The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  For some reason, he didn’t fire. The guard did. His bullet ripped into Tanksley’s shoulder, ricocheted off a bone, and severed his aorta. Blood spurted from the exit wound in his chest as he fell dying. Hearing gunfire, Post dashed from the vault just in time to see the guard swing around. Post ducked behind a counter and began firing. The guard dived back into the stairwell and pulled the door shut. Post riddled the door with rounds from his .357 Magnum handgun. The metal-piercing slugs splintered the wood as the guard raced down the steps to safety.

  Post ran over to Tanksley. “Blood was squirting out of his chest like a spigot,” Post recalled. “I mean, blood is everywhere, and I swear he’s got a big red halo around him.”

  Post had taken $21,000 from the vault and Tanksley was still clutching a bag of cash from the teller drawers. But as Post reached for it, he suddenly jerked back his hand. “It was crazy but I thought, ‘Man, I’m not reaching down in all that blood.’ ” Instead, he dashed outside to a waiting getaway car.

  A few hours later, Post was captured, and on April 24, 1973, he was turned over to the bureau. Had the bank robbery been his only crime, he might have received a lighter sentence than forty-five years, one month, and seventeen days. But his criminal record dated back to 1953, when, only eight years old, he stole a car and ran away from home. As he grew older, he was arrested for robbery, burglary, assault, car theft, and assorted petty crimes. By fifteen, Post was described by a court psychologist as a “psychopathic delinquent with highly destructive impulses and no apparent motivation for altering his behavior.” Over the next twenty-seven years, Post only spent a combined total of one year as a free man. That was it—one year—between the ages of fifteen and forty-two. Every other moment was spent in some sort of incarceration.

  At Leavenworth, Post was known simply as the “Catman” because he took care of six cats that lived inside the prison. No one knows exactly when the cats arrived. Probably they were brought in to catch mice, but before long there were so many cats running around the cellhouses that they had become a nuisance, and guards began talking about getting rid of them. The inmates protested. There were rumors that for every cat killed, a guard would be slain. A compromise was reached. As long as an inmate took care of the cats and the feline population was kept to a reasonable number, they could stay.

  Post was the prison’s second catman. He fed the cats each morning and night, paid their veterinary bills out of his meager earnings from his prison job, and badgered guards into taking kittens home as pets. Since Post had taken over the job in 1982, he had found homes for more than one hundred kittens. His entire day revolved around the cats. In the mornings, he worked at the trash dumpster behind the kitchen, one of the filthiest jobs at the prison, but the best for collecting meat scraps. In the afternoon, he played with the cats in the yard. His antics were so lighthearted that other convicts often gawked as Post chased the cats, mimicking their shrill meows, or lay on his back on the ball field tossing a kitten in the air above his chest like a father playing with a toddler. His favorite cat was Tiger. When asked why he bothered with the cats, Post replied, “Because I’m a militant heterosexual. I love pussy!” Most guards—and inmates—figured he was nuts.

  He did little to discourage that opinion. He was the scruffiest inmate in Leavenworth. Most days, the rail-thin Post wore faded army dungarees, tattered black tennis shoes, a soiled T-shirt, and a light purple jogging jacket with gaping holes in the elbows. A bright red cowboy bandanna was wrapped around his unwashed, shoulder-length brown hair and he wore a full unkempt beard and sunglasses with mirror lenses that hid his bright blue eyes. His nose was flat, as if it had been smashed several times and rebuilt with fewer and fewer pieces.

  Post lived in a one-man cell that was as unkempt as he was. Washed and filthy clothes were strewn together on his unmade bed. Old issues of Guns & Ammo lay on the floor. Used yellow legal pads peeked from cardboard boxes crammed with envelopes, crumpled papers, and tattered paperback books. Guards were always getting after Post to clean up his cell; some even threatened to assign him extra work around the cellhouse if he didn’t straighten up the mess. Such threats would usually prompt him to pick up a few things, but within minutes after guards had checked his cell, it was as messy as it had been before.

  While Post was seen as dimwitted by some at Leavenworth, he had actually scored higher on intelligence tests than most of his peers, and, unlike nearly all of them, he came from a stable, middle-class family. His father was a naval officer cited for heroism in the Pacific theater during World War II. His mother was a housewife and devoted mother. None of Post’s siblings had gotten into trouble.

  Why had he been different?

  Post himself had spent much of his time in prison trying to answer the puzzle. The experts hadn’t helped. Numerous prison psychologists had examined Post since his first arrest, and each had issued a diagnosis that mirrored the latest fad. When society felt criminals were being coddled, the psychologist wrote that Post had not received adequate discipline in his home as a child. Whenever a more liberal attitude prevailed, psychologists reasoned that Post had turned to crime because he was “rebelling against the rigidity of the family setting—a military father who ran his home like he ran his ship.” After Post earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology while in prison, he read the information in his prison file more judiciously. He understood what a psychologist meant in 1968 when he had written that Post exhibited “a sociopathic personality disturbance, anti-social reaction personality trait disturbance, and emotionally unstable personality.” Not only did Post understand the terms, he could remember the interview with the psychologist.

