Print Witness Us State with airSlate SignNow

Save witness us state

in 1963 the first mobster received protection from the federal government in exchange for testimony against mob cohorts a move that marked the beginning of what would become the federal witness security program or WITSEC next Gerald sure who is credited with founding the organization and journalist Pete Earley discussed their book by the same name with details on the more than 6,400 protected witnesses responsible for over 10,000 convictions this program runs 35 minutes good evening everyone my name is Greg Schuyler I am the community relations director here for Pfizer Noble in Georgetown thank you very much for being here this evening and eBooks has put out Whitsett inside the federal witness protection program everything you want to know about my few figures and crime lords that squeal on their own will find out exactly what kind of life they lead we welcome the authors of this book shelter Peter Lee we thank you very much for being with us thank you very much thanks very much sir I'm Peter Lee I'm the co-author along with Gerald and I'm gonna start tonight a microphone here hook I must tell you it's a little intimidating because I look out in the audience I realize how many of you folks have worked in the program and know it know it quite well so I guess we get a jam on a question we'll just take a show of hands and whoever handled handled that case can do it I'm gonna start by doing a reading from the book it's gonna be very short and I actually typed it out and I did that because I swear to you it is in the book but I did it because I didn't want to wear my glasses and I don't know if I can read this small print this is from the book this was a lady in Brooklyn and this is what she told me and I'd like to share with you this is how it happens you're cooking dinner your son is playing with carmine the kid next door and your baby is taking a nap your sisters stopped by and you're gossiping about the woman who's having sex with this Jewish guy who owns a corner deli and there's a knock and when you open the door to Marshalls show you badges and your life suddenly ends I mean I had tomato sauce simmering I knew my husband Sal was thinking about cooperating with the cops the last time I'd seen him in jail he told me he was going to go down for a long time 15 or 20 years he was worried but I had no warning one of the u.s. marshals introduces himself and says real polite like that we got to go like right now he says Sal is in protective custody which means everybody in jail knows he's a rat which means his boss Tony may be sending guys over right now to whack us this other marshal he keeps looking outside as if somebody's coming Anna she's my only sister and me send carmine home and start grabbing swimsuits t-shirts baby stuff and I wake up Maria my two year old I come out of the bedroom and Ana is arguing with the marshals because they're saying she and our grandfather have to come with us too since Tony might go after them now Ana lives with our grandfather there are a few buildings down and the marshal says there's another marshal down there getting him right now and and I just look at each other we're thinking oh yeah the captain leaving that's not going to happen we call him the captain because he wears a blue sailor's cap he has since war war one the marshals drive us down to where Ana and the captain live and I run upstairs still carrying Marie and try to talk to him but the captain says he's staying put so I signed some stupid paper from the marshals about how they tried but he refused to go and Ana comes and gets in the van with her suitcase and her puppy now the puppy's part German Shepherd and part Labrador Retriever and John loves him but Maria is scared and starts fussing again what a sight we're all crowded in this van with these two marshals there's another car behind us with another two marshals and we're all afraid Tony's crew is going to come racing up and open fire meanwhile all around us life is going on as normal people are walking their dogs talking to neighbors and us hurrying around I don't think I really understood what leaving meant until we pulled away there wasn't time to think and then I looked through the glass and there's the captain standing on the porch stoop watching us go for God's sakes how safe is that the captain's angry but he has tears in his eyes and suddenly I'm blubbering like a baby and then Anna starts and the kids begin and even the dog starts whimpering and these marshals are trying to get us quiet and the next thing you know we're pulling out of Brooklyn where I've lived my entire life 27 years never having gone no further than New Jersey in the shore and I'm thinking to myself what the hell is going to happen now now as terrible as that situation may sound that's a vast improvement over what this person would have faced only a few years earlier before Gerald sure and several people in this audience helped started the federal witness protection program back in the 1960s the mob really controlled an awful lot of businesses and industries and anyone who had enough guts to step forward and testify against them ended up and a lot of times dead we begin the book with the scene where there's a witness who has found an informant who is found and her throats been slit and her innards have actually been pulled out a literal message sent to people if you spill your guts about the mob they'll literally spill your guts so the program that mr. Sher started gave people an option I got interested in the book before I met Gerald sure I was trying to find people in the program because I'd heard a lot of negative things about it and it's easy to find people if you're only looking for the complainers and I realized quickly that I was only getting a very small part of the story I ran into Gerald sure and I discovered he was doing his own book and I said hey instead of us competing you've been there since Joe Valachi all the way to Sammy the bull you know more about this program that I ever will let's throw in together and let's do a book together and luckily he agreed Gerald sure well we agreed but only after we met and decided we could fall in love the first problem I had was here I was dealing with a guy who has a