Authors: Pete Earley
Simply put: Criminals were criminals, and every one of them was equally capable of being a government witness or the defendant on trial. Circumstances had much more to do with who became a witness than any psychological traits. “In many cases, it’s simply which rat is the first to jump off a sinking ship,” a BOP psychologist explained. “The first one becomes the witness.”
This was not the case, of course, when it came to the 6 percent of witnesses in the program with no
criminal record. Many of them had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time: a bookkeeper who discovered irregularities in a mob front company, a reporter who helped federal prosecutors by telling them about off-the-record conversations she had had with mobsters during a murder trial, a business owner who helped the FBI run a sting operation in New York after several local criminals mistook him for being in the LCN because his last name was the same as that of a New York City crime boss. These noncriminal witnesses usually paid a higher price than criminals in the WITSEC program.
“This was a terrible, terrible program for a noncriminal witness,” Howard Safir recalled. “I told witnesses who were not criminals, ‘Do not enter WITSEC unless you have absolutely no alternative, because it will be the toughest experience you will ever face.’ ”
While noncriminal witnesses would later voice the same complaints as others in WITSEC about long delays in getting new documents or other snafus they faced during relocation, they had to deal with a deeper problem. The psychologists described it as loss of identity, dignity, and self. “Without this program, my two daughters and I would be dead,” a noncriminal WITSEC witness explained. “There is no question about it. But in giving up our pasts we paid a heavy price, because what you are as a person is based on where you came from and the people who love you. If you are honest, you suddenly find yourself being forced to live a lie, and you feel ashamed, even though you did the right thing in testifying, because you are now being forced to lie by your circumstances. You are not a criminal, but you are treated like one and made to act like one. I think they should have two programs: one for criminals and another for witnesses, with completely separate rules.”
Although it had been more than fifteen years since Max Caulfield and his family entered WITSEC in August 1985, he was still bitter about the experience when he was interviewed for this book. His problems began in 1982, after he met Phil, the owner of several adult bookstores in Chicago. At the time, Caulfield was supporting his pregnant wife and their four-year-old daughter by training dogs, and when a police department changed its mind about buying one, he was left scrambling to find a way to pay his current bills. A friend had introduced him to Phil, who wanted a guard dog for his own personal protection, and he was so impressed by Caulfield that he not only bought the dog but hired him to work nights at one of his bookstores. A short time later, the store’s manager went on a vacation, and Caulfield was responsible for collecting quarters from the store’s video peep machines that showed X-rated movies. Caulfield bagged more than $6,000 worth of the coins during the week and reported that figure directly to Phil. “All of the sudden, Phil called me over to his house, and when I got there, he had this guy who was his enforcer standing right next to him,” said Caulfield. “They both were angry and I was wondering what the hell I had done wrong.” Phil demanded to know exactly how many quarters Caulfield had collected that week from the machines. Caulfield gave him an exact figure, which was over $6,000. “Then how do you explain this?” Phil demanded. “The guy who usually counts the coins has been giving me six hundred dollars a week for the past three years and that’s all he says was ever in them. Now you count ’em for one week and there’s more than six thousand.” Without waiting for a reply, Phil continued, “Obviously, someone has been keeping some of the coins for himself.”
Caulfield never saw the store manager again. He assumed Phil had fired him but didn’t ask, and never knew whether something more sinister had happened. Phil promoted Caulfield, gave him a hefty pay raise, and began giving him gifts, including a newer car and clothes for his wife. He also arranged for him to move into a nicer apartment and began paying his rent. “I like to invest in people,” he told him.
But when Caulfield objected to Phil bringing prostitutes into the bookstore, their relationship quickly soured. “I’m not going to be a keeper of a house of prostitution,” Caulfield declared during a heated exchange. “Oh yeah?” Phil replied, pulling a ledger out of his desk.
“He handed me this ledger and it contained a list of every ‘present’ Phil had ever given me,” Caulfield recalled. “If he bought me an ice cream cone, it was there.” The list totaled more than $7,000, which Phil now said Caulfield owed him, plus $200 a week in unpaid interest.
“But you said those were gifts,” Caulfield protested.
