Stuff You Should Know - How Witness Protection Works

Episode Date: October 27, 2009

The Witness Protection Program, or the Witness Security Program, was established in 1970 to protect government witnesses before, during and after a trial. Learn more about witness protection in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. You've heard the rumors before. Perhaps some whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies. Paranormal events. All those things that disappear from the official explanations.

Tune in and learn more of the stuff they don't want you to know in this video podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. That there is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. But there. That there. Down the road of peace. Yes.

Et cetera. I am down the road of peace. I'm sure you are, Chuck. I wish. Have you ever committed a crime, Charles? I've never been caught or convicted of committing a crime, Josh. But you have. I have never been convicted of a crime.

Nice, Chuck. Chuck is big on the CYA. He's a good at it. Crime. Everyone's made a right on red when they shouldn't have. Sure. Yeah, I've committed a crime. Everyone who listens to this podcast knows that I started out early as a thief and stopped shortly afterward.

Remember the firecrackers in the Pacman shirt? Oh, yeah. Sure. Yeah. Shoplifter. Yes. If you commit a crime, you've got your own thing going on, right? Sure.

But what happens if you witness a crime? You're just some innocent person and you see somebody shoot somebody else in the head. The blood comes spurting out and like a big arc and the eyes go glaze and you're just standing there watching this and you get a good look at the person who did it. What do you do? You get the heck out of there. You call a cop. Yeah, that's a good first step. And what may end up happening, and I think this is where you're going, is you may end up a witness that has to go to court and testify against this bad person.

Here's the thing. Part of our Constitution, actually I don't know if it's in the Constitution, but let's say a general protection that any individual has is protection against being coerced into testifying against somebody. Yeah. It's an individual's right to choose whether or not you want to testify and a lot of people choose not to. Yeah, very much. It's a big problem actually. There's a lot of people who do witness crimes that just say, I'm not doing it. I'm not going to get involved.

Exactly. One of the reasons why is because there is a long standing tradition of witnesses being murdered when they testify or agree to testify. Especially in circumstances where you're dealing with gangs or drugs or racketeering crime. Yeah, but some of the heavy hitters. Sure. I mean, if you're going to go upriver for 20 years and you've already killed a bunch of people, what's one more witness? Exactly. Right.

So the U.S. federal government and actually some other countries have this as well. I looked into that. Did you come up with? Well, we'll get to that later. They have something called the witness protection program. Right. Commonly thought to be called the witness relocation program. That's kind of an aspect of the larger program, right?

Exactly. So let's go back to the 1960s. Okay. So we're the guys that are dressed funny in 1960. Exactly. Okay. And I haven't figured out yet if people can see us, can't see us or just ignoring us. I think we're observing.

Okay. So Chuck, it's the 1960s. Yes. John F. Kennedy's father, Joseph, has just stolen the presidential election for him. Okay. And he's put his brother Bobby in as attorney general. Yes. They have turned on the very mafia that helped get them New York, I think Illinois, some

key states in the presidential election. Now, up to this point, there was no mafia. It was an unrecognized entity. It existed, but as far as the federal government was concerned. It was renamed. Including, and especially J. Edgar Hoover, it wasn't real. Okay. Organized crime in the United States wasn't real and there certainly wasn't a mafia.

Well, Bobby Kennedy comes in and is like, there is a mafia number one and number two were going after them. Right. And so the Kennedy administration goes after organized crime. They very famously started interviewing crime bosses, some of whom said that they were patriotic Americans because they pay their taxes, that kind of thing. And the mafia becomes part of the collective consciousness of the United States. Right.

Yes. By 1970, there was actual real strides made in combating organized crime, one of which was the Organized Crime Act of 1970. Organized Crime Control Act. Thank you, Chuck. Just to be specific. Which was introduced by who? Arkansas Senator John McClellan.

Right. In 69. Yes, he had an aide who actually drafted the legislation for him. That would be G. Robert Blakely. Yes. And it was a large bill. So what he did and like many bills, there's a lot of things kind of snuck in there. Sure.