reporter's background and you remember some of you how report his treatise and so I had you know wonder whether or not he's going to be objective whether he'd be fair of course what's in his mind is he's dealing with someone who was in the government and he knows they're never fair they're never straightforward and he has the same suspicions that I have of each other and by talking we began to realize that what we wanted to do was put together a solid history of what we think of as a very important program I had the advantage of a very skillful writer he had the advantage of someone who could make it up as he goes along we're going to use it and and he had Pappas journal which is what I called my first work there I was actually writing this for my grandchildren at Miriam's suggestion and so we got together and in fact the marriage was formed the one way we ensure the integrity of the book was we had an agreement that if either one of us wanted to write something that the other didn't like about facts in the case if we disagreed we each would write that he could write his paragraph as he saw the case I could write the next paragraph and say this is why it was different and we had that understanding and that that ensured the integrity of the book the nice thing about it is neither of us ever had to resort back to that we will let me interrupt here I'll show you how quickly my fears went away the very first line very first sentence in this book is Gerald sure thought he was going to vomit and I showed that to Gerry he goes that's great that's wonderful and I thought hey this guy's gonna be easy to work with after he left I went inside and threw up yeah but with that and with constant questioning I mean I had I had to be on my toes because I have a very very skillful analyst over here skillful reporter and very skillful writer and he's probing me and probing and making me really reach reach and defend this program and do what we were doing and he did it more intelligently than anybody else who would ever question me and and together I think we have put together what is the real history of the witness program and with the help of some very wonderful people who used to be in the Marshal Service and Bureau of Prisons and the federal investigative agencies all of whom wanted to see a straight honest history put forward the most satisfying thing I've had so far out of the book besides the completion of the book itself into working was that several people who have worked in the program have written to us and told us how wonderful they think the book is now honest they think it is and people sort of on both sides so that that is a warning delightful experience for someone who's trying to put forth an honest history you've said so many nice things about me I think one of the reasons why and I'd never written a book with anybody else one of the reasons I wanted to do that was because Jeri really had been there I mean he dealt with Joe Valachi who was the very first person to really come forward and talk about the mob he dealt with Sammy the bull and one of the unique things I discovered which he really doesn't like to talk about was he and his wife Miriam had to go into the program at a certain point because the Colombian cartel had decided that a good way to find a witness was to kidnap Jerry or Miriam torture him and then find out this name and I found that incredible and in fact one of the problems we had was that I felt like a dentist pulling teeth trying to get him to talk about some of this because at one point Jerry's is living on a houseboat in the middle of night wakes up and there's these five guys on motorcycles who come down the middle all night and they're all looking at his houseboat so he gets out this automatic weapon and Miriam the phone she's sitting there with a revolver and they're looking through a night-vision scope at these folks waiting for him to see if they're going to come up and try to take him hostage and you know I'd say things like oh my gosh you know wow what do you feel well I'd do what was necessary oh no no you can say more than that how's this sound he had the focus terrifying fingers Miriam holding a revolver I wasn't worried those five but yes the probably comes the reporters and you know any other end but what we did we sat there that night and it was it was frightening we had night-vision cameras on put on by the Marshal Service and and suddenly we hear the roar of those motorcycles and we look on our we had monitors all through the boat Peake says houseboat it was actually a trawler wasn't a houseboat it was meant to actually move it had a motor in it and and we was sitting there and we're watching the camera and I zoom in on these guys and I can barely see in the dark and we did was sitting there with a with a machine gun and a shotgun and a revolver and a telephone and we waited until they passed around something that they all puffed on and then they left and went away she's your typical federal bureaucrats out for a ride that's right that was it but I think one thing that you told me about that there I thought was very interesting was that when I was out interviewing people trying to find people in the program they all told me these stories where they'd be hidden and they'd walk into a grocery store and by God there was somebody from their neighborhood and that happened to you you ran into that and also I just how odd several times things that you think would never happen like forgetting your name those things do happen I remember one time you told me Miriam looked out the window and someone was crawling into her car and she immediately assumed it was somebody planting a bomb there it turned out to be a gas station guy who had been sent to pick up a car and the guy had said I'll put my keys on the back wheel but when you're in this situation where you think your life's threatened and you're thinking you know could be anything you see things differently right Miriam was on the phone I called the police and the police in turn had called me and I was on my way home at the time and so I started zooming up well beyond that 60 mile limit going on home and went to by the time I got got home there were two police cars had stopped this truck coming up from where the where the Miriam's car