Geoff Nunberg

DATE February 18, 2002 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Gerald Shur and Pete Earley discuss relocating mobsters
in the Federal Witness Protection Program and their new book
"Witsec: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

When the federal government tried to break up organized crime in the '60s, it
was facing the code of silence and the assumption that anyone who testified
would be killed. My guest, Gerald Shur, figured out a way around this. In
1967, he created the Federal Witness Protection Program. In return for
testimony, the federal government would keep the witness alive before, during
and after the testimony, providing him or her with a new name, identity and a
home. Gerald Shur ran the program for 34 years and wrote nearly all the
program's rules. Now he's co-written a book called "Witsec," which is short
for the program's official title, the Federal Witness Security Program. The
book is co-authored with journalist Pete Earley, who is also with us.

During Shur's tenure, the program protected 6,416 witnesses and 14,468 of
their dependents. Shur says none of the witnesses who followed the program's
rules were murdered. I asked him to describe those rules.

Mr. GERALD SHUR (Co-author, "Witsec"): The primary rule is to sever all
contact with the people back home. That's the most difficult one for them to
follow. But going out and looking for work, I mean, is a requirement. Taking
a job if we find it for them, that's a requirement.

But the most important rule is that they follow the security regulations that
we put before them, and that is no letters going home directly. You've got to
send those through a mail drop. You'd have to do that. No telephone calls
directly because of Caller ID. They've got to get rid of their automobile
because it can be traced because of the vehicle identification number. Things
like that, things that go to security.

GROSS: Now, Pete Earley, you're a journalist. Why did you want to write
about the Witness Protection Program?

Mr. PETE EARLEY (Co-author, "Witsec"): I think all of us have in the back of
our head this kind of concept of what would it be like just to disappear, to
kind of erase your past, to start over? And that is how I started and
approached this book. I started interviewing people who I was lucky enough to
find in the program. And then I came upon Mr. Shur, who, of course, is the
expert as far as how the program ran. I mean, this is the man who knew
everyone from Joe Valachi on to Sammy Gravano, all the big mobsters, all the
big players in this world. And so we decided to combine forces.

I was fascinated from the aspect of: How do these people actually live once
they're taken out of their environment and provided with these services, but
they still have that criminal mind-set? That's what fascinated me.

GROSS: Gerald Shur, you were one of the founders of the Witness Protection
Program. Let's go back to the beginning, or even the prequel. You were
involved with the Joe Valachi revelations. He was the first Mafioso to break
the code of silence and talk to the feds about the inner workings of the mob.
What was your role in that story?

Mr. SHUR: Well, Joe had been cooperating for several months with the FBI and
with the fellow who was my boss, Bill Hundley, chief of the Organized Crime
and Racketeering Section. And one day, it was decided that a summary should
be prepared of what he had to say for the president of the United States, and
I was given the task of putting that summary together. While doing that, I
wound up, of course, meeting with Joe, and Joe and I became fast friends after
a rather disturbing beginning. And so Joe and I met rather regularly for the
next couple of years until he died.

Mr. EARLEY: Yeah. One thing I'd like to point out is after Joe Valachi
testified, the government really didn't know what to do with him, and Gerald
Shur was kind of the baby sitter put in charge of him. And Gerald is the one
who suggested to him that he start writing down his notes. Now this was a guy
who was nearly illiterate, and yet he turned out thousands and thousands of
pages of notes. And it was Gerald then who then took this to the Justice
Department and said, `Gee, we should get this printed,' and that ended up
becoming a best-seller after some controversy about whether he should be
allowed to profit from publishing a book.

GROSS: Gerald Shur, when did you start to think about the need for a Witness
Protection Program? Why did you start to think about that?

Mr. SHUR: I started to think about it in 1961, which is when I first joined
the department under Bobby Kennedy's new expanded organized crime drive. I
was assigned to work New York City, and I would fly up to New York from
Washington, DC, several times a week. And I would begin to meet with
potential witnesses, and then they would refuse to testify because, you know,
`I'll be killed if I talk' kind of thing. And so I began to think about,
`Gee, we've got to get some way for these people to survive if they testify.'
And then my colleagues were running into the same experience. So that one
experience after another led to a need. We had to do something about it, that
led to the witness program.

GROSS: Peter Earley, do you think the concept of the Witness Protection
Program was very controversial when it started?

Mr. EARLEY: It was very controversial when it first started because a
lot--and it still is today because, basically, the only way you can get the
big fish is by getting into bed or reaching down into the gutter and getting
involved with some of the little fish. Take, for example, Sammy Gravano.
Here's a guy who murdered 19 people, who was a killer, and yet we needed him
to go after the bigger fish, John Gotti. And so we provide him with rewards,
we provide him with protection. And this is--at the core is the moral issue
and the dilemma that Gerald Shur and others faced in this program.

