My good friend, Gerald Shur, and I have received lots of inquires from Hollywood about our nonfiction book, WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program since it was published ten years ago. For those of you who have not read it, Gerald is the Justice Department lawyer who came up with the idea of creating a government program that would protect mobsters and give them new identities in return for their testimony against their Mafia Godfathers.
By the time Gerald retired in 1995, he had overseen the handling of such famous gangsters as Joseph Valachi, “Jimmy the Weasel” Fratianno and “Sammy the Bull” Gravano. The witness protection program that he created helped shatter the mob’s code of silence.
Interested screenwriters and producers would call us and ask about WITSEC. But for a variety of reasons, we never sold the dramatic rights — until now. The trade magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, announced the sale.
described how important the HOPE Clubhouse in Ft. Myers was to her recovery. As with so many of our young people, Jourdan had excelled as a teenager and had gone to college with big plans – only to become sick. She was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and not long after that she became so ill that she had to drop out. At one point, she was suicidal. When she called the local police during a manic episode, rather than getting help, she ended up getting arrested and jailed — “to be taught a lesson.” That experience — at the hands of unsympathetic and poorly trained sheriff’s deputies — resulted in her developing PTSD.