  “He began by reading me my rights, which I thought was odd,” Post recalled, “and then he turned on his tape recorder and started questioning me about my crime like a prosecutor looking for information. I said to him, ‘You dickhead, you faggot motherfucker, why are you asking me about my crimes? I’ve got nothing to say to you.’ That is all he heard—and from that, he wrote that description which has been part of my file for nearly twenty years!”

  Post had drawn up his own diagnosis: he had always identified with losers. “I was always an outsider,” he explained. “When my family lived at the naval base in the Philippines, I used to tag along with Filipino kids, not Americans. We would sit on the roofs of the whorehouses near the navy base yelling ‘Americans are pigs!’ When my family came back to the States, my brother and sisters and parents didn’t have any problem fitting in, but I did. I used to look at pictures in magazines, you know, of the Chevy commercial with the dad and mom and kids all sitting in the car in suburbia, and it gave me vertigo. I didn’t want it.”

  His relationship with his father played some role in his rejection of society, although Post wasn’t certain how or why. “I was raised by a genuine war hero. He won the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart. People were used to looking up to him,” Post recalled. “No one looked up to me.”

  When Post went to Saturday matinees as a child, he found himself cheering for the outlaws. “I could identify with James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, guys who didn’t fit in, because that is how I always felt.”

  There was one evaluation in his prison file that Post liked. On June 14, 1973, a prison psychologist wrote:

  “It must be noted that Post has spent most of his entire life incarcerated. Yet, he has not become an institutionalized individual.…”

  That someone in authority had written that he had not become “an institutionalized individual” was momentous to him. “After all these years, they still think I can make it in the outside world,” Post said as he walked around the prison track. “That’s significant.”

  Privately, Post said he sometimes wondered if he could. “It’s getting to the point where I can’t even picture myself on the streets anymore. I look at children on television and they no longer look real to me. After fifteen straight years, they look like cartoon characters.

  “Lately, I’ve been having scary thought
s,” he continued. “Being in here gets to you, day after day after day. Sometimes, I think about what it would be like to just go into a bank and blow the head off the first teller I see. I know that I am capable of that; I mean, any criminal is capable of that, and long-term prisoners can kill easier than most people, because you are around the dregs so much and for so long that you forget the worth of a human life. You think all humans are dregs. The guards are no different. They are dregs, broken by the same system.”

  That is why the cats are so important to him. “I don’t want to be a mass murderer, a killer. The cats keep me feeling some warmth, some kind of feeling connected to something other than ‘those’ dregs or ‘us’ dregs. The cats are what I need to remind me that I still have some standards and have not yet gone to the bottom, where you are capable of anything.”

  Post knew convicts at Leavenworth who, he said, were institutionalized and happy about it. “The truth is, some of these guys really like it here. It’s their home! But it’s not mine. That’s why I don’t clean my cell. I want to remind myself that it isn’t my cell. Guys in here refer to their cell as being their ‘house.’ This isn’t my ‘house.’ It’s theirs, and if they want it clean, then they can clean it.”

  Post had dealt with parole boards several times, he knew his long criminal past was going to be difficult to overcome, but he had been gathering newspaper clippings about other criminals who had been successful at getting paroles. He found the stories encouraging. The case of Lawrence Singleton had caught his attention. Convicted in 1978 of raping a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, hacking off her forearms with an ax, and leaving her for dead along a rural California road, Singleton had been paroled after serving nine years. “If a guy like that can get a parole after nine years and I can’t get one for a simple bank robbery after serving fifteen years, then I got to wonder what kind of message they are trying to send me,” Post said. “Does that mean I’m worse than Lawrence Singleton? If the parole board makes me stay here for twenty-five years, are they telling me I am twice as bad as a guy like him? Twice as bad! And if that’s the case, what am I allowed to do? Am I missing out on not taking advantage?

  “The next time I rob a bank,” Post continued, “why not rape the teller or shoot everyone, since society already has said to me that I am twice as bad as someone who rapes a little kid and chops off her arms? Where is the justice in turning him loose and keeping me in prison?”

  In his appeal to the parole commission, Post had tried to differentiate between himself and the likes of a Singleton:

  I committed none of the mindless random violence of the terrorist or airplane hijacker. None of my crimes was designed specifically to harm people as is the murderer; and none of my crimes had the countless victims as has the large scale heroin dealers.…

  As he turned toward the main penitentiary building and completed his last lap around the track, Post explained: “Perhaps it’s rationalization on my part, but I have always tried to think of my crimes in terms of permanent damage, and I don’t think that bank robbery causes permanent damage. Maybe a teller gets so scared she wets her pants, but it’s not a crime like rape.”

  As soon as Post entered his cellblock, a guard told him that a prison counselor wanted to see him. There could be only one explanation. The federal Parole Commission had written him an answer. Post hurried to the counselor’s office and took the envelope from his outstretched hand. He removed the neatly typed letter.

