The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  “Here’s the best,” Peckerhead said a few minutes later, handing Lacy a printed form about four inches long and one inch wide. The words “Medication—Saturdays” were printed at the top of it.

  “Gambling slips,” Lacy explained. “The printed one was done by some shithead known by the nickname Medication. He pays off on Saturdays. Inmates print these slips in the print shop when they’re supposed to be printing government forms.”

  “Wanta bust him?” Peckerhead asked.

  “Naw, but we’ll let him know we found his toys,” Lacy replied, tossing the slips onto the inmate’s locker in plain sight.

  Lacy took a pencil-size screwdriver from his shirt pocket and ran the tip over the metal lip above the cell door. “Never wanna put your fingers anywhere you can’t see when searching,” he explained. Some inmates set booby traps. They tape razor blades along the edge of a doorframe hoping that a guard will run his fingers along the edge. “Never taste anything, either,” he advised. Once a guard found a small packet of white powder, suspected narcotics, and tasted some. It was caustic toilet-bowl cleaner.

  The two inmates who lived in the cell had collected several clear plastic squeeze bottles, each shaped like a bear wearing a pointed dunce hat. They had contained honey and were sold by the prison commissary, but they were empty now.

  “Some shitheads fill these bottles with water and then stick ’em in their dicks,” Lacy said. “They figure they can beat a urine test if they squirt water up into their bladders. That way, they think all they’re gonna pee is water. But it don’t work. They can’t get all traces of the drugs out and we still catch ’em.

  “I hope no one tells the shitheads that, though,” Lacy added. He tossed the bottles into the trash after cutting holes in each with his pocketknife so it couldn’t be used.

  Just then Lacy got a call on his portable radio telling him that a telephone call was being transferred to the shakedown office. Lacy hurried there. An FBI agent in Louisiana wanted information about an inmate who had been paroled from Leavenworth a few weeks earlier and was now a suspect in several bank robberies.

  “That shithead ran with the Georgia Boys in here,” Lacy said, but the agent didn’t understand Lacy’s prison lingo and Lacy had to explain that the Georgia Boys were a prison gang.

  “Let me see what I can find for you,” he told him. Then Lacy headed for a cell in A cellhouse.

  “I got maybe ten minutes before the shithead who lives here gets off work in prison industries and comes back to his cell,” he explained. “He’s a member of the Georgia Boys.”

  Lacy pulled a cardboard box from under the bunk, thumbed through several papers, and spotted an address book. He opened his shirt and slipped the book inside. Searching further, he examined the inmate’s photograph album.

  “Well, my oh my, what do we have here?” he said, removing a five-by-seven-inch picture that showed several inmates standing with their arms on one another’s shoulders. It had been taken in the prison recreation room, where convicts often posed with their buddies for souvenir photographs. “I do believe this one shithead,” Lacy said, pointing to one of the inmates in the picture, “is the bank robber the FBI is looking for.” He slipped the picture inside his shirt next to the address book, shoved the cardboard box back under the bunk, and hurried out of the cell to a copying machine located in the hallway near the lieutenant’s office. By the time he had copied half of the address book, he could hear the noise of convicts filing into center hallway from prison industries. Their workday was over and they were returning to their cells for the four o’clock count. Lacy was running out of time. There was nothing illegal in copying the address book and photograph, he said, but he didn’t want the inmate to know what he was doing. Lacy figured the guy would tip off his bank-robbing pal.

  As soon as the copying machine spewed out the last page, he tucked the book and photograph back into his shirt and walked briskly back to A cellhouse. The Georgia Boy had not yet returned, but other inmates standing on the tier saw Lacy go into the cell and he knew that they would tell its occupant as soon as he entered the cellblock. Lacy returned the address book and photograph to the cardboard box and slid it under the bunk. He bent over the desk in the cell and began rearranging the items on it so the convict would think he had searched the desk, not the box under the bed.

  Lacy stepped from the cell just as the inmate came walking up the tier. They passed without speaking or making eye contact. Neither acknowledged the other’s existence.

