The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

Steve and Sharon Lacy, now at the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. Both Lacys were Leavenworth employees until they were transferred. Steve sees himself and his friends as society’s guardians: “In our world, there are only two sides: them and us, and there’s a bunch more of them than us.” (C. A. Maragni)

  Eddie Geouge in the rotunda outside his office. As a soldier in Vietnam, he had killed more men than most of the convicted murderers he supervised in Leavenworth. Few prison officials were as tough, and none knew the scams, players, and dangers of prison life as well as Geouge. (Debra Bates-Lamborn)

  After the Cubans in Leavenworth rioted, Bill Slack was told to bring them under control. Everyone else had used brute force to manage the unruly Cubans. Much to the other guards’ horror, Slack offered them more freedom and decent food. (Russ Kennedy)

  A pen-and-ink drawing by Thomas Silverstein. Drawing and painting were his only outlet in his isolation cell in the Hot House basement, and when he was deprived of drawing materials for three months, he besieged the Bureau of Prisons with formal appeals. When Warden Matthews finally ordered pencils and sketch pads restored to him, the flood of paper abated though his anger did not.

  When they began remodeling A cellhouse, I went in there just to see what it looked like, you know, after they had gutted it and torn out all of the tiers and cells, and suddenly I found myself going to where I had found Selle’s body. This is about fifteen years later, and yet I could see his face and I started hyperventilating and I got so bad they had to get me the hell out of there.

  His face was as clear to me that day as it was when I found his body. Even now, I can still see Selle’s face and I still get mad because, you know, there was no reason for them to kill him. No reason at all.

  Chapter 20

  The hiring of a new personnel clerk at the Hot House didn’t usually get much attention, but when Brittany Monet got the job, convicts and guards took notice. Blonde, single, twenty-four years old and striking, Monet worked in an office on the second floor of the administration building and only came into the penitentiary area at lunchtime to eat in the officers’ cafeteria. No matter. By the end of Monet’s first week on the job, convicts had started rearranging their daily routine so they could be near the rotunda when Monet passed through on her way to lunch. They wanted to get a glimpse of her.

  The bureau has always been dominated by men, and has remained so even though Norman Carlson was the first director to really open it up to women and minorities. Under his leadership, women were hired as guards for the first time. They did all the jobs that male guards performed, including strip searches, but only in lower-security prisons. The bureau claimed its maximum-security penitentiaries, such as Leavenworth and Marion, were simply too dangerous for women to work in as guards.

  This didn’t mean that there were no women inside the Hot House walls. Of the forty female employees, ten actually worked in the main penitentiary or in prison industries, often side by side with inmates. Nearly all, however, were relegated to lower-paying secretarial jobs, not to the top-paying positions in the custody department.

  While the bureau was careful to avoid sexism in its employee manuals, women were expected to adhere to several unwritten rules at the Hot House. Within the penitentiary it was customary for them either to walk together in groups or to ask a guard to escort them. Most women followed this practice. Monet didn’t.

  A few days after she began work, Monet noticed that a guard was trailing her and another woman as they went to lunch.

  “Is there something we can do for you, Officer?” Monet asked.

  “No, I’m just escorting you girls to the officers’ mess,” the guard replied.

  “We don’t need an escort,” said Monet. The mess was located at the end of center hallway and there were plenty of guards milling about as the women walked there.

  “Well, I’m going to escort you anyway,” the guard said. “It’s for your own good, girls.”

  These comments irritated Monet, and later that day she complained to her supervisor. “Correctional officers shouldn’t be bodyguards for the staff,” she said. “I can take care of myself.” She later added that the last two times she had been escorted, the guards had used the opportunity to ask her for a date, and one of them had been married. Monet’s superior told the guard who had followed the women to lunch to apologize.

  Several days later, a different guard spotted Monet in the prison yard, where she had been sent on an errand by her boss. The guard demanded to know what she was doing walking alone in the compound. Monet berated him and continued on her way.

