The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  “In there,” came the order, and Little fell in line behind another inmate, whose name had been called before his, and walked to the bus. He chose a window seat and looked outside through the bars that covered the green-tinted pane. Little would later describe his feelings that morning: “I was upset—no, it was more than that, I was scared shitless. I couldn’t believe I was being sent to Leavenworth.”

  Little was twenty-six years old and had been convicted of two armed bank robberies in his home state of Florida. He had never been to prison before, and when he discovered that the bureau had elected to send him to the Hot House, he had been dazed. Little had assumed, as had his attorney, that a first-time felon would be sent to a minimum-security institution, probably one of the camps. They were wrong.

  When the last Leavenworth prisoner was finally off the federal marshal’s jet and inside the bus, the white van that Little had seen parked nearby pulled forward and preceded the bus off the airstrip. It was a chase car. The armed guards inside it were responsible for protecting the bus from attack. Besides the twenty or so prisoners, the bus held three guards. One sat in a metal cage at the rear of the bus with a pump shotgun cradled in his lap; another stood with a shotgun at the front of the bus, outside a wire-mesh screen that enclosed the convicts. The third guard, who wore a pistol, drove the bus.

  As Little watched, the 727 taxied down the runway. Every day the marshal’s plane flew cross-country picking up and discharging prisoners at key cities. The Hot House guards jokingly called it Convict Airlines.

  “Hey, white boy,” a black inmate sitting in the seat across from Little whispered, “they gonna love your ass in prison.” He laughed. Little ignored him.

  When he was first arrested, Little had actually relished the idea of going to prison. All his life, the slightly built inmate had wanted to be a tough guy. A short stint in jail would be just like going to college, he figured. “I liked stealing things, but I wasn’t very good at it because my mama had raised me to think like a Square John,” he explained later.

  While Little was being held for trial in a county jail, he discovered there were drawbacks to being a thief. Three inmates demanded he have sex with them, and when he refused, they attacked. Little had held them off with a mop handle until a jailer separated him from the group. When he learned that he was being sent to the Hot House, he began having nightmares. “I figured if this shit happens in a county jail, then imagine what Leavenworth is going to be like.”

  Another young inmate, who introduced himself as Gary, had sat next to Little on the airplane and had offered him some advice. Gary had done time in Leavenworth before and was quick to tell Little that young, good-looking convicts had a difficult time. There is a saying in the Hot House that goes like this, Gary had explained: “Every convict has three choices, but only three. He can fight [kill someone], he can hit the fence [escape], or he can fuck [submit].”

  “You’re gonna need someone to show you around,” Gary said. “Ask for Carl Bowles. No one fucks with him.”

  How, Little asked, could he find Bowles?

  Gary had laughed. “Don’t worry, Carl will find you,” he said.

  When the bus stopped outside the prison’s front entrance, a guard yelled, “Everybody out!”

  The guards from the chase car had already formed a gauntlet on each side of the stone steps. The inmates hustled off the bus and climbed the steps single-file. They were directed through the rotunda and downstairs, where they were ordered to strip and stand next to each other in a line.

  “Run your fingers briskly through your hair,” a lieutenant yelled.

  “Open your mouth, stick out your tongue.”

  A guard walked along the row of naked men peering into each gaping mouth.

  “Lift up your dick and balls.”

  The inmates complied and the same guard looked to see if they were concealing anything.

  “Turn around, bend over, and spread your cheeks.”

  Little would learn later that this last order was done simply to humiliate inmates, although bureau officials would argue differently. The most common spot for prisoners to hide keys, drugs, and even hacksaw blades was inside metal cigar tubes—called “butt plugs”—inserted in the rectum. But the only way a guard could tell if an inmate had something hidden there was by conducting what the bureau referred to technically as a “digital examination.” Convicts called it a “finger wave.” There was no way for a guard to look at a man’s anus and learn anything other than whether he had hemorrhoids. But the bureau still insisted on performing the visual check.

