Criminals in many cities have been sending a brutal message: if you talk, you’re dead. “It’s a revival of the tactics of Chicago in the ’30s,” says Earl Sanders, a homicide officer in San Francisco. But instead of a well-paid Mafia hit man rubbing out a stoolie, small-time drug dealers and street thugs are increasingly willing to risk murder raps to eliminate any witness-from a turncoat gang member to an innocent bystander. In a climate of reckless intimidation, no one is safe. Last month Migdalia Maldonado, 45, died after being shot through a window while playing dominoes at the Bronx home of a friend. Though Maldonado herself was not scheduled to testify in a court case, her host was the mother of a key witness in a drug-related murder trial-and police believe a gunman seeking revenge may not have cared whom he hit. A police patrol car, which had been checking on the family periodically, had left minutes before the shooting.
For many law-enforcement officers, the only workable answer is a full-scale witness-protection program. Most state and municipal police departments claim they can’t afford it; Georgia police recently spent $10,000 to relocate one murder-trial witness for a little over a month. But in some cities, the problem has become too serious to slough off. In Washington, federal and city officials became alarmed by a runaway murder rate that is twice that of New York City and Los Angeles. Last year Congress voted the District of Columbia a budget of $3 million to create a pilot short-term protection program-based on the federal model-that is expected to serve an estimated 100 witnesses a year. The new program will guarantee protection, including temporary relocation, from the minute a witness is judged to be in danger until the trial is over. “The greatest intensity of the threat exists during the pendency of the trial,” say U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens, who helped develop the District’s plan.
It’s nearly impossible for police departments to keep count of how many murder victims were witnesses to other crimes. Often, all they have is a corpse, and no clue to a motive. In other cases, families are mistrustful of the police or afraid of more bloodshed. To illustrate how deeply fear of retribution can run, the U.S. Park Police, in a highly unusual move for a federal law-enforcement agency, refused to release the name of an officer who witnessed a killing in Washington last month. “We feel for his safety,” Park Police Maj. Robert Hines told The Washington Post. For many criminals, witness intimidation has proved to be a boldly successful strategy. The biggest loser may be a justice system tarnished by a growing spiral of one unpunished crime following another.
