The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  By the time the cab got Scott home, it was Monday morning and he was supposed to report to his parole officer. Scott called an outlaw biker friend to give him a ride, and as they were going downtown, they got into an accident and Scott’s left foot was injured. But he managed to make his first appointment, limping into the parole office. Only then did he hear that Silverstein and Fountain had murdered two guards in Marion and the prison had been locked down.

  “You are going to be under surveillance for a while,” his parole officer warned him. Both the FBI and a special California prison-gang unit had decided to monitor him because of the events at Marion and his membership in the Aryan Brotherhood.

  Back home, Scott began getting collect calls from gang members in various prisons asking about Silverstein, Fountain, and others at Marion. Some callers claimed that guards from Leavenworth’s SORT team were beating inmates. Amid the hubbub, Silverstein himself telephoned Scott.

  “Now Tommy knows that he is being bugged and he knows a lot of people are getting a lot of heat about what he did in Marion,” Scott recalled. “Tommy wants to take the heat off of them, so he is trying to explain that it was an independent act between him and that guard he killed, Clutts. He killed the guy for specific reasons and it wasn’t any gang thing, it was personal, just between the two of them. Well, I can’t just leave this alone, you know. I got to open my big mouth, ’cause I figure they are still going to kill him, so I tell Tommy, ‘Yeah, everybody understands that it was a personal thing between you and Clutts,’ and then I say, ‘And those folks better understand too that you are not suicidal, meaning that if anything happens to you, then it’s not going to be a personal thing anymore. I’m out here in the street where I can move around and you’re my brother, man, you know what I mean?’ As soon as I hung up, I got to thinking, ‘What the hell did I just say?’ I mean, it’s not like I don’t have enough problems of my own.”

  Bureau officials would later cite that telephone call as evidence that Scott intended to seek revenge on behalf of the Aryan Brotherhood for the way inmates were treated at Marion.

  At about this time, an ex-convict whom Scott had met in Folsom State Prison years earlier arrived at Scott’s house looking for a place to stay. He and Scott quickly struck a deal. Since it was now November, the convict, who was in failing health and in his sixties, could sleep on the sofa in return for stealing Christmas presents for Scott’s family. “He was a pretty good booster,” Scott recalled. “I’d drive him to a shopping center and he’d come out every so often with whatever I ordered.”

  One morning, Scott walked into the living room around eleven o’clock and noticed the old man was still lying on the couch even though the room was filled with noisy kids and three women. An argument broke out between two of the women and one of them threw a telephone at the other, but it missed its target and hit the old man in the head. He still didn’t budge. Scott walked over to the couch and checked the old man’s pulse.

  “Hey, this guy’s dead!” Scott announced.

  “He ain’t dead,” Scott’s wife said. “You’re playing a trick.”

  One of the women in the room picked up the man’s arm.

  “Shit! He is dead!” she said.

  Scott asked if anyone had killed him. “Hell no, we didn’t kill him,” one of the women replied.

  “Well,” Scott explained, “if he died of natural causes, all we have to do is call the fire department and tell them to come get the body.”

  No one volunteered to make the call. Meanwhile, one of the women started searching the corpse’s pants looking for money. “This gal is trying to get a ring off this guy’s hand and I couldn’t believe it,” Scott recalled. “I mean, this ring is something out of a bubble-gum machine, that’s how cheap it is, and this nut is going to break his finger to get it off this old coot.”

  “You’re gonna make it look like someone killed him,” Scott complained. “Leave him alone.”

  Scott finally convinced his teenage son to call the fire department.

  The elderly man’s death made Scott even more nervous about the police. Everywhere he went that day, he felt he was being followed. “I couldn’t conduct any business,” he said. Police later claimed that Scott was selling drugs.

  The next morning, Scott and his wife put a suitcase in their truck and headed toward Texas, although he wasn’t supposed to leave Sacramento without first clearing it with his probation officer. “I was just going to disappear.”

  They had gotten as far as Southern California that night, when Scott began spitting up blood and his wife rushed him to the University of California at Irvine Medical Center, where he registered under an assumed name. He was given a blood transfusion and listed in critical condition for six days. A blood vessel that led to the liver had burst, causing the internal bleeding. When doctors opened up Scott to repair it, they found that he had chronic hepatitis caused by severe cirrhosis of the liver. At best, they told him, he had ten years to live.

  As soon as he could walk, he slipped out of the hospital without paying and continued with his wife to Texas. He checked into a motel in a Dallas suburb, where he later said he had gone to be closer to his relatives. A few days later police burst through his motel door with their weapons drawn. Scott had a pistol, but he didn’t reach for it. The bureau later claimed that Scott had driven to Dallas to kill Jim Graham, who worked at a prison camp just outside the city. Graham was the lieutenant who had been in charge of Leavenworth’s SORT team just before it was sent to Marion to quell the trouble there. The bureau claimed that the AB had put out a contract on Graham because of the way the SORT team had acted in Marion.