  Satisfied that the fish were not hiding anything, the guards issued them a set of clothing and took them one by one to have their prison mug shots made and fingerprints taken. Finally each was taken to a cell.

  By this time it was late afternoon, and Little tried to rest but couldn’t. “All I wanted to do was get a piece of pipe and crawl into some corner,” he said later. “I just wanted to be left alone.”

  The next morning, a short muscular convict in his late forties paused outside Little’s cell. His brown hair was cut military-short, revealing a scalp freckled by the sun.

  “Thomas,” the convict said, “I’m Carl Bowles.”

  This is how both men later recalled their conversation.

  “Look,” Bowles told Little, “you’re in prison now. You need to keep your mouth shut, stay out of people’s way, and don’t cultivate friends. I don’t care how nice they are, don’t take nothing from anybody, ’cause you don’t know the man’s intent. You don’t know whether he is a good person or not. Any man can walk up to you and tell you anything. You might be impressed by the way he looks. He might be a weight lifter. He might be clean and neat. He might have books under his arms, but you don’t know his real intent.”

  Then Bowles gave a warning about himself. “I’m like every other asshole in here,” he said. “You don’t know me any better than anyone else. But I work out in the east yard with flowers. You come out there some day and look at those flowers if that’s what you want to do. You come out there and look around, and I’ll be out there and I’ll make sure you can go to the yard anytime you want. I’ll make sure no one fucks with you.”

  Little nodded and Bowles left.

  “You know, I wanted to go out there the very next day—out to the yard and look at the flowers,” Little recalled later, “but I didn’t want to be caught dead in prison looking at flowers. There was no fucking way that I was going near him and flowers, ’cause you think, ‘O-o-o-h-h-h flowers, there’s the pretty boy looking at the flowers.’ ”

  The next morning, Bowles stopped outside Little’s cell again.

  “You okay? Need anything?”

  “I’m okay,” responded Little. “Thanks.”

  Bowles left.

  “I was scared to leave my cell,” Little recalled. “Guys were coming by acting friendly, offering to do things for me, bring me stuff from the commissary. It was just like Carl had said it would be. I was ready to snap.”

  The next morning when Bowles stopped by, Little asked if they could talk. Bowles suggested that they take a walk, and he boldly led Little past the guards in the fish tier back to his own cell. “Carl sat on the bunk and I sat in a chair,” Little recalled. “He asked me what was wrong and I told him I felt like I was on the moon and didn’t know what to do.”

  “Well, what do you want to do?” asked Bowles.

  “I’d like to draw. I want to study mathematics. I want to work out with weights and I want people to leave me alone. I just want to be left alone.”

  “Okay,” replied Bowles, “you can do those things.”

  “But how?” asked Little.

  “Just breathe,” Bowles replied.

  “What?”

  “Just do ’em, that’s all.”

  “Wait,” said Little, “it ain’t that simple. I just can’t go out there in the yard and do those things.”

  “Sure you can,” Bowles replied. “Why can’t you?”
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  “ ’Cause I … uh … just can’t.”

  “You can if you want to. I’ll show you how you can,” Bowles replied. “Look at me. I’m not some big, beefed-up motherfucker, but I haven’t had to stab anyone in twenty-three years. It’s how you carry yourself in here that matters, and how you think. You can learn those things. I can teach you.”

  “What do you want?” Little asked.

  “I’m just looking for a friend,” said Bowles. “That’s all. Just a friend.”

  Lieutenant Michael Sandels had seen Little go into Bowles’s cell. There were no regulations against Bowles showing a fish around, but Sandels was suspicious. He made a point of talking to Little in private after the two convicts’ meeting. Sandels came right to the point. “You are young and you probably will get a lot of sexual pressure. Do you know what Carl is about?”

  Little didn’t answer.

  “Hey, man,” Sandels said, “Carl Bowles is a homosexual predator and he’s looking to make you his wife. He’ll have you waiting on him, having sex with him, doing whatever he demands. You’ll be a slave, and when he’s tired of you, he’ll sell you to someone else.”

