The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  Greschner said he, too, tried to discourage Silverstein. “If you do a cop, you are going to go on Birdman status,” he told him, a reference to the Birdman of Alcatraz, who killed a Leavenworth guard and was never released from prison.

  But by this time it had reached the point where nothing else mattered to Silverstein except striking out at Clutts. “I knew that I had to do it. I had to kill him.”

  Sometime in early October, Clutts removed the mattress in Silverstein’s cell and replaced it with another one. It is not clear why the mattresses were switched, but Silverstein saw the change as yet another attempt to torture him. Silverstein began plotting a way to kill the guard, and he found plenty of help in carrying out his plan.

  After Cadillac Smith was murdered, the bureau decided to handcuff prisoners in the control unit whenever they were taken out of their cells. The inmates would then be escorted by three guards to the shower stall or recreation cage.

  The obvious time for Silverstein to attack Clutts was when guards released him from his cell. But he still would have to get out of the handcuffs, find a knife, and make certain that Clutts was trapped on the tier, or else Clutts would simply run off the tier to safety. Whispering to other convicts through the air vents in the back of their cells, Silverstein and his fellow gang members came up with a plan.

  On Saturday, October 22, at 8:40 A.M., guards took John Campbell, a reputed member of the Aryan Brotherhood, outside the control unit so he could exercise out-of-doors. A few minutes later, Campbell complained that he was cold and wanted to exercise in the inside cage that ran parallel to the tier. Guards moved him back indoors. From his cell, Silverstein shot Campbell a knowing smile. Step one of the murder plan had been accomplished.

  At 9:30, Silverstein was ordered to cuff up so that he could be escorted to the stall for his weekly shower. He stuck out his hands without protest and a pair of handcuffs was snapped over his wrists. He was frisked as he stepped from his cell, no weapons were found, and three guards took him to the shower. As Silverstein walked down the tier, he continued to smile. Step two was going as planned.

  Forty minutes later, Silverstein finished his shower. He had been hyped up, nervous, but like most other inmates in the unit he had always taken lengthy showers and he had kept to his routine today to avoid suspicion. Still wet, he called to the guards and was secretly pleased when he saw three of them coming down the tier to open the locked shower door and escort him back to his cell. Clutts was one of the three. The third step had been accomplished.

  Silverstein put out his hands to be handcuffed, and turned to walk down the tier. Officers William McClellan and John Mahan were on either side of him. Clutts would follow behind Silverstein. But as the four men began to walk down the tier, they heard a voice.

  “Hey, Clutts, I need to talk to you.” It was John Campbell, the gang member in the indoor exercise cage.

  Clutts turned and walked to the rear of the tier. Without knowing it, he had just completed step four of Silverstein’s plan. Clutts had been drawn away from the other two guards and was now standing at the end of the tier, as far away as possible from the exit and steel gate that separated the tier from the guards’ office.

  As Officers McClellan and Mahan escorted Silverstein back to his cell, he stopped to chat with Randy Gometz, another gang member. Allowing Silverstein to stop at Gometz’s cell was against bureau regulations, but these encounters had become common practice in the control unit because guards were afraid to tell the inmates that they couldn’t stop to visit.

  In a flash, Gometz reached through the bars and used a key to unlock Silverstein’s handcuffs. Then he lifted his shirt and Silverstein grabbed a shank tucked in the waistband of Gometz’s pants. Step five.

  “Look out! He’s got a knife!” McClellan yelled as Silverstein spun around.

  “This is between me and Clutts!” Silverstein screamed, and shot past the two guards.

  “Clutts saw me coming and he froze for a second,” Silverstein said. “He knew I had him cornered.”

  Clutts raised his arms to protect himself, but Silverstein’s knife jammed deep into his belly.

  “I just went off,” Silverstein later recalled. “I just started stabbing him over and over and over again. Clutts tried to hit me, but I didn’t even feel it. I’m not hearing nothing. I’m not feeling nothing. I don’t know what is going on around me. All I know is that I got a knife and I am jabbing it as fast as I can into Clutts. All I see is his hands moving and me stabbing him and everything else is blank.”

