The mobsters and terrorists next door

Who are the toughest types of criminals to get to testify?

Shur: Members of organized crime -- be it La Cosa Nostra or a Colombian narcotics organization or a motorcycle gang or a terrorist group -- none of them want to testify. Nobody walks up to us and says, "You know, I've been doing all these bad things all my life, and I've decided to change my ways." There has to be some motivation, something pushing them, that forces them to make a choice. Either you tell because of vengeance, or I tell because I'm about to be hurt or killed. But not: I tell because I've fallen in love with the American flag.

Then they have to be able to blend into these communities that you put them in. Even that story about Sal from Brooklyn -- he stuck out in South Dakota with his stereotypical gold chains and chest hair. How are the communities chosen that they're placed in?

Shur: You try to find somewhere they will be comfortable, and it has to be large enough to absorb them. The first few years we made a terrible mistake: We put everybody in Florida and California because they all said they wanted to go there. That was bad. You have to look at where the danger areas are. We ask: Where have you traveled? Where have you spent time? Where are your relatives living? All those places are excluded.

Earley: Donald "Bud" McPherson's experience is interesting. He was one of the only marshals who wanted to have anything to do with these guys. So they all ended up going out to Orange County, Calif. And the reason is because back then they didn't have cellphones and pagers, and Bud wanted them to be within an hour of his house. So he had 20 mobsters in this one area -- that's what led to the movie "My Blue Heaven."

Can you give a sense of where you think the Mob would be today without the program?

Shur: They would be very strong and very influential in politics, in city councils, in police departments. They'd still be controlling illegal gambling, and they'd probably still control Las Vegas.

Earley: A good answer for that is to look at what happened in Italy. They weren't able to protect people, and if you study the mob in Italy, you'll see that it still had tremendous power and influence, and corrupted the whole country. The one prosecutor who tried to change it got blown up. I'm not an expert on the Italian Mafia, but I have seen studies that show just how much money is wasted on corruption. You wouldn't want the United States to be facing the same kind of corruption problems that they do in Italy.

Gerry doesn't like to be flippant, but I will. You could say that the Sopranos would be in the White House.

What kind of threats did you and your family face?

Shur: There was a time when my daughter answered the phone at home and someone said, "Have you thought about death? It's about time you start." One time, she was coming home from school and a car went by and she thinks that she was shot at, she heard a loud pop.

Once, I had one of the witnesses in my office. He was very disgruntled, certainly not a criminal intellectual, and he looked at the picture of my wife and looked at me and said, "Have you thought about how you'd feel if she suddenly turned up missing?" And so we had a talk about that. We discussed how he would feel when I asked thousands of FBI agents to investigate his family and his friends and his friends' friends and made sure that they all told him that they were being investigated because of what he just said. Then I told him something that I told many people after: "You have just become my wife's insurer. You should pray that she doesn't trip, fall or scrape her hands."

What finally caused you to enter the program?

Shur: I learned that a person from the Medellín cartel, which was then the major narcotics cartel, had told one of the agents that he'd been assigned the job of kidnapping either my wife or I to find out where a witness is relocated. What they didn't know is that I always made sure -- it was built into the system -- that I would not know where witnesses were. We thought it best that I leave Washington. We went into hiding in a hotel. Marshals would meet me at night, follow me for a while and tell me it was clear, and I would drive around for an hour before I would head to where I was really going.

Did that alter your perspective on the program in any way?

Shur: It made me realize that it was every bit as uncomfortable as we were telling people. I had to go into my granddaughter's graduation -- we're very family-oriented -- but [my family] doesn't know about the kidnapping threats. When we hid in the hotel, our phone from home was forwarded to the room, so when they called us, we picked up as usual. We had to tell them that I had to work and we'd be late. So we snuck in and snuck out, got on a cellphone and left a message on the machine about something we saw there, so she knew that we were there.

Father's Day was a big deal, too. I told them I had to work but that the Department of Justice has this really wonderful courtyard. Why don't you all come down to the courtyard and we'll go and picnic? Of course, the Justice Department was guarded and we had Father's Day.

Advancements in technology must make everything a bit more complicated, too.

Shur: The Internet makes it easier for people to do searches, but I have not heard of a single witness found on the Internet yet, except for those who want to be found on the Internet.

Earley: You laugh, but Henry Hill [of "Goodfellas" fame] does. He was in WITSEC, but like a lot of these guys he just couldn't quite not want to be famous.

• View blog reactions