The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  After he drops his pants, I order him to turn around and bend over, and when he does, I rip off his shorts and I start fucking him … and then out of nowhere I suddenly have a knife and I start stabbing him in the back over and over and over again.

  What’s wild about this dream is, it’s black-and-white until I start sticking this pig and then everything shoots to Technicolor. Brilliant colors, man. Bright reds, yellows, greens.

  I used to dream about fucking women—beautiful women with great big tits. I used to dream about being on the street or in the backyard with my old lady and kids. But this is what I dream about now. I dream about fucking a fat prison guard and stabbing him in the back.

  It’s scary, man.

  I wonder what I’ll be dreaming a year from now, you know, or maybe five years from now. I wonder what I’ll be dreaming when I finally get back on the streets.

  Chapter 24

  THOMAS SILVERSTEIN

  While Warden Matthews didn’t like the stark conditions in the Cuban units, keeping Thomas Silverstein in even harsher circumstances didn’t bother him at all. “This inmate has killed four people in prison,” said Matthews, “and has little to lose by killing again.” Had Silverstein been found guilty of committing a murder in a state prison, in a state that allowed capital punishment, he would probably have been sentenced to death. But Congress has given federal judges permission to impose the death penalty in only a limited number of cases, and at the time Silverstein committed his murders, the killing of an inmate or a prison guard wasn’t one of them. No matter how much the bureau wanted to execute Silverstein, federal law prohibited it.

  Matthews defended the isolation that the bureau imposed on him. “Our intent is not to punish or persecute Silverstein. Our intent is simply to keep him away from inmates and staff so he will never have the opportunity to kill again.”

  While this was true, the bureau kept Silverstein under “no human contact” status for another reason as well. “When an inmate kills a guard, he must be punished,” explained a bureau official. “We can’t execute Silverstein, so we have no choice but to make his life a living hell. Otherwise other inmates will kill guards too. There has to be some supreme punishment. Every convict knows what Silverstein is going through. We want them to realize that if they cross the same line that he did, they will pay a heavy price.”

  Matthews had ordered his staff to install two video cameras outside Silverstein’s cell so that he could be watched twenty-four hours a day. The cameras couldn’t operate in the dark, so the fluorescent bulbs in the cell were left on all the time. Matthews also decided to take away Silverstein’s drawing and painting supplies until the bureau had a chance to review his behavior during the Cuban riots. This was the worst punishment that the bureau could inflict on him, because he had considerable artistic talent and was constantly sketching.

  Once a week, Matthews visited Silverstein to see if he had any complaints. Silverstein always asked when he was going to be given drawing materials. But one day in August 1988, he raised a different issue. Silverstein held a piece of paper against the bars and complained, “I can’t read my mail.”

  The Hot House guards were under orders to photocopy all letters sent to Silverstein to make certain they didn’t contain “secret messages from the Aryan Brotherhood.” The copies given to him were so badly reproduced that they weren’t legible.

  “I’ll look into it,” said Matthews, jotting down a note on his ever-present pad.

  “Sure,” Silverstein replied. He didn’t believe him, and after the warden left, Silverstein recited a litany of the ways in which guards were harassing him. “These guys are on a bunch of sick little trips,” he complained. One guard rattled the bars on his cell at night after he fell asleep. Others would dial the number of the telephone located just outside his cell, letting it ring for as long as fifteen minutes at a time.

  “They are trying to drive me crazy,” Silverstein charged. Suddenly he put his finger to his mouth and told me to be completely silent. “Do you hear that?” he asked. “Do you hear the hum? It is the buzz of those damn lights. Everyone knows that one of the ways you torture someone is to keep them locked up with the lights on twenty-four hours a day. That’s what they are doing here.

  “I know what all of this is about,” he continued. “It’s not security, it’s payback time because I killed a guard. It’s nothing but revenge, man.”