  Lieutenant Edward Pierce was working in the lieutenant’s office when the guard came in and complained about Monet. “That blonde bitch is going to get herself or some officer killed,” Pierce snapped. “One of these shitheads is going to drag her into a closet, rape her, and cut her throat, and we’re not going to find out about it until we find her body.”

  The two other lieutenants in the room agreed, but neither volunteered to say anything to Monet or her supervisor. “Technically she’s right,” one said. “An employee can walk wherever he or she wants to, and if we demand that she have an escort, some judge will slap us with a fine and we’ll be accused of being sexist pigs. What she’s doing, though, is simply crazy.”

  Monet’s attitude upset many of her female coworkers as well. “She is making it dangerous for all of us,” complained Susan Avila-McGill, who worked down the hall from Monet. Refusing an escort was only part of the reason for resentment. The close-fitting business suits, dark-hued hose, and high heels that Monet wore would have been acceptable apparel anywhere else, but in the Hot House, most women intentionally “dressed down.” Some even wore the same black blazers, white shirts, and gray slacks that the men wore. “None of us wants to walk down center hall after she goes by because the inmates are so riled up,” Avila-McGill said. Monet’s good looks had also prompted several guards to stop by her desk and ask her for dates. When Monet announced that she never dated her co-workers, the guards got mad. “That bitch thinks she’s too good for us,” said one.

  Soon, Monet was being ostracized by both guards and her female coworkers. A few women felt sorry for her. Phyllis Driscoll later recalled how difficult it was for her to adjust to working in a traditionally all-male environment. When Driscoll’s first boss patted her on the buttocks, Driscoll complained to his superior, only to be told, “Oh well, those things will happen when you’re a pretty girl.”

  But even women who felt strongly about equal rights didn’t want guards to stop being their escorts, especially those women who had worked at the Hot House long enough to recall what had happened to Peggy Hudson.

  A stocky woman in her late thirties, Hudson had grown up on a Kansas farm, married her high school sweetheart, and taken work at the prison simply because it paid better than most clerical jobs. In 1983, she was at her desk in the prison hospital when an inmate came in carrying a prescription slip. Hudson’s boss and another man were standing less than ten feet away when the inmate suddenly darted around her desk, pulled a shank from under his shirt, and pressed it against her chest.

  “I’ll kill her!” he screamed. “Get out!”

  The two men backed out of the office and the inmate kicked the door shut and locked it. He pulled the curtains closed, ordered Hudson to sit down in a chair, and tied her hands with a piece of braided cord he had made from his own hair.

  When guards began pounding on the door, the convict yelled that he would kill Hudson if anyone tried to break in. He demanded that another female employee be brought to the office to speak to him. She was the only person he would talk to, he screamed. The guards sent for the woman.

  While waiting, the inmate ordered Hudson to stand up and then whispered in her ear, “Pull down your pants!”

  “I told him ‘No!’ I wasn’t going to do that,” she recalled later.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  When Hudson refused again, th
e inmate grabbed her and jerked her pants down. He took out his knife, forced her onto the floor, and climbed on her. Hudson sobbed, but her tears didn’t stop him from raping her.

  A few minutes later, the inmate and Hudson heard voices outside the door. The other employee had arrived, and she and the guards were able to convince the inmate to free Hudson and surrender.

  The first person Hudson saw was Warden Jerry O’Brien.

  “We had sex,” she whispered. “He raped me.”

  “Oh my God!” said O’Brien.

  “I couldn’t cry,” she recalled later. “I couldn’t cry for three days, and then I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. My husband and I talked for hours and hours about how we wanted to kill that inmate and how we would make him die slowly.”

  The FBI told her later that the convict had been planning the rape for three days. He had attacked her simply because she worked in an office with a door that could be locked. He had never spoken to her before the attack and Hudson couldn’t remember ever noticing him before he came into the office that morning. “I was just convenient.” The inmate was sentenced to an additional thirty-five years in prison, but since he already was serving several life terms, the rape sentence was made to run concurrently. As far as Hudson was concerned, he had “gotten off without any punishment at all.”

