Witsec (43 page)

“The purpose of the center was to give WITSEC one voice,” explained one WITSEC inspector who
asked not to be named but who was responsible for designing it and oversaw its construction. “We were still having problems with consistency despite the use of MOUs [Memorandums of Understanding] that spelled out exactly what was going to be done for each witness. One inspector in the field might explain the program and MOU one way, another would highlight different things, and this led to some confusion. Mr. Safir thought if we brought every witness into one location and had a core of inspectors, who had been trained to say the exact same thing, explain to the witness what was going to happen, then we could be certain of consistency. The complaints dropped dramatically once we got the center operating.”

Each witness and his family arrived at the center in an armored vehicle with blacked-out windows so they couldn’t see where they were being taken. Once the vehicle had driven inside an underground garage, the witness and his family were directed down a hallway into hotel-like accommodations. “We had psychologists give them tests, and we had both psychologists and psychiatrists available to help them deal with the trauma of what, in effect, was being reborn. The fact that we had these professionals available showed the witnesses that we cared about them,” the inspector said. “We also discovered that while many of these people had money from their criminal activities, they hadn’t spent it on medical care, and many of them had medical problems that needed attention.” During their stay at the center, they were given complete physical exams. “Many of them didn’t really have the skills they needed to take care of a family in a normal society,” the inspector recalled, “so we had people come in and help them learn how to take better care of their children. We were preparing them to go out into the
legitimate world.” The WITSEC analysts responsible for providing them with new documents also met with them. “One reason for past delays in getting new documents was mistakes that were made in filling out forms. If a paperwork mistake was made in the field, when that paperwork got to Washington it had to be sent back, and that meant delays.” The analysts at the orientation center went over each form with the witnesses to ensure they were correctly and completely filled out. Inspectors also discussed job placement with each witness.

When all of the testing and various health exams were completed and paperwork done, each witness and his family were teamed with a WITSEC inspector who found them a suitable city to be relocated in. Before leaving the center, the witnesses would be shown videotapes of where they were being sent.

Movement inside the center was carefully controlled, much as it was in a prison. Doors were electronically bolted and could be opened only by inspectors in the center’s control room. Hallways were monitored with video cameras and motion detectors. Inspectors were told about witnesses on a need-to-know basis, which meant that inspectors working with one witness would not know that another witness was in the center. “Witnesses never saw each other,” the inspector said. The center could hold up to six families of five, and six prisoners in more-spartan rooms. It was designed to withstand an outside attack. Several fences kept the curious away. The center itself had an exterior wall and another completely separate interior wall to withstand bomb blasts. There were also vehicle barriers to prevent cars filled with explosives from being crashed into the building.

The typical orientation process lasted about two
weeks. The witness and his family would then be driven in a vehicle with blacked-out windows to an airport and sent to where they were being resettled. A WITSEC field inspector would meet them at the airport and take them to an apartment, where they would live until they could move to a house and find a full-time job.

“You could often tell by the problems that you heard a witness or former witnesses complain about when they had been relocated in WITSEC,” explained WITSEC chief Eugene Coon. “There were the pre-Safir days, the Safir days, and the orientation center days.”

Another veteran WITSEC inspector described it more bluntly. “In the early days of the program, witnesses were dumped in motels, given a hundred bucks, and told to wait there until the local U.S. marshal sent one of his deputies to ‘help’ them. There were a few improvements between 1970 and 1978, but not many. In truth, most of the witnesses whom we helped got minimal services, and most of them had valid complaints about how they were treated. They simply weren’t a priority. After Safir arrived, things got significantly better, but there were still problems. We were struggling to fix the mistakes from the past and catch up. The number of complaints slowly dropped, but we still had a lot of problems in the field from 1978 until 1988. There were misunderstandings and there were still long delays in getting documents. But after 1988, we had the relocation process down pat. The program was running as smoothly as possible, given that it was a people program and that meant there would always be unusual circumstances and unforeseen issues and problems.”

WITSEC’s all-inclusive service wasn’t cheap. In 1988 it cost $75,000 to relocate a family of four. But at
the Safesite and Orientation Center’s opening ceremony, Morris insisted the price was well worth it. The director cited a long list of sensational criminal cases that could not have been successfully prosecuted without protected witnesses. In cases where WITSEC witnesses testified, he added, prosecutors had almost an 80 percent conviction rate. Later, in a report to Congress, Morris cited examples of the defendants in 1988 alone who had been convicted in cases where WITSEC witnesses were used. They included:

Shur had developed an especially good working relationship with Eugene Coon after the latter took charge of the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations in 1987. “I felt Gene was simply a top-notch chief,” Shur recalled. “When it comes to egos, on a scale of one to ten, Gene Coon clocked in at zero. He had none. His only interest was in doing the best possible job. He was imaginative and solid and solution-oriented.”