Not snuck in there, but inserted. He inserted a little thing about witness protection for the first time officially. Thanks to a guy named Gerald Shure who created the witness protection program. He was a U.S. attorney. He had the ear of Blakely. Yeah, and he was a U.S. attorney under Bobby Kennedy. So in this provision in 1970, there's a provision that says the Attorney General can basically allow the federal government, I guess the Marshall Service is named in it, to protect

any witness by any means they need to. Yep. So there you go. That's how it starts. That's a pretty wide latitude, right? It was revised in 1984 to include family members as well. Yeah, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 84. Right, and it's been going ever since then.

Better known as Van Halen 1984. That's the alternate name for it. Alternate title. Yeah. Man, you just made me want to do the robot. Which you just did. I did, didn't I? Yes.

So Chuck, we've got the witness protection program. Everybody knows about it. It's been part of popular culture since its inception. Yeah, movies especially. Right. The owl in all the movie Betsy's Wedding. Yeah. My Blue Heaven.

Yeah, one of your favorites, right? I love that movie. I know you don't like it. I, it's not that I didn't like it. I didn't like Steve Martin. I didn't buy his character. You're not. You weren't supposed to buy his character.

I know, I know, man. Steve Martin doing a mafioso. That in and of itself is comedy. That makes me a schmuck. Not necessarily. Everyone's entitled to his own opinion. Here at Stuff You Should Know, our motto is to each his own. Sure.

So you're fine, Chuck. Thank you. But there was another little movie that's arguably the greatest gangster movie ever made. Possibly better than The Godfather. Mmm, that's a tough one. It is, but the fact that it's even competing with The Godfather is a lot about it. That movie is a little Martin Scorsese movie called Goodfellas. Yep.

Based on real life events. Based on a book called Wise Guys. By Nicholas Pelagy. Yep. And based on a famous rat snitch called Henry Hill. Yeah. Who Ray Leota played in the film. Yeah.

And Henry Hill was a real dude and he really did snitch on the, what was the, what was the family? The Luchasi crime family? Yeah. And he took the stand and was in the witness protection program for a while. He's clearly not anymore because he's on Howard Stern all the time. No, but he was in the witness protection program. Yeah. He was a problem child from what I understand.

Uh-huh. And ladies and gentlemen, may I announce Mr. Charles W. Bryant doing a dramatic reading from the movie Goodfellas. Silence, please. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out.

Everything was for the taking. And now it's all over. That's the hardest part. Today, everything is different. There's no action. I have to wait around like everybody else. Can't even get decent food. After I got here, I ordered spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles with ketchup.

I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook. Thank you, Charles. That is the last scene from Goodfellas when Ray Leota goes out to get the paper and the house code. Right before he imagines Joe Pesci just shooting up the place. Yeah, such a classic movie. So you can tell from that passage, brilliant by the way, buddy. Thank you.

You can tell by that passage that witness protection is not a lot of fun necessarily. No. Especially if you are a high-flying mafioso. Sure. You have to go become some regular Joe and Tempe. Yeah, absolutely. Right? Chuck, I'm about to blow your mind, my man.

I've been waiting on this. You ready? Mm-hmm. My Blue Heaven? Also based on Henry Hill. Was it really? Do you want to know why? I don't know.

In 1987, Nicholas Pelleggi married one Nora Ephron, the screenwriter. Shut up. No, I kid you not. I went back and cross-referenced. Really? Yes. Those two got married in 1987. Nora Ephron, who wrote My Blue Heaven.

Yeah. Both movies were based upon joint interviews they conducted with Henry Hill. No kidding. I kid you not. Did she write My Blue Heaven? Uh-huh. Did not know that. Yeah.

Wow. Yep. So there you go. There's a cocktail party tidbit. Yeah, that's good. Did not know they were married. Are they still married? Yeah.

As far as I know. Or do you have her rubbed out? Not yet, but she does know too much by this time. She's got some concrete boots with her name on them. All right. So Chuck, let's talk about the actual witness relocation program, which in the industry is called WITSEC. Yes.

Officially took hold in 1970. Yeah. We get to that part already. Since then, hush your mouth. There have been more than 7,500 witnesses and 9,500 family members have entered this program and been protected and relocated by the U.S. Marshals. Right. And by family, Chuck means by marriage or blood, not by crime family.

Right. Right? Of course. Yeah. Like hide my wife and kids along with me. Right? Yeah. Okay.

So who's eligible, Chuck? Well, you have to apply. And the ultimately see the application, you know, ultimately the attorney general gives a stamp of approval, but they take certain things into account like what you're going to testify against. Right. It's got to be big. Sure.

