The mobsters and terrorists next door

Was there any point in your career where you particularly wrestled with the idea of murderers being let loose in society? Was there any moment where you were really grappling with this?

Shur: I was always concerned about it, but one thing I realized was that I wasn't releasing this murderer in society, this murderer is already in society. And he's in society with 35 others, like Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano was. [Gravano, who killed 19 people himself, helped put away John Gotti in 1992]. And if we take Sammy Gravano and use him, we can put 35 murderers in prison, leaving one out who promises he'll never commit a crime again. That turned out to be right; WITSEC's recidivism rate is about 10 percent now. Compare that to the state's recidivism rate of 40 to 50 percent.

But to put the question differently: Did some of these people really trouble me? Yes. Are there times, with hindsight, I look back and say, why did we put that witness in the program? We should have put the defendant in the program and had the defendant testify against the witness.

Was there any particular case, besides the case of Marion Albert Pruett, that you felt was a failure? [Pruett was a convicted bank robber who testified against Allen "Big Al" Benton after "Big Al" murdered William Zambito while all three men were in the Atlanta Penitentiary in 1978. After testifying and entering WITSEC, Pruett went on an interstate crime spree, robbing stores and banks and killing eight people.]

Shur: I never viewed Pruett as a failure of the program. The witness security program didn't cause Pruett to kill. There were cases that caused me to feel awfully bad. But it wasn't that I would have to rethink whether we should've put someone in the program. It's that once we're dealing with a criminal, is there anything else we can do to minimize the chance that he'll commit crime? That was my concern.

Was there any specific example?

Shur: After Pruett, of course, I thought we should be much more intensive in making psychiatrists and psychologists available, and very early on.

And you do administer psychological tests.

Shur: Yes, to everybody over the age of 18. The first reason we did them was because [Pruett] went off and killed a lot of people and Congress said, "We want you to predict violence with psychological testing." Problem with that is that the American Association of Psychologists said that you cannot predict violence with certainty. When I mentioned that to a congressional staffer, he said that was my problem, do it anyway. So we were left with having to do that.

Pruett's case was one of the low points of your career. What do you think it proved, if anything?

Shur: I have relocated people with backgrounds more violent than his that never committed another crime.

Earley: And if you look at the case of Arthur Kane [a 10-year WITSEC participant who, in 1987, walked into a Miami Merrill Lynch office, started shooting people and then shot himself] of all the people, you thought what, Gerry?

Shur: [That he was] the most docile human being I'd ever met.

Earley: You would have guessed he would have been the last to commit another crime.

Shur: He didn't want to relocate, never was involved in violence of any kind in his life, was a very giving person. He was a lawyer who dealt in ambulance chasing, securities frauds and corrupt stuff like that, but not a violent guy. Loved his family. Followed the rules very well in the program. He was so anxious to go to work and took a job as a claims adjuster for the Social Security Administration in Florida.

So what do you think happened?

Shur: He flipped. The stock market crashed in '87 and he had invested over a half a million dollars of his wife's money, and he saw that he wiped her out. He thought he cost the family everything.

The personal story of the wife of that Mobster -- you call her Witness X in the book -- was really heartbreaking. How much care can you give to the family members?

Shur: They pay the highest price. The biggest thing they suffer from is not being able to go home. They can't go back to a family affair or a wedding or a funeral. You hear your mother's dying and you can't go home. So, what we would do is sneak people into a hospital before the person dies. Once, after a death, we thought a former witness psychologically had to see the deceased. We couldn't take him to the funeral home because it was run by racketeers, so we arranged for the body to be moved from that funeral home to another place.

Earley: [These stories] show how much of our identity is based on our past and our relationships. Everybody has this fantasy: Oh, won't it be great, I could just disappear, get a new name and start all over. What you discover is that this is the worst thing any of these people ever had to do. Once your past is taken away from you, and you're living a lie, it's almost like you don't exist.

Has anyone thought about giving more compensation to family members in any way?

Shur: If you start giving money, you begin to violate the federal statute that prohibits the purchase of testimony. You would not be solving the real problem. The real problem is that they're cut off from their folks back home.

Earley: The only guy who really got away with a lot of [demands] -- and this was with Mr. Shur's protest -- was Jimmy Fratianno.

Shur: I protested how much money we gave him.

Earley: Fratianno kept trying to go to people above Mr. Shur. He's the one that got the breast implants for his wife. Of course, he was the biggest fish at the time that they'd ever caught.

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