not going to follow through.” Carlson decided something had to be done, so he contacted Shur.
Looking back later, Shur would note that a natural evolution had occurred. Before WITSEC, there weren’t many government witnesses, and when the program began in 1970, federal prosecutors had been so eager to recruit mobsters that many of them were
granted full immunity and didn’t have to spend a day in prison. But as more and more LCN members agreed to testify, prosecutors and judges became more selective about who was let off without being punished, and by 1974, almost every criminal who entered WITSEC had to serve some time in prison before he was paroled and relocated. This created a new problem: where to house them. The Marshals Service initially let LCN witnesses do their time in safe houses. It also tried military brigs and county jails. But none of these facilities proved to be suitable. Safe houses weren’t designed to hold prisoners for long periods, mobsters objected to the rigid regimen of military prisons, and witnesses didn’t feel secure in county jails.
Working together, Shur and BOP director Carlson came up with a solution. They decided to build a special prison exclusively for government witnesses. Carlson already had a location in mind. He had his architects reconfigure the third floor of the high-rise Metropolitan Corrections Center the BOP was constructing in New York City, and when the prison opened in mid-1978, Shur moved twenty-one government witnesses into the new WITSEC prison unit.
Not everyone liked Shur and Carlson’s “prison within a prison.” Prosecutors in New Jersey and New York were afraid that putting witnesses in the same prison as the mobsters who wanted to kill them was foolhardy. But Shur felt confident. “I considered Norman Carlson one of the best administrators in the federal government. He was not going to let a witness be poisoned, stabbed, or harmed.”
Carlson used strict security guidelines to keep the third-floor unit separate from the rest of the prison. It had its own secure entrance, and every witness in the
unit was given an alias to prevent other inmates in the prison from knowing who was being housed there. The only prison official who was told the inmate’s actual name was the warden. Each witness was assigned a one-man cell, and if he wished, he could ask for his cell door to be locked when other witnesses were free to watch television or play pool in the unit’s common area. Before any visitors were permitted to enter the unit, they were required to stand in front of a two-way mirror so the WITSEC witness they were coming to see could verify that the visitor was actually who he said he was. To prevent witnesses from being poisoned, a BOP lieutenant selected trays of food at random from the prison’s mess hall and locked them inside a cart that was then taken into the WITSEC unit.
Carlson required every witness to pass an FBI-administered lie detector test before he was allowed to be housed in the WITSEC unit. Carlson wasn’t trying to discover whether or not he had testified truthfully in court. He wanted to be certain no one was trying to sneak himself into the unit to kill another witness. And even after a witness passed the test, he wasn’t automatically admitted into the unit. First, a photograph of him was distributed to everyone already housed there so they could tell correctional officers if they were afraid of the prospective new arrival. “In some Mafia cases,” Shur explained, “we would get a low-ranking guy to testify against his gangster boss. Then that gangster would testify against someone higher up in the organization, and up the chain we would go. This meant there were a lot of WITSEC witnesses who had grudges against each other and couldn’t be housed together.”
In most of the BOP prisons, Carlson tried to keep
rival prison gangs and various hate groups separated from each other to prevent trouble, but that wasn’t possible inside the tiny WITSEC unit. “We had Ku Klux Klan members living in cells next to Black Panthers, the Aryan Brotherhood—with swastikas on their arms—sitting with Jews at the dinner table. All these groups who normally would not associate with each other were housed together in our unit,” Shur explained. “It worked because there was a common threat that kept them in line. They knew they’d be kicked out of the unit if they caused problems, and no one wanted to be sent into the main prison population because he’d have to check himself into an isolation cell to keep from being murdered.”
When it first opened, the WITSEC unit was a spartan affair. It had one communal television set, a pool table, table tennis equipment, some exercise equipment, and a small visiting room. At night, prisoners were taken up to the roof for fresh air and to exercise. Carlson assigned his most senior correctional officers to work there. “I needed strong, experienced officers because these inmates were sophisticated and conniving,” he recalled. He also wanted his staff to know that the WITSEC unit was a top priority.
The Manhattan unit was so successful that within months Shur and Carlson had opened two more in federal prisons in San Diego and Chicago. Two years later, a fourth unit opened in Otisville, New York. Together, these four housed a total of four hundred WITSEC witnesses, some serving sentences as long as life. “I felt bad for many of our WITSEC prisoners because they had helped the government,” said Shur, “and we were imprisoning them under harsher conditions than the criminals whom they had testified
against. We didn’t have jobs in the WITSEC units that our witnesses could do to earn money. There was no vocational training, no recreation areas. Boredom was a real problem, and that concerned me because I knew that a bored, idle prisoner could be a dangerous person.”