  Silverstein was sent to the penitentiary at Marion in 1980 after he was found guilty of killing Danny Atwell in the Hot House. At the time, Marion was an institution in turmoil. Although it was built in 1963 to replace the notorious Alcatraz, it did not actually begin receiving the bureau’s so-called “worst of the worst” inmates until 1979, when it was designated as the system’s only level-six penitentiary. Before that, it had housed younger inmates, and even after it began accepting tougher prisoners, the bureau continued to run it as an open penitentiary, allowing inmates to roam the compound unrestricted. Pooling all the troublemakers in one prison without instituting any special precautions proved to be a fatal mistake.

  “Every warden in the entire system suddenly had an opportunity to get rid of his worst inmates by sending them to us, and that is exactly what they did,” a veteran Marion guard recalled. “I’m not certain that anyone in Washington really understood just how many bad apples we had streaming in here.”

  From the outside, Marion has always looked peaceful. It is built inside a national refuge and is surrounded by pristine lakes, forests, and wildlife. There are no towering cellhouses, no stone walls, only a cluster of low-level, flat-roofed buildings set amid acres of manicured lawns. Except for the guard towers and two chain-link fences with thirteen rolls of razor wire dumped between, the prison might pass for a manufacturing plant.

  But in 1980 inside Marion, there was no such serenity. The guards were steadily losing control. Prison logs would later show that between January 1980 and October 1983, there were more serious disturbances at Marion than at any other prison, including fourteen escape attempts, ten group uprisings, fifty-eight serious inmate-on-inmate assaults, thirty-three attacks on staff, and nine murders. Silverstein proved to be in the thick of things.

  Because Silverstein had been convicted of killing Atwell, he was assigned a cell in the “control unit” when he first arrived. The unit was a self-contained wing of the prison with seventy-two cells, and it was operated much like a small prison inside the larger prison. At the time, it was the only long-term facility in which prisoners were locked in single-man cells all day and allowed out only to shower or to exercise.

  On November 22, 1981, at 7:15 P.M., guards discovered the body of Robert M. Chappelle, a convicted killer and member of the D.C. Blacks prison gang, sprawled under his bed in his locked cell. FBI agents later theorized that Chappelle had been murdered while lying on his bunk, with his head on a pillow propped against the bars of the cell. An autopsy report showed that he had been strangled by a wire slipped around his neck. Based on the bruises, the coroner later testified that two men, each holding one end of the wire, had done the job.

  When FBI agents checked prison records, they found that the only inmates who had been let out of their cells simultaneously on that day to exercise by running up and down the tier were Thomas Silverstein and Clayton Fountain, twenty-eight, another convicted murderer.

  As in the Danny Atwell murder case, federal prosecutors based their case against Silverstein on testimony given by inmate informants who had cut deals with them. But this time, the chief witness was David Owens, a former pal of Silverstein and an actual member of the Aryan Brotherhood. He claimed Silverstein belonged to the three-man commission that ruled the gang in Marion, and he testified that Fountain was an “AB associate” anxious to “earn his bones.” They had killed Chappelle as a favor to the Mexican Mafia, which Owens said was an ally of the AB.

  Silverstein and Fountain both claimed they were innocent, but jurors ruled otherwise and both got additional life sentences for the
murder.

  Chappelle’s death worried some bureau officials, who feared that it might spark a war between the AB and the D.C. Blacks gang. But apparently it did not worry them enough to separate gang members at Marion. In fact, while Silverstein and Fountain were on trial for Chappelle’s murder, the bureau transferred Raymond “Cadillac” Smith, the national leader of the D.C. Blacks prison gang, from another prison into the control unit in Marion and put him in a cell near Silverstein’s. The bureau would later insist it had nowhere else within the entire system secure enough to place Smith, even though guards knew that Chappelle had been a close friend of Smith’s and that Smith had vowed to avenge his death.

  From the moment that Smith arrived in the control unit, prison logs show that he began trying to kill Silverstein. On September 6, 1982, guards opened Smith’s cell electronically so that he could walk down the narrow tier to the shower stall. En route, he stopped in front of Silverstein’s cell, pulled a knife from under his towel, and swung at him through the bars. When guards saw what was happening, they sounded an alarm and ran down the tier, but by the time they reached the two men, the knife had vanished and both lied about what had happened.

