It has been a long time coming
It has been a long time coming but we are getting much closer to the release of my latest book.
RCMP WITNESS PROTECTION - Pros and Cons will give you a glimpse inside the world I have lived in and around for 21 years.
Take a quick look below at an unedited excerpt from the book!
Secret Games
“In all secrets, there is a kind of guilt, however beautiful or joyful they may be, or for what good end they may be set to serve. Secrecy means evasion, and evasion means a problem to the moral mind.”
-Gilbert Parker
Canada’s Witness Protection Program is so secretive that most people do not even believe it exists. If they do have some inkling that it does, then they envision the Witsec program created by the United States Marshals emulated in movies and joked about in shows like the Simpsons. At best, within the criminal world, there is a vague understanding that people get whisked away and are only ever seen again in the courtroom to testify. I can assure you that when I was signing on the dotted line to enter the sought-after escape to avoid prison or death, I never in a million years would have imagined the reality of what was to come.
The cover of this book is a good picture of what witness protection looks like to me after twenty-one years of being in and around the program along with ten members of my family. It is a game of strategy similar to chess where on one side sits the professionals (RCMP) and on the other side sits the convicts. (Protectee’s)
Why do I see it as a game? The truth is that it has been set up from its foundation to not only protect through secrecy and deceit, but it is administrated using manipulation and lies – not thought of as nefarious, yet unfortunately often having the same result as if it were.
Gerald Shur was known as “the father of Witsec”, a witness protection program that became formalized under the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 in the United States and is run by the U.S. Marshals. In the 1980s a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigator said that Shur’s program was the worst-run in the government. The comment made was that Witsec was “like a body without a brain”. In comparison, Canada’s witness protection program received Royal Assent in June of 1996 and is administered by the RCMP. I would suggest that the Canadian program could also be described as a “body without a brain” or at the very least, brain damaged. The question is, did Shur’s program get better or worse and did the RCMP ever learn from their American counterparts?