  Back in the shakedown office, Lacy read the photocopied pages of the address book and then reached for his telephone. The robbery suspect’s home address wasn’t listed in the book, he told the Louisiana FBI agent, but there was a woman’s name and address and she was identified in parentheses as the bank robbery suspect’s girlfriend. “Find her and you’ll probably find him,” he said, reading off the street address. Lacy also told the agent that he would mail him a copy of the photograph taken from the cell.

  “This is all a big game,” Lacy said as he put down the receiver. “They try to beat us and we try to beat them. Sometimes the shitheads win and sometimes the good guys win.” Looking down at his copy of the address book, Lacy added, “Today, the good guys won.”

  Chapter 29

  WILLIAM SLACK, JR.

  Lieutenant Bill Slack, Jr., didn’t want to be placed in charge of the Cuban units. He liked working as operations lieutenant, and everyone knew that overseeing the Cubans was a thankless and nerve-racking job. Word had also spread through the prison that Warden Matthews had called for an investigation of suspected brutality in the Cuban cellhouse, which made the job even less appealing, particularly to Slack. The last thing he needed was to be linked to a messy brutality case.

  Slack couldn’t prove it, but he was certain that he had been blacklisted by the bureau for the last five years. Slack had advanced quickly when he joined the bureau as a guard in 1971, but the promotions had stopped in 1983, and Slack knew why. It was his father.

  William D. Slack, Sr., had been a lieutenant at the federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C., when black gangs from New York City and Washington clashed in the prison dining room on Christmas Day in 1982. Gregory J. Gunter, a thirty-one-year-old guard, had been trapped between the warring gangs and stabbed to death. Two days later, the senior Slack was responsible for getting the gang members out of their cells and ready to be moved to other prisons. Two guards under his command began manhandling inmates in retaliation for the murder of Gunter. One sprayed tear gas on a shirt and stuffed it into a belligerent inmate’s mouth; another kicked a naked inmate in the chest.

  Over the years, there had always been an understanding that if an inmate attacked a guard, that inmate would later receive “an ass-whipping.” But Bureau Director Norman Carlson didn’t believe in vigilante justice. “If staff used appropriate force, I backed them to the hilt,” he said later, “but if they used it inappropriately and simply thumped inmates, I did the best I could to get them fired and prosecuted. I felt the message had to get out loud and clear that this was not the way we were going to operate.”

  When Carlson heard about the brutality at Petersburg, he asked the FBI to investigate and encouraged the Justice Department to prosecute. Two guards, and Slack as their supervisor, were indicted.

  The senior Slack had worked at the Hot House before moving to Petersburg, and his friends were outraged when they heard that he was going to be tried for permitting what many guards considered had been the proper thing to do. “My God,” a veteran Leavenworth guard recalled, “this wasn’t some case of a guard beating up an inmate on a whim. These bastards had killed a guard, and in the old days they would have been thankful just to get off with having their asses whipped.”

  The fact that Carlson investigated the Petersburg incident so infuriated some old-time guards that one year later, when Silverstein and Fountain murdered Officers Clutts and Hoffman in Marion, they unfairly blamed Carlson for the dea
ths. “Thanks to Carlson, every inmate knew there wasn’t a damn thing we could do if they attacked us,” said one disgruntled veteran. “He made it so the inmates had more rights than we did.”

  A U.S. district court judge found the senior Slack guilty of violating the inmates’ civil rights by taking part in a conspiracy to punish inmates for the murder of Officer Gunter. The judge said Slack also attempted to keep the brutality from being exposed. Slack was sentenced to five years in prison, but all but four months were suspended.

  Bill Slack, Jr., had been devastated by his father’s conviction and prison sentence. “My dad always did everything the bureau asked of him,” he recalled. “The bureau was his life, and then suddenly, because of that one incident, all those years of service and dedication didn’t seem to matter. It didn’t seem fair.”

  When Slack was first indicted, the staff at the Hot House rallied around his family and raised money for his defense. But after he was found guilty, the support waned. Bill Slack wanted to resign, but his father talked him out of it. “My dad told me, ‘This has ruined my life; if it ruins yours, that will hurt me even more,’ so I stayed on.”

