For decades no law enforcement program has been as cloaked in
controversy and mystery as the Federal Witness Protection Program.
Now, for the first time, Gerald Shur, the man credited with the
creation of WITSEC, teams with acclaimed investigative journalist
Pete Earley to tell the inside story of turncoats, crime-fighters,
killers, and ordinary human beings caught up in a life-and-death
game of deception in the name of justice.



WITSEC
Inside the Federal Witness Protection
Program



When the government was losing the war on organized crime in the
early 1960s, Gerald Shur, a young attorney in the Justice
Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, urged the
department to entice mobsters into breaking their code of silence
with promises of protection and relocation. But as high-ranking mob
figures came into the program, Shur discovered that keeping his
witnesses alive in the face of death threats involved more than
eradicating old identities and creating new ones. It also meant
cutting off families from their pasts and giving new identities to
wives and children, as well as to mob girlfriends and
mistresses.



It meant getting late-night phone calls from protected witnesses
unable to cope with their new lives. It meant arranging funerals,
providing financial support, and in one instance even helping a
mobster’s wife get breast implants. And all too often it meant odds
that a protected witness would return to what he knew
best–crime.



In this book Shur gives a you-are-there account of infamous
witnesses, from Joseph Valachi to “Sammy the Bull” Gravano to “Fat
Vinnie” Teresa, of the lengths the program goes to to keep its
charges safe, and of cases that went very wrong and occasionally
even protected those who went on to kill again.



He describes the agony endured by innocent people who found
themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in a
program tailored to criminals. And along with Shur’s war stories,
WITSEC draws on the haunting words of one mob wife, who vividly
describes her life of lies, secrecy, and loss inside the
program.



A powerful true story of the inner workings of one of the most
effective and controversial weapons in the war against organized
crime and the inner workings of organized crime itself–and more
recently against Colombian drug dealers, outlaw motorcycle gang
members, white-collar con men, and international terrorists–this
book takes us into a tense, dangerous twilight world carefully
hidden in plain sight: where the family living next door might not
be who they say they are. . .