Authors: Pete Earley
Shur met with another witness after he had tried to commit suicide because he had tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. “I violated my own rule and saw him alone,” Shur recalled. “He was angry and upset and desperate. He was not only afraid of dying from AIDS, he was terrified other inmates in the unit would think he was homosexual.” Shur tried to reassure him, but he got nowhere.
“What the hell do you know?” the inmate snapped. “I could die tomorrow! You don’t know what it feels like—not knowing if you are going to wake up in the morning!”
“Can you read?” Shur asked.
As the inmate glared, Shur lifted his wrist, revealing the Medic Alert bracelet that identified him as suffering from multiple sclerosis. “I know what it’s like to live with that same uncertainty,” Shur explained, “so if you want to talk about it, we’ll talk. If you want to pray about it, we’ll pray. But if you want to feel sorry for yourself and feel pity for yourself, we are both wasting what time we have left here.”
Shur made certain word spread through the unit that the witness had contracted AIDS from a contaminated needle. Later, Shur had mixed feelings about their confrontation. “Here was a man responsible for killing innocent people. Society considered him to be
evil, but I was there trying to keep him from killing himself, telling him that his life was worth saving. I discovered my feelings about these witnesses were complicated. As I got to know many of them, things were less black and white. I remember an arsonist whom I got to know well. This man always made certain the buildings he was going to torch were uninhabited, but he made a mistake one day and a pregnant woman was burned to death. He couldn’t talk about his crime without breaking down in tears—not tears to arouse pity, but tears of real remorse. He was truly haunted by what he had done. I saw that as a sign that there was a spark of redemption in him.”
Other witnesses were not as easy to stomach. When a warden told Shur that a WITSEC inmate had been caught using a pay phone to make sexually explicit calls to children while he masturbated, Shur told the warden to immediately kick him out of the unit.
“I can’t do that,” the warden replied. BOP rules required that he hold a disciplinary hearing first before punishing an inmate, he explained.
“Maybe the BOP has to hold a disciplinary hearing,” Shur replied, “but I don’t have to hold a hearing to remove someone from the WITSEC program. If I say he’s out of WITSEC, he’s out. And if he’s out of WITSEC, then he can’t live in the WITSEC unit.” Within the hour, the witness had been put into solitary confinement and transferred. “I wanted him out of the unit so other witnesses there would know that conduct like his was totally unacceptable,” said Shur.
Shur eventually developed his own philosophy about witnesses in the units. “I decided the world is not made up of good people and bad people. Rather, I chose to believe it is made up of people who are not by definition either good or bad, but simply people, some
of whom do good things and some of whom do bad things, and most of whom do some of each. I encountered men who had done horrible and unspeakable crimes, yet I saw them perform extraordinarily decent acts in prison. I used to give speeches to various groups and I would say, ‘To concede that there is a group of “bad” people by definition would be an admission that there is no hope for any of them. That means any effort I put forth to help them is going to be futile, and I refuse to believe that.’ ” The BOP’s Carlson began referring to Shur as the Criminal Division’s “social worker.”
In 1979, the Justice Department reorganized its Criminal Division, and Shur was named senior associate director of a new section, called the Office of Enforcement Operations (OEO). It was being formed to oversee the department’s use of “sophisticated investigative tools,” a bureaucratic catchall term that covered such things as the WITSEC program, requests for federal wiretaps, and secret operations that the FBI, DEA, and other agencies occasionally ran. Philip Wilens, another former Organized Crime and Racketeering Section attorney and close friend of Shur’s—they had eaten lunch together at work almost daily since 1961—took over supervision of federal wiretaps, leaving WITSEC and whatever other matters arose for Shur to oversee. One afternoon the BOP’s Carlson called Shur with a request that seemed to fit his new responsibilities. Carlson explained that federal statutes gave him the authority as BOP director to grant prisoners a furlough from prison for up to thirty days. Historically, furloughs had been given to prisoners so they could attend family funerals. The prisoners weren’t turned loose. They were escorted to the memorial service by armed guards. Carlson was calling because federal prosecutors
and various FBI and DEA agents had begun asking him to grant furloughs to inmates so they could be used in undercover sting operations. Carlson didn’t know the U.S. attorneys or the federal agents as well as Shur did, so he asked if he would review their requests and decide which ones were worth pursuing. “Here’s how it worked,” Shur recalled. “A DEA agent would ask the BOP to furlough an inmate because he knew a drug dealer in Miami. Obviously, the dealer didn’t know the inmate had been put in prison. If I agreed with the plan, Carlson would grant the inmate a furlough and the DEA would set up a meeting between the inmate and the drug dealer. These usually took place in a motel room that had been rigged with video cameras. As soon as the inmate bought drugs from the dealer, the DEA would move in and make the arrest. The inmate would then be brought back to prison.” In return for his help, the inmate hoped time would be taken off his sentence.