GROSS: Gerald Shur, facing that moral dilemma, why did you feel comfortable
rewarding a mobster like Sammy Gravano by giving him protection? I know
you're going to get the bigger fish that way, you're getting John Gotti that
way, but still you're giving refuge to a criminal. How were you on the ethics
of that?

Mr. SHUR: Well, first, I didn't always feel comfortable. Sometimes it was a
very uncomfortable decision. I didn't view it as a reward. I was not in the
business of granting immunity or lesser sentences or whatever. My concern was
how to keep a witness alive. And so I was moving him from one part of the
country to the other, and helping him get started again so that he would not
again commit crime. In other words, if we left him where he was, if we didn't
put him in the Witness Program, Sammy Gravano still would have continued his
criminal behavior, John Gotti still would have continued his criminal
behavior, as well as the 35 or so other people that were convicted. So by
removing one, we took 35 or 36 off the street and put them in jail, with the
hope that Sammy Gravano would not again commit crime, which, of course, he
did.

GROSS: Gerald Shur, when you were in on creating the Witness Protection
Program and you were in the position of helping to create false identities for
mobsters, who did you have to talk to to learn more about how to create false
identities?

Mr. SHUR: Well, first, I contacted agencies that specialize in that business.
I talked to people at the Central Intelligence Agency. I talked to people in
charge of undercover operations in various federal investigative agencies.
And I learned from them what techniques had to be--you had to use to protect
somebody to keep them alive. And I found that for the most part, their
techniques were much, much greater than we really needed. We weren't keeping
people away from the KGB. I didn't want to supply total false backgrounds to
our relocated witnesses. I was concerned they might use them to perpetrate
new frauds. So we narrowed down what we were told you needed to rather basic
documentation.

GROSS: Like?

Mr. SHUR: Like new driver's license, but providing the person had a driver's
license. I mean, we didn't give drivers' licenses to people who didn't know
how to drive. But we would arrange for them to get a new driver's license in
a different name. We changed their names legally. We got them new birth
certificates or new passports, altered their Social Security numbers so they
couldn't be tracked that way. We did not give them credit histories. They
didn't have real work histories. In lieu of that, I approached 200
corporations, corporate executives and asked for their help, and they would
hire people pretty much based on faith.

Mr. EARLEY: This is one of the core problems with the Witness Protection
Program. When you don't trust someone, you're in a weird position because
you're going to reintroduce them into a community, but you really don't want
to give them the financial background, etc., because you don't trust them,
because they're criminals. And what this created was all kinds of problems
for witnesses. How do they get a telephone without any form of credit
history? And it was particularly rough on people who happened to be innocent,
a very small number, because they lost their good standing.

GROSS: Now one of the first big-time mobsters to enter the Witness Protection
Program was Vincent "Fat Vinnie" Teresa. What did he confess to, and what did
he give you that you needed in terms of testimony?

Mr. EARLEY: Well, Vinnie was involved in the New England mob, and he was very
involved in a lot of stock scams. And he was really one of the first big fish
who was willing to testify about white-collar crime. One of the problems they
ran into with Vinnie was that he liked being famous. This not only made a
problem when they relocated him--they had to move him several, several times
because he would--literally at one point jumped up on a bar and announced,
`Hey, I'm Vinnie Teresa. I'm the big mobster'--but they also had trouble with
Vinnie because he developed what became a problem with some witnesses. He
didn't want to quit and he started inventing things and making stories up, so
he could stay in the public limelight and still be the big Mafia star.

GROSS: Like what? What did he make up?

Mr. EARLEY: He made up that he had delivered a cash payment to Meyer Lansky,
one of the most famous mobsters of all-time, and the government fell for it.
They went down to Florida to prosecute the case. And when they got him on the
stand, he couldn't describe the guy's house. And when they finally got Lansky
on the stand, they showed that he was not even in town at the time that Vinnie
was claiming he made this cash payoff. And so everybody got red faced, and
Vinnie was abruptly moved to the marshal side of the program and then taken
away and hidden.

The first place they hid him was on the East Coast. They set him up in a fish
market, and they had a problem because all of the other fish markets in town
started having their windows broken out, etc. They went to move him and they
found out that he had sold all of the ice coolers and everything in his
business even though they were rented, and that was kind of typical of some of
the problems they had with these guys.