“I lied,” Phil replied. “You want to be Mr. Clean, you got to pay up.”
If Caulfield tried to quit his job at the store or didn’t pay the debt, he and his family would be murdered, Phil warned. As soon as he could arrange it, Caulfield and his family fled town.
Chicago FBI agent Ivan Harris tracked him down a few months later. The FBI and the Chicago strike force had been watching Phil’s adult bookstores for nearly five years and had noticed that Caulfield had disappeared. They also knew he did not have a criminal past. Caulfield agreed to testify against Phil, four of his employees, and three Chicago cops who had been accepting
bribes. For seven months, the FBI hid him and his family in the Chicago area while it prepared its case. “They treated us really well,” said Caulfield. “We felt safe.” When Caulfield reported to the Marshals Service to undergo psychological testing so he could be approved to enter WITSEC, IRS agent Harris baby-sat his children. “Ivan took my daughter and newborn son to his daughter’s birthday party—that’s how much this guy was there for us.”
But that special treatment ended, Caulfield said, as soon as the FBI turned him over to WITSEC. The WITSEC inspector in Roanoke, Virginia, where the family was first relocated, assumed he was a criminal. “I told him to read my file,” Caulfield said. Even worse, when Caulfield pointed out that he wasn’t a criminal, the inspector replied: “It doesn’t really matter. We treat all witnesses the same.”
“That meant he treated me like I was scum,” Caulfield recalled.
Before they could settle in, the Caulfields’ security was accidentally compromised. “They told us we would have to relocate and moved us into a motel temporarily,” said Caulfield. “The night before we were scheduled to leave town, I went down to pay the long-distance portion of our telephone bill because I was responsible for all long-distance calls.” Caulfield gave the night clerk $35 in cash. The next morning, that same clerk denied that Caulfield had paid him. “The WITSEC inspector automatically assumed I was lying. He told me to pay the clerk or I would be booted out of the program. I said, ‘I am not a thief and I don’t lie!’ The desk clerk was lying but no one would believe me because I was in the program and suddenly I didn’t have any credibility. Some night clerk, who knew WITSEC kept criminals in the motel and knew the marshals
would believe his word over a criminal’s, had pocketed my money. It was humiliating. I kept thinking: ‘I didn’t do anything wrong! Why am I being treated like a criminal?’ ”
With the inspector looking over his shoulder, Caulfield was forced to pay another $35.
Even though Caulfield warned deputies that his wife had relatives living in the Wilmington, Delaware area, WITSEC moved him there. “Once again, no one believed us. They just assumed we were lying to avoid being sent to Delaware. The marshals ended up sending a deputy to my wife’s relative’s house to knock on the door and ask if she was related to us.” After living for nine weeks in a Wilmington hotel, they were flown to Bremerton, Washington, outside of Seattle, where the WITSEC inspector there greeted them with a stern warning: “You’ve been relocated twice, which means you’ve screwed up twice. Do it again and you’ll be kicked out of the program!”
The stress of being relocated began to get to Caulfield. He broke into tears one night when he couldn’t remember his alias while ordering pizza by phone. Meanwhile, his mother, Rose, became depressed about not being able to see her son and his family. She pleaded in a letter to President Reagan for help. The White House sent the note to Safir, who ordered his inspectors to arrange a visit. Caulfield later claimed the inspectors who were given the assignment yelled at him because of the extra work it caused them.
Eight months later, Caulfield and his family met his parents in a Minneapolis, Minnesota, motel for a two-day visit. “Before my mother arrived, I told my kids the rules; ‘You can’t tell Grandma what your name is or where you live,’ and during the visit we were not allowed to be together out of earshot of the
marshals.” At one point, Caulfield asked if he and his mother could talk privately. “They let us go into the bathroom, but said we had to keep the door open.” Caulfield had wanted to hug his mom and tell her how much he missed her without the inspectors hovering over him. “I kept thinking, ‘My God, we are adults here. I didn’t do anything wrong. But they don’t trust me to be alone with my own parents because they think I will tell them where we are hiding.’ This is nuts.”