was and and I came out and we all had a nice chat and it turned out the two guys were mechanics who were just about to pass out I mean they were absolutely devastated because when I arrived they took officers they'd have their guns drawn and they were you know things were not going well for these two guys who just wanted to pick up the car unfortunately the car why they wanted to pick up look exactly like Miriam's and they got under the wrong car which they probably never never did again but dia but memory was a problem when you know Miriam was teaching at the time when when the kidnapping was going to occur and when I first told her about it after I learned that day that there was this plan I asked her if she wanted to leave and she said I can't leave I have my first grade class to tend to then here on one hand I'm telling she's going to be tortured and she's worried about the first grade class I then called the Marshal Service and asked that they send some protection for my wife they found an absolutely delightful wonderful deputy who posed as a student teacher with the blessings of the principal of the school principals school was the only one that was told the truth and they all agreed everybody understood that Miriam was not presenting a danger to the children she was in danger on her way to and from school but not at school and so she had this undercover marshal who was grading papers for her and under her coat of course was her weapon and such and so if these first graders got out of line with they were going to be handled appropriately but I want to tell one story before we open it to questions this is one I ran into and I was out in California and I was talking to some marshals and maybe a little racy but it just shows the kind of problems that Gerald sure had to deal with because you had dysfunctional people who were being brought into this program and trying to get them into normal society and I think it's a funny funny story had a mobster who got into the program and it was very tough on him to testify against his buddies and his self-esteem went down and of course the marshal is working with him trying to get him pumped up so he could testify and finally the guy said to him I'm just so devastated he said you know I can't even satisfy my wife and so the guy sent him to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist came back and said that's the true story said I think a penal implant would help this guy out I think it really booster his ego and it'd really be a good thing to do so they did it and he did a great job testifying everything is fine about a month later the marshal got a call he says everything's great except I got a problem okay said well what's that and he says well they put this wire in that makes this work he said they put it right above my belly button he says every time I lean forward to eat at the table the button hits the table he says this is very embarrassing and uncomfortable and the marshal looked at him and said well why don't you get a taller table or a shorter chair now that's really the witness program practical solutions for practical problems the now you made me nervous here a little while but anybody have any questions so long the way that you want to ask yeah place we go on if you have a question anybody well yeah yes questions okay so yeah yes I spend part of your book like what you're giving witness protects identity don't you why don't you have the financial records I was very concerned when we started the program since we were dealing with people who like to steal that if we gave them full backgrounds with financial records we would be helping them steal and so I decided there were alternatives to giving him background direct full backgrounds they didn't need financial records they didn't need employment records because I had gone out and contacted 150 or 200 employers in the country who agreed to hire witnesses in the very beginning that was the first at the start of it and so they didn't have to have those background records subsidy it turned out to be that is what they did do many of them who didn't have backgrounds from us went out committed fraud anyway and I was glad that we did not give him the background well I think it'd be helpful if you understand that when Gerald sure took a mobster he had to say okay how am I going to give this guy a new identity well he needs a social security number because he's going to have to work he needs a new driver's license but want to keep it a minimum maybe we'll get new school records for his kids but I don't want to vouch for him financially and this made it tough and there's 5% of the people in the program who were not involved or found guilty of any crimes now imagine being 42 being sent from New York because you'd seen a crime out to Rapid City South Dakota and walking in at age 42 and not being able to have a credit report get a telephone hooked up that kind of thing but the worst part when I talk to these people the number one thing that drove him crazy was they felt like they'd really lost their identity and lost their self they hated that they couldn't stay with their family deal with her family and I found a lot of them who after a few years just made that contact or moved or whatever but this one woman who's in the book witness X told me she said it was you you lost your name you lost who you were and I never realized how much of our individuality depends on this talking about the past where I went to school who my friends were all I guess he lost all that and I think the main reason she talked to me was she had lost both of her children and accidents and she felt like she'd been on this earth and nobody knew it didn't matter sure her whole self had been erased and I think she was desperate to try to say I'm here I mattered I'd lived and I think that's something that they faced those same psychological reasons many of the witnesses begin to use the term week where after we relocate and they talk about we're going to prosecute we're going to get a conviction we're going to do this and we're going to do that and what you're doing is substituting the agents and the prosecutors and us for their family back home and so and you had to watch out for the we because if they start saying we too much they might deviate