  “I know people think he is a homosexual, but we are not homosexuals,” Little answered. “Everyone thinks he is pressuring me, but he is not, and if you want to believe that he is, then that’s fine, but we aren’t doing anything. That stuff about Carl is bullshit!”

  “Well,” said Sandels, “if you have any problems, I know the situation you are in, and you can just come by and see me and I will take care of you.”

  Sandels said later that he was sincere in offering to help Little. “I wanted to help, because when you are young, something like this could fuck you up for the rest of your life, but the truth is, I really couldn’t do anything for him if he had asked.”

  Dr. Thomas White, the chief psychologist at the Hot House, had also noticed Bowles and Little, but he too felt there was nothing that he could do. “Most of us are never pushed into a corner during our lives,” White explained later. “When you are small and need help, you run to your parents. When you get older, you run to a priest, a minister, a psychologist. If you have a legal problem, you hire an attorney. If someone threatens you, you call a cop. In prison there is no one to turn to, no one to solve your problems for you. If you go to the guards, you will be known as a snitch and that can get you killed. So you are on your own, perhaps for the first time in your life, and you are forced to deal with your own problems. Believe me, the guy demanding that you drop your drawers isn’t going to be a good sport and simply let you walk away. You must either be willing to fight or you must give in.”

  Little returned to Bowles’s cell after his conversation with Sandels.

  “He told me to stay away from you,” Little reported.

  “Look here,” Bowles replied, “the cops have a category in prison for everything. If more than three people get together in a prison, then they’re members of a gang. If there are two people, you’re both homosexuals, and if you hang by yourself, you’re antisocial. That’s just how cops are. Now, here’s the thing, Thomas. You are in here twenty-four hours a day. The cop is here eight hours. The cop is not suffering the same thing you are suffering. The cop is not here to see you going through these mind changes. I have little faith in having them protect me in here. Why, I can’t even find a lieutenant when I want to find him. If I was getting stabbed right now and went looking for Lieutenant Sandels, I probably couldn’t even find him. You got to deal with the reality of this place. Who means more to a guy in here? Who is in here twenty-four hours a day with him? Who is here to talk to him, help him through difficult times? It’s very simple. Don’t you understand that trust and reliance are built on very little things?

  “Okay, when I don’t get my mail, I go up to the officer and I ask him if he knows where it is. ‘I don’t know where the fuck your mail is! Check with the fucking mailroom!’ he says. Now listen to me, if this cop is not concerned about my mail, does he really care about me? Or when I go to the chow hall and the doors are being closed and I tell the officer there that I’m late but I have a reason, and he says, ‘Fuck your reason, you’re out a dinner!’ Now, when those things happen, those little things, why the fuck do you think that Sandels or any other cop is going to give a shit about you and whether you are being preyed upon? He isn’t in here twenty-four hours a day. I am. He says he is going to protect you? Well, what are you going to do the sixteen hours that he’s off duty?”

  Little nodded. Bowles was making sense.

  “The reason that Sandels wants to help you,” Bowles continued, “is because he really wants to use you. He’s gonna tell you, ‘Hey, a guy in here, he pretty much makes his own bed. If you want to help us, then we can help you. These convicts, they don’t give a fuck about you, but I can help you, and all you have to do is help me. Give me a little bit of information here and there, and I can help you get a transfer or help keep those predators away. It doesn’t have to be anything really serious, why, just tell us who was drinking the other night up on your tier. That’s all, something small like that.’

  “I’ve seen guys fall in that trap. See, it doesn’t matter what you tell them, ’cause once you’ve crossed that line you’re a snitch, and they know it and they got you. It’s just a fucking trap. Everyone in the world is trying to use everyone else in here. That’s how life is, and that’s what it is all about in this joint.

  “Now you go back to your cell and you think about what I just told you,” said Bowles, “and if you are afraid of me and afraid I’m going to fuck you, then you just tell me and we will go our separate ways. I told you, Thomas, all I’m looking for is a friend.”