  Despite his wounds Clutts managed to push Silverstein to one side during the attack, and struggled down the tier. Officer McClellan hurried forward, grabbed him, and helped him toward the steel gate at the front of the tier where they would be safe. Just as they were about to go through it, Silverstein caught up with them, grabbed Clutts’s shoulder, jerked him down onto the floor, and began punching him again with the knife.

  Officer Mahan, who was standing on the other side of the gate, reached through the bars and smashed a nightstick against Silverstein’s head. Silverstein staggered back, and McClellan and Mahan pulled Clutts off the tier and slammed the steel gate shut. Clutts’s chest was covered with blood. He had been stabbed forty times.

  “This ain’t against cops!” Silverstein yelled, the knife still in his hand.

  “Drop the shank,” ordered a lieutenant who had just arrived at the cellblock.

  Silverstein refused. “I honestly believed that they were going to kill me, and I was not going to give up without a fight.”

  For several minutes the lieutenant talked to Silverstein, finally convincing him to put down the shank and lock himself in his cell.

  “I felt that a huge weight had been lifted off me,” said Silverstein. “I was so happy Clutts was finally dead.”

  Unpardonable though the killing of a guard was, at this point Clutts’s murder remained an isolated incident, but that quickly changed. Prison officials decided against sweeping the entire control unit for weapons. Instead, they moved Silverstein into an isolation cell and decided to continue operating the control unit as usual.

  Eight hours later, Officers Robert L. Hoffman, Sr., Jerry L. Powles, and Roger D. Ditterline were taking Silverstein’s friend, Clayton Fountain, back to his cell from the recreation cage when Fountain stopped to talk to another inmate, who repeated the earlier process by unlocking Fountain’s handcuffs and giving him a shank.

  Fountain spun around and yelled, “You mother-fuckers want a piece of this? Come on!”

  He then attacked all three guards, stabbing Ditterline first. Powles was second in line. Fountain knocked him to the floor. In a courageous act, Hoffman helped Ditterline off the tier and then went back inside, unarmed, to rescue Powles. Hoffman grabbed his fellow officer and began pulling him to safety as Fountain continued to stab both of them. As soon as the two guards were on the other side of the steel gate, out of Fountain’s reach, Hoffman collapsed. He died a few minutes later in the arms of his son, who also worked as a guard at the prison. Because of Hoffman’s valor, Ditterline and Powles both survived. Fountain, meanwhile, danced up and down the tier. He later was overheard telling other inmates that he wasn’t going to let Silverstein get ahead when it came to “dead bodies.”

  Never in the history of the bureau had two guards been slain on the same day in the same prison. Director Carlson was outraged. “The murder of an officer can never be justified,” he recalled. “Even if Clutts was harassing Silverstein, and I don’t believe that he was and there was never any proof that he was, that still didn’t give Silverstein the right to murder him.”

  Marion was clearly slipping further out of control.

  Even though the murders had taken place in the control unit, Warden Miller ordered inmates throughout the prison locked in their cells until further notice. Then, two days later, he lifted the order. He still believed that Marion could be operated as an open institution. Within a few days, an inmate was murdered, this time in the gener
al prison population, and four inmates attacked a group of guards. Miller declared a state of emergency, every prisoner was locked in his cell, and Leavenworth’s SORT team was sent to Marion to help restore order.

  John Greschner, Ronnie Bruscino, and other inmates at Marion would later claim in a class-action lawsuit filed against the bureau that Marion’s guards and the SORT team from the Hot House beat and tortured them in retaliation for the murders of Clutts and Hoffman. After listening to testimony from ninety witnesses and reviewing 150 pieces of evidence during twenty-eight days of trial, a federal magistrate would later conclude that there was “no credible evidence” to prove inmates had been abused. “This is not to say that there may not have been isolated incidents of excessive force,” Magistrate Kenneth J. Meyers wrote, but given the circumstances at Marion after the murders, “an extra push or shove would be understandable.” He noted that guards were being attacked, doused with feces and urine, fires were being set by inmates, cells were being destroyed, and officers were being told that they would be killed. The magistrate also specifically criticized Greschner and Bruscino, whom he described as “not credible witnesses.” He wrote: “This litigation was conceived by a small group of hard-core inmates who are bent on the disruption of the prison system.…”

  Carlson decided that Marion would remain permanently locked down after the guards and SORT teams restored order. He was not going to let the prison slip out of control again. Inmates remained confined in their cells twenty-three hours per day. Fountain was sent to a prison in Springfield, Missouri. Silverstein went to Atlanta. Both were put under “no human contact.”

  Five years after the murder, as he sat in the basement of the Hot House recalling how he had stabbed Clutts, Silverstein said that he still thinks about the guard every day. “Even when I dream, Clutts is there. I thought killing him would put an end to it,” Silverstein explained, “but it hasn’t. He still haunts me. I think about him a lot and I hate him because of what he made me do. He is responsible for me being locked like a wild animal in this cage. He made me give up my life. I didn’t know until after I killed him that there are a thousand Cluttses out there and all of them have a stick and all of them want to poke it at me.”

  Silverstein refused to sleep on a mattress at Leavenworth, he said, because it had been his anger over the mattress that Clutts took from him in Marion that had finally driven him to kill the guard.

  Upstairs in the warden’s office at the Hot House, a few hours after I finished talking to Silverstein, I watched as Robert Matthews pulled his notepad from his coat pocket during his regular four P.M. meeting with his executive staff and told them that Silverstein’s mail was being poorly copied.

  “He is the only special inmate we have here and I don’t want him sending copies of his letters to some judge or court and getting us in trouble,” Matthews said. “Regardless of what he has done, we must accommodate him.”

  The next day, Silverstein’s mail arrived on time and he was able to read each photocopy.

  Chapter 25

  DALLAS SCOTT

  Within sixty days after his arrest on drug-smuggling charges, Dallas Scott was taken before the disciplinary-hearing officer at the Hot House. It was the officer’s job to decide whether Scott had violated any bureau regulations and, if so, to dispense punishment. Scott arrived with his hands handcuffed behind him. The hearing lasted less than five minutes.

  “You are accused of attempting to smuggle heroin into a penal institution,” the officer explained. “How do you plead?”

  “Not guilty,” said Scott. “I don’t know nothing about any heroin.”

  The officer quietly read some papers in front of him and then announced, “I find you guilty.”

  “Based on what?” Scott asked.

  “Statements from people who know you did it,” the officer said.

  “Can I see them?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think it would be in the best interest of the people involved, the confidential informants who have given statements about what you did.”

  “Shit, you don’t have no evidence against me,” Scott declared. “This is a bum beef. You can’t prove anything.”

  “If you don’t have anything further to say,” the hearing officer replied, “then I will pronounce sentence.”

  Scott laughed.

  He was sentenced to 65 days in the Hole, stripped of 485 “good days” that had been previously deducted from his prison sentence because of good behavior, and was told that he would be transferred to Marion.

  Scott hated the transfer the most. “I’m not sniveling,” he said later. “I’ll do my time anywhere these bastards put me, but I’d hoped to stay in Leavenworth.”

  A few hours after the hearing, Scott sat in the Hole and talked about the last time he had been in Marion. He was paroled from the prison in October 1983—the day before Silverstein and Fountain murdered Officers Clutts and Hoffman. Scott was a friend of Silverstein, Fountain, Greschner, Gometz, and Bruscino. As a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, he would have been in the middle of the trouble between the inmates and guards that followed the murders if he hadn’t been released the day before. As it turned out, after a series of farcical mishaps Scott got dragged into the Marion mess anyway.

  The bureau gave Scott a one-way airplane ticket to Sacramento and $150 in cash on the Friday afternoon he was released. He didn’t get far, however, before he was in trouble. It started innocently enough when Scott’s flight made a layover stop at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. “I got a brother, sister, and brother-in-law there I hadn’t seen in years, so I gave them a call.” He had such a good time visiting with them that he decided to spend Friday night in Dallas and resume his trip the next morning, but when he showed up at the American Airlines ticket counter on Saturday, he was told his original ticket wasn’t any good. He had spent too much time in Dallas.

