The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison
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“Forget every prison book you’ve read and every prison movie you’ve seen.… You don’t read this book as an outsider looking into Leavenworth. On the first page, you open the gates of the prison; by the second page, the gates have been closed behind you—and you won’t get out until the final page. Even then you’ll never forget what you saw. A truly remarkable achievement.”
—Nelson DeMille, author of Spencerville
“A grimly fascinating tale … Earley successfully conveys the scary atmosphere of prison, and the never-back-down code a convict needs to live by if he’s to survive.”
—The Washington Post
“A powerful eyewitness account … The Hot House is an exciting, highly readable book which, without question, will generate renewed interest in prisons by both the public and the media.”
—Norman Carlson, retired director,
Federal Bureau of Prisons, in Corrections Today
“If you’re going to read any book about prison, The Hot House is the one.… For anyone who wonders why America imprisons its criminals, this book is a must. It is the most realistic, unbuffed account of prison anywhere in print.”
—The Kansas City Star
“The Hot House is a page-turner, as compelling and evocative as the finest novel. The best book on prison I’ve ever read.”
—Jonathan Kellerman, author of Self-Defense
“Hypnotic … We haven’t read a book as powerful as The Hot House in a long time.… Earley, the first reporter ever to be given free access to Leavenworth, does more than capture what it’s like to live behind bars. In re-creating a world governed by codes of conduct that fly in the face of accepted behavior and morality, Earley sheds surprising light on our own.”
—Book-of-the-Month-Club News
“Before we had schools of journalism, there was a straightforward task called reporting that took you where you had not been, and told you what you had not known. This book is by a reporter, and gives the reader reporting at its very finest.… [The] Hot House is a book that sucks one deep into the darkness.… [It] makes the reader feel in the room while secret things are being said.… [It] offers no solutions to the prison problem; for that matter, it offers no clear statement of the problem. Earley is much too honest for such cheap tricks.”
—Los Angeles Times
“This is a book that fits the cliché: impossible to put down.”
—The Oregonian, Portland
“Searing, compelling … [A] fascinating white-knuckle tour of hell, brilliantly reported.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[A] harrowing book … Through Matthews, Silverstein, Bowles and others, Earley tells us the story of Leavenworth. In the process, he creates an exceptional work of journalism.”
—Detroit Free Press
“[A] riveting, fiercely unsentimental book … [Earley] vividly re-creates the strange world of the country’s oldest maximum security prison with its insular culture and attendant rituals.… And what a cast of characters Earley discovers.… To [his] credit, he does not romanticize the keepers or the criminals. His cool and concise prose style serves him well … this is a gutsy book.”
—Chicago Tribune
THE HOT HOUSE
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published March 1992
Bantam paperback edition / March 1993
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1992 by Pete Earley.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 91-25400.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80831-8
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York
v3.1
“Fancy thinking the beast was something you could hunt and kill!… You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go. Why things are what they are.“
WILLIAM GOLDING
Lord of the Flies
This book is an eyewitness account of day-to-day life inside the United States penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, the oldest federal prison and one of the most dangerous in the nation. I was the first writer ever to have been given unlimited access by the federal Bureau of Prisons to one of its maximum-security prisons. The names of a handful of persons have been changed to protect them from physical harm or from further criminal prosecution, but all the characters are real and the events are described exactly as they happened.
PETE EARLEY
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
PART TWO
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
PART THREE
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
PART FOUR
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
MAJOR PLAYERS
CARL BOWLES: The Predator
WILLIAM POST: The Catman
ROBERT MATTHEWS: The New Warden
THOMAS LITTLE: The Newcomer
DALLAS SCOTT: The Gang Member
THOMAS SILVERSTEIN: The Killer
NORMAN BUCKLEW: The Savage
EDDIE GEOUGE: The Tough Cop
BILL SLACK: The Humanitarian
PART ONE
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore!”
DOROTHY
FROM THE MOVIE
The Wizard of Oz
Chapter 1
CARL BOWLES
Jeffrey Joe Hicks was a snitch. Carl Bowles was certain of it. But Bowles needed proof. Convicts at the U.S. penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, hated informants even more than they hated guards. A “hack,” as guards at the maximum-security prison were called, was simply
doing his job. But an inmate snitch was a Judas, and the best way to deal with a rat, as far as Bowles was concerned, was to kill it.
