The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  By the time the SORT team had put six Cubans into the four-point position, the cellhouse began to quiet down. By midnight, Cuban orderlies had cleaned the tiers, and the only sign that there had been trouble was the fact that six inmates were still chained to their beds.

  Lieutenant Bill Slack had watched the disturbance, but it had been Connor who had called the shots. The next morning, Warden Matthews toured the cellblock with Slack and told the lieutenant he could have all the manpower and whatever extra supplies that he needed to keep the Cubans under control. Matthews was as determined as he had been when the Cubans first arrived to make certain they did not riot. After Matthews left, Slack went on another tour of his own. With an interpreter at his side, Slack stopped at each cell, introduced himself as the new lieutenant in charge, and then, as his guards watched in amazement, asked the Cubans for their help.

  “I need you to be patient and give me a chance to improve things,” Slack said. “You got to give me some time. You got to realize if you as an individual or a member of a group set fire or tear this place up, then our money and time will go toward repairs rather than increasing things I want to do for you.”

  No other lieutenant had ever introduced himself to the Cubans or asked for their cooperation. Most of the Cubans didn’t respond, but a few demanded to know what Slack planned to do for them.

  “Better food and more of it,” Slack told two Cubans in one cell. “I got some ideas about televisions too, but I can’t do any of it if you don’t give me some time.” And then Slack said something that both his own guards and the Cubans found astounding.

  “You got to trust me,” he told the Cubans. “I’ll never lie to you. My word is good, and I expect you to keep your word, too.”

  Several hours later, after he finished talking to every Cuban in the cellhouse Slack left for a meeting with Connor. “We got to have a special meal tonight for the Cubans,” he explained. “I gave them my word.” Slack had been forced to take the Cuban-unit job. He had been promised whatever manpower and money he needed to keep the Cubans in line. But he didn’t want more guards or more money. He wanted better food, and by personally promising the Cubans that they would get better food, Slack had put his bosses—as they say in prison—“on front street.” If Matthews and Connor wanted Slack to succeed, it was up to them to cajole the food administrator into bettering his performance. When the guards delivered the evening meal that night, it arrived in the same Styrofoam containers as always, but when the Cubans opened them, they found two sandwiches, crackers, a candy bar, a piece of chicken, and an apple. There was nearly twice as much to eat as the meal served the day before, and all of it was fresh. The next morning, Slack once again went by each cell personally and asked about the meal. “I kept my word,” he told each Cuban. “Now you keep yours. I need more time. You need to be patient and things will get better.” In a single day, Bill Slack managed to accomplish what no other lieutenant had been able to do during the entire ten months that the Cubans had been at the Hot House. He got the detainees to cooperate with him. While there would be isolated incidents during the next few weeks, there were no group demonstrations and for the first time the mood within C cellhouse began to improve. The Cubans couldn’t quite figure out Slack, and neither could many of the guards.

  Slack knew that one meal wasn’t going to appease the Cubans for long or make them trust him. He had to move quickly or his negotiated truce would collapse. He continued to push for better food. “If all a guy has to look forward to every day is a meal,” Slack explained, “he gets really upset when it is not good or it’s not served on time.” Slack did some checking and discovered that the Cubans were generally fed meals made from whatever food was left over from the meals served the main prison population. If the American convicts ate hamburgers on Wednesday, the Cubans got meat loaf on Thursday. Slack also discovered that most of the meals were served late, and that when the Cubans did get food prepared especially for them, it was generally something the American prisoners would have refused. An example: sauerkraut, a dish that few Cubans had tasted and fewer ate. Slack began to complain—a move that outraged the food administrator. But Slack didn’t care. He pressured his bosses for better food and he got it. For the next several weeks, Slack personally tasted each meal, and he called the kitchen every day, half an hour before it was time for the Cubans to be fed, just to make certain that everything was on schedule. Only once did Slack catch the kitchen trying to serve the Cubans a meal that didn’t meet his standards. Slack rejected it and Connor and Matthews backed him up.

  Once the food situation was improved, Slack turned his attention to finding ways to keep the Cubans busy. He asked Matthews for permission to buy several color televisions. The cellhouse already had a few television sets, but they were in the recreation cages where the Cubans were allowed one hour of exercise per day. Most of them never got to watch television for a full hour, because they were being moved to and from their cells during that period. The hour limit also made it impossible for them to watch a complete movie or sports program. Slack suggested that additional television sets be purchased and mounted on the cellhouse walls in strategic positions so that the Cubans could watch them from their cells. He asked for money to buy several video players so he could show Spanish-language movies rather than English ones. Matthews approved the requests.

  Next Slack turned his attention to personal telephone calls. An inmate never knew when he would be able to make his once-a-month telephone call, because he couldn’t be certain when a telephone would be brought to his cell. It depended on how busy the guards were and how many other inmates were waiting. When the inmate finally got the phone, he was given time to dial only one number. If no one answered, he was out of luck. Slack set up a schedule and kept a list of inmates whose calls didn’t get through, so that they could place a second call.