Mr. SHUR: Well, then his problems continued after he actually entered the
witness relocation program. And we moved him out West and he got discovered
there. We had to move him again, and he wanted to take his automobile with
him. We told him no, so he promptly drove his automobile into the moving
truck without our knowledge, concealed it with the furniture around it after
having loaded the trunk with liquor, and got all that shipped to his new
location. So we really got had, but we got some good results out of him,
eventually.

Mr. EARLEY: One of the problems with these early mobsters--and Gerald just
referred to it--is they would find out they were going to be moved. And so
what they'd do is they'd go out and buy everything they could on credit and
then they'd hide it. And then you'd move them and then the creditors would
show up a week later and say, `Hey, aren't you this guy?' You know, little
things like, you know, $500 worth of steaks or something. And `Where is he?'
and nobody could tell them. And so that was one of the little things that
they encountered.

GROSS: This sounds like it was a pretty discouraging start to the Witness
Protection Program. What did you learn from this experience that you could
apply to later witnesses?

Mr. SHUR: We learned that we had to monitor them much closer than we thought
we would in the beginning. Each witness was a learning experience. I mean,
each witness brought his own set of problems. I mean, one guy we relocated
from New England down to the Washington area temporarily, and he had been here
two days before we find out that he's been arrested for being a Peeping Tom.

One guy went into a Sears Roebuck and stole $40 worth--I think it was a bow
and arrow, as a matter of fact, $40 bow and arrow. And he was walking down
the street with it out of the store, got two or three blocks away when he was
arrested, and he said he was just looking for a cashier.

So we learned that we had to watch out for these folks because they were going
to try to con us just as they conned everybody else.

GROSS: Well, as recently as last spring, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, whose
testimony put John Gotti in prison, was found guilty of leading a drug ring.
So this problem hasn't gone away.

Mr. SHUR: Well, there are two problems. One is in the dealings with the
government, and that's part of the relocation problem. The other is whether
or not they commit crime again. And our recidivism rate is extremely low.
The recidivism rate is significantly below 20 percent. A recent study puts it
at about 10 percent, which means that 90 percent of those we relocate of the
7,000 that are out there are not committing crime again. So we're very
pleased with that. That comes about because of the addition of more
psychological help, more social worker-type help, more intense working with
them getting started in their new community.

Mr. EARLEY: And, also, they're afraid that they're going to be killed if
they're discovered.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. EARLEY: That's a good incentive.

Mr. SHUR: Word has gone through the criminal community now, I think, that if
you commit a crime while you're in the Witness Security Program, there will be
no tolerance and you will go to prison again and you will serve all your time.

GROSS: My guests are Gerald Shur, founder of the Federal Witness Protection
Program, and journalist Pete Earley. They've co-authored the new book
"Witsec: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program." More after a break.
This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guests are Gerald Shur, founder of the Federal Witness Protection
Program, and journalist Pete Earley. They've co-authored the new book
"Witsec: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program."

Peter Earley, you said at the beginning of our conversation that one of the
things that interested you in writing about the Witness Protection Program was
the idea of somebody going straight who had a criminal mind, what happens to
that criminal mind when you're trying to live the straight life. So what are
some of the insights that you've learned about that from writing this book?

Mr. EARLEY: I think that most of the people I spoke with thought that this
was going to be an easy thing to do; they'd just disappear, they'd be on the
government dole for a while, they'd be famous. And what they discovered was
this was probably the most horrible thing they'd ever encountered in their
life.

And you have to stop and think. First of all, they're not supposed to contact
any family members. They have to have their past erased. Most of us are
creatures from the past, and that's how we define ourselves, who we are, how
we think, how we talk. And all of a sudden, you're living a lie, which didn't
really bother most of the mobsters. But it bothered them that they had to
become square Johns, or honest people, and it bothered them because they had
lost their status and their power.

Early on in the program, to hide these mobsters, they gave a lot of them
rather mundane jobs. And it was pretty tough to go from having several
hundred dollars in your pocket and being a big shot in New York to all of a
sudden being in Rapid City, South Dakota, you know, working for a street crew.

So psychologically, it was horrible for a lot of them. And then after a few
years, you discovered that those who did make it adjusted rather well, and
they were proud that their children had gotten out of a life of crime.

GROSS: They must have really stuck out, though, particularly, like, you take
a New York mobster who has a thick New York accent and a very kind of
street-type of slang, put him in a small town in the Midwest and he's really
going to stick out.

Mr. SHUR: I wondered about that, and that was a problem. And then it dawned
on me that I was a New York street guy who went down to the University of
Texas and I did stick out.

GROSS: Yeah. But universities tend to attract people from all over, and so
you expect that a university.