Shur agreed to begin screening requests, and soon he was reviewing an average of 150 furlough requests each year. He recommended that Carlson release prisoners in about half of those cases. Today, prison furloughs are still being used, although they are rarely discussed by the government.
“I had to weigh three factors when I reviewed a furlough request,” said Shur. “Was this inmate an escape risk, was there a chance the inmate might be murdered or murder someone else, and what would be gained by furloughing him?” Because the agents who had asked for the furlough were responsible for making certain the inmate was returned to prison, an inmate was rarely left unguarded when he was on the streets. A common trick that the agents used to foil escapes was to lie to the inmates about when they would be sent back to prison. The prisoner would be told a specific
date, but actually be hustled back behind bars several days earlier. Only two prisoners escaped during the two decades that Shur oversaw the program, and both were recaptured before they had a chance to commit new crimes.
“Getting prisoners out of prison wasn’t as easy as you might think,” said Shur. “We had to make certain that other inmates didn’t know what was actually going on because they would have killed inmates who helped us.” Sometimes inmates were taken out of prison in ambulances under the guise of needing special medical care. Others would “disappear” while they were being moved from one prison to another.
“I was once asked to recommend a furlough for an inmate who knew the ringleaders of a gang that had stolen military weapons,” said Shur. “Agents were going to send him to make a buy and then follow him to where the guns were being stashed. The catch was that we were going to have to put this inmate in a car by himself, because he was supposed to meet the gun traffickers by himself at a fast-food restaurant and then follow them to where the weapons were hidden. The agents were going to follow him and the traffickers, and move in as soon as the deal went down. I talked it over with my staff, and one of them suggested we give him a car with just enough gas in the tank to drive about five miles, so he couldn’t run too far if he tried to escape. But the more I thought about it, the more I decided it was just too dangerous. We knew he was going to have access to a car and also weapons. What if he grabbed one of the guns and opened fire on the agents? Or double-crossed them in some way? I was getting a lot of pressure to approve the request because it was a major operation, but I said no. The problem with furloughs was that the agents’ priority was making an
arrest, so they were more willing to take risks than I was. Not only did I have to balance the risks, I had my firm belief that a prisoner ought to serve his time in prison, not on the streets. Sometimes agents would ask me to get Carlson to extend a furlough for another thirty days. I knew these agents were simply keeping a prisoner they liked from going back to prison. The stupidest reasoning for a request I ever got was from a U.S. attorney who wanted me to recommend a furlough for a prisoner with a very long sentence. He told me he could tell by looking into the inmate’s eyes that he wasn’t going to run away. I rejected that request.”
Shur soon began getting other tasks in his new job. He became the Criminal Division’s liaison with the federal parole board, an assignment that gave him even more clout when it came to the board’s deciding which federal prisoners would be paroled and which would stay behind bars. Shur also advised it about organized crime figures who were being considered for parole, and about relocated WITSEC witnesses who had committed new crimes and been sent back to prison. By 1980 he had become an even more powerful figure when it came to determining the fate of federal witnesses. Not only did he decide who got into the WITSEC program, but also whether they would be protected in a WITSEC prison unit or sent to a state prison to be hidden under an alias. He could single-handedly remove a witness from the safety of a WITSEC unit, forcing him to be sent back into the regular prison population, where he’d have to hide in the hole to survive. Because of his federal parole board contacts, Shur was in a position to influence whether a WITSEC witness was released early or had to serve all of his prison sentence. Finally, he alone decided whether a witness was turned over to the Marshals Service after he was
paroled and given a new identity, or simply shown out the front prison gate.