  Little left.

  “I didn’t want to have to kill someone in prison,” Little said later, recalling his thoughts. “I didn’t come here to get a life sentence, but I didn’t want to have guys fucking me, either.”

  Little knew he had to make a choice—move in with Bowles or try to make it on his own in the general population. Although he had never been in the Hot House before, Little had heard stories about some of its most notorious residents, including Cyclops, a convicted murderer from Washington, D.C., who had a glass eye and was known for turning young inmates into “fuck boys,” a term used to describe a prisoner who is not a homosexual but is forced to work as a prostitute in prison by a pimp. The idea of being raped and forced into being a fuck boy terrified Little. The idea of being forced into trying to kill someone as deadly and cold-blooded as Cyclops was just as terrifying. He didn’t see any other choices.

  Little didn’t have much of a criminal past to fall back on. His parents were upper-middle-class and well-educated, and he was raised in a nonviolent, suburban home. Little was twelve when his parents were divorced and he moved from Florida to Nebraska with his mother. “My mama is the most wonderful woman to ever walk the face of this vile earth,” Little recalled. “My father is some sort of genius. He runs his own company. We cannot understand one another. I do not like him. He does not like me. So be it.”

  As a teenager, Little yearned for adventure and liked to consider himself somewhat of a rebel. He told everyone in high school that he was going to join the navy and become a member of SEAL, the navy’s elite underwater demolition-and-attack team, as soon as he turned seventeen. Few of his classmates took him seriously. After graduation, Little returned to Florida and enlisted, but he washed out. Afraid to return home a failure, he got a job as a bartender in a club near the base frequented by SEALs. He began smoking marijuana and using uppers and downers. Soon he was selling them. “I would do anything for money. I sold dope, and began pimping, pushing pussy at the bar. I started robbing left and right, too.” At first, he hit mom-and-pop grocery stores and all-night gasoline stations. He tried banks next, but didn’t know any of the secrets that most felons learn from older thieves—the simple things, like the best day to rob a bank being a Friday because that’s when banks have money on hand to cash paychecks. His first ban
k robbery was in Orlando. He got caught doing his second one, in Lakeland, Florida. The conviction was his first and he hadn’t hurt anyone during the two robberies. Little couldn’t understand why the bureau had decided to put him in the Hot House. It just didn’t make sense.

  When it came time for Little to move into the general population, he asked for permission to live with Bowles. “I decided to use Carl,” Little said. “I sure did. I figured, ‘Okay, Thomas, you’re in Leavenworth. Carl Bowles is the best thing you got going for you. You’d better grab onto this guy and do what’s necessary to be his friend.’ ”

  Little’s request was sent to Eddie Geouge, who was in charge of the cellhouse where Bowles lived. Geouge was a highly decorated Vietnam combat grunt, former drill sergeant, and an eighteen-year bureau veteran with a reputation for being as scrappy as any convict in the Hot House. He was forty-seven, with receding red hair and a chain-smoker’s raspy voice. When Geouge saw Little’s request, he knew what was happening. Geouge didn’t approve of any convict preying on a weaker convict, but if Little wanted to cell with Bowles, it was okay by him. “The truth is that Bowles is doing everyone a favor,” Geouge candidly admitted later. “Little is the sort of guy who can’t take care of himself in here, and if we tell him he can’t live with Bowles, then Bowles won’t be able to protect him from other convicts. There will be heaps of problems for everyone, particularly Little. As long as Bowles and Little don’t do anything out of line, then it’s really no one’s business.”

  As soon as Little was released from the fish tier, he moved into Bowles’s cell. From that moment on, word spread through the penitentiary that anyone who messed with Little had to answer to Carl Bowles. That was something that no one wanted to risk. But behind both men’s backs, inmates and guards alike began making fun of Little. They called him “the new Mrs. Bowles.”

  Chapter 7