  “I kept thinking about what he said, how he told me he wasn’t going to hurt me,” Hudson recalled. “After he raped me he said, ‘See, I didn’t hurt you,’ and it’s true that people don’t die from having sex, but being raped scars you inside. He really hurt me and he hurt my husband and he hurt my family, and the thing about it is, he didn’t even care.”

  Hudson thought about quitting. She was afraid to go back inside the penitentiary compound. But she decided that she wasn’t going to let the rapist end her career. She worked in the administration building for a year before returning to a job inside the penitentiary that required her to be in contact with inmates. “I am glad that I am doing something to help keep criminals locked up,” she said. “Most of these inmates don’t have any conscience. They think they can just do whatever they want and then walk away. If it weren’t for the bureau and the people who work for it, that would be true.”

  Peggy Hudson had watched Brittany Monet and had considered telling her about how dangerous the Hot House was and how quickly someone could be attacked. But Hudson decided not to. It was just as well. Monet said later that knowing about the rape wouldn’t have changed her mind about asking guards to escort her. “I’m not naive,” she said. “I know this is a dangerous place, but I can also take care of myself. I don’t need a babysitter.”

  Norman Bucklew had noticed Monet the first time she came into the officers’ cafeteria, where his job was cleaning tables. The thirty-nine-year-old convicted murderer was sure he could seduce her. Most women found Bucklew handsome. He had short, curly salt-and-pepper hair, a mustache, unflinching steel-gray eyes, and a muscleman’s build. But it was his confident, even arrogant manner that made him noticeable. Bucklew had the air of a Boston Brahmin. When he was later asked why he had been so certain he could seduce Monet, he laughed. “A young filly,” he said, “doesn’t chase after a weak or crippled horse. She picks the strongest stallion in the pack and runs after him.”

  For her part, when she first met Bucklew, Monet had been curious enough to go back to her office and read his prison file.

  The next day, Bucklew was standing outside the cafeteria when Monet came to lunch.

  “So you’re from New York,” he said, obviously pleased that he had managed to discover where Monet had grown up.

  “So you’re from New Jersey,” she retorted with equal cockiness.

  From that moment on, they began a game of quiet flirtation. Whenever Monet was too busy to come to the cafeteria, Bucklew fixed her a special plate and had one of her coworkers deliver it. On the days that she did make it to the cafeteria, he brought her ice cream for dessert. One afternoon, Monet found rose petals hidden in her napkin.

  The attraction growing between them did not go unnoticed by guards. Monet would later note that she had not violated any bureau regulations by talking to Bucklew. But she acknowledged that she found him appealing. “If anything ever happened at work and I needed someone to protect me, I would depend on him, not the officers,” she said. “I think they would have been scared and they wouldn’t have protected me from being raped or killed. But I honestly believe he wouldn’t have let anyone touch me.” When asked later about Monet’s comments, Bucklew said she had been “halfway” correct. “No one is gonna rape a broad while I’m around,” he explained. “I won’t permit that to happen. But hey, if there’s a riot and all the hacks are being slaughtered, then that would be okay. See, she’s a hack, and if all of them is being killed, then it’s nothing personal. It’s a convict-versus-hack thing. But rape her? No way. I would stop that.”

  Three months after she began work at the Hot House, Monet was fired. Her termination notice, ironically, came nine days after she received her first pay increase and promotion. Warden Matthews’s termination letter said she was being fired because “numerous staff members have complained to your supervisor regarding your uncooperative and/or unreceptive attitude towards them.” He told the union president that Monet was “not cut out” for prison work.

  Monet appealed her dismissal to the federal board that oversees personnel complaints. She pointed out that she had received superior performance ratings and had not been warned or received any counseling about her “uncooperative” attitude. She also claimed that the real reason she was being fired was because she had refused to have sex with an associate warden at the prison. Just before her complaint was scheduled for a hearing, Monet agreed to drop it in return for an undisclosed cash settlement from the Justice Department. The associate warden named in Monet’s complaint later denied her accusation. “The truth is, she should never have been hired here,” he said. “She didn’t fit in. I think she had a mothering complex, you know; she wanted to be a mother to the convicts. It probably had something to do with her big breasts.”