It was not surprising that some WITSEC witnesses began referring to him behind his back, not always kindly, as “the little god.”
H
oward Safir was having too good a time as WITSEC chief to return to the DEA, as he had originally planned, after his year “on loan” ended in 1979. Nor did the Marshals Service’s director, William Hall, and its deputy director, John Twomey, want him to go. They offered to make him an assistant director for operations if he would join the Marshals Service, a promotion that would give him more pay and power. He accepted.
Twomey already had a new assignment in mind. When he was a prison warden in Illinois, he had noticed the Marshals Service was still responsible for capturing escaped convicts and other federal criminals on the loose, just as it had in the old Wild West days. But over the years, the FBI had taken over the task of tracking down federal criminals. While it had done a great job of catching the notorious felons on its Most Wanted List, it hadn’t had the time or funds to go after the smaller fish, or much interest in doing so. By 1979, there were fifteen thousand federal fugitives free on the streets with no one actively pursuing them. Twomey asked Safir if he was interested in helping the Marshals Service reclaim its turf, and he jumped at the chance.
It took some wrangling, but after several meetings the directors of both agencies signed an agreement
in October 1979 that divided up the government’s manhunting duties. The FBI kept jurisdiction over the cases its agents developed and criminals charged with “unlawful flight to avoid prosecution,” including bank robbers, kidnappers, and other high-profile felons who crossed state borders. The Marshals Service got the leftovers—escaped federal convicts, bond jumpers, and parole and probation violators. At first it appeared the FBI had gotten the better end of the deal by shedding the warrants that it didn’t want to pursue anyway. But Safir jumped in with both feet. In 1980 his deputies nabbed ninety-five hundred of the long-overlooked fifteen thousand wanted fugitives. Showing the same creativity that he had used in revitalizing the service’s WITSEC operations, Safir created an elite Fugitive Investigation Strike Team (FIST) and dispatched it to Miami. There it joined state and local police officers in a concentrated effort to track down fugitives, and in a five-week period, seventy-six felons were arrested. In Washington, D.C., Safir’s deputies used an ingenious ruse to arrest more than a hundred felons. Rather than staking out the wanted men’s last known addresses and hoping they would show up, FIST mailed letters to them announcing they had won free tickets to a Washington Redskins football game. Their relatives made certain the letters were forwarded, and when the fugitives arrived on game day to board a bus to the stadium, they were handcuffed and instead driven to the D.C. jail.
The real test for Safir, however, came after Christopher Boyce escaped in January 1980 from a federal penitentiary in California where he had been serving forty years for espionage. Along with a childhood friend, Boyce had sold military secrets to Russia’s KGB in the early 1970s that he had stolen from a U.S. defense
contractor. Known as “the Falcon” because of his love for the birds, Boyce had been profiled in a best-selling book called
The Falcon and the Snowman
. A motion picture by the same name was being filmed about the case, and Boyce was so daring that he called the Hollywood set to ask about the movie’s progress while he was on the run. Safir turned the hunt for Boyce into one of the most extensive and expensive in American history. His deputies investigated tips in South America, the Middle East, Europe, and Australia. He began every day’s staff meetings with the same question: “Where is Christopher Boyce?” and as the months began to roll by, he started to worry that Boyce would surface in Moscow and thumb his nose at the Marshals Service, causing it to once again become the butt of jokes by other federal law enforcement agencies.
It was in the midst of the hunt for Boyce in the late summer of 1980 that a security guard at the Marshals Service’s operations center called Safir from the front desk and told him that ABC newsman Geraldo Rivera and a film crew were in the lobby demanding to see him. Safir assumed Rivera wanted to interview him about the Boyce manhunt, but he was wrong. Rivera, who had launched his career by exposing government neglect of the mentally handicapped, felt confident that he’d found another exposé: federal ineptness in the running of WITSEC. Safir suddenly found himself being forced to defend WITSEC and push the hunt for Christopher Boyce to the side. This is how Safir would later recall what happened next.