Bowles had been suspicious of Hicks from the moment they met eight months earlier, when Hicks was still being held in an area of the ancient prison reserved for new inmates not yet assigned permanent cells. Hicks had stood out among the “fish,” prison slang for newcomers. At twenty-eight, he had a small build and pubescent appearance, but it was his demeanor that everyone noticed. Hicks was terrified. “Guys were damn near fighting each other over him,” Bowles recalled later. “They said, ‘Oh, we got to protect this poor kid! Why, he’s white and he doesn’t want anything to do with the niggers and he is afraid they are going to take him and fuck him. Somebody’s got to do something.’ ”
Bowles had been the first to actually meet Hicks. At the time, he claimed he simply wanted to give Hicks some advice, but guards suspected that the forty-seven-year-old Bowles had a different motive. The federal Bureau of Prisons identified Bowles in its files as a sexual predator, a convict who forced weaker inmates to satisfy his sexual needs. “It wasn’t the goodness of his heart that caused Carl Bowles to search out Jeffrey Hicks,” a guard remarked. “It was a lower section of his anatomy.”
Except for a short stint when he was free after an escape, Bowles had spent twenty-three consecutive years in prison. A convicted cop killer, kidnapper, and triple murderer, he had been taken into custody for the first time at age twelve. Bowles had literally grown up in jail, and few inmates knew their way as well around a prison or had better jailhouse instincts.
At Leavenworth, all convicts are released from their cells at six A.M., and are free to roam the large prison compound relatively unrestricted until ten P.M., when they are locked up for the night. Bowles had gone to the “fish tier” to meet Hicks within days after he arrived.
“First time in a penitentiary?” Bowles had asked.
“Yeah.”
“It can be pretty scary until a man figures out what is going on,” Bowles had said, shaking a cigarette out of a pack for himself and then offering one to Hicks. “Where you from?”
“A state joint in Michigan,” Hicks had answered.
“Oh yeah?” Bowles had remarked with interest. “Well, what they got you for?”
“Uh, I can’t say,” Hicks had answered. “I got an appeal, you know, still in court.”
“Sure, kid,” Bowles had replied, his mood noticeably colder. He had dropped his cigarette, stomped it on the prison’s tile floor, and left.
Months later when he recalled that meeting, Bowles explained: “When Hicks told me he was a state prisoner from Michigan and then refused to tell me his crime, I knew there was something spooky about him. You see, there are only two reasons why the feds accept state prisoners. The guy is either such a mean son of a bitch that the state joint can’t handle him or the state has to get rid of him because he’ll be killed by convicts if they put him in a state joint.
“Now, even an idiot can see that Hicks ain’t no ruthless motherfucker, so I figured there was something wrong with him. I figured he was a snitch.”
Just because Bowles had suddenly lost interest in Hicks didn’t mean others had. It took prison officials two weeks to process Hicks’s paperwork, and by that time another convicted killer and alleged sexual predator had invited Hicks to move into his cell. Guards and inmates assumed Hicks was the inmate’s “punk”—serving as the convict’s sexual partner in return for protection. But a few months after Hicks moved into the inmate’s cell, something strange had happened. Hicks and his cellmate were accused of plotting an elaborate helicopter escape. Lieutenant Edward Gallegos, who exposed the plot, said Hicks’s cellmate had tried to hire a helicopter pilot to swoop into the prison yard and rescue them.
As punishment, Hicks was moved into an isolation cell in the prison’s Hole. His cellmate received a worse punishment. He was sent to the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, the harshest prison operated by the federal government. At Marion, prisoners were kept locked in one-man cells twenty-three hours a day and denied nearly all privileges.
“The only way guards find out anything in here is when someone snitches,” Bowles complained. “Someone had tipped off the cops to that helicopter plot, and it sure as hell wasn’t the guy who got shipped to Marion. After that I was certain Hicks was a snitch.”
When Hicks was released from the Hole, another white inmate took him in as his cell partner and sexual punk. Bowles knew this inmate. They were friends and Bowles was worried about him. He figured that Hicks was going to do something to get the inmate into trouble. Bowles decided to investigate Hicks’s background and he began by visiting Harold Gooden.