And probably there also can't be any other witnesses that have the same information as you that don't need to be because it costs some money. Oh, yeah. So I got the idea that they want to try to avoid it if possible. But if you have the information and you're guaranteed to show up and testify and you definitely are going to need protection because of this testimony, then there's a good chance that you might be accepted. Usually it covers people who have information big time about organized crime, racketeering.

Yep. Major drug offenses. Major. Terrorist activities. Yeah. That's kind of a new on the scene that is new and also fairly new on the scene are people who are members of gangs that have information about gang members. Yeah, I think a lot of them are fit that mold these days.

Right. So prosecutor trying a case has a witness puts in an application on his or her behalf to the Justice Department. They have a special bureau called the Office of Enforcement Operations, the OEO. Right. And they get with the federal martial service and basically all these agencies come together, interview the person. They create a dossier on the potential witness.

I love that word, by the way. Thank you. And one of the things that they come up with is what kind of a threat that person will pose to his or her new community. That's something I never thought about. A lot of times, well, you clearly haven't seen My Blue Heaven then, buddy. A lot of times these people are criminals themselves. And you know, just because the government's moving you doesn't mean you're a reform person.

True. Although we should say there's a recidivism rate of 17% in the witness relocation program. Right. If you were a criminal and you are turning states evidence, you're protected. There's a 17% chance that you will go on to commit a crime while under protection. It is a bonehead word, isn't it? Yes. Compared to paroled cons, that's not too bad considering that it's 40%.

Yes, there's a 40% chance that they'll go on to commit another crime while on parole. Yeah. Or off parole, but sure. Right. So it's not too shabby. And so far 10,000, I believe more than 10,000 criminals have been convicted from witness testimony from witnesses in the witness relocation program. So it's 89% chance or 89% success rate of conviction when they're using someone who's

turning states evidence. Which is why it's going on still and why it has such a spectacular budget. So apparently this year or in 2008, they had a $38 million budget. Really? The Marshall's office did just for witness relocation. Don't you get $60 grand a year? Yeah, let's talk about that, Chuck. So let's say that you've been enrolled in the program.

You've been accepted. What happens is... Well, you get a T-shirt. It says, Witness Protected Person. Do you remember that Simpsons, where they go in the witness relocation program? Yes, I do. Yeah. And did you see that onion article I sent you?

I did the witness protection parade. That FBI cancels annual witness protection parade. Yeah, that was good. So you've been enrolled in the program. You moved out to Tempe and you are living a new life, right? Yes. You're no longer living a life of crime. Say you were a criminal or say you were a normal person and you don't have your job

any longer. No, you got to get a new job. To get to this point, to get to Tempe from, say, Philly, there are some things you had to do first. I'll say Detroit. Okay. Okay. All right, to get from Detroit to Tempe, there are some things you had to do first.

Number one, if you have outstanding debts, you got to pay them first. Yeah. See, this is something I never would have thought of. No. I would think maybe they would just kind of settle those. Because what if you can't pay your debts? I imagine that if you have good enough information, they'd pay them for you. Okay.

But I think that part of the program is they want you to do that if you can. Sure. And they, I imagine, would know whether you have the money or not. Okay. But yeah, you have to pay your outstanding debts. They will change your name. You get to pick it, though. You do get to pick it.

Which surprised me. They suggest that you keep the same initials and or the same first name. That surprised me, too. Well, think about it. I mean, if somebody's like, hey, Johnny, and you look and that was your old name, but your new name, you know, your new name's Fred, you don't want to do that. Yeah, but it also makes it easier to find once they put out this alert that, hey, they're probably going to have the same initials and maybe the first name.

Sure. But who wants to go to Tempe? Yeah, that's a good point. All right. So they are, you have to clear your debt. They change your name. You get all sorts of new records, new birth certificate, new social security card and all this is handled on the download.

But there are records of you changing your name, changing your social security number. Right. But it's all sealed. Yeah. I mean, apparently it happens just like a regular name change, but they seal it off instead of allowing it. It's, it's not public record. Right.

Once you get to Tempe, you are given housing or they help you find housing. I think it's a temporary thing at first while they just want to get you taken care of immediately. And then later on, they will help you out with your ultimate like living out your life scenario. Right. And to help you live out your ultimate life scenario, how much do they get a year? Did you say Chuck? 60,000. They're called a substance payments are on average 60,000 per year.