  “There was no murder plot,” said Scott. “All of it was a bunch of nonsense.” The bureau had no proof that he had been plotting to kill Graham, but Scott had violated his parole by leaving Sacramento without permission, and that was sufficient grounds to have his parole revoked. He was sent back to Marion.

  Scott saw a certain irony to his story. “I can walk into any prison in this country, any prison, and know immediately what’s happening. I can deal with this crazy prison environment, with the so-called worst of the worst convicts in Marion and the so-called prison predators and all that baloney,” he explained. “But in the outside world, I’m always getting tripped up. Every time I mess with a Square John, I end up getting fucked because you people have no concept of jailhouse respect and absolutely no honor.

  “Take that woman in Dallas at the airport. In prison, she wouldn’t have dared talk to me like she did, because I would have grabbed her by the neck and demanded a price for such shitty treatment. But I knew I couldn’t do that in your world. You just can’t go around out there and grab every fool by the neck when they do something stupid.

  “You see,” he continued, “in here, I know how to play all the games and play them well, but out on the streets, the deck always seems to be stacked against me.”

  A few weeks later, Scott was taken from the Leavenworth Hole to Marion.

  Chapter 26

  THE CUBANS

  Lieutenant Torres Germany had eased off his investigation of brutality in the Cuban units after Shoats’s death. The guards in the units had closed ranks and Germany’s probe had hit a dead end. But when he arrived at work one morning in the summer of 1988, Germany found a counselor from the Cuban units waiting to speak to him. Besides a case manager, each inmate, including the Cubans, had a specific counselor assigned to him when he first entered the Hot House. It was his job to help the inmate with any personal problems that might arise. The counselor claimed that Cubans in C cellhouse were being physically abused by guards. Germany handed him a legal pad and pen, and asked him to write down every incident of abuse that he knew about. Without hesitating, the counselor began scribbling and had soon filled up several pages. He not only wrote down incidents that he had personally seen, but also stories that he had heard. Among his most serious charges were that Lieutenant Shoats had hit Cuban inmates while they were in handcuffs, an
d that other guards had chained inmates onto mattresses soaked with feces and urine, dragged handcuffed inmates from their cells, and denied Cuban prisoners food. Guards had even planted knives in some of the Cubans’ cells, he charged.

  When the counselor finished writing his statement, Germany interrogated him, and the counselor admitted that he had personally despised Shoats. “I was glad when I heard Shoats had been killed,” the counselor said. “It was one of the happiest days in my life.”

  Germany took the counselor’s statement to the warden’s office. Matthews didn’t believe a single one of the accusations. “I felt they simply weren’t true, because I had been in that cellhouse too many times to have missed all these things,” Matthews explained later. “You must remember, I talked to Cuban prisoners once a week during my rounds and none of them had ever complained about the sort of charges that were being made. Not one single complaint.”

  Even so, Matthews notified the bureau’s Office of Inspections in Washington, D.C., the equivalent of a police department’s internal-affairs office, and asked that they send an investigative team to Leavenworth.

  Calling in a group of outsiders to investigate the Cuban units was not going to help Matthews’s already sagging popularity with the Hot House guards. But the warden wasn’t about to have his career ruined or the bureau embarrassed by ignoring the counselor, only to discover too late that he had leaked his charges to the media or notified some congressional subcommittee. Besides, Matthews said, if any of the accusations did turn out to be true, he wanted the guards caught and punished.

  Besides notifying the Office of Inspections, Matthews decided to change the leadership inside the Cuban units. As Matthews looked at his list of lieutenants, he focused on one name—Lieutenant William “Bill” Slack, Jr., the operations lieutenant.

  “What I liked most about Slack was his maturity,” Matthews said later. “He had lots of experience and he was low-key and patient, yet he was tough enough to get the job done.”

  Matthews knew, however, that putting Slack in charge of the Cubans was going to make some bureau officials nervous. No one had ever said anything publicly to Matthews, but the bureau was still a small enough agency for most employees to know or know of one another, and nearly everyone in the bureau understood that the name Slack had a dark cloud hanging over it.

  Warden Matthews didn’t like to take chances, but he wanted the best man for the job, and that was Slack. He buzzed his secretary and told her to ask Associate Warden for Custody Lee Connor to come to the warden’s office. Matthews had two announcements: an investigative team was coming in to probe the counselor’s charges of brutality and Lieutenant Bill Slack was being put in charge of the Cubans.

  As he waited for Connor, Matthews hoped he was making the right choices.

  Chapter 27

  THE LIEUTENANT’S OFFICE

  Thomas Little was about to take a bite of his lunch when Carl Bowles nudged him with his elbow and nodded toward a white convict walking past their table in the prison dining room. The inmate lived on the same tier as Little and Bowles.

  “He’s got a shank,” whispered Bowles. “Gonna be a sticking.”

  The white inmate was carrying a towel over his right hand, as if he were a waiter, as he walked past the tables in the white section of the dining room and moved toward the serving line by the entrance. Little suddenly understood what was happening.