  Bucklew was disappointed when he heard that Monet had been fired. “That broad had heart, and if she had stuck around, we would have eventually gotten together,” he said. “I know it, and after I had a bit of that pussy, I would have gotten her to bring me a gun or a few hacksaw blades, and you know what?—a broad like that would have done it because she would have been in love, and when a broad’s in love, it’s only natural for them to want to help. I’m gonna miss her.”

  Chapter 21

  NORMAN BUCKLEW

  Norman Bucklew flipped several sizzling pork chops over on the grill in the officers’ cafeteria and checked the big pot of spaghetti boiling nearby. It was Sunday afternoon, two days after Brittany Monet’s firing, and Bucklew was fixing his weekly spaghetti feast for his buddies. Within an hour, six inmates would join him at the same yellow Formica tables that Bucklew cleaned during the week for the guards. The inmates would devour plates of pasta covered with Bucklew’s special tomato sauce.

  No one in the bureau liked to talk about it, but over the years it had become a custom at the Hot House for the inmate cooks to take over the kitchen for themselves on Sundays. There was no way for the bureau to feed 1,200 inmates three times a day during the week without the help of inmate cooks, and most of these men, like Bucklew, could have earned three times their regular $75 per month salaries by working in prison industries. They chose the lower-paying kitchen duty because they wanted to eat well, and on Sundays they did.

  Technically, the kitchen was closed. Inmates had to make do on Sunday morning with a brunch of coffee, milk, and pastries, and a dinner of cold cuts and bread. But behind the kitchen’s stainless-steel doors, the inmate cooks divided themselves, as always, along ethnic lines and the mammoth kitchen took on the atmosphere of a church bazaar. Black inmates ate fried chicken with thick white gravy in one area; a handful of Chicanos dined on tortillas and refried beans in a
nother. Bucklew and his crew ate spaghetti and pork chops in the officers’ cafeteria. It was the most private of all the unofficial dining spots, a separate room big enough for about thirty people built between the kitchen and the inmate dining hall.

  During the week, the cafeteria was off-limits to inmates. It was the guards’ private lounge. For $1.25, they could take as much as they wished from a large salad bar, or choose between two hot entrees, soft drinks, tea, coffee, milk, freshly baked rolls, fresh pies, and cakes. But despite the bargain prices and bountiful selection, the cafeteria was rarely crowded. Years ago, an inmate had been caught urinating into a steam kettle filled with beans bound for the staff dining room. There were stories about convicts ejaculating into sandwiches or spitting in them before serving them to guards. To quiet such fears, the bureau had installed a short-order grill in the cafeteria itself so that employees could watch their food as it was cooked. But that wasn’t enough for many of them. They stayed away.

  As soon as he arrived, Bucklew locked the front entrance to the cafeteria because he didn’t want to be bothered by other inmates or the guards on the Sunday shift. There was a certain irony to having an inmate lock guards out of their own cafeteria and that made Bucklew chuckle as he fussed over his spaghetti sauce. The highly seasoned sauce was his specialty, and it was so good that the Mafia honchos in B cellhouse had been known to send wiseguys to the kitchen to ask politely for a plate.

  A bank robber from New Jersey named Artie provided the garlic bread; another bank robber made the onion and tomato salad. Sometimes they even had wine.

  “I’m a thief,” Bucklew boasted as he stirred his sauce. “I don’t think robbing a bank is wrong. I will never think it is wrong. If I want to take the money in a bank, then I’m going to take it, and if you catch me and put me in prison, I’m not going to sniffle about being in the pen. But don’t try to tell me what I did was wrong and don’t tell me I got no integrity. I’ll tell you what having no integrity is. It’s claiming you’re not a thief and then coming into this dining room every day, like these hacks do, and eating lunch without paying for it. Beating the pen out of a buck twenty-five—now that’s having no integrity.”