Mr. SHUR: That's correct, and that's precisely the theory that I followed:
take the people out of New York, put them where there are other people from
New York City or from other cities and so on, cosmopolitan areas. We did put
some out there in Wyoming and we put some out in Idaho, and those folks just
did not understand the beauty of where they were living. I mean, they thought
they were put out into the wilderness and they needed the noise of the city
and the excitement, and so on. So we then began to move people into larger
communities where they were pretty comfortable.

Mr. EARLEY: You'd find that these guys learned quickly how to try to work
the system. And what they would do when they got stuck in Fargo was say,
`Gee, it's dangerous out here. I just saw Pete the Hit Man,' and the
government then would be obligated to move them. And a lot of them ended up
in California or Arizona, which they much preferred.

And, in fact, there's a funny story. They relocated so many in Orange County,
California, that they got together--and the mobsters began running into each
other. They got together, and a few of them started a drug ring out there.

GROSS: Gee.

Mr. EARLEY: And when the sheriff found out how many relocated mobsters were
in his county, he accused the Marshal Service of relocating the entire mob
right there in Orange County. And they had a one-year ban where they could
not put any more mobsters in Orange County.

What's funny about that is the marshal who did that did it for convenience.
This was before cell phones and pagers. And he actually was putting these
mobsters within driving distance of his house, because they had problems and
would call him up and he didn't want to spend four hours driving around
finding them all.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are Gerald Shur, a founder of the
Witness Protection Program, and journalist Pete Earley. They've collaborated
on the new book "Witsec: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program."

Do you ever use plastic surgery to help create a new identity for someone
who's become a witness?

Mr. SHUR: I was asked about plastic surgery for one witness very early in
the program, and I took photographs of that witness and sent them to a doctor
I was told was the very best plastic surgeon in the public health service. He
thought that changing a whole appearance of a face just really wasn't
workable, and it was not worth the effort and it wasn't worth the pain that
the person would go through.

A couple of witnesses have gone out on their own, I've been told, and have had
plastic surgery. One of whom--I saw his picture and it absolutely did not
change his identity at all.

Mr. EARLEY: Vinnie Teresa weighed over 300 pounds. Gerald Shur thought,
`I'll change his appearance not by plastic surgery, but by sending him to a
fat farm to slim him down.' He did. And as soon as the guy got out of the
hospital, he stopped at a doughnut shop and bought a dozen doughnuts, had the
marshal stop there and put all the weight back on.

While they haven't paid for plastic surgery, the Marshal Service has paid for
breast implants to keep one mobster happy. His wife wanted them, so he got
them. And in another case, a penal implant.

GROSS: Oh, really?

Mr. EARLEY: Yeah. The mobster's self-esteem had fallen so low that a
psychiatrist recommended he get a penal implant, because he felt like his
masculinity was suffering. And then the guy called up the marshals and he
said, `Hey, they put this switch in here above my belly button. Every time I
lean forward to eat my pasta, it goes off. What do I do? And it's
embarrassing.' And the marshal, very smartly, said, `Well, get a lower table
or a higher chair.'

GROSS: That's great. But I guess that implant isn't going to help you change
your identity when you're in the supermarket or anything.

Mr. EARLEY: No, it doesn't your identity. It might change your reputation.

Mr. SHUR: That's right.

Mr. EARLEY: But the idea was he was so devastated by testifying against his
former buddies that he just thought he was less of a man. And actually, his
wife and his girlfriend were thinking about leaving him.

GROSS: Gerald Shur is the founder of the Federal Witness Protection Program.
Pete Earley is a journalist. Their new book is called "Witsec: Inside the
Federal Witness Protection Program." They'll be back in the second half of
the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Credits)

GROSS: Coming up, relocating federal witnesses, as well as their wives and
mistresses. We continue our discussion with Gerald Shur, founder of the
Federal Witness Protection Program, and journalist Pete Earley.

Also, language commentator Geoff Nunberg considers how cars are named.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

We're talking about the federal witness protection program with its founder,
Gerald Shur, who also ran the program for 34 years. Also with us is
Washington Post reporter Pete Earley. They've co-authored a book called
"Witsec: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program." The program has
given mobsters, white-collar criminals, drug dealers and terrorists new names,
identities and homes to protect them, in return for testimony that can help
convict others.

When a mobster joined the witness protection program, how much of a choice did
they have over who they took with them--their wife, their kids, their
mistress? I mean, who could they bring into this new identity with them?

Mr. SHUR: What I looked for was who was in danger as a result of this
person's testimony, and I would watch out for who they left behind. For
example, I had one fellow who wanted to relocate his mistress, but not his
wife, and she certainly would have been in danger, and, well, what he was
looking for was us to become a quick vehicle to an end to the marriage. We
relocated the wife, of course, as well. I've relocated grand...