from the truth and you wanted him to stay with the truth I recall one fellow who absolutely bragged about how he had his own office in the United States Attorney's Office and he was going there every day and had his own office with a desk and he said I have my own secretary which surprised me because we were scrambling for secretaries than the Department of Justice and his fellow who like to kill got his own secretary in the US Attorney's Office but the the use of the we became very important to them otherwise they had nothing nothing to hold on to also they've come out of a gang the gang is gone there was something in the gang now they're in their eyes nothing in this civilian non criminal world and it's you know what do I do now I'm not who I was I'm not important and also another problem they had they had to stay with their wives and their children normal hours something the first racketeers we relocated we're not used to doing back in New York you know typically they would go out at 6:00 or 7:00 in the evening and they come back at 5:00 in the afternoon now we've relocated them and they have to get a job working from 9:00 to 5:00 and for a long time we couldn't get them jobs that meant they were sitting in motels with their wives and their children from 9:00 in the morning till 9:00 the next morning till 9:00 the next morning and they found that absolutely intolerable I think another thing you need to realize is that these folks Gerry not only had to hide the witness but anybody the mob could get to and so there were situations like that one where the mobster said I don't care about you hiding my wife but don't hide my mystery and he'll hide my wife don't hide my mistress but don't hide my wife right right I was going to be his answer to it you know don't get it divorced here I don't need to spend the money I got this guy who will leave my wife back in the home area and that will solve the problem and we relocated his wife of course anyway but I think another thing that one of the problems that I was very interested in was with Vinny fat Teresa fat Vinny Teresa who got into the program a guy who weighed what over 300 pounds and I found this typical of some of the big shots like Jimmy the weasel and others they loved the fame they loved the attention they loved bringing down the big mobster and they didn't want to disappear and so one of the problems you ran in with Vinny is he actually started making stuff up and trying to stay as much as he could in the limelight the first problem I ran to with Vinny was was after we we sent to a hospital lose weight and on his way out of the hospital after he successfully lost some weight he stopped and he had two or three dozen donuts and the way they went so you don't try that sort of thing I mean don't don't do that again but the he started to make up stuff about famous people that he thought would be useful for prosecutors always trying to really sort of stay on the public dole and get more money and but after a while we got sort of savvy to that kind of thing and as we gained experience we were with taken less and we began to try to out-con the con which is what it amounted to I guess and sometimes we were successful sometimes not now in in this whole story about the witness program and in a WITSEC it's not just about the witnesses that we talk about although they certainly are an important part and I and we have to remember that during my day we relocated about 6500 witnesses about 14,000 members of the family about 20 21,000 people who were relocated and almost enough to make another community and relocated successfully we talked about the criminal part but there are the innocent folks and those are the spouses and the children and now in 2002 the Marshal Service is dealing with the third generation of some of those people and some of those generations don't even know that their grandparents were criminals so that that factor the innocent people in this program I think tends to get lost with some of the newspaper publicity and then there are the investigative agencies that we don't want to lose sight of I mean the fact that the FBI and DEA and IRS all these agencies are feeding into this program and making their cases off of it yes you had a question what kind of obstacles were in your way in the early days within the department itself the biggest obstacle I had in the department was money was getting money was hidden well then call the administrative division in a department who the administrative division had no role in anything substantive in a department as far as I was concerned except they controlled the budget and they saw no need to hide people now they knew nothing about fighting crime they know nothing about crime itself they knew about saving dollars and that was that was their role I had a fixed budget and I had to fit everything into that budget so when I asked for money for a witness they thought that these requests were absolutely bizarre and I would fill out a form and I would ask for some money and for two thousand or three thousand dollars and they were used to putting out $8 a day for a witness to testify so they couldn't understand why would we need $2,000 or $3,000 and what do you mean you're going to put them up in a hotel or hide them and you're going to have deputy marshals around a massage that was that was the first big problem I had the second problem was convincing the agencies that the agencies that we're going to do this work in this program pure prisons US Marshal Service that this is a good program for them and I think in the case of the u.s. marshals these people are trained to go out and investigate and arrest apprehend criminals and I come along and say I'd like you folks to be social workers I want you to take him to doctors I want you to take him to schools you know I want you to give him marriage counseling and so on something that they just were not accustomed to do I think one of the things that surprised me too one reason I was happy to work on the booklet but Jerry is because you were on as there were a couple times you told me you know I put the wrong guy in the program I should have put the guy he was testifying in the program and he should have testified against him and I think one of the other things that was really