  On the day his father was taken to prison, a fellow guard brought Slack a teletype that showed which camp his father had been sent to. “I was furious,” Bill Slack recalled. “I couldn’t believe that my father was an inmate.”

  Slack began looking at convicts at the Hot House differently. “I’d see how an officer treats an inmate and I’d ask myself, ‘If that were my father, would I want him treated that way?’ I began to realize that sometimes there were better ways to solve a problem than by simply sending an inmate to the Hole.”

  Slack soon found himself being passed over for promotions and being viewed by some coworkers with suspicion. At one point, he called a friend in the bureau’s headquarters and asked why the promotions had stopped. The Slack name, he was told, was synonymous with the Petersburg incident. Over the years, other guards had been fired for brutality and a handful had even been prosecuted, but his father was the first lieutenant ever sent to prison for not stopping brutality done in retaliation for the murder of a guard. His father’s case had become an unofficial watershed within the bureau. From that point on, guards knew that brutality was illegal regardless of the provocation. Carlson had made his point, but in the process the Slack name had been permanently linked with misconduct. “No one wanted to risk promoting a Slack,” Bill Slack recalled. “I was a reminder, an embarrassment.”

  Once again Slack thought about quitting, but decided against it. Later, he would jokingly recall that one of his relatives had once boxed an exhibition match in the Boston Garden against heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan to raise money for a charity. “He wasn’t a good enough boxer to tie Sullivan’s shoes,” Slack recalled, “but he considered it an honor to step into that ring and he never did let Sullivan knock him down. He just took the licking and kept coming back for more.” The comparison, Slack decided, fit.

  Born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, Slack had grown up tough. When he was seven, he joined a local gang of white Catholic boys. “In our neighborhood, you either joined a gang or everyone wanted to fight you,” he recalled. He was frequently in fights, and whenever he came home with a black eye, his father marched him into the basement and they put on the gloves. “He’d really lay it on me. ‘I know what you did wrong,’ he’d say, and then pow, he’d hit me with his left,” Slack recalled. “He would really whip me good, but I don’t believe he did it out of anger. He had grown up in the same type of neighborhood, and he didn’t want me to go out there and be a bad-ass, but he knew that if a boy in our neighborhood didn’t defend himself, everyone would pick on him and beat him up, and he didn’t want that for his son.”

  Slack joined the Marine Corps after high school and was sent to Vietnam as a radioman. When he was discharged in October 1970, he returned to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where his father had gone to work as a prison guard. The younger Slack joined the bureau too and discovered that the fact his father was a guard didn’t mean he was treated any better than other new hires. “In those days, no one trusted you until you proved that you weren’t a coward or a snitch,” said Slack. “The older officers used to send you down to ask the captain for a piece of equipment that didn’t exist. After the captain chewed your ass for being so stupid, he’d casually ask, ‘Hey, who put you up to this?’ and if you told, everyone knew you were a rat and couldn’t be trusted.”

  Like most other penitentiaries, Lewisburg had its own version of what is known in the bureau as the “acid test.” Whenever an inmate refused to come out of his cell, the old-timers would make certain that a new guard went through the door first. The older guards would wait for a few minutes before coming to the rescue. They wanted to see how the new guard reacted to violence.

  “There was a sense of brotherhood among the staff, and they didn’t let just anyone into their group because they knew that someday their life might depend on you and they didn’t want anyone behind them who was going to run away or was going to rat on them,” said Slack.

  Slack was finally accepted after he grabbed an inmate who was swinging a knife at another convict. Another guard tackled the convict’s unarmed opponent. But when the operations lieutenant wrote up his report, the guards’ roles were reversed. “The report said this other guy had grabbed the inmate with the knife, not me. He had seven years’ experience and the lieutenant wanted him to get the promotion.” Slack didn’t complain.

  “When new officers come into prison they are given a rule book, but they are really educated by their peers,” said Slack, “and the same is true for inmates. Most hook up with someone and find out the unwritten rules—where to eat in the dining room, who’s a snitch, who they can trust. We are both caught in the same world where there are rules and then there are rules.”

  What Slack tried to do, especially after his father’s conviction, was not to worry about which set of rules to adhere to, but to treat inmates with compassion and common sense.