And I didn't see in the article that they ran out ever. Yeah. I couldn't determine whether or not once you get your job, I didn't know if that was to tide you over until you got a stable career or if that was for life. I don't know. I don't know either, which one could argue and I'm sure many critics have that basically this is the government paying for testimony. Yeah.

Sure. Never really thought about that. But you have to try to get a job or you can be dropped. You can be dropped or you, they can stop giving you the subsistence payments. Yeah. I think that's what happens, but you can go on to welfare if you want. Right. So they try that the marshals are responsible for, I think they said they have to give you

one job opportunity. They have to bring you one job opportunity. All right. So Chuck, like you said, they get you out of Detroit to Tempe as fast as they can. They get you whatever temporary housing until you can find real housing. You're getting 60 K a year and you're trying to find a job. But sometimes trials drag out for a while. Yeah.

What do they do? I mean, do they just leave you alone? No. What happens when it comes time to go to trial? This is the most dangerous part, kind of like stealing a nuclear weapon. The easiest time to steal one is when it's in transport. Sure. Same with a protective witness, protected witness.

You've got 24 hour protective custody, like around the area of the trial to and from the trial clearly. And they use all kinds of little tricky ways to make sure that you stay alive. Right. Gerald Shear wrote a book called Whitsack. Remember, he's the founder of the witness protection program. Yeah, he did. And in it, he talks about how witnesses were delivered by fishing boat.

I like that one. By mail truck. Armored car. Yeah. And actually, they often use armored cars as decoys while they bring a witness in a normal car to the trial. He did that famously with a mafia member, Joseph Barbosa. Yeah.

Who? Don't you kind of have to say it like that? Yeah. Clearly, if your name is Joseph Barbosa, you're born to be in the mafia. It occurred to me right now. We're really treading on thin ice. We might get greased by the FBI, the Marshalls or the mafia. So they cover you before trial.

They cover you after trial, especially during transport. Sure. And then after that, all you have to do is, if you remain in the program, you can remain in it for the rest of your life and you just check in once a year. I believe is what it is. Once per year. Unless you're moving that kind of thing. Yeah.

And you definitely have to let them know when you're moving. So it's not just that they move you to the dump and ground of Tempe. There are some rules to follow and we should say that the Marshalls service is quite fond of pointing out that no one who's ever followed the rules of the witness protection program has ever been killed. Yeah. Josh, there are two rules actually, which is you can never go back to where you were originally from and you can't get in touch with like friends and family

members from your past life. And apparently it's getting more and more difficult to get people to follow the rules, which yeah, why is that? Well, apparently people are dumber than they used to be. Sort of. What the what the deal is from what I read is that the nature of the crimes these days with gang members and the like, you're getting younger and younger people turning states evidence.

So it's not like the old days of Sammy the bull Gravano is like in his 50s and he turns states evidence. What was the story you sent from Newsweek that one girl 17 17. She was a member of I think MS 12. Yes, which is an Hispanic gang in Virginia. I think it's all over the place, but she was based in Virginia. Right. And she turned she apparently had a very vivid memory.

The what what's that quote is that quote is beautiful. Yes, her court appointed lawyer said she wasn't just a witness. She was like the rain man of witnesses. Yeah, she'd like to talk. So she spilled it, bro. She did and they relocated her successfully to Kansas City. I think yeah, they moved her to Kansas City. She did a while, did a good job for a little while and then was like, oh,

I miss my friends. LOL, let me get back in touch with my friends and had them come out and visit. Yeah. At one point, her handler came out to check on her and apparently her handler was supposed to be her stepfather and she hid her MS 12 friends in the bathroom of the weekly hotel they had put her up in while he visited. Yeah. So bring the past she wasn't really trying to stay alive very she wasn't.

And you know what? She didn't know. She didn't actually. She she went home. Yes, she got homesick and lonely and went back to Virginia and what two days later they found her floating in the river. I think some other some other person in the witness relocation program an official of it called her a fatality waiting to happen.

Yeah, they knew she wasn't in for the long haul. Right. So it is becoming increasingly difficult to protect people. But the as we said, the marshals have a really good budget. They are what's been called the gold standard of witness protection. If you go down to the state and local level, if you're a witness secret protection, you're probably going to die. Yeah, there are state few states have their own programs that don't have a good ones.

