relatives, best friends, even hobbies. For the first time, OCRS analysts were able to identify patterns in mob activities and links between various crime families. They discovered several mobsters who were related through marriage. “My analysts did suchan incredibly good job that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms began hiring women as criminal analysts, too.” His analysts even developed their own computer program, with help from the National Security Agency, called the Organized Crime and Racketeering Intelligence Language, for processing LCN data.
One night while Shur was working late, he noticed that Thomas Kennelly, the Buffalo strike force chief, also was laboring over paperwork in a nearby office. Shur stopped to say hello, and Kennelly mentioned that he was filling out a requisition form so he could give cash to two witnesses stashed in a motel. They had agreed to testify in a Utica, New York, mob case, and they needed to buy groceries.
“Tom,” Shur said, “you’ve got better things to do with your time than to fill out these forms. Why don’t you let me handle this for you? I’ll take care of them so you can focus on getting ready for the case.”
Kennelly was delighted.
“Tom thought I was doing him a favor that night,” Shur recalled later, “but it was pure selfishness on my part. I was looking for an excuse to jump in and take charge of his witnesses. I’d been telling people for a long time that we needed a uniform way to protect our witnesses. Otherwise, every U.S. attorney was going to be starting from scratch each time a witness came forward. I had been in the Justice Department long enough to realize that if I could get control of the money, by volunteering to be the person in OCRS who handled the paperwork, I could begin to establish procedures about how our witnesses would be protected.”
After Kennelly turned the day-to-day handling of his two witnesses over to him, Shur became theOCRS’s de facto witness manager. The Justice Department had a small fund, called Fees and Expenses for Witnesses, that it used whenever a U.S. attorney needed to bring in an expert—usually a psychiatrist or other medical specialist—to testify at a trial or to reimburse witnesses for their travel, meal, and housing expenses. Shur began tapping into that fund to pay the cost of hiding mob witnesses. There weren’t many—in 1966, only six in the entire nation—and Shur estimated the number would never total more than ten per year. “I didn’t see this as a big operation, but I had been thinking about it for several years and I had developed some ideas about how we needed to proceed, based on my experiences in Brooklyn and the Valachi, Calabrese, and Barboza cases.”
Shur was convinced that the most efficient way for the government to protect a mob witness was by giving him a new identity and relocating him to a new community. “Protecting someone with guards, the way the government had done in the Barboza case, was expensive and dangerous,” Shur later explained. “It also caused a witness problems in the long run. You couldn’t afford to have guards protect him for the rest of his life, so he’d always be looking over his shoulder. During the 1960s, I was also very aware of the threat of assassinations. President Kennedy was on my mind. If we couldn’t keep a president alive, with the very best agents in the world and unlimited funds, how were we going to protect a mob witness from assassination? The solution was protection through anonymity. The best way to keep a witness safe was by moving him away from the danger area, moving him to a place where no one knew who he was. We weren’t dealing with sophisticated KGB spies here, we were dealing mainly with New York metropolitan area mobsters,and many of them had never stepped outside the city. The United States is a big country with plenty of cities where people could be hidden. Of course, if we were going to
One night while Shur was working late, he noticed that Thomas Kennelly, the Buffalo strike force chief, also was laboring over paperwork in a nearby office. Shur stopped to say hello, and Kennelly mentioned that he was filling out a requisition form so he could give cash to two witnesses stashed in a motel. They had agreed to testify in a Utica, New York, mob case, and they needed to buy groceries.
“Tom,” Shur said, “you’ve got better things to do with your time than to fill out these forms. Why don’t you let me handle this for you? I’ll take care of them so you can focus on getting ready for the case.”
Kennelly was delighted.
“Tom thought I was doing him a favor that night,” Shur recalled later, “but it was pure selfishness on my part. I was looking for an excuse to jump in and take charge of his witnesses. I’d been telling people for a long time that we needed a uniform way to protect our witnesses. Otherwise, every U.S. attorney was going to be starting from scratch each time a witness came forward. I had been in the Justice Department long enough to realize that if I could get control of the money, by volunteering to be the person in OCRS who handled the paperwork, I could begin to establish procedures about how our witnesses would be protected.”
After Kennelly turned the day-to-day handling of his two witnesses over to him, Shur became theOCRS’s de facto witness manager. The Justice Department had a small fund, called Fees and Expenses for Witnesses, that it used whenever a U.S. attorney needed to bring in an expert—usually a psychiatrist or other medical specialist—to testify at a trial or to reimburse witnesses for their travel, meal, and housing expenses. Shur began tapping into that fund to pay the cost of hiding mob witnesses. There weren’t many—in 1966, only six in the entire nation—and Shur estimated the number would never total more than ten per year. “I didn’t see this as a big operation, but I had been thinking about it for several years and I had developed some ideas about how we needed to proceed, based on my experiences in Brooklyn and the Valachi, Calabrese, and Barboza cases.”
Shur was convinced that the most efficient way for the government to protect a mob witness was by giving him a new identity and relocating him to a new community. “Protecting someone with guards, the way the government had done in the Barboza case, was expensive and dangerous,” Shur later explained. “It also caused a witness problems in the long run. You couldn’t afford to have guards protect him for the rest of his life, so he’d always be looking over his shoulder. During the 1960s, I was also very aware of the threat of assassinations. President Kennedy was on my mind. If we couldn’t keep a president alive, with the very best agents in the world and unlimited funds, how were we going to protect a mob witness from assassination? The solution was protection through anonymity. The best way to keep a witness safe was by moving him away from the danger area, moving him to a place where no one knew who he was. We weren’t dealing with sophisticated KGB spies here, we were dealing mainly with New York metropolitan area mobsters,and many of them had never stepped outside the city. The United States is a big country with plenty of cities where people could be hidden. Of course, if we were going to
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