GROSS: Wait, so you relocated the wife and the mistress?

Mr. SHUR: That's correct. Right. Two different places.

GROSS: Oh.

Mr. SHUR: Now there were some occasions, we've relocated the wife and
mistress to the same community, and in one particular case, the mistress moved
in with the fellow's parents, who we relocated, and his wife lived with him,
she knowing about the mistress. So we felt it was not for us to judge the
relationships among the people, but to make sure that those who might have
been killed because that witness testified were kept safe.

Mr. EARLEY: You know, these people brought a lot of baggage with them. Most
of them were very dysfunctional, so what Gerry Shur had to deal with was not
only relocating them, but, for instance, a mobster and his wife would be in
the program, they decide to get divorced. You had to relocate each of them
and not let the other know where they were going, because you didn't want the
wife saying, `Well, I'm going to get even and turn him in.'

Then you had situations where the mobster would take his girlfriend and her
children with him, and the ex-husband would all of a sudden discover, `Hey, my
kids have disappeared. Where are they? And Gerald Shur had to deal with
that.

GROSS: Have there been witnesses who've had their covers blown?

Mr. SHUR: There have been witnesses who've had their covers blown where they
themselves have taken an action to cause that to happen. None of the
witnesses who have followed the rules that we've laid down have been found and
killed. Some have gone back home. Some decided to deal in crime in their
local community, like Sammy Gravano. Some of those have been found. One
fellow went back home, opened up the door of his house and it blew up in his
hand and blew him up. He, of course, had been told not to go home. The
program, over the 30 years, has been extraordinarily successful as far as
keeping witnesses alive.

Mr. EARLEY: I think it was more that these guys tended to blow their own
covers. I mean, you had one who was a relocated witness who decided to run to
be mayor of his city. That's a little tough. Another one got angry at the
program, didn't feel like he was being treated properly, so he made two big
signs he hung around his neck that said, `Mob star' and a big target, and
protested out in front of the Federal Building.

Mr. SHUR: The fellow who ran for mayor of the city advertised during his
campaign that he was very skillful in dealing with city crime because he
himself had been a criminal.

Mr. EARLEY: And what did he also say? He said something, like, `You'll
know--I'm telling you up front that I'm going to steal the money,' or
something like that.

Mr. SHUR: Something similar to that, right. Right.

Mr. EARLEY: So you know I'm going to steal it before I'm elected.

Mr. SHUR: That's not typical, I should say.

GROSS: I'm sure that the mob wanted to find people who had ratted on them and
wanted to infiltrate the witness protection program. Gerald Shur, did you
ever feel like you were in jeopardy, that maybe the mob would be after you,
and torture you until you gave them information about witnesses against them
who were now using fake IDs?

Mr. SHUR: I had a few instances occur. One time I had one of the witnesses
in my office who looked at a picture of my wife and said, `How would you feel
if she turned up missing?' One day, we had a phone call at home, and my
daughter answered the phone and someone said, `Have you ever thought about
death?' Those, we knew who was doing that, and we could sort of make those go
away.

The more serious one was about 10 years ago, when I was advised that a
Colombian narcotics cartel had hired to someone to kidnap me or my wife, the
intent being to get the information about where a relocated witness was
hiding. What they didn't know, of course, is that I don't know where
witnesses are hiding. We built that into the system, so I wouldn't know. So
there I was with that combination of a threat of being tortured and not having
the information to give up. So my wife and I wound up going into the witness
protection program.

GROSS: And how long were you in the program?

Mr. SHUR: Well, we were in the program for several weeks, a few months,
actually. My wife was a schoolteacher, and she had insisted that she continue
to teach her class. She was a first/second grade teacher and she thought
those kids really needed her, which I guess they did, and so the Marshal
Service assigned an undercover marshal to work with her, and the people at
school, the other teachers, did not know that she had an undercover marshal.
The only one who did know was the principal. And there was no danger to the
children. The assessment indicated that the threat to her was moving to and
from work, not at work. I continued to work, and I, at that time, had
marshals only follow me out of the Justice Department to make sure that I
wasn't being tailed, and after 10 or 15, 20 minutes of driving, they would
call me on my cell phone, tell me it's clear, and then I would drive another
hour out of the way to make sure, and then I would proceed on to wherever we
were living at that time. We moved from hotel to hotel in the Washington
area.

GROSS: What did you learn about what you put witnesses in the witness
protection act through by going through it yourself?