  “I told this hack, ‘Hey, we were talking about a football game and he was out there waving his hands around,’ ” Silverstein recalled. “I hated Smith, but I’m no rat and I wasn’t going to tell on him. I was going to take care of it myself.”

  A few days later, guards caught Smith trying to shoot Silverstein with a zip gun, made from a piece of pipe crammed with sulfur match-heads that worked like gunpowder when lit Smith was taken to an isolation cell as punishment, but he was returned to his old cell a week later.

  “I tried to tell Cadillac that I didn’t kill Chappelle, but he didn’t believe me and he bragged that he was going to kill me,” Silverstein recalled. “Everyone knew what was going on and no one did anything to keep us apart. The guards wanted one of us to kill the other.”

  Now it was Silverstein’s turn. At 7:30 P.M. on September 27, he put his plan in action by asking the guards for permission to exercise with his buddy, Clayton Fountain. Both men were let out of their cells and placed inside a screened recreation cage that ran alongside the tier. Ten minutes later, guards opened the door to Cadillac Smith’s cell because it was his turn to walk down the tier and take a shower.

  While Smith was showering, Fountain and Silverstein used a piece of hacksaw blade to cut through the wire screen on the exercise cage, and as Smith stepped out of the shower Fountain slipped through the hole in the screen and ran down the tier, shank in hand. Silverstein crawled out of the cage too and was close behind, although he didn’t have a knife.

  Cadillac Smith had his own knife, hidden under his towel, and as Fountain approached him, he pulled it out and lunged forward, stabbing Fountain in the chest. The impact threw Fountain backward but didn’t kill him. Silverstein tackled Smith, knocking him over, and the two men wrestled for control of Smith’s knife. Back on his feet, Fountain joined the fight, and he and Silverstein quickly overpowered Smith. Both began stabbing him. The guards on duty sounded an alarm, but no one would open the steel gate that separated them from the inmates. They were not going onto the tier as long as Silverstein and Fountain were armed.

  An autopsy would later show that Cadillac Smith had been stabbed sixty-seven times. When Silverstein and Fountain finished, they grabbed his arms and dragged him up and down the tier so that the other inmates, still locked in their cells, could see the bloody corpse. A few white inmates cheered and yelled racial slurs. Then, the two killers surrendered.

  The control unit was supposed to be the most secure cellblock in the bureau, yet Silverstein and Fountain had managed to kill two inmates in a matter of months. These deaths, plus the multitude of problems among inmates in the general population of Marion, prompted bureau officials to wonder if it wasn’t time to begin cracking down. Some within the bureau urged Director Norman Carlson to lock down the institution, which meant that every inmate would be locked in his cell twenty-three hours a day and only released for one hour of exercise. But others, including the warden at Marion, Harold Miller, argued against such harsh restrictions. They pointed out that inmates in the control unit already were locked in their cells all day long, but that it hadn’t stopped Silverstein or Fountain from killing other inmates. Carlson sided with Miller.

  No single incident in the bureau’s history is as controversial as what happened next. Over the years, guards have made Officer Merle Eugene Clutts into a martyr and inmates have done the same with Silverstein. The men locked horns almost from the moment that they met.

  By 1983, Clutts had worked for the bureau for nearly nineteen years, always as a guard at Marion. He had grown up in southern Illinois, had never left the area except for a short stint in the military, and wouldn’t have flinched at being described as a redneck cowboy. At age fifty-one, he had a watermelon belly, white hair cropped short, and the weathered looks of a man used to working outdoors on a farm. He didn’t talk much, preferred the company of the horses he raised on a few acres outside Marion to most people, and didn’t take guff from anyone, whether from an inmate or a fellow guard.