tough for you I remember one of your most emotional sessions was we were talking about the programs failures you sound like my psychiatrist here the emotional session it was you're talking about Marian Pruitt going on seven state crime spree and killed people and you had to deal with the parents calling up and saying why do put this sob in the program and turn him loose on the streets and it's funny since we've been doing this book tour we begin the same kind of questions not about mafia but about terrorists since the Marshal Service and WITSEC is now hiding terrorist people saying we'll put him next to my neighbor but don't put him next to me you know right well no but nobody wants a racket here or criminal or terrorist or whatever next to them at the but he days when I started is so far back you know that the when JK Hoover was head of the FBI there were people who believed that we had put a communist on one side of them in a racketeer on the other side of him and they would didn't going to be a killer but us reporters and it was yes they were a reporter that's right yeah so any other questions yeah yes just out of curiosity what what you see is the biggest flaws biggest failures in program well the biggest fairies in the program started on my watch when I was there and I was responsible for some of the biggest failures in the program I've left so there is no more fizz in the program like what how is I think I think the biggest failure we have in the program the most difficult thing to this day is working with the very innocent person who has absolutely nothing to do with crime we can't pick them up move them to another part of the country and make them whole and make them feel really good about themselves with the criminal whom you do that to the criminal has seen some benefit out of this but to the honest person that 5% or less it's really tough on them and I think that we still have a difficult time with that yes I there any criminal who has really flourished under it literally they've taken that new the new environment and they have gone on to be very independent they vary they've just come at different personal looks good many criminals have flourished under it we had we've had some rise so high at the corporate level that I was concerned that they would be disclosed and they gotten up to corporate boards and such most of them have done extremely well and we have a 10% about 10% I think of the people who have entered the program have committed crime again compare that to a normal state recidivism rate of 40 percent or 50 percent then the program's done extremely well and that makes sense because a guy gets out of prison give 150 bucks or whatever and say good luck goodbye and in this program you're going out and you're spending six months getting them into the community helping them adjust getting them jobs you know I know so they know if they show up they may be killed so that's a pretty good incentive I one of the things that Jerry told me was funny was they had a witness who ran for mayor in a Texas and what'd he say he said he was he was telling the voters that he was a crook to begin with instead of a after he elected and then there was a case what you were worried because a guy was in the punt his son was in the putt has punt and kick yeah and it looked like he was gonna win and you were thinking what how in the world are we gonna keep this guy hidden if he's down there with his son on national TV Freddie be on national television right then that would be a problem and he didn't win so was not a problem we fixed it so I said we did not I mean I think that this is being uh this is on c-span I suppose we should not we did not fix it it's just one let's just deal laughing sweet huh okay it really didn't happen yes somebody else had a question up here yes how has organized crime changed since the late 60s oh we know the program was originally designed to hide the identity of witnesses against the Mafia is that is that still true today the Mafia has been decimated by the witness protection program it absolutely has been demolished they're still remnants around and still functioning but they're certainly do not have the capacity that they had in the 1960s I think virtually the heads of every major syndicate has been put in jail or is about to go to jail and the so so as far as the cousin Oscar goes the program has been highly successful it moved on from there to motorcycle gangs and hate groups here in Brotherhood and and on to terrorism and program seems to be very adaptable to the different kinds of people that it's running up against and something in the very beginning I really didn't think about I thought about Casa Nostra and then suddenly I find myself dealing with motorcycle gangs and hate groups and I found that the Marshal Service was very very adaptable to that newer prisons I mean something we've not mentioned us so far Bureau prisons had to establish witness security units to protect prisoner witnesses and more than half of the people who enter have entered the program for the last several years we've gone to prison for us and and then another decision is made after it's time for them to come out of prison whether they should be relocated again but Bureau of Prisons started out by starting a unit in New York City on the third floor of a high-rise jail in effect and we put all of the prisoner witnesses in there and then we needed a second unit went to another high-rise prison another high-rise prison and through the good graces of the Bureau prisons and their directors they finally built regular prison units so that prison where prisoner witnesses are hidden in units which are inside of prison so they go to prison and that's important because the prosecutors and agents begin to realize that we can keep their witnesses alive and they don't have to plea-bargain all the cases all the way down I was impressed with the marshals that I ended up interviewing because as you said when this program first started a lot of these guys were trained to go out and hunt down bad guys not help them and these guys were protecting mobsters and they and they were doing things mobsters are trying to drop bombs down courthouse chimneys and assassinate these people and I think a lot of people the wrong impression that