Witsec: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program

The “fascinating” (The Washington Post) true story behind the foundation of the Federal Witness Protection Program and the mob informants, killers, white-collar con men, and ordinary people caught up in a life-and-death game of deception in the name of justice

“By turns hilarious and horrifying . . . a lively and unusual glimpse inside an operation obsessed with secrecy.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

IN DEVELOPMENT AS AN HBO STREAMING SERIES

For decades no law enforcement program has been as cloaked in controversy and mystery as the Federal Witness Protection Program. Now, Gerald Shur, the man credited with the creation of WITSEC, teams with acclaimed investigative journalist Pete Earley to share the explosive inside story.

When the government was losing the war on organized crime in the early 1960s, Shur, then a young attorney in the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, urged the department to entice mobsters into breaking their code of silence with promises of protection and relocation. But as high-ranking mob figures came into the program, Shur discovered that keeping his witnesses alive in the face of death threats involved far more than eradicating old identities and creating new ones. And he also discovered that all too often a protected witness would fall back into a life of crime.

A powerful true story of the inner workings of one of the most effective and controversial weapons in the war against organized crime—and the inner workings of organized crime itself—Witsec is a you-are-there account of infamous witnesses, from “Sammy the Bull” Gravano to Joseph Valachi to “Fat Vinnie” Teresa, that takes us into a tense, dangerous twilight world carefully hidden in plain sight: where the family living next door might not be who they say they are. . . .

Formerly a reporter for The Washington Post, Pete Earley is the author of Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring and Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life, and Justice in a Southern Town, winner of the Edgar Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

Gerald Shur was the founder and longtime head of WITSEC. He passed away in 2020.