  What Slack was doing was not extraordinary. Improving the meals, buying televisions, making certain each inmate got a telephone call were simple ideas. Still, no one before him had tried them. He came up with the changes, he said, by simply putting himself in the Cubans’ shoes. “If I were a detainee, I’d be pissed off too,” Slack said. “Some of these men have been locked up for eight or nine years for small things they did in Miami and they are caught in a bunch of red tape and politics.” This didn’t mean that the detainees weren’t dangerous. Slack considered the Cuban units to be the most threatening cellblocks in the prison for guards. But in one sense, what the Cubans had done on the streets, and whether or not they rioted in Oakdale and Atlanta, didn’t matter. “The bottom line is that if you treat these men like animals, they will definitely act like animals and we will all pay the price. If you treat them like men, maybe, just maybe, they will respond like men.”

  Slack soon discovered that Cubans in C cellhouse were telling Cubans in D cellhouse about him, but he wasn’t certain how, because detainees were prohibited from corresponding with one another. He found out that the Cubans were beating the prohibition by putting a fictitious address on the envelope and writing the name of the person that they actually wanted the letter sent to in the space reserved for the return address. When the post office returned the letter to Leavenworth marked ADDRESS UNKNOWN, it was automatically delivered to the Cuban in D cellhouse.

  Slack began improving working conditions for the guards too. Some had been inside the Cuban units ever since the detainees arrived. This included several who had worked for Shoats and who were now under suspicion of brutality. Slack suggested that one third of the guard force be replaced immediately, another third be moved out in three months, and the final third in six months. He suggested that no guard be allowed to work longer than one year in the Cuban units, including himself. “This is simply too intense and stressful.”

  After a few weeks, Slack made his most controversial decision. In the past, the Cubans had been placed in cells at random. No one had ever asked or cared whether they liked their cellmates. Each day as Slack walked the tiers, Cubans as
ked him for permission to move to different cells. Many of the Cubans were homosexuals, and Slack knew that some of the men were interested in changing cells because they wanted to be with their lovers. Others wanted to move in with their cousins, brothers, and friends. Slack decided to allow the Cubans to pick their own cellmates, but he required them to maintain several weeks of good conduct before he agreed to any changes and he then made both men promise that they would not fight if he put them together. Slack’s decision to allow Cubans who were flagrant homosexuals to cell together outraged some guards. Behind his back, they called him a weak sister, and accused him of ignoring the bureau’s regulations against homosexuality. Slack claimed he was being pragmatic, simply trying to make the Cubans understand that they were responsible for how they would be treated. If a Cuban followed the rules, he got extra privileges. If he didn’t, he got nothing special.

  An incident on September 24, four days after Slack took charge, dramatized the new attitude that Slack brought to C cellhouse. A guard asked him for permission to chain a Cuban to his bed because the detainee had refused a direct order. Slack decided to investigate. According to the guard, the Cuban had refused to cuff up and leave his cell so it could be searched for contraband. But the Cuban told Slack that he had been saving the granola bars served at mealtime and didn’t want them taken away. He had thirteen bars, and he knew the guard would confiscate all but five of them, the maximum a detainee was supposed to keep in his cell. Slack looked at the Cuban. The detainee knew that if he disobeyed an order, he could be put in a four-point position, yet the granola bars meant so much to him that he was willing to risk it.

  “Ask him if his cellmate has any granola bars,” Slack told the interpreter.

  “No,” the interpreter replied. “His cellmate ate all of his granola bars when they were served with the meals.”

  “Okay,” Slack said, “tell him to give five of the bars to his cellmate. Tell him he can keep five bars for himself. The other three he has to give away to another inmate or eat right now.”

  The interpreter relayed the suggestion to the anxious Cuban, who quickly agreed and began eating granola bars. The Cuban then stuck out his hands to be handcuffed, and thanked Slack. It seemed like a good compromise to Slack. But after he left, the guard who shackled the prisoner was irritated. “He shouldn’t have negotiated. We should’ve four-pointed this prick. He let that Cuban beat us.”

  Sitting in his office later, after working fifteen straight hours, Slack wearily defended his solution. He was exhausted. For the past hour either the telephone or guards had been interrupting him repeatedly as he tried to complete a two-inch-high stack of paperwork before going home. “A few granola bars aren’t worth a confrontation, at least not to me,” he said. “It’s not worth risking either the inmate or an officer getting hurt.”

  Lighting yet another cigarette, he continued: “Technically, yeah, we could have gone in there and chained him down. And sure, I’m certain his cellmate gave him back the five bars after we left, so he’s still got too many granola bars in his cell. But what I did made sense, and it worked, and no one got hurt—and that’s worth something, or at least, it should be worth something too.”

