Transcript for Gerald Shur on the Witness Protection Program

Jim Fleming: If you really want to disappear, ask the professionals. They’re the U.S. marshals who run the Federal Witness Protection Program. The witness security program, or WITSEC, as its called, was authorized by Congress under the Organized Crime Control act of 1970. Since then the program has relocated, and given new identities to over 8,200 witness, and 9,800 of their family members. Gerald Shur is the founder of the Federal Witness Protection Program, and ran it for over 34 years. He says “no-one was ever murdered while under protection”, that is, if they follow the basic rules.

Gerald Shur: The rules are fairly simple; have no contact with anyone in your former community. You don’t write to them. You don’t call them because of caller ID. You don’t write to them where you can have a postmark or return address on it. You are now a new person in a new community, that’s where your life is.

Fleming: That must be easy to say and hard to do.

Shur: It is extremely hard to do

Fleming: I suppose the hardest thing must be that you say “don’t do that”, and they think “ok I wont, for a while.” But it means forever, doesn’t it?

Shur: Well, it means forever. Essentially what you’re doing is you’re breaking the chain. Picture a long chain, you’re taking out a link, the two pieces of chain no longer meet. Therefore there is safety; you now cannot be found.

Fleming: Yeah. Well lets talk about the program itself a little bit. Remind us, who qualifies to be in the witness protection program.

Shur: Essentially what you’re looking for in the who qualifies is a significant witness, in a significant case, without whose testimony you cannot succeed in prosecuting the defendant.

Fleming: Well lets talk, without names, about who some of these people are. Bluntly, to be blunt about it, were talking about people who were criminals, some of them murderers.

Shur: Over 95%, and perhaps it would be closer to 98%, of the people that we relocated were involved with crime in one way or another. They’re not all killers, many of them were people who killed. Many of them were drug dealers. We have dealt with quite a variety from Casanastro, or what used to be known as the mafia, to drug dealers, terrorists, and so on. We’ve run the gamut.

Fleming: Have you had problems with protectees committing crimes?

Shur: Yes, we have had problems with protectees committing crimes.  The recidivism rate, there’ve been two studies, one indicates 22%, one indicates 18%. So the recidivism rate is quite good, you always want it lower, you’d love to see 0. But when you’re dealing with the kind of world were dealing with, you cant really expect it to be 0. We can try to get there. We do a lot of things that should help them change their lives. For example, when they’re relocated, they're not just dumped into an area. There are specialists in that area that will help them find housing, take care of medical care, help them find employment. We provide them with subsistence, albeit a minimal amount, but subsistence to live on for several months until they’re employed. They can see therapists.

Fleming: But of course were not just talking about the witness, were talking about their wives, their children.

Shur: Yes, we are.

‘
Fleming: Who do you include?

Shur: Included are any individuals who may be endangered as a result of that witnesss testimony. We would relocate a wife, a girlfriend, we have relocated mistresses. That reminds me of the one fellow that asked that we relocate his mistress but not his wife.

Fleming: I don’t imagine you gave any thought to this when you were creating the program decades ago.

Shur: I did not.

Fleming: Well you have to do things like new Social Security Numbers I suppose and new Birth Certificates.

Shur: Yes, yes you do.

Fleming: Who new identities, for all of these people.

Shur: Whole new identities, right, whole identities.

Fleming: Do you have to do plastic surgery?

Shur: We don’t do plastic surgery, other than to occasionally remove a tattoo that is exposed, and would identify the person as a particular type of gang member. We do not do plastic surgery to change looks or things of that nature. Early on in the program, when I was very unwise about how things go, I discussed with some physicians, plastic surgeons. I was asked to send a photograph of this one witness that I was concerned with who had received considerable publicity on the television. One look at the photograph, and I got a call from the doctor saying there was “nothing I could do to help this man, he’s perhaps the ugliest person I have seen.” So there went a plastic surgeon. It wasn’t realistic; it was expensive but it really wasn’t realistic. It was more what’s in that persons mind that’s going to make this successful or not.

Fleming:  I suppose you send them to an unexpected place, if there is such a place. You know what’s interesting about that, in a way I guess, is you think about these guys who have made big criminal lives, if you will, in New York, or L.A, or wherever. How do they end up living the rest of their lives if you make them a gas station attendant in Fargo, North Dakota.?

Shur: There’s some difficulty there, you know? The first people we were relocating from New York, New Jersey, New England, and I did not know there were people in the United States who would not think that Yellowstone was beautiful. Or that seeing streams and mountains and fishing and so forth, was perhaps the worst thing you could do to me. Why would you put me in a land like this?  In deciding where to send someone, it has to be a place, of course, where they’re not known, but also a place where they fit.

Fleming: You don’t want them to stick out like a sore thumb.

Shur: You don’t want them to stick out, no. You don’t want them to stick out, nor do you want them to be completely miserable because they’re liable to then decide on their own to move.

Fleming: There are some of these guys whose lives have to be spent in some kind of fear, but they’re tough guys who are after them. What about you and the people who run this program, do you worry about these guys coming after you trying to find these people?

Shur: Well, my philosophy in the program was when the witness and the witness’s family did not have to look over their shoulder. They no longer thought about it, and in other words, were left alone. People involved with the program have been threatened, yes. There was a plan to kidnap my wife and I, seven years ago, with the intent of finding out where witnesses were hidden. It was a Columbian narcotics gang that planned to do it. What they didn’t know, what the outside world doesn’t know, is that even as the manager of this program and running this program, was purposely never told where people were hidden. If I was subject to torture or something, I would not be able to answer their questions as to where people are hidden. I purposely did not know, nor members of my staff. 

Fleming: You’ve said that times have changed; you’ve helped a lot of people over the years and helped in a lot of cases. Do you think this can go on given the increasing surveillance around the world and the increase of information available on the internet?

Shur: Yes, it has gone on. Will it get more difficult? Probably. Most of it is going to be dependent on the individual we relocate; the type of individual. Is that person capable of moving into a new society and living in that society and functioning? You know, not finding a best friend to say let me tell you a secret. The technology, yes, will make things more difficult, but then again, new technology will have to be devised to defeat that new technology. 

Fleming: Right.

Shur: So is it of concern? Yes.  Do I believe it will materially affect the program? Probably not in the long run.

Fleming: Gerald Shur is the founder of the Federal Witness Protection Program. He is the author of WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program.