W
HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS
↓ GREAT UNKNOWNS
Big questions.
Answers you can’t find on the internet.20 March 2019 _ PopularMechanics.comDo people in witness protection
ever get sent somewhere cool?
Or is it always, like, Nebraska?
Do you have unusual questions about how things work and why stuff happens? This is the place to ask them.
Don’t be afraid. Nobody will laugh at you here. Email [email protected].HAT’S THE MATTER? Nebraska isn’t “cool”
enough for you, Mr. Hipster Guy? They don’t
stock your favorite brand of mustache wax
out there? Lucky for you, pal, the U.S. Federal
Witness Protection Program, also known as
the Witness Security or WITSEC Program, tries
to stash you where you’ll blend in, whether that’s
Portland, Oregon, Portland, Maine, or anyplace in between.
Thriving cities and sunny beach towns are definitely possibil-
ities, depending on who you are.
“If you’re relocating [a
witness] from New York City,
you wouldn’t send them
to a town in Texas with a
population of 70 people,”
says Gerald Shur, a former
Justice Department attor-
ney who founded the Witness
Protection Program in 1971.
“You’d try to relocate them to
a place where they’d be com-
fortable, where you can get
them employment and take
care of their health needs.
And of course the first thing
is safety.”
The system seems to work,
by the way, so long as you
follow the rules. According
to the U.S. Marsha ls Ser v ice,
which administers WITSEC,
while about 18,865 witnesses and family members have been
relocated since the program’s inception, “no Witness Security
Program participant, following program guidelines, has been
harmed or killed.” Note the embedded qualification: following
program guidelines. What that means exactly is anybody’s guess—
neither the Department of Justice nor the Marshals Service is
eager to dispense any detail on the program’s inner workings,
which seems reasonable enough. You never know who might
be reading a magazine like Popular Mechanics, studying up on
shovels or cement.Still, we can piece together how it works in general—and speculate
a bit to fill in some gaps. Once a witness is relocated under an assumed
name, their primary point of contact is a special U.S. Marshal known
as a Witness Inspector, who helps them ease into the new location,
likely assisting in establishing a credible-yet-concocted “history”
for them through the sorts of front companies and other bogus
entities that undercover federal agents use to appear legitimate.
In an interview on a true-crime podcast last year, retired FBI agent
Bobby Chacon speculated as much: “The FBI has businesses—
it’s called backstopping. It’s a private business that’s been in
existence for many years.
That’s who provided me,
when I was undercover, with
my employment history and
credit reports and stuff like
that. I’m sure the marshals
have something similar.”
Judging by the, ahem, evi-
dence, most folks do fine in
WITSEC, wherever they’re
sent. Though 95 percent of
those relocated are criminals,
only 10 percent re-offend, an
admirably low recidivism
rate. And despite what must
be the stress of disappearing
into a new life, the dropout
rate is reputedly low, though
one famous participant,
Henry Hill of Goodfellas
fame, was booted after seven
years and went on to open a restaurant in West Haven, Connecti-
cut—which, you may be unsurprised to learn, promptly burned to
the ground. Presumably he was not “following program guidelines.”
One final tip: If you’re angling for a new life in Hawaii, what-
ever you do, don’t request it. When Shur ran the program, he’d
ask witnesses where they wanted to go, under the theory that they
might name destinations where they had ties or in which they
might have previously expressed interest. “Every place they gave
me, that’s where I wasn’t sending them,” he says. So best, perhaps,
to ask for Omaha and hope for Honolulu.