Every prison has its oddballs, and at Leavenworth, Gooden was one of them. A convicted counterfeiter, he was the only inmate in the penitentiary who subscribed to Architectural Digest. Gooden was college-educated, an honorably discharged navy veteran, and a bearded, pipe-smoking, self-proclaimed prison philosopher who passed his time by writing what he claimed was an epic novel. He also had the largest magazine collection at Leavenworth, much of it not the convicts’ typical reading materials—Penthouse and Hustler—but old copies of the Sunday edition of The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s. But these were not what Bowles had come looking for when he paused outside Gooden’s open cell door, knocked, and waited to be invited in, a sign of respect between convicts in prison.
“I need to borrow a few magazines,” Bowles explained.
“Help yourself, Carl,” Gooden told him. “Anything in particular?”
“True crime,” Bowles replied.
Besides his rows of highbrow publications, Gooden also kept a large collection of sleazy detective magazines. He subscribed to them, not because he enjoyed reading them, but to identify inmates who had committed particularly heinous sex crimes. After snitches, the most despised inmates in Leavenworth were child molesters, rapists, and other sexual deviants. Sex offenders gave criminals a bad name, convicts claimed. Most inmates either were married or had been, and many were fathers. Like men outside prison, they didn’t want their mothers, wives, and children to be victims of a deviant.
Bowles took a few magazines and returned to his cell, where he scanned them, but he found nothing of interest and returned to Gooden’s cell.
“Carl, I think you should check out this one,” Gooden volunteered, handing Bowles a copy of Inside Detective. Page thirty-six was folded down, so Bowles turned to it. He saw a two-column, black-and-white photograph of a freckle-faced boy grinning into the camera. Above it was a headline: STOP THE SEXUAL SADIST FROM ABDUCTING BOYS! The story below said that the thirteen-year-old boy in the picture had been forced off a road while riding his bicycle on October 19, 1986, in Green Oak Township, Michigan. The driver had jumped from his Jeep, dragged the boy inside the vehicle, and sped away. A few days later, the youngster’s naked body was found abandoned in a forest. He had been sexually molested and strangled. When Bowles turned the page, the baby face of Jeffrey Joe Hicks stared up at him. The caption underneath the photograph read, “Hicks has a long history of molesting children sexually.”
Bowles closed the magazine, said “Thanks,” and took it back to his cell. There he read the entire story. It reported that Hicks had first gotten into trouble in January 1975, when he was sixteen, and abducted a twelve-year-old boy at knife-point, forced him to swallow several tranquilizers, and molested him. Despite the seriousness of the crime, Hicks was put on five years’ probation. Seven years later, he sexually assaulted two other youngsters, but was released on probation again. Only after he was accused of kidnapping and murder was he finally jailed. At his trial, Hicks’s attorneys admitted their client was guilty, but said he shouldn’t be sent to prison because he was himself a victim. Hicks had been raped as a child by a psychiatrist who was supposed to be treating him for deviant behavior, they said, and it was that molestation that caused him to attack young boys. Hicks testified in his own defens
e, describing how he had held his victim’s hands down and strangled the cyclist with his belt after abusing him. A jury ignored Hicks’s plea for mercy and sentenced him to life in prison, plus sixty-five to one hundred years.
Now Bowles knew why state officials in Michigan had arranged for Hicks to serve his sentence in a federal prison rather than in a state institution. His crime was so monstrous and had attracted such wide publicity that Hicks would have been instantly recognized in a state prison and most likely would have been physically attacked or even murdered by other inmates. In the federal prison system, however, Hicks would be safe because he would be just another anonymous convict—unless, of course, someone put out word about his crime.
Clutching the magazine in his hand, Bowles walked toward the prison law library where he planned to photocopy the article. He would post copies on the bulletin boards in each cellblock. But before he reached the copying machine, he decided to tell Hicks’s cell partner about his discovery. He walked directly to the cell, entered without knocking, and tossed the magazine to Hicks’s cellmate. Hicks wasn’t there.
“Why, that little fucker!” the inmate snapped when he saw the photograph.
Bowles took back the magazine and started back toward the library. Midway down the tier, he spotted Jeffrey Hicks coming toward him. Hicks had been doing his cellmate’s laundry and was carrying several carefully folded items. Bowles grinned and kept walking until Hicks was close, then lifted the magazine so that Hicks was suddenly face-to-face with his own photograph.
“You little bastard!” a voice yelled from behind Bowles. It was Hicks’s cellmate, who had come charging out on the tier.
Terrified, Hicks dropped the laundry, spun around, and bolted toward the two guards stationed near the tier stairwell. They hustled him out of the cellblock.