  Chapter 31

  DALLAS SCOTT

  As soon as Dallas Scott was assigned a cell at Marion, he began searching for some legal loophole that would help him overturn his 1976 conviction for bank robbery. He really didn’t think he had much of a chance. He wasn’t a lawyer, didn’t have much education, and the trial had taken place more than a decade earlier. But none of that mattered. Scott needed to find something to occupy his time at Marion, something to give him some hope. Otherwise he would slowly go crazy being locked all day in a cell.

  Life at Marion was designed to be monotonous, and it was. Scott’s world consisted of fifty-one square feet of living space that came equipped with a mattress, toilet, locker, sink, mirror, small black-and-white television, and radio.

  Scott got up each morning at six A.M. when breakfast was slipped through the bars. He ate, watched the morning news, and went back to bed until ten o’clock, when he did an hour of exercise and then ate lunch. He’d watch the afternoon movie shown on the prison’s closed-circuit channel, and then turn off the television and work on his legal appeal. He refused to watch soap operas.

  “Guys in here are crazy about their soap operas,” Scott explained. “Some guys have watched them for years, and they get so caught up in them they won’t come out of their cells when it’s time for recreation ’cause they don’t want to miss them.”

  Scott liked having a television, but he also considered it a trap. “It’s a tool that they use to pacify you,” he said. “You got to learn how to turn off that television or else you will sit all day in front of it and forget what prison is all about. You become a lamb, which is exactly what the administration wants.”

  Scott would turn the set on around dinnertime and watch the national news. He used to watch a game show before the news, but he stopped in protest when a black man appeared as a contestant.

  At some point during the day, Scott would be released with seven other inmates to exercise outside his cell. On nice days, the group played basketball outdoors in a wire-enclosed cage. But sometimes Scott would use the time to take a shower or walk along the tier talking to other inmates through the bars of their cells.

  Scott’s return to Marion had been a family reunion of sorts. Gang members John Greschner and Ronnie Bruscino were still there, as were other inmates whom Scott had known for more than a decade. None of these inmates was well-known outside the bureau, certainly not like some of Marion’s notorious prisoners such as John A. Walker, Jr., the head of a family spy ring that sold secrets for eighteen years to the KGB; Edwin Wilson, the CIA “Death Merchant” who supplied plastic explosives to Libyan terrorists; or Joseph Franklin, the Ku Klux Klansman convicted of killing two black men and suspected of at least thirteen other racist murders. Within the bureau, however, Scott and his crowd were considered much more trouble.

  “Most inmates come into prison, follow the rules, do their time, get something out of it, and never come back,” explained Marion’s warden, Gary L. Henman. “But some inmates come in and actually form their own prison culture. These men refuse to conform or follow rules. They want to conduct business in here just like when they are on the streets. They want to steal, sell drugs, whatever, and they are very disruptive.”

  For some convicts, in a twisted sense, being housed in Marion was an honor. “When you’re a kid,” explained Greschner, who was sent to a reformatory when he was nine, “you got to have some sort of role model, and the baddest motherfuckers at the reformatory—the guys who tried to escape and didn’t take any shit—those were the people I admired.” When he was nineteen, Greschner was considered to be such a sophisticated criminal that he was sent by Minnesota officials to a state prison even though he was under twenty-one and therefore eligible for a youth facility. “I liked it. I felt totally comfortable in the environment. I was around older guys who I’d heard about for years and years, and they were like heroes to me.” Now at age thirty-eight, Greschner was the convict that younger thugs looked up to.

  Scott saw himself much the same way. “I know it sounds silly that some guy like me locked in a cell is a role model, but the reason these youngsters see me or Tommy Silverstein as a role model is because we stick by certain principles. I always tell these youngsters about Tommy and try to make them understand that Tommy did something he had to do and we don’t feel like he was wrong to do it. It’s important for us and these younger kids to remember Tommy, because he’s gonna be down a long, long time, and it’s important that we keep him in our thoughts.”

  Each man had to find his own way to beat the drudgery of Marion. Some simply slept as many as twenty hours per day. As the years inched by, it became harder and harder for long-term inmates to recall what being on the streets was like. The highest suicide rate in the bureau was among white men in their early twent
ies, and Scott was convinced that one reason was that they hadn’t learned how to “do time.” In order to survive Marion, a man had to learn this. Scott knew how and so did Greschner, who had spent a cumulative total of thirteen years locked in various Holes or in a cell at Marion. “To be healthy, you need to interact with other people, and when you lose that, when you are in isolation or locked up by yourself day after day, all you got is what you are carrying around in your own head,” Greschner explained. “After a while you start losing the extra baggage. You learn you don’t need all the things that society says you need to survive and be happy. Your world starts shrinking. The memories get old and you start losing your identity. Eventually you hit rock bottom, where it is just you and your own demons, and the isolation forces you to examine yourself, your fundamental foundation of who you really are.

  “Some people get to that point and find there is nothing there, so they string themselves up. Others break and bail out. They flip over because they are weak and can’t take it anymore. But some get down to rock bottom and discover who they are.