Coon came from a law enforcement background. His father and grandfather had both been county sheriffs, and his uncle had been a top DEA official. He’d
joined the Marshals Service in 1972, and risen through the ranks, doing a variety of assignments. His first was escorting prisoners between the jail and courts in the District of Columbia, a job that often involved daily fistfights with angry prisoners. Like most deputies at the time, he received almost no special training. From there he had been sent to rural West Virginia, where he won praise by capturing a fugitive without firing a shot, even though the suspect had barricaded himself inside a trailer and bragged he would never be taken alive. Coon had surprised him by crashing through the front door and tackling him before he could grab his pistol. Coon was then sent to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where he helped hunt for the murderers of two FBI agents. He also escorted nuclear missiles between military bases, another job done by federal marshals. At one point he was assigned to help protect Jimmy the Weasel Fratianno in the basement of a Cleveland courthouse, where the mobster was scheduled to testify. “Fratianno got out of his cot one morning,” Coon said later, “and while he was eating his breakfast, he looks up and says to me, ‘Hey kid, make up my bed, will ya?’ I looked at him and said, ‘Hey old man, make it yourself.’ You had to let him know up front that he couldn’t push you around, otherwise he’d never respect you.” In 1978 Coon became a WITSEC inspector and was stationed in Connecticut, where he helped hide New York mobsters while they were waiting to testify.

Beginning in the 1980s, more than a dozen countries sent delegations to the United States to learn about WITSEC. They patterned their own programs after it. “We had reached the point,” Shur said later, “where we had become the absolute best witness protection program in the world.”

O
n an october afternoon in 1987, Arthur Kane walked into the local office of Merrill Lynch in Miami and began shooting. He critically wounded his stockbroker, Lloyd Kolokoff; murdered the office manager, Jose Argilagos; and then killed himself. Detectives said later he had recently lost $6 million in the stock market. Shur was stunned.

“If you had asked me to pick from the thousands of witnesses I knew, the most docile criminal I had ever encountered,” he recalled, “I would have instantly named Arthur H. Kane. I would have sworn he was as safe a choice as I could have possibly made when it came to putting a criminal into the program.”

Shur had personally persuaded Kane and his wife to enter WITSEC in 1977, and until the shooting he had considered their relocation a success story. He flew to Miami to meet with Kane’s widow. “I asked her if she wanted to be relocated since her husband’s past had been revealed,” Shur recalled, “but she felt safe. I told her I just didn’t understand what had happened. Neither did she.”

When he returned to Washington, Shur combed through his records for some clue that would have warned him that Kane had a violent streak. There was none. “I had never seen anything but politeness and a
calmness about him,” said Shur. “The violence of the shooting was totally out of character.”

Shur could still remember the Saturday afternoon when he had Kane and his wife brought from Kansas City to Washington to meet with him and his staff. On the surface, the Kanes appeared to have a wonderful life. Kane was a respected attorney; he and his wife lived in an exclusive Kansas City neighborhood, had healthy and talented children, and were socially prominent. But Kane had a secret. He was stealing more than $100,000 per year through his law firm by filing phony insurance claims and lawsuits. A Kansas City mobster was running the scam. He would arrange car accidents, file bogus medical claims, and have Kane file lawsuits on the victims’ behalf. Eight doctors were also in on the ruse. Kane was so embarrassed when he was arrested that he immediately agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in order to avoid a trial.

“An excellent source had told me Kane was going to be murdered,” Shur recalled, “but when I sent word to him, he was adamant about not wanting to enter WITSEC. He didn’t want to disrupt his family or interfere with his wife’s community and social activities.” That’s when Shur had arranged for the couple to come to his office on a weekend so he could personally explain the threat. But even then, they seemed oddly unconcerned. They cared more about returning home for an upcoming charitable event. “My God!” Shur erupted. “Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? You are going to be
murdered
.” Three days later the couple entered WITSEC.

Kane had refused to accept any WITSEC subsistence after he was relocated. Instead, he used his wife’s money. They paid $400,000 in cash for an upscale six-bedroom house in Miami that shared a backyard
with Congressman Dante Fascell. But he did let deputies find him a job as a claims inspector at the Social Security Administration, which paid him a salary of $30,000 per year. For the next ten years, Kane had been a model citizen—and then he had snapped.

Wanda Kolokoff, whose husband had been shot by Kane, accused Shur and other WITSEC officials in a civil lawsuit of gross negligence because no one had warned her husband that Kane had “homicidal tendencies,” but a judge dismissed it.

Shur had spent much of his career trying to understand the criminal mind, and Kane simply didn’t fit. He was better educated than most criminals, was a devoted family man, and seemed to have few vices. Yet he had become a murderer. “Kane had entered the program before we were required to do risk assessments and psychological testing of potential witnesses,” said Shur, “but I have little doubt he would have sailed through those evaluations without anyone raising an eyebrow.”

Shur asked the BOP psychologists if they knew of a foolproof way to predict whether a potential WITSEC witness was going to become violent after he was relocated. Based on their testing of hundreds of WITSEC witnesses and thousands of other prisoners, the psychologists sent him this answer: “There remains no consistent, reliable means by which to accurately predict an individual’s future behavior.”

“What this meant to me,” Shur said later, “was exactly what the Kane case demonstrated. Witnesses were unpredictable. People would tell me: ‘You should have known this witness or that witness was a walking time bomb.’ But the truth is, every witness who was a criminal was a gamble.”

Shur then asked BOP psychologists if there was a
difference between the criminals who became government witnesses and the criminals whom they testified against. He was told there wasn’t. Both came from the same damaged psychological bin. While there were always exceptions, such as Kane, most had “strong narcissistic personalities” and “severe antisocial tendencies.” One BOP report described the “typical” WITSEC criminal this way in a report prepared for Shur: