The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  “Old Thunderbird,” Pierce said, calling the inmate by his nickname, “was just letting off steam. It wasn’t personal on either of our parts.”

  Pierce fell in with the three young guards taking Thunderbird to the dentist, where he would be fitted with false teeth. At least once a week, the dentist stayed late into the evening to handle patients who were busy working in the prison factories during the day or who for some other reason couldn’t come into the hospital during regular hours.

  “What’s Mama gonna say when you get home and pull those choppers out?” Pierce chided him.

  “Shit, Lieutenant, her pussy ain’t gonna taste no different.”

  Pierce left them at the hospital entrance and strolled into the prison yard, where he took a seat on the concrete bleachers. An after-dinner Softball game was under way. He sat by himself midway between a group of black inmates perched along the top row and a cluster of Italians sitting on the bottom row.

  The black inmates were from Washington, D.C., and were known simply as “D.C. Blacks.” They were one of the most difficult groups at Leavenworth for guards to control. Because it has limited jail space of its own, the nation’s capital sends a disproportionate number of inmates into the federal system, and most are black, a reflection of the city’s predominantly black population. At the Hot House, D.C. Blacks were the largest single ethnic group from any single city, making up 10 percent of the overall population, and nearly all were well-schooled in violence. D.C. Blacks were especially notorious as “locker-knockers”—petty thieves who ransacked the personal lockers of other inmates—and for pressuring new inmates for sex.

  The dozen Italians sitting below Pierce were Mafia “wiseguys.” Each wore prison-issued white shorts and cotton shirts, but their clothing had been pressed and was brand-new. Some smoked William Penn cigars at fifty cents apiece, the highest-priced stogies in the commissary. Gold chains dangled from their necks, and a stack of graphite tennis rackets, the most expensive item a convict could special-order at the Hot House store, was nearby. Even though they were watching the ball game, each of the wiseguys was sitting so he could face and hear an older convict in the group. Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo didn’t say much, but when he spoke, his comments either brought a solemn nod or a boisterous laugh, depending upon which was appropriate. Corallo was the boss of the New York-based Lucchese crime family, a real-life Mafia godfather, and no one at the Hot House bothered him. Not that anyone had reason to. He was a perfect gentleman. In prison, a Mafioso did his time as quietly as possible because it improved his chances for parole. There was only one time anyone could remember that a Mafia member got into trouble, and that had happened at the penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where Mafia members are frequently housed because of its proximity to New York City. A guard, for some reason, began harassing a wiseguy. Every day the guard searched the inmate’s cell, went through his mail, and frisked him as he walked the compound, until the wiseguy had simply had enough. One day a visitor from outside the prison came to see the wiseguy. The guard saw the visitor slip something into the wiseguy’s hand.

  “What you got there?” the guard demanded.

  Without protest, the wiseguy opened his fingers, revealing a photograph of the guard’s six-year-old daughter playing at her elementary school.

  “See how easy it can be?” the Mafioso asked.

  Whether or not the story was true was impossible to tell, but every guard and most inmates in the Hot House had heard it. The message was clear. The Mafia could “reach out into the streets,” and that made guards and other convicts nervous.

  Most of the black inmates sitting in the bleachers were dressed in “jams,” long shorts made from gray and blue sweatpants chopped off at the knee. Each wore high-top Nike tennis shoes with the laces intentionally untied. A few had wool stocking caps on their heads despite the July heat. None wore a shirt. They were in their early twenties, loud, full of horseplay. They provided a running commentary on the game.

  A batter slammed a pitch toward center field, a high, beautiful hit that forced the outfielder to race backward toward the prison wall. Just when it looked as if the hit was out of reach, the outfielder leaped backward and snagged the ball in his bare right hand since he didn’t have time to raise his glove.

  The black inmates cheered. Pierce did too. Even the wiseguys, who Pierce figured were wagering on the game in Italian, jumped up and applauded.

  Minutes later another batter slammed the ball out into center field. There was a different outfielder playing now and he badly misjudged the ball, allowing it to fall several feet behind him.

  “Stupid motherfucker!” a D.C. Black screamed.

  “Your momma sucks!” another yelled, the end of his comment drowned by a chorus of boos and similar obscenities. Even the player’s own teammates pelted him with vulgarities.

  Except for a single guard standing across the yard, Pierce was the only officer out there among some four hundred inmates, many of them convicted killers. He leaned back in the evening sun, rested his black cowboy boots on the seat in front of him, and relaxed.

  “Some officers come in here and try to act like trained killers,” he said. “Hell, they ain’t fooling nobody but themselves. These inmates are for real. They can smell fear, and they know who is for real and who is selling wolf tickets. Now, other officers will come in here and be real meek and mild, but if there’s a shit storm, they’re right there ready to do whatever is necessary.

  “The secret is that there is no secret. You can’t fake it in here. You either are the kind of person who can handle violence or you’re not.

  “People make this job harder than it is. If an inmate has something coming—his mail, a blanket, whatever—you give it to him. If he don’t, you tell him. And most importantly, if an inmate ain’t going over the fence or thumping somebody, then you just leave him the fuck alone.”

  Had you asked Pierce’s classmates at Wiley High School in Terre Haute, Indiana, if they ever thought he would end up in prison, most would have quickly answered “Yes!” But as an inmate, not as a lieutenant. Pierce was, as he put it, “a hood, a problem child.” Enough so that at age eighteen, he was taken before a judge who gave him a choice—jail or the military service. He chose the navy. “I decided to change my life. I decided. No one else gave a fuck, really. But I decided and I changed it.”

  Pierce said he was physically abused as a child. “I had the living shit beat out of me with belts, two-by-fours, fists—and that was by my own mother,” he said. “Once I was beaten unconscious. That’s why I’m not afraid of getting my ass whipped in here. There is nothing that these guys can bring to me that I’ve not already been through, and that is why it really pisses me off when some television program whips up a bunch of sympathy for these inmates by telling how they were abused children. That’s bullshit. Their mama didn’t drive them to the bank and force them to rob it.”

  Since he joined the bureau, Pierce’s nose has been fractured twice, his upper lip sewed up more than a dozen times, and a piece of his ear chewed off during a scuffle. He paused, and looked at the inmates exercising in the yard. What kind of convict would he have been if he had not been able to turn his life around? I asked. The idea intrigued him, but only for a moment. He tried to picture himself out on the ball field staring back at the bleachers and the faceless lieutenant seated there. How would he have felt if he were on the other side? It didn’t compute. “I’m not one of them,” he said.

  Pierce looked over at the prison industries buildings. In the summer, the yard stayed open until the shadow from the west prison wall reached the second-floor windows of the printing plant. When that moment arrived, a horn would sound and inmates would trudge back into the main penitentiary. The night before, the horn had sounded during the final inning of an electrifying ball game. The losing team was at bat, was only one run behind, had two men on base and its best hitter stepping to the plate. There were two outs. Before the pitcher could throw his first pitch, t
he horn sounded and the team that was ahead scrambled off the field declaring victory. Nine convicts had cornered Pierce. A few accused him of deliberately setting off the signal to throw the game. Pierce was sitting in the bleachers tonight to make certain that the horn sounded between innings. It didn’t really matter, because tonight’s game was lopsided. Still, he waited several minutes after the shadow reached the windows before giving his okay for the horn. He wanted the inmates to realize he had listened to them. The yard cleared peacefully and by ten o’clock all the inmates were locked in their cells and being counted.

  Midnight approached, time for Pierce to go home. Lieutenant Bill Thomas, a lanky white-haired quiet man, arrived at the lieutenant’s office on schedule and chatted with him. A few minutes later, Pierce stepped outside the prison and walked over to his black motorcycle. He revved the engine as the guard in the front tower looked down and waved, and then slowly rode down the horseshoe drive.

  Chapter 11

  THE CUBANS

  In 1987, summer slipped quickly into fall at the Hot House, the weeks passing without incident, until Friday, November 20. Shortly after nine A.M., Associate Warden Richard Smith got a telephone call from the bureau’s regional headquarters. Within seconds, he knew there was going to be trouble, big trouble, from an unlikely source.

  Fidel Castro had just agreed to take back as many as 3,000 Cubans who were now sitting in federal prisons. These were Cubans who had sought political asylum in the United States in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift but had not qualified because they were either criminals or mentally ill. Getting rid of them after nearly eight years was great news to Smith. But when he was told that the State Department planned to announce their impending deportation at noon that same day, Smith was appalled. Cuban inmates would be enraged by the announcement. A few of them at the Hot House had told Smith that they would butcher a guard, if necessary, to keep from being sent back. They knew that such a murder would result in their spending their lives in prison. But it would be an American prison, not a Cuban one, and that was worth killing for.

  The time of the State Department press conference gave Smith less than three hours to figure out what to do with the Hot House’s thirty-five Cubans. They weren’t really much of a threat, he decided. But as he put down the receiver he wondered what the wardens at the federal prisons in Atlanta, Georgia, and Oakdale, Louisiana, must have been thinking. Together, those two facilities held 3,000 Cubans.

  What could they possibly do in so short a time to prepare for the violence that was sure to come? Smith also wondered how people at the State Department could be so reckless.

  The so-called “Cuban problem” had actually begun in the spring of 1980, when thousands of Cubans swarmed the Peruvian embassy in Havana seeking to escape Cuba’s crumbling economy. A furious Fidel Castro announced that any Cubans who wanted to desert their homeland could, but only if they left through the tiny port of Mariel. No Central American country would accept the refugees, however, so there was no place for them to go until then-President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would welcome the Cuban refugees with “open arms and an open heart.”

  Virtually overnight, 125,000 Cubans made the ninety-mile journey from Mariel to Florida ports, where they completely overwhelmed immigration agents. To make matters worse, Castro thumbed his nose at the U.S. during the height of the boatlift by emptying his country’s prisons and mental hospitals into Mariel. Months later, the Immigration and Naturalization Service would calculate that Castro had released 23,000 “undesirables,” yet federal agents were only able to stop 210 of them at Florida ports. Many of the others were arrested during the months that followed, and were turned over to the INS for deportation. But Castro refused to take them back, so the INS had no choice but to house them in makeshift detention camps, mostly at old army bases. After numerous demonstrations and riots in the camps, the Justice Department forced the bureau to turn the penitentiary in Atlanta into a prison for Cubans.

  In the beginning, Atlanta held only 1,844 men, but as the months passed, Cubans streamed into the badly dilapidated prison at an average of 100 new inmates per month. Worse, not all of the Cubans being sent to Atlanta were criminals or mentally ill. INS guidelines were so poorly written that even Mariel Cubans who had no criminal backgrounds were detained for deportation if they were stopped by police for any reason, even traffic violations. This contributed to even more overcrowding. As the number of Cubans skyrocketed, the bureau became alarmed. Finally, a federal judge in Atlanta ordered the Justice Department to establish some sort of review process so that Cubans who were not dangerous could be released. On paper, the procedure sounded good, but it couldn’t and didn’t work. Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan had promised to slash the federal budget, and funds for halfway houses and other social programs that the Cubans needed were the first to go. A federal study would later reveal that only fifty Cubans out of two thousand declared ready for parole were actually released. A second setback for the Cubans and the bureau came when a federal appeals court ruled in 1983 that they were not protected by the U.S. Constitution because they were not U.S. citizens. That meant they could be held in prison indefinitely until Castro agreed to take them back, no matter what their crime.

  Faced with drastic overcrowding at Atlanta, the bureau built a $17 million “Alien Detention Facility” in Oakdale in 1986. The only security at the forty-seven-acre camp was a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence, but the bureau said additional security wasn’t needed because only Cubans who were about to be paroled would be confined there. Seven months later, the bureau reluctantly added a second twelve-foot fence to the camp, dropped razor wire between the two fences, and announced that overcrowding at Atlanta was so bad that violent Cubans were going to be shipped to Oakdale. The mood at the camp changed dramatically. When it opened, the camp had averaged one incident per month, usually a fistfight. By the fall of 1987, it was reporting thirty to thirty-five serious incidents each week, including attacks on guards.

  When Richard Smith’s telephone rang at the Hot House with news that Castro had suddenly agreed to begin taking back the Cubans, the Oakdale camp held 1,039 prisoners. It had been designed for a maximum of 574.

  The bureau would later compare Oakdale to a pile of dry kindling drenched with gasoline. All that was missing was a match, and the State Department was about to strike one.

  Normally, Warden Matthews would have received the telephone call about the Cubans, but he was out of town and had left Smith in charge. Smith didn’t shrink from the job. He ordered the lieutenants to round up every Cuban detainee in the prison and lock them up in separate cells so they couldn’t cause any trouble. The real leader of the Cubans in Leavenworth, however, was an American. Osiris Morejon had been born in Cuba, but was a naturalized citizen and had lived in Florida for more than twenty years before he was arrested for drug trafficking and murder. In 1981, Morejon and nine other Cubans raided the hideout of another drug trafficker and seized more than two tons of marijuana. In the process, Morejon executed the two men who were supposed to be guarding the stash, and also shot an innocent passerby who happened upon the robbery. At the Hot House, Morejon had ingratiated himself with some guards because he was one of the few Cubans who spoke English well enough to be understood. But while he was jovial and friendly, guards suspected that he was extorting money from Cubans who didn’t understand English and was casting himself in the role of a Cuban godfather.

  Edward Geouge was in charge of Morejon’s cellhouse, and when Smith told Geouge that five members of the prison’s Special Operations Response Team (SORT) were being sent to round up Morejon, the crusty officer suggested an alternative.

  “Hell, Dick, why don’t I just go have a talk with Mr. Morejon?” he asked. “I figure the worst he can do is try to kill me.”

  Smith thought Geouge was kidding but he wasn’t. Without waiting for any backup, Geouge walked down to Morejon’s cell.

  “Morejon, we got to lock you up,” he said. �
��I don’t know how long it’s going to be for. It could be a day or it might be forever, but you are going to be locked up and that’s not negotiable. Now, let’s do it.”

  Geouge held up a pair of handcuffs. Morejon, who was sitting on his bunk, looked perplexed.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Geouge replied. “Now, cuff up.”

  Morejon rose. He was taller than Geouge. His arms were three times as thick. For a few seconds, he glared at the smaller man.

  “I said cuff up, and I don’t aim to say it again,” Geouge commanded.

  Morejon stuck out his hands.

  A few hours later, Smith got another frantic telephone call from the regional office. Inmates at Oakdale were rioting, the camp was burning, an unknown number of guards were being held hostage. How long would it take for Leavenworth to send its SORT team—some twenty men—to Louisiana?

  “They’re on their way,” Smith replied.

  The next question was tougher. How long would it take for the Hot House to be ready to house the Cubans from Oakdale once the riot ended?

  * * *

  Like Richard Smith, Oakdale Warden J. R. Johnson had been notified that the State Department was going to announce the deportation agreement. But unlike Smith, Johnson didn’t have any way to lock up his Cuban prisoners. At Oakdale, inmates lived in dormitories, not individual cells. Johnson had ordered his staff to quiet the prisoners’ fears by handing out a printed memorandum:

  Cubans at Oakdale can help their chances to gain community release through continued positive behavior and respect towards staff and other detainees.

  Just in case the memo didn’t work, Johnson ordered an additional fifty guards to stand by. All day Friday, he had walked through the camp reassuring the Cubans. None seemed to be alarmed, he later noted in his daily journal. But that night a drunk Cuban prisoner stumbled into the inmate dining room, and when guards tried to arrest him, other Cubans began overturning tables and smashing dishes. The guards retreated and let the drunk return to his dormitory.