  Part of the reason Clutts was moved into the control unit in 1981 was because he wasn’t afraid of the inmates. Many other guards were. According to a special task force sent in afterward to investigate his death, most inmates in the control unit, including Silverstein and Fountain, lifted weights during the one hour when they were out of their cells. They also exercised in their cells by doing several hours of calisthenics each day, including hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups, until they became so strong that they could “virtually not be physically controlled by staff.” The inmates’ strength and violent backgrounds made many of the guards “reluctant to carry out their duties because of fear of personal liability,” the panel wrote.

  Of all the inmates in the unit, Silverstein was perhaps the most notorious, particularly after he killed Cadillac Smith. Other convicts saw him as a defiant leader, unafraid of guards and the bureau. On the other side was Clutts, one of Marion’s tougher guards.

  Convicted killer John Greschner, another member of the Aryan Brotherhood and Silverstein’s best friend in Marion at the time, had tangled with Clutts before Silverstein arrived at the control unit. “We’d bang heads, back up, and bang heads again, [but] I eventually backed up. I tried to figure out a way to navigate around Clutts. After I backed up, everything was cool; in fact, Clutts even did me some favors. But only after I backed up,” Greschner recalled. “When Tommy and Clutts started bumping heads, I told Tommy ‘You got to back up from this guy or it’ll get way beyond a “cop versus convict thing.” It will get personal.’ And that’s what happened. It got personal—real fast.”

  To this day, Silverstein claims that Clutts set out to break him by harassing him in a dozen petty ways that most guards learn early in their careers. According to Silverstein, Clutts passed him by when it was his turn to be the first to go into the recreation cage. He searched his cell more often than those of other prisoners and left it in a shambles each time. He would hang on to Silverstein’s mail and deliver a big bundle of it all at once after several days. At night, he would shine his flashlight in Silverstein’s eyes during the inmate counts. Worst of all, according to Silverstein, Clutts would intentionally smudge his artwork, later teasing him by saying, “I did a bit of work on your painting.”

  Whether or not Clutts actually did these things is impossible to verify. The bureau denies it, of course, while Greschner and other inmates claim Silverstein is telling the truth.

  “I remember hearing Clutts tell Tommy, ‘Hey, I’m running this shit. You ain’t running it. You’re a fucking prisoner! I’m the cop, who the fuck you think you are?’ ” Greschner recalled.

  What isn’t disputed is that Clutts and Silverstein clearly disliked each other, and regardless of the cause, this dislike turned to a personal hatred—at least on Silverstein’s side.

  “That guy
was torturing me,” Silverstein said. “It was like I was a little kid again walking home from school and that bully [Gary] was picking on me. I’ve always attracted bullies, and I don’t know why, but I hate ’em and I hated Clutts. Everyone knew that Clutts and I had a thing.… Everyone always says how mean and nasty and rotten I am for killing him. They say he was just doing his job, blah, blah, blah—you know, because he put on a badge he’s somehow a saint. But it wasn’t like that. When someone starts to poke at you, after a while nothing matters anymore. All you think about is getting revenge, striking out. With me, it was Clutts.”

  Inside the isolated Marion penitentiary, deeper still within the control unit, the so-called prison within a prison, Silverstein began to fixate on Clutts.

  “From the time I’d hear his voice or see him come to work, I’d be pacing my cell,” Silverstein recalled. “My whole day would be ruined.”

  Silverstein became so frazzled that he couldn’t draw. When other convicts yelled to him, he didn’t answer. At night, he couldn’t sleep. All he could think about was Clutts—and getting revenge.

  “It just kept building and building, and pretty soon, killing him was all I could think about. Every day, every night, every moment that I was awake, I just thought about how much I wanted to kill him. How much I wanted him dead.”

  His fellow prisoners noticed that Silverstein had become obsessed. They couldn’t talk to him without his turning the conversation to Clutts. No matter what happened, if it was something bad, he accused Clutts of being behind it—even when some other guard was involved.

  “I told Tommy, ‘Hey, man, when you kill a cop, you know it’s over. Your life is gone. You got to get some perspective here,’ ” recalled Ronnie Bruscino, a convicted murderer who was in a cell near Silverstein’s at the time. “Twenty years from now, every new guard will still know you are the one who killed a cop, because that’s something the guards never, never forget.”