  “I started getting real vocal and loud,” Scott recalled. “Customers are starting to gather around and I figured the agent will give me a ticket to shut me up, but she didn’t back down an inch.”

  Scott’s brother-in-law, standing next to him, was embarrassed and he offered to buy Scott a new ticket. On his way to the gate, Scott stopped to telephone his wife in Sacramento so she’d know he was on his way.

  “I finish the call and hustle to the gate and there are two guys in American Airlines blazers standing by the door watching me, and when I get about ten feet away, they shut the door in my face. I said, ‘Boy, am I glad to get on this plane,’ and this guy says, ‘We are through boarding, sir.’ I can’t believe it, but these sons of bitches won’t let me pass. Now, I’m wondering, ‘What the hell is it with these people?’ I think maybe that bitch at the counter told them to shut the door in my face.”

  Irritated, Scott walked back to the public telephones and called his house to tell his wife that he’d missed the flight. Then he returned to the ticket counter and squared off with the same agent with whom he had argued before. Once again, they exchanged angry words, but the agent booked Scott for a later flight. Scott called home with the new flight information and then wandered into an airport lounge, swallowed a few drinks, and lost track of time. When he realized his flight was about to leave, he dashed to the same gate where he had been earlier and slipped onto the airplane. As he was fastening his seat belt, he heard the crew announce that the airplane was bound for Atlanta, Georgia. As the passengers laughed, he rushed down the aisle and off the airplane. Scott had not flown much and had incorrectly assumed that all flights for Sacramento left from the same gate. Again, he found himself across from the ticket agent.

  “I’ve been out of prison for less than forty-eight hours, and I’ll admit I was paranoid, but by this time, I’m convinced this bitch is screwing with me,” Scott said. “I figure she’d changed that gate on purpose. I am angry. I mean, I got steam coming out of my ears.”

  Scott unleashed a string of profanity that only ended when the ag
ent gave him another new ticket. He marched to a pay telephone and called his house. Thomas Silverstein’s girlfriend, who happened to be staying with Scott’s wife at the time, answered, but before he could give her his new flight information, Scott felt a tap on his shoulder.

  “I turn around and see this little bitty guy in a seersucker suit,” Scott recalled. “I look at him—and he comes to my shoulders—and he tells me to hang up the telephone. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Scott demanded.

  “Airport security,” the man replied, pulling a badge from his pocket.

  “Hey, look, pal,” Scott said, jabbing the air with a finger in front of the man’s face, “the best thing that you can do right now is get the fuck away from me. I’ve just about had it with you fools!”

  Scott turned around. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on here,” he said in the telephone, but before he could finish the sentence, the security guard grabbed the receiver and tried to take it away. Scott backhanded the guard, knocking him across the corridor.

  “Get the fuck away from me!” Scott yelled.

  Four other security guards who had been standing by jumped Scott, and the fight was on. It wasn’t until two Dallas policemen arrived that he was finally subdued.

  “I called my sister from jail, and by this time I am so embarrassed. It’s like I’m forty-some years old and I’m thinking, my brother and sister got to be wondering, ‘God, we leave this guy by himself for one half hour and he is in jail again!’ I figure they’re thinking I’m some sort of nut.”

  Scott’s sister pleaded with police to release Scott, and after she paid his fine, he was escorted to the airport and accompanied by two security guards on the Sunday afternoon flight to Sacramento.

  Meanwhile, Scott’s wife had not gotten word that her husband was spending Saturday night in a Dallas jail, so she had been waiting all night at the airport. When Scott disembarked, he discovered that she had taken a number of amphetamines to stay awake and was in no condition to drive. Even so, they drove off from the airport, and soon were hopelessly lost. “We musta made seven hundred U-turns and I’m a nervous wreck. Cars are zipping by and I am holding on the dash for dear life.” That was when he first saw the police car. He told his wife to slow down. “I can’t believe what she does. She decides we’re going the wrong way and makes a U-turn right in front of this cop. She damn near hits him. I think, ‘Shit, I haven’t even made it home yet and I’m about to get arrested for the second time!’ ” The police pulled them over, but Scott managed to talk his way out of the mess and they were both released on the condition that they take a taxi home and leave their truck by the freeway.