Mr. SHUR: I was putting them through a very, very uncomfortable experience.
Even the remembering part was difficult. The first night that I was to meet
my wife after I got this information was at a hotel in Baltimore. She had
been taken from school directly to this hotel, and told that after a secret
knock on the door, she could open the door. I got in there, and I had been
given a--checked in under a new name. I wanted to leave a wake-up call, and
just simply dialed the operator and said, `I'd like a wake-up call for, you
know, 7:00 in the morning,' and she says, `Yes, and your name, please?' And I
couldn't remember my name, what my new name was.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. SHUR: Never before had I been asked for my name when I asked for a
wake-up call. Usually I just announce the room number. And so I went
know, and she said, `Parker,' you know, and I said, `Parker.' And so I
realized that was a problem.

I'm accustomed to, as is my wife, looking into the rear-view mirror. That was
not new to us. She learned a long time before that whenever she drove, she
was to see whether or not cars were following her, and if they were, she knew
what to do, driving in and out of shopping centers, police stations, that sort
of thing.

Running into people--I used to have witnesses tell me that they ran into
people that they knew. My wife and I went grocery shopping 50 miles from
where we should be grocery shopping, and we fill up a basket full of
groceries, and there is my wife's first cousin coming in the store, at which
time we decided, `We'd better get the hell out of here,' and left the
groceries to melt or whatever they do, and we snuck out of the store. We did
not want to have to explain where we were and why we were there.

I had to sneak into my granddaughter's graduation from high school. The
family did not know what our problem was. We couldn't tell them; the matter
was being investigated. So I snuck into her graduation, told her I would be
late, that I couldn't go with the rest of the family 'cause I'd be working.

Father's Day, normally, the family would be together. I told them I had to
work, but we could meet and have a picnic inside the Justice Department, where
I knew it would be safe. And I arrived an hour before them; I left an hour
and a half after them. So I began to realize the discomfort that the
witnesses were going through. It was something I'd thought about but never
quite experienced.

But let me interject here, by the way, something totally unrelated. We've not
mentioned the witness protection and the Bureau of Prisons. And they hide
about half the witnesses.

GROSS: Well, tell us about that.

Mr. SHUR: OK. Half the witnesses that enter the program today are hidden in
witness protection units by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. This started
several years back when witnesses that were going to testify had been
convicted of crimes, had time to serve, and we couldn't put them in general
population; obviously, they would be murdered for being witnesses.

So with the help of Norm Carlson, the director of the Federal Bureau of
Prisons, we developed a witness security unit in New York City which was on
the third floor of a high-rise, in effect, jail, as opposed to prison. And in
that unit, we began to put one witness after another until we finally had 50
or 60 witnesses hidden in this one place and realized, `This isn't workable;
we need to get more units.'

And as a result, Bureau of Prisons developed several prison units throughout
their system, each holding 60 to 70 cooperating inmates. What's fascinating
about them is that these are inmates that oftentimes would have killed each
other in a regular prison system because they generally hated each other. You
had gangs that competed with each other. You had witnesses who testified
against one another, all in the same place. And yet it was really very
peaceful in those units because they had one thing in common: staying alive.
And they knew that if they did something wrong in the unit, they could get
sent to general population.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, we're talking about the federal witness
protection program. My guests are Gerald Shur, who founded and ran the
federal witness protection program--he ran it for about 30 years--and
journalist Pete Earley. They have collaborated on the new book "Witsec:
Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program." We'll talk more after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guests are Gerald Shur, founder of the federal witness protection
program, and journalist Pete Earley. They've co-authored the new book
"Witsec: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program."

Now, Gerald Shur, you worked with some of the international terrorists
involved with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the thwarted plot to
blow up New York landmarks. What are some of the differences working with
international terrorists, compared to New York mobsters?

Mr. SHUR: Well, I'd start to say cultural differences, but as you pointed out
earlier, there's some cultural differences between New Yorkers and the rest of
the United States, in some ways. But cultural differences with respect to
their religion, to their customs, to their dress, made it somewhat difficult.
Even within the families, there was a problem.

I recall one instance where the fellow's--the witness's wife wanted to go to
college and she wanted to absorb some of our Western culture, and her husband
wanted her to maintain the traditional dress, the traditional attitude. He
didn't want her to go to college. He didn't want her to get a job, all of the
things that she wanted to do. And that required really considerable
counseling on both parts.

People coming from the Mideast wish to be relocated to areas where they can
practice their religion or there were mosques. Well, that was fairly easy to
put people where there were mosques, but you had to be concerned about would
other people who attended religious services with them begin to pick out who
they were. We found out it was workable; it can be done, primarily because
this is such a very, very large country and we have so much choice in where we
can place people.