  The night before, the white inmate had gotten into a fistfight with a black convict a few cells down from the cell in A cellhouse that Little and Bowles shared. Everyone but the guards at the end of the tier, who were busy talking, had heard the scuffle, and as soon as the other convicts saw that a black and white were fighting, the inmates on the tier automatically segregated themselves. A dozen whites stood in one corner and a similar number of blacks formed a group across from them. It was an instinctive move. Neither race was going to allow the other to step into the fray.

  The fistfight had not been an even match. The more skillful black quickly got the better of his opponent. At one point, he held the white convict in a headlock and the watching blacks began to laugh as the white inmate threw wild punches and gasped for air. When he finally broke free, he stumbled away.

  “C’mon, white boy,” the black inmate jeered, dancing before him with raised fists.

  “Fuck this, I’m gonna kill you, motherfucker,” the white inmate replied. He headed down the tier, apparently in search of a knife.

  Darting into a nearby laundry room, the black snapped off the metal handle from a mop wringer and then returned to the tier. He dropped the weapon inside a trash can and stood next to it with his arms folded across his chest, waiting for the white inmate to return. Bowles and Little had watched the fistfight, as had Norman Bucklew, and each of them had expected to see a stabbing. But the white inmate didn’t return, and his opponent eventually went to his cell for the ten o’clock lock-down.

  The next morning, several whites confronted the white inmate and demanded to know what he intended to do. He had embarrassed all of them by fighting so poorly and then disappearing. Now, as he walked across the dining hall, Little realized that the inmate was about to show everyone that he was not scared.

  Prison officials were so busy standing mainline that they didn’t notice the white inmate as he moved within a few yards of them. His target, facing the other way, hadn’t noticed his approach either. He was standing in line talking to a friend when the white inmate suddenly dropped the towel, revealing a seventeen-inch knife. He lunged forward, driving the knife directly into the center of the black man’s back. He had tried to sever his victim’s spinal cord, but the long blade slid off the backbone and thrust all the way through the man’s body, poking through the front of his white shirt. He gasped and fell forward. The white convict pulled out the bloody knife and started to swing again. But Jacob Tyler, a guard who had only worked for the bureau for six months, tackled the knife-wielding convict, knocking him to the floor. Other guards quickly overpowered him.

  “You got me, you got me!” he yelled as he was being handcuffed and jerked to his feet. Other guards were standing over the black inmate, who lay clutching his chest. Blood poured from the wound.

  “We have to live with these black motherfuckers, but we don’t have to take their shit!” the white convict yelled as he was being led from the room. “I’m feeling fine! Why don’t you ask that fucking nigger how he feels?”

  Little turned back to his salad, Bowles took a drink of coffee, and prison officials resumed standing mainline. Over the years, the bureau had learned that it was better to continue on as if nothing had happened after such incidents rather than send everyone to their cells. None of the convicts who watched the stabbing had taken part in it; therefore locking them up would seem unjust punishment to them and only spark more violence. The attack would be handled through the normal procedures. No special searches for weapons would be done.

  Within ten minutes of the stabbing, orderlies had mopped the blood off the floor and everything in the mess hall was back to normal.

  PART THREE

  The first year, a guard can’t do enough for an inmate. The second year, a guard can’t do enough to a convict.

  AN OLD PRISON SAYING

  Chapter 28

  THE LIEUTENANT’S OFFICE

  “Let’s do it, gentlemen,” Steve Lacy, the head of the Hot House’s shakedown crew, said as he opened the door to a cell in B cellhouse and led two of his men inside. Two inmates lived in the cell, but only one was there, asleep in the bottom bunk.

  “Shakedown,” Lacy announced.

  “Oh man,” the inmate grumbled, still groggy. “Why you always picking on us? We ain’t got nothin’.”

  “Take a walk,” Lacy ordered.

  The inmate got out of bed, slipped on some pants, and shuffled outside.

  Lacy and his crew, two guards whom he had nicknamed Foreskin and Peckerhead, began searching under the bunk bed, looking through books on the cell’s only s
helf, peering underneath the sink and behind the mirror. It was their job to search cells at random every day for contraband.

  “They don’t allow these in here anymore,” said Foreskin, who had discovered several photographs of a woman clad only in panties in one of the inmate’s photo albums. He slipped one of the pictures from its plastic cover.

  “Hey, check this out,” he said, holding up the photograph.

  Lacy and Peckerhead glanced at the snapshot, which showed a woman with her hands cupped under her breasts.

  “ ‘My tits miss your lips!’ Honest to God, that’s what she’s written on the back,” Foreskin said.

  “Must be his girlfriend,” said Peckerhead.

  “Yeah,” quipped Foreskin, “his wife’s probably the fat broad with clothes on in these other pictures.” The two guards laughed.

  “The bureau doesn’t allow naked pictures like that anymore,” Foreskin repeated, “but since he got them before the rule change, we won’t take them.”

  “Here’s something,” Peckerhead said, tossing Lacy a playing card with numbers written on the edge. “Got another,” he added, this time producing a matchbook with numbers written inside.