it's the FBI hiding them or some other agencies and it's US Marshal Service US Marshals yeah often you see on television so I've got something about the witness program they say the FBI did it or some agency I never heard of a member interviewing Jean [ __ ] and he told me the hardest person for him as a u.s. marshal to hide was an outlaw motorcycle gang member because one he didn't want to be part of normal society and two he had tattoos all over him so you know you can hide him in in Idaho but the first thing he does is look for a biker bar how do you protect somebody like that that was until he wanted to hide me and I didn't want to hide and gave him fits and he said bring back the biker guy again I didn't follow any rules but somebody had a question over here today questions it you think that the that since you have gotten rid of the vast majority of the high-ranking mafia that's the new groups that are coming and have run the program it's an interesting question I have the new groups through in the program I recall going to a witness security unit a prison unit and walking through walking through the unit and the old-time Mafia Cosa Nostra guy pulls me aside he says Jerry I got to talk to you we got a problem and I what's the problem he says you're not putting in the same classic criminal used to you know and in all I said what do you mean he says you're bringing in these guys here you got tattoos on you got guys in here that want to kill ya guys it'll kill anybody says we don't do that kind of stuff we don't do that at all and so that the type of person that's coming in came was coming into the program after the first ten or fifteen years I think was very different was what dangerous in certain ways I found that I could I personally felt I could trust a cut what a cousin austere person told me if they said they would not do something they didn't if they said they will do something they did it was what they didn't say I worried about with the others that came in after them and the motorcycle gangs and the hate groups and they've just lied about everything and I just had a great deal of difficulty with them yes anybody else yes if it let me move away from Enron since I know nothing about that case being a private citizen now and I'm delighted if if there were a case that involved fraud and a criminal fraud and the person where a person was endangered because they became a whistleblower this program would be broad enough to cover them and protect them if they were in danger but it would be a program you would not want to go into unless it was the last resort you know I think all of us kind of had this fantasy at least I know when I started researching this book I did about wow you could erase your past you could disappear you could get a new identity you could start over and when I talk these people I found out it was the hardest thing any of them have ever done and not I think the Congressional studies showed 86% of the people were happy that eventually but there was still you know it's just so many problems none of them said that they would if they note all the problems they would have really thought about it even they didn't have a choice they had to do it any other questions yes I'm glad you asked that question have people been murdered in the program I repeat Divac sure everybody hears it no person who's followed the rules has been murdered in this program and I don't mean that as a catchy title phrase you had some people who just decided you know I'm a wise guy I can handle myself and I'll just tell everybody who I am we had one guy who was hidden out west on California and he got so excited when he saw that he was on a network newscast he ran next door to his neighbor and he said hey turn it on that's me we had one guy go back home to New England when he was told not to go home and he turned the doorknob and a house blew up we've had those kind of deaths we've had a few witnesses commit suicide and that concerned me for some time and I had a study done to see if there was something we could do to prevent that or if there was an excessive number of suicides and the study revealed that the number of suicides that occurred was not disproportionate to the rest of the population and that in effect I go back to the old tort law that I learned in law school you take the actor as you find him right we take these people in with whatever baggage they may have and take them into the program relocate them with their baggage and then we try to deal with that baggage as best we can yes why the witnesses go on TV and are not killed I can't explain why they go on TV easy I can explain why they're not killed but uh I think I think that with with the Casa Nostra type of witness that went on television which I'm more familiar with those that go on television I think that the there wasn't that desire to sort of reach out and chase after them as much if they came back to their home city I think they would have been done in but I don't think there was that ability that you'll find with terrorist organizations for the people to go out and do the searching that they had most of them were also on TV after they'd already testified yeah it was it was after they testify you but you would think they would want to somebody would want to Grail Ange her he does set an example to the others not not to testify of course they haven't been a whole lot that have gone on TV and you've got one out there now who's got his own internet site they know he's he's everywhere he's very public about it and I think time has always been a factor when it came to the cycle of risk and I always felt that there was a timeline we could draw when the witness was most at danger and when he was least at danger and I think years after the case is over he's least at danger and we've had we've had witnesses wind up meeting the people they testified against on the street when they've gone back to the same city and they've not been hurt Jerald sure is the founder of the federal witness protection program reporter Pete Earley has worked for a number of newspapers including the Tulsa Tribune and the Washington Post WITSEC inside the federal witness protection program is published by banham del an imprint of Random House visit Random House com for more information