My European counterparts often would express envy over the fact that we had
3,000 miles across the country, whereas in the Netherlands, it was
significantly worse and other countries in Europe.

GROSS: Could you be confident that the Islamic extremists who you gave new
identities because they had confessed to their involvement in
conspiracies--could you be confident that they weren't still part of terrorist
networks?

Mr. SHUR: Well, `confident' and `guarantees' are words that are difficult
words to deal with. Certainly, we couldn't guarantee that any more than we
could guarantee that a relocated criminal won't commit crime again. I think
the information supplied by the intelligence agencies to us about those
individuals would probably be the best guide as to whether or not those people
would again be involved in terrorist activities. I was very comfortable with
the people we relocated in the first World Trade Center case. Very...

GROSS: And are they still living as relocated witnesses in the protection
program?

Mr. SHUR: Yes, but that implies that you're always receiving benefits or
something from the program and you're always tied to it. After you're safe
and after you've established your own new life, then there is no activity
between the government and that witness unless that witness is again
endangered as a result of their testimony.

GROSS: I want to read a really interesting quote that is from the head of the
federal Marshal Service that ran the protection for the witnesses in the
witness protection program. And he said, "If you take the government's dollar
to protect a witness, you have to be prepared to take the bullet, whether it's
for a scumbag or the president of the United States. You don't take a bullet
for the Mafioso. You take it because you're a professional." Any reactions
to that?

Mr. SHUR: Yeah, that's the statement of a remarkable guy, Reese Kash, who
was the first guy to head the program for the Marshal Service. And he came in
under the most difficult times: no support in the terms of money or manpower
and so on. And he had received a complaint from one of his people who said,
`Look, I don't want to hang around with these creeps, these dirty guys,' and
so on. And he was simply saying, `Look, you're getting paid to do a job, and
your own personal feelings have to be put aside, and I expect you to do that
job.' And interestingly enough, he himself did not particularly like this
program, and yet, did a remarkable job in trying to get it off the ground.

Mr. EARLEY: I...

GROSS: Yes.

Mr. EARLEY: I think that that is the key to why the program worked initially.
Inside the Marshal Service, there was a lot of problems with this because
marshals initially didn't like protecting these people and they had to develop
specialists. And then the problem Shur faced was keeping these specialists
from becoming advocates for the people they were protecting.

GROSS: Gerald Shur, did you ever run into a similar problem in a sense of
thinking, like, `I really don't like these guys; I really don't want to be in
the position of protecting them, but I have to and I'm a professional and I
know it's somehow for the larger good'?

Mr. SHUR: You hit it. I mean, you hit it right on the head. I'm a
goal-oriented person. And my object was to see to it that the courts, that
our system of justice could work. And it can't work if witnesses are
intimidated. And so that was what drove me to working with this program, was
I knew that if we could get witnesses protected, they could testify; if they
testify, this system works. So, yeah, I did not always like these people,
as I indicated earlier.

And sometimes, I should confess, I mean, I made a mistake. I mean, I put in
people into the witness program that probably should have been a defendant,
and I should have had the defendants used as a witness. That wasn't always my
choice, but there were times I reflected back and said, `No, that was wrong.'

GROSS: Gerald Shur, just one more question for you. You mention in the book
that you have multiple sclerosis, and that could be very painful when it
flares up. You've had very painful episodes. Has it been possible to
distract yourself from the pain, so that you can continue what's already
pretty complicated, problematic work?

Mr. SHUR: Well, curiously, I found that the worse I felt, the worse the
attack, the more I wanted to get to work, because getting to work and dealing
with some of these characters was extremely distracting. And so I think that
a lot of people at work never really knew that I had multiple sclerosis. But
I've been fortunate; I have a case that allows me to go to work. There are
those who are less fortunate that can't do that. So I found multiple
sclerosis an inconvenience, sometimes annoying, but really, it drove me to go
to work.

GROSS: I want to thank you both so much for talking with.

Mr. SHUR: Thank you very much.

Mr. EARLEY: Thank you.

GROSS: Gerald Shur created the federal witness protection program. Pete
Earley is a journalist. Their new book is called "Witsec: Inside the Federal
Witness Protection Program."

Coming up, language commentator Geoff Nunberg on automakers' strategies for
naming cars. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Commentary: Names of cars, past and present, and the trends that
car makers followed in choosing them
TERRY GROSS, host:

Retro is very big among the Detroit car makers these days, as you can see by
the design of cars like the PT Cruiser and the Plymouth Prowler. But as our
linguist Geoff Nunberg points out, the nostalgia extends to old-fashioned car
names as well.