  “I am almost ashamed to say it in public, but the key to being a good correctional officer is having a caring attitude. Now that sounds to most staff here as being weak and not very macho,” Slack said. “It sounds like you are giving in to the inmates—or at least, that is how the staff interprets it, anyway—but it is not the same at all.

  “Our job is to be professional and get the job done, and the best way to do that is by letting your conscience be your guide, not by always following this regulation or that procedure. If an inmate hasn’t had a change of underwear in two weeks, you should care enough to get him a change of underwear. If he hasn’t had a shower in a week, you should care enough to get him a shower. You shouldn’t have to wait for someone to tell you to do that or have some regulation tell you.”

  Slack’s attitude was not always appreciated by others, particularly those who were sticklers for regulations. Once while escorting an inmate to a federal courthouse for a trial outside Leavenworth, Slack drove through the drive-in lane of a fast-food restaurant and told the prisoner to order whatever he wanted.

  “I told him that I’d treat him to Burger King if he didn’t give us any shit,” Slack explained to the guard with him. But the guard later complained, because bureau regulations only allowed inmates to have something to eat if they were being transported during regular mealtimes and were traveling a specific number of miles outside the prison. When Slack was asked by his superiors why he had bought the inmate lunch, Slack replied, “Because the inmate was hungry.”

  “To you and me, eating at Burger King isn’t a big deal,” Slack said, recalling the incident. “But to a guy who’s been locked up for ten or fifteen years, it’s a real treat. It makes them feel like they are still part of the outside world.”

  Slack also wanted to make a point. “Some U.S. marshals and other lieutenants pull a cheap trick on inmates during these outside trips by telling an inmate that he’ll get fed when he gets to prison. Only when the inm
ate finally gets there, he finds that the kitchen is closed and he’s out a meal. Meanwhile, the marshal pockets the money that he should have spent feeding the inmate. It’s not right, and I want inmates to know I don’t play that game.” Slack’s supervisors decided to forget about the Burger King incident.

  Neither Warden Matthews nor Associate Warden Connor gave Slack a choice about overseeing the Cuban units. Lieutenant Monty Watkins would be his second-in-command. They told Slack that he would take charge of the Cubans on September 20.

  Slack knew that the guards’ morale in the Cuban cellblocks was miserable and that the detainees were more raucous than ever. He didn’t know how much time he would have to familiarize himself with the Cubans and figure out how to improve things. As it turned out, he didn’t get any time. Late in the afternoon that Slack took charge, the Cubans in C cellhouse rioted.

  Chapter 30

  THE CUBANS

  The riot in C cellhouse began shortly after five P.M. as guards served the Cubans their evening meal. Each white Styrofoam container pushed through the cell bars contained a sandwich made of two pieces of white bread with a mixture of chopped ham and mayonnaise inside. There were potato chips and a piece of fruit. One of the Cubans complained about the meal. Another joined him, and soon it seemed as if all 257 Cubans in the cellhouse were screaming and throwing their food out onto the tier. Ham spread, bread, chips, and fruit were splattered against the floor and walls.

  “When they ran out of food to throw, they began throwing feces and urine,” the Hot House’s newly arrived captain, David Ham, explained, “and when they made it so we couldn’t do our job, it was time for a show of force and we moved in.”

  Associate Warden Lee Connor ordered Lieutenant Monty Watkins and his SORT team to go from cell to cell and handcuff every Cuban in the cellhouse. Anyone who refused to cuff up would be chained in a four-point position to a bed. There would be no exceptions, and Watkins was told to ask each inmate only once to comply. SORT began a methodical march through the cellblock. The Cubans had seen SORT back in June when they had first attempted to riot. The team’s actions now didn’t intimidate them—at first. But as the SORT team moved along the tier, the detainees saw the guards were carrying a new piece of equipment—black riot batons. The clubs were three feet long and had a shiny chrome ball the size of a marble attached to their ends. These metal balls had a humane purpose, according to the manufacturer. If a guard jabbed an inmate in the rib cage, the ball would slide off the rib without breaking the bone and would instead tear the intercostal muscle, causing intense pain but no permanent damage. The clubs were something new for the Cubans to think about.