Witsec by Pete Earley

Author:Pete Earley
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780307431431
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-13T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

Around the same time that Jimmy the Weasel first began to cooperate with FBI agents, a vicious murder inside a federal penitentiary prompted Shur to expand the WITSEC program in a new direction. The change was set into motion one afternoon in 1978, when a bus carrying William Zambito and twenty-one other prisoners arrived at the maximum-security penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. Zambito was a state prisoner who had provided information to Miami prosecutors about Florida drug dealers. In exchange, his own prison sentence for drug peddling had been shortened. Although he was not a federal prisoner, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had agreed to hide him in one of its facilities because inmates in state prisons in Florida were threatening to kill him. He was en route to a federal facility in the southwest when the bus stopped for the night.

As he was being led into the prison wearing leg irons and handcuffs attached to a belly chain, Zambito briefly considered asking to be put in the “hole,” the nickname inmates used for isolation cells. He would be safe there overnight and sent on his way in the morning. But he was worried that other prisoners riding on the bus with him would notice he had been afraid to stay in a regular cell block and correctly surmise that he was a snitch. That wasn’t a label Zambito wanted following him to his final destination, so he kept quiet and trudged along with the others into an area called A&O, shorthand for Admissions and Orientation, where prisoners in transit were housed with other newly arrived inmates not yet assigned permanent cells. Zambito had reason to be worried. Allen “Big Al” Benton, one of the drug dealers whom he had helped convict, was also in the Atlanta prison.

Zambito was taken to a six-man cell, which was kept unlocked so inmates inside it could move freely around the tier. He had two cellmates: a Hispanic inmate, who didn’t speak much English, and Marion Albert Pruett, a bank robber who had arrived a few days earlier, having been sent to Atlanta because he needed surgery on his left leg that could only be done there. Pruett would later tell investigators that Zambito had been jittery from the moment he entered the cell. “He said to me, ‘Hey, what’s the hole like?’ which I thought was an odd question,” Pruett recalled. “And I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ and he says, ‘I just don’t like it here on this compound.’ That’s when I knew something was going on.”

Pruett would later testify that he had been sleeping in his bunk when he was awakened by a noise shortly after 4 A.M. “I had my eyes closed,” he said, “but I could see what was coming down.” What he saw, he said, was Big Al Benton slashing a knife across Zambito’s throat and repeatedly stabbing him. Afraid Benton might kill him, too, Pruett said, he pretended to be asleep.

When Miami prosecutors heard that Zambito had been murdered, they accused prison officials of being both incompetent and stupid.

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