On December 17, 1986, Caulfield was terminated from WITSEC because he had allowed a local police department to fingerprint him when he applied for a gun permit and because he had called FBI agent Ivan Harris to complain about how he was being treated in WITSEC. Since he still was waiting to testify against Phil and the others, Caulfield was terrified. He moved his family into a tiny camper and spent the next seven months hiding for short periods in state parks. His marriage collapsed, his wife sought psychiatric help, and his kids began having nightmares. When it came time for Phil’s trial, the FBI arranged for Caulfield’s safe return to Chicago. Phil and the other eight defendants were all subsequently convicted and sent to prison.
“Max was a very young man at the time,” the FBI agent, Harris, recalled. “I have a lot of respect for him. He made a tremendous sacrifice.”
After the trials, Caulfield went back into hiding. “I felt abandoned. I was scared. It took me years to recover. When my children asked me why their names were constantly changing, I told them there were bad people after them who wanted them dead. I wasn’t going to lie to my kids.” His son, Christopher, would later recall that his earliest childhood memories didn’t make much sense. His father kept guns everywhere,
even hidden behind the toilet. They lived in a series of motels, moving five or six times a year. “My family was paranoid,” he later told a reporter at
New Times
magazine. “I remember seeing my father outside in a tree with a rifle waiting for a hit man to come. Other fathers didn’t do that.”
Caulfield changed his life around after he remarried. “My wife, Christine, saved my life. I was so haunted, I didn’t know how to live in the real world anymore. I had no self-esteem until I met her.” He blamed WITSEC. “These deputies treated us like garbage. They destroyed our sense of worth. I will never forgive them. They owe me and my family an apology.”
Shur investigated several ways to make WITSEC easier for noncriminal witnesses, but none of them was adopted. “We thought about letting them keep their credit histories, for instance,” Shur recalled, “but we discovered that would lead to a substantial increased risk of them being found. To replicate a credit history meant going to the credit reporting agencies—there was more than one—and getting them to change their records. This meant revealing to nongovernment agencies the new name, new location, and other identifying data of the relocated witness. One slipup by the credit agency and we could have a dead witness. I decided it simply wasn’t worth the risk.” In the end, noncriminal witnesses went through the identical relocation process. “The best we could do was be as forthcoming as possible when we explained the program to them so they would know it was not going to be easy.”
Besides noncriminal witnesses, Shur found himself facing another unhappy group whose lives had been dramatically affected because of the program. These were the victims of relocated WITSEC witnesses,
including relatives of murder victims and investors fleeced out of their life’s savings.
“I always felt strongly that we needed to explain our actions to the public, especially when we made a mistake,” said Shur. “I also thought we had a responsibility to listen, if for no other reason than to let someone who had been victimized say their piece. But I must admit, these were tough times for me, not because I felt we had done anything wrong, but because I could see their pain and understood that they were hurting, in part, because of a program that I had created.”
One call in particular stuck in Shur’s mind. A secretary told him that Pulitzer prize–winning journalist David Halberstam was on the telephone demanding to speak to a WITSEC official. She said he was so upset that Shur might not want to speak to him. Five years earlier, Halberstam’s brother, Michael, a popular and well-respected cardiologist in Washington, D.C., had been murdered by a burglar. Halberstam and his wife, Elliott Jones, had returned home early one night and surprised Bernard C. Welch ransacking their house. Welch shot Halberstam and fled on foot. Although he was critically wounded, Halberstam got into his car and began driving to the hospital. En route, he spotted Welch running down a side street and ran him down. Moments later Halberstam blacked out and died. Police found $4 million in stolen gold, silver, jewelry, art objects, and furs in Welch’s suburban house. They also identified him as an escaped convict who had broken out of prison in 1974 and had not been recaptured. A judge sentenced Welch to 143 years for the murder, and the Halberstam family hoped they had heard the last of him. But in 1985, Welch tipped off federal prosecutors to a prison escape plot, and Shur moved him into a
WITSEC prison unit to protect him from other inmates.
Welch and another inmate escaped from the unit by using a weightlifter’s barbell to knock a hole in a wall and then lowering themselves down to the sidewalk some six floors below with a seventy-five-foot extension cord.