Witsec

Praise for Pete Earley and Gerald Shur’s
WITSEC

Praise for the works of Pete Earley

SUPER CASINO
INSIDE THE “NEW” LAS VEGAS

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE
DEATH, LIFE, AND JUSTICE IN A SOUTHERN TOWN
Winner of the Edgar Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

THE HOT HOUSE
LIFE INSIDE LEAVENWORTH PRISON

Prologue

Epilogue

G
ERALD SHUR
thought he was going to vomit. The black-and-white photograph in front of him showed a woman splayed on a tile floor with her throat slit. Not satisfied to simply kill her, the murderer had mutilated her body by cutting her open from throat to navel. He’d then yanked out several of her internal organs, leaving them displayed on her abdomen. The woman had been an informant helping federal agents in a mob case, and the gruesomeness of her murder had been meant as a crude warning: Those who spill their guts to the authorities risk having their own guts literally spilled out by the Mafia.

Shur, a young attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section in Washington, D.C., slid the photograph into a file folder and slipped it into his desk drawer. No need to have his secretary stumble upon it. The murdered woman was the twenty-fifth government informant killed in the past five years. It was October 1961, and Shur was still new at his job. He hadn’t yet become accustomed to the viciousness that gangsters could unleash.

An excited Internal Revenue Service agent telephoned him later that day. “We got a promising lead,” the agent declared. “How fast can you get here?” Shur caught the next flight to New York City. The IRS had
learned that Johnny “Sonny” Franzese, a notorious member of the Colombo crime family, was extorting money from the owner of a trucking company. If the agents and Shur could convince the owner to testify against Franzese, the government would be able to put one of the city’s most violent gangsters in prison.

“Two guys showed up at my business one day,” the owner explained after he welcomed Shur and the agents into his Long Island home. “These guys tell me Sonny Franzese wants to be my new business partner. I tell them, ‘Hey, I don’t need a business partner,’ and they look at each other and laugh, and say, ‘Oh yeah, you do.’ I told them to get out of my office.”

The next morning, one of his new trucks wouldn’t start. Someone had poured sand in the carburetor. Still, he continued to ignore Franzese until four men attacked him with baseball bats. The last thing he remembered before being knocked unconscious was one of them telling him that Sonny wanted to see him. A few weeks after he was released from the hospital, he signed over half of his business to the mobster.

“What happened ain’t right,” he told Shur. “You guys in the Justice Department should do something.”

“If you testify,” Shur explained, “we can tie Franzese directly to extortion and send him to prison for a minimum of five to ten years.”

“Testify?”
the owner asked.

Shur was taken aback. “Of course. We’ll need you to tell a jury what he did. We can’t make the case unless you testify.”

“I thought just telling you would be enough,” he replied. “The mob will kill me and my entire family if I testify. No way am I speaking out against Sonny Franzese! I’d rather pull up stakes and move to Florida.”

“Suppose we put him in jail right away—I mean tonight?”

“What about tomorrow when he gets out?”

“You don’t really have a choice,” Shur warned. “Sonny Franzese is going to bleed your business to death. He’ll destroy it and ruin your reputation.”

But nothing Shur or the agents said could sway him. During the car ride back to Manhattan, Shur fumed. “There’s got to be a way to get witnesses to testify against the mob.”

“Would you?” asked one of the agents in the car.

The question made him think. What if
he
had been the trucking company owner? What if
his
wife and
his
family had been the ones at risk? He thought about the photograph of the dead woman and the frozen look of terror on her face. What would—what could—the government do that would convince him to risk his life and the lives of his wife, his son, and his daughter to testify against the mob?

•   •   •

At exactly 7:30
A.M
. on April 19, 1995, a black helicopter swooped over the guard towers at the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix, Arizona, and hovered above the Mesa Unit, a two-story concrete structure. The unit was an isolated “prison inside a prison,” surrounded by its own fence topped with razor wire. At the same moment the helicopter appeared, an armored personnel carrier roared across the prison yard into the Mesa Unit complex and six burly men wearing black jumpsuits burst out. Each carried an automatic weapon and wore a black hood to conceal his identity. A sharpshooter in the helicopter flying overhead watched as the commandos hustled inside. Ignoring the other inmates locked in their cells, the squad went directly
to where a solitary federal prisoner was waiting. They ordered him to put on a bulletproof vest and hustled him outside. Four cars were waiting for the APC after it exited the prison. They raced alongside it toward a heavily guarded military airfield where a Learjet stood ready, its engines already burning. The commandos formed a human shield around the inmate as he stepped from the APC and onto the jet. It lifted off seconds later, its destination a secret so well guarded that only four government officials knew where he was being taken.

The inmate now sitting comfortably in the jet was a cold-blooded killer. By his own admission, he had committed nineteen murders. But the armed guards with him were not there to prevent him from killing again. They were protecting him from harm. Salvatore Gravano, better known as “Sammy the Bull,” reportedly had a $2 million price tag on his head. His testimony had helped the Justice Department send thirty-six of his former Mafia pals to prison. The biggest prize had been John Gotti, the “boss of bosses” in New York City. The government had tried twice to convict him, but juries had found the country’s best-known racketeer innocent, prompting the media to dub him the “Teflon Don.” He had seemed invincible until his closest friend had betrayed him.