Carlson tried to make life easier by having small color television sets installed in each cell, but, he recalled, “that was about all I could do.” Because there were only four units nationwide, relatives often had to travel across the country to visit, and when they arrived, correctional officers had to sneak them inside at odd hours to prevent other prison visitors and inmates in the main prison from seeing them. “We didn’t want anyone to discover who we had hidden in the unit based on the visitors coming to see them,” Shur explained. Arranging visits was such a nightmare that Shur arranged for witnesses to call home on government lines without charge once each week so they could keep in touch with their families.
Not every WITSEC witness was sent to one of the units. “If we thought it was safe,” Shur said, “we would hide witnesses in state prisons under an alias. It gave them a chance to take advantage of educational and vocational classes and live a more normal prison life.” But some witnesses were afraid to be housed anywhere except inside the units.
Shur now had to deal with two separate agencies: the BOP and Howard Safir’s WITSEC operations office at the Marshals Service. The BOP was responsible for keeping the witnesses safe while they did their time. As soon as they were paroled, the Marshals Service took over protecting them.
While the BOP ran the WITSEC units, Shur had the final say over who was housed in them. He visited
each unit at least twice a year to hold “town meetings.” He always began by asking: “How are things going?” After listening to the witnesses’ complaints as a group, he met individually with anyone who wanted to speak to him in private. “A few inmates in the WITSEC unit tried to run cons on me,” said Shur, “and they were the most interesting to deal with because they’d lie, scheme, and try to manipulate me.”
At one town meeting, WITSEC inmates demanded that Shur complain to the BOP’s Carlson and get a correctional officer transferred out of the WITSEC unit because no one there liked him. But when Shur met separately with several inmates, they admitted the group meeting had been staged. One of the witnesses in the unit had a grudge against the officer and was trying to get him transferred. Everyone else had simply been going along. In a unit that housed only informants, Shur found it easy to keep track of what was happening. For instance, one afternoon a witness called Shur with a disturbing tip. He said a female BOP caseworker was periodically engaging in sex with a witness in the unit. Shur was skeptical, even when he went into the unit and confronted the witness who reportedly had seduced the woman.
“Yes, I’ve had sex with her,” he admitted. “Who told you?”
Shur, who knew the woman personally, decided to see if he could catch the witness in a lie.
“If you had sex with her, I assume you have seen her nude,” Shur said.
“Yep,” the witness replied, grinning.
“Then you must have noticed the scar she has on her left leg?” he continued.
“Ah, no,” the witness said after a few awkward moments. “I don’t remember a scar.”
“Well, you had to have noticed that she had a breast removed because of cancer?”
“She did?” the witness asked, seeming genuinely confused. “No, I guess it’s possible I missed that. We did it real quick and I didn’t always look at her breasts, but I thought for sure she had both of them.”
Shur had made up the scar and cancer stories, hoping to trick the witness into confirming them.
“When was the last time you had sex with her?” he asked.
“The twenty-fifth of the month.”
At that moment, Shur was called away to answer an emergency phone call. He took it in a tiny office. As he was talking on the phone, he glanced down and noticed that someone had drawn a heart in red ink on the desk calendar. It was on the twenty-fifth. “Whose office is this?” Shur asked a correctional officer. “It’s our caseworker’s,” he replied.
“I had been absolutely convinced the witness had been lying to me,” Shur said later, “but seeing that heart had made me suspicious enough to confront the woman, and she admitted having sex with him. She had to resign.” The incident reminded Shur of how treacherous witnesses could be. “I warned my staff constantly never to meet alone with a witness in a WITSEC unit, no matter how much they liked them or thought they were a friend,” said Shur. “You didn’t want to put yourself in a position where it was your word against theirs.”
Whenever Shur found himself wondering if a witness was lying, he’d look for corroborating evidence and motive. “That was what prosecutors were supposed to do when they dealt with these guys, too. I’d ask myself, ‘Okay, what’s this guy’s motivation? What’s he trying to get out of me?’ Then I’d look for
other evidence. If everything else failed, I’d go with my gut, but that was extremely risky.”
As the years passed, Shur watched some witnesses grow old. “Time was frozen for them. They were stuck in the same WITSEC unit year after year, and a lot of them, especially witnesses in the Mafia, were filled with self-loathing because they had testified against their former friends. I had one witness who tried to kill himself by eating a hundred paper clips.”