GEOFF NUNBERG:

Two years ago, General Motors successfully revived the Impala name for its
full-size Chevrolets. And last month at the Detroit Auto Show, the company
debuted a new concept convertible that bears the name of the old Chevy Bel
Air. But it's one thing to revive a name and another to revive its precise
connotations. As the linguist Mark Aronoff has pointed out, the Big Three
model names of the 1950s and '60s really acquired their meanings from their
place in a vast and slowly turning wheel of brands.

Recall how things were back then, when every American make of car had several
distinct models for each of its lines, full-sized, midsized and compact. In
1958, there were three full-sized Chevrolet models, the deluxe Bel Air, the
standard Biscayne and the economy Del Ray. The Impala was introduced in that
year as a special edition of the Bel Air. Then the next year, the Impala
became a separate model of its own, and the other models were demoted. The
Bel Air became the standard model, the Biscayne became the new economy model,
and the old economy Del Ray was dropped. The same process was repeated a few
years later when Chevy introduced a new deluxe model called the Caprice and
demoted the Impala and Bel Air a notch, eliminating the Biscayne name at the
bottom.

The cycle was the same at Chrysler and Ford. The Fairlane, the Galaxie, the
LTD--each of them started out as a limited edition deluxe model, then worked
its way gradually down the chain to the economy slot.

While it lasted, it was the most elaborate and successful experiment ever
undertaken in the semantic manipulation of demand. Every few years, a new
name was introduced, fastened to a rare and desirable object, and then over
time, the cars it was attached to were made cheaper and more accessible to the
point where anyone could have one.

But it was also probably the most wasteful marketing strategy ever developed.
Companies deliberately degraded their established brand names just to increase
the demand for new ones, like a builder who lets an apartment complex go to
seed so that tenants will want to move into the new one he's putting up next
door.

What was remarkable was that consumers were willing to buy into the illusions
that the system rested on. In fact, there was virtually no difference between
the models, apart from the options and trim. The main feature that
distinguished the deluxe Chevy models from the standard and economy models was
that they had three little round taillights on each side, rather than two.

But the great wheel of model names could only keep turning so long as the car
companies could assume that consumers had nowhere else to go, that people
would be willing to spend their entire lives climbing the ladder of GM brands,
even as the company kept throwing more grease on the rungs. And by the 1970s,
consumers were becoming less willing to replace their cars every few years,
just so they could own the new model, partly because new car prices were
rising much more rapidly than the average family income and partly because the
Japanese and Europeans were grabbing large parts of the US market with brand
names that kept their luster over the long haul. By the '80s, American car
makers were offering only one model per line.

All of that led to changes in the kinds of names that manufacturers were
putting on their models. The car names of the '50s and '60s were based on a
few unimaginative patterns. Most were taken from the names of exotic
destinations like the Monte Carlo and the Seville, from animals like the
Mustang and Impala, or from vaguely superlative words like the Regal and the
Invicta. But then those names didn't have to be evocative. Their
connotations were inherited from their place in the constellation of brands
and shifted as they moved from deluxe to standard to economy.

It was only when the system broke down in the late '70s that car marketers
took to using fanciful names in the fond hope they would connote the car's
character all by themselves. That's when they began appropriating random
English words or jumbles of nonsense syllables, as car names started to sound
like the names of every other product. A Monte Carlo or Mustang could only be
a car, but Prodigy, Protege, Prizm, Precis, Prius--those could as easily be
digital cameras or office productivity software. And other names sounded like
they should be attached to china patterns or cosmetic lines: Corando,
Elantra, Vitara, Sedona, Nubira. They're words out of some `lingua branda' of
the far future, what we'll all speak when the last common noun has been
trademarked.

Among the Big Three, names like those started to become nervous incantations,
as if the car makers believed the right string of syllables could somehow
conjure a market niche out of nowhere. Long before General Motors announced
this year that they were phasing out the Oldsmobile brand, you could tell the
division was in trouble just from the desperation of its model names in the
late '90s: Alero, Achieva, Bravada, Ciera with a C. It was a sad dotage for
the brand that gave Americans classic model names like the Rocket 88, the
Futuramic 98, the Starfire and the Toronado.

Of course, there's always the possibility that GM will someday bring back the
names of some of those vintage Oldsmobiles, particularly if the nostalgia
vogue continues. But I think it's safe to say we've heard the last of Alero.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a consulting linguist at Stanford University and the
author of the new book "The Way We Talk Now."

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

We'll close with a track from guitarist Bireli Lagrene's new CD "Gypsy
Project." This is a Django Reinhardt composition called "Daphne."

(Soundbite of "Daphne" performed by Bireli Lagrene)
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