  In response to your plea for a more lenient decision, you provide no significant mitigating circumstances sufficient to merit a different decision.… Your institutional behavior and achievements have been considered by the commission, but are not deemed sufficient to warrant a more lenient decision.… Your plea is therefore denied.

  Post walked back into the prison yard and tracked down Tiger. He was angry, not at the commission, he said, but at himself for actually believing that the college degree and his good behavior while in prison would sway the board.

  “How can I take these people seriously,” he asked, stroking Tiger, “when they tell me I’m worse than a guy who rapes a girl, chops off her arms, and throws her out on the side of a road?”

  Chapter 4

  THE PENITENTIARY

  There is no air-conditioning in C cellhouse, and until a man sits inside a cell on the top tier during a scorching Kansas summer, he does not really understand sweat. The brown metal fans turning sluggishly outside the cells do not cool the air, they simply move it back and forth as if to make certain no corner is untouched by the heat. The design of the cellhouse contributes to the misery. It is actually two independent structures, one within the other—a great stone building dropped like a cake dish over a rectangular, five-story-tall row of human cages. The cells are stacked in the center of the building like a giant honeycomb: side by side, one row atop the other and back to back, so that each cell facing north has an identical cell behind it facing south. There is a twenty-foot open space between the cells and the exterior walls. Because of this, you can stand on the bottom floor and look down the entire length of the shoebox-shaped cellhouse. You can look up, too, and see each of the five tiers bounded by steel balconies. But if you try to count the cells you will eventually lose track, because the five-and-a-half-by-nine-foot cubicles are indistinguishable from one another, and counting them is as difficult as keeping track of boxcars on a mile-long freight train.

  On most afternoons the sun filters through the cellhouse’s cathedral-size windows, casting a grid of shadows on the white tile floor. It is then that the cellhouse’s double-structure design works like a greenhouse, capturing the warmth inside. Some convicts claim that the bottom tier is the coolest when they are locked in their cells at night because it is closest to the ground. But others argue the middle floors are the best because they are nearest the few windows that actually open. No one disagrees about the fifth tier. It is agony. The air is thick, hot to the tongue. Convicts sit on mattresses at night on the top tier as if in a narcotic stupor, naked except for sweat-soaked boxer shorts. They keep their cells dark, afraid that the heat generated by the single 100-watt bulb above the metal sink will make the cell even more unbearable. Their bodies are covered with a thin layer of sweat that gleams even in the blackness when illuminated by the red glow of a half-spent cigarette. When you walk along the fifth tier you can smell the sweat and stale smoke. Sometimes, a face will loom forward from a darkened cell, appearing a ghostly white behind the inch-thick steel bars before disappearing moments later into the blackness.

  Little wonder that years ago a gang of convicts called the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth “the Hot House.”

  The twelve hundred men imprisoned there are considered to be among the most dangerous criminals in the United States. Years ago, the Bureau of Prisons learned that mixing first-time offenders with hard-core criminals was disastrous, so it created a stepladder system. Nonviolent and white-collar felons, as well as inmates in their twenties and thirties serving short prison sentences, are supposed to be sent to level-one prison camps, where they live in college-style dormitories and attend therapeutic rap sessions and drug-treatment classes. Some of these camps don’t even have walls or fences, and in recent years they have been dubbed “Club Feds” by the media because the inmates, including the Watergate conspirators in the 1970s and Wall Street inside traders in the 1980s, often spend their afternoons playing tennis or sunbathing. At the Hot House, level-one camps are called “kiddie joints” because they are considered the kindergarten of prisons.

  On the next rung of the bureau’s ladder are the medium-security prisons, officially labeled “level-two, -three, and -four federal correctional institutions.” These prisons are progressively more secure, and most have perimeter fences and guards stationed in gun towers, but the emphasis remains on educational and vocational training. The Hot House convicts call these prisons “gladiator schools,” because they are where an inmate gets his first taste of real prison life.

  At the top
of the ladder are the level-five penitentiaries, the true colleges of crime. The Hot House is the Harvard of them all. It is the oldest, the most infamous.

  There is only one federal penitentiary with a higher ranking than Leavenworth and that is the much-dreaded prison in Marion, Illinois, the bureau’s only level-six penitentiary. It is considered the end of the line for the “worst of the worst convicts.” But Marion’s reputation as being the nation’s most dangerous prison is deceiving. Marion houses only four hundred inmates, and since 1983, when two guards were murdered there, the inmates have been locked in one-man cells for twenty-three hours of each day. Whenever an inmate at Marion is taken from his cell, his hands are cuffed, his legs are chained, and he is surrounded by three guards, each armed with a nightstick.

  The federal penitentiary at Leavenworth holds three times as many inmates as Marion and they roam the compound relatively unchecked during the day. Hot House guards are not permitted to carry nightsticks or any weapons without special authorization. On any given day, Leavenworth holds a minimum of two hundred men whose records are filled with just as much violence as anyone at Marion. In fact, these men would have been sent to Marion if there had been room for them. So while Marion reigns as the bureau’s “toughest prison,” it is, in many ways, a safer place for both guards and inmates than is the Hot House.