I think usually up to about 500,000 is about as much as a state throws into witness relocation. Yeah. And remember, you have to be testifying in a federal trial to get witness protection from the US marshals. Right. If it's just a state or local trial, it's Gummer at the sheriff's office. Exactly. That's you're getting that level of protection from what I understand most of the protection

you can expect will be to be put up in a weekly motel for a couple of weeks until the trial and a bus ticket out of town. Yeah. Maybe a security deposit for down payment on an apartment somewhere else. Right. That's about it. Yeah. And that's when Javier Bardem shows up at your front door with a with a cattle killer.

Yeah. And as a result, a lot of witnesses are murdered every year in state trial. Sure. In New Jersey, apparently won't work with anyone who has a criminal record. Really? Yeah. So prosecutors are like, this guy can shut the case, but he wants witness protection. And you won't give it to him because he's sold crack before or something.

New Jersey, you know, I live there. They don't have, or at least where I was, they didn't have county sanctioned waste disposal. So it was literally like the Sopranos, the trash guys would come and it would be like Luchoni's trash service on the side of the truck. We're so dead. And these guys would get off the truck and remove your trash. And I always remember thinking, wow, that's an excellent front. So that's it for witness protection.

You can read the article on the site by taping in witness protection in the handy search bar howstuffworks.com. We're sorry we don't have a lot more to present to you, but it's kind of a hush hush program. Yeah. They do have other programs in the rest of the world. We briefly mentioned that, but Canada has it. New Zealand. I think Jamaica has one that's reportedly not very good.

Oh, yeah. And what else? South Africa and Kenya, New Zealand, oddly, China. You already said New Zealand. Well, it's even odder now. And Israel has one that's slated to start next year. Gotcha. So good luck, Israel.

Good luck with the witness protection program. Let's see. I guess since I already said handy search bar and then Chuck started up again, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a listener mail from Jordan. How's that for straightforward? All right. Josh, you may remember recently we did a show on the Clovis people.

I do remember. You want to recap that briefly? Sure. The Clovis people were thought for a long time to be the first inhabitants of the Americas that they came around about 12,000 years ago. And then a discovery, no, I'm sorry, 10,000 years ago, then a discovery of a site in Chile. Right? Yes.

Monteverde. Uncovered people who had lived there 12,000 years ago, completely turning the field of anthropology on its ear. So Jordan is an archaeologist in Kansas. He writes in. He just graduated from UK. Go Jay Hawks. I'm a longtime listener.

I love your podcast about the first Americans. It was entertaining and well researched. There was one mistake. However, I can't let go as an archaeologist working on the planes. Josh mentioned there was no evidence of Clovis people on the planes to explain how they traveled from the Bering Land Bridge all the way to Chile. Clovis sites are found throughout the planes, but they're not as many of them as in other regions of North America.

The problem is that and here's where he starts to nerd out a little bit. The problem is that Paleo Indian records on the planes are deeply buried due to massive sedimentary deposition following the Clovis time period. Hey, this means that most of the known sites are in valleys where streams have down cut and exposed the deep sediments on the banks containing the Clovis deposits. So basically the record could be several meters deep and only easily seen in cut bank exposures that leads to sampling bias when compared to regions east and west of the Great Plains, a minor quibble, I will admit.

So he wrote in and I wrote him back and he wrote back again and said that if you're interested for context, there are a lot of pre-Clovis investigations currently going on all around North America. In fact, a major research area here at KU is searching for pre-Clovis and there are a lot of sites in North America that are convincing just they're not Monteverde. So he said that the Bering Land Bridge, his theory is that there were quite a few treks across that by different peoples during various periods and I just wrote an article on evolutionary geneticists who found evidence of an evolutionary bottleneck at the Bering Land.

So yeah, that supports what we were talking about or what the Clovis police say Jordan. Good luck, brother. Yeah. Let's keep up this Indiana Jones stuff. Yes. Very thrilling life that of an archaeologist. I imagine. If you want to correct Chuck and I, it's not that hard, you can send in an email to stuff.

Hold on. You thought I was going to give the email address, didn't you? I thought. Nope. First I want to say if you have a spare $25 lying around and you feel like saving the world with it, go to our Kiva team. Yes. It's a natural landing website that helps entrepreneurs in the developing world and

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