The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  At Benny’s the guards weren’t so sure.

  Chapter 38

  At Warden Matthews’s request the Office of Inspections sent two investigators, Phil Potter and Jim Schenkenberg, from Washington, D.C., to the Hot House in late 1988 to determine whether Cuban prisoners had been brutalized by Lieutenant Phillip Shoats, Jr., and his men. When they arrived, both investigators appeared to be sympathetic.

  “We realized it was going to be frustrating to the officers to have us come in and second-guess them,” said Schenkenberg, “so we tried to be sensitive.” Potter, a former lieutenant who had dealt with Cubans in Atlanta in 1984, told guards that he understood how difficult these prisoners could be. “I knew where these officers were coming from. But I told them, you don’t cover up if someone’s crossed the line. You admit you made a mistake and people will understand. It’s the people who try to hide errors who get into trouble.”

  Despite these assurances, the guards who had worked with Shoats considered both inspectors to be “headhunters” and didn’t trust them. While Potter and Schenkenberg conducted their probe, these guards launched an investigation of their own. Word had leaked out that someone had given Warden Matthews a written account of brutality in the Cuban units, as well as the names of guards who were allegedly involved. This was true, of course. The prison counselor who had first raised the charges had written such a statement. But that counselor no longer worked for the bureau. He had transferred to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, another branch of the Justice Department, and had left the prison several weeks before the inspectors arrived. Because the counselor was gone, none of the guards suspected him as the informant. Instead, they looked for someone within their own ranks who they figured had, in their words, “snitched.” It didn’t take long for them to find a suspect. Officer Juan Torres, a quiet man in his early thirties, had worked at Leavenworth for only six months and had barely known Shoats, but Torres had never been accepted by the other guards. He was a loner who didn’t stop at Benny’s after work for a beer with other guards. He spoke Spanish and had been seen joking and chatting with Cuban prisoners. He wasn’t from the Leavenworth area; he had been recruited in Arizona, where the bureau had gone to hire Hispanics. Most important of all, Torres was viewed as a do-gooder because he was a devout Roman Catholic and a guard who went by the rule book.

  “We all figured he was the weak link,” said a guard, “but we weren’t certain until he was interviewed by the headhunters.”

  Without realizing it, Schenkenberg and Potter had inadvertently aided the guards in their search for the snitch. Schenkenberg had conducted his interviews in an upstairs office of the administration building while Potter had done his in an office next to the warden’s. It was impossible for a guard to enter either room without first being seen by the men working in the prison control center, and each time Potter or Schenkenberg called someone in for questioning, the guards in the center wrote down that man’s name and timed the interview.

  Torres held the record—ninety minutes with Potter.

  Each night after work, the guards who had worked for Shoats gathered at Benny’s to review the names on the control-center list. Nearly all, they decided, could be trusted to follow the so-called “blue code,” an unwritten pact between law enforcement officers that requires them to never say anything incriminating against a fellow officer. Everyone, that is, except for Torres.

  As soon as Potter and Schenkenberg completed their investigation and left Leavenworth, the guards decided to test their theory, but rather than ask Torres point-blank about what he had told Potter, they decided to take a subtle approach.

  “I was eating lunch with some guys,” Torres recalled later, “when one of them asked if we would tell on someone if we saw him thump a Cuban. Everyone else said they wouldn’t, but I didn’t say nothing. This guy pressed me and I said, ‘Hey, I ain’t losing my job or going to prison because of someone else.’ After that, people began calling me a snitch.”

  Torres soon found himself being shunned by his peers. No one wanted to work on the same tier as he did. Most avoided speaking to him. One morning when he went to his mailbox outside the lieutenant’s office, he found the word SNITCH written over his name. He tore the name tag off and replaced it with TORRES, but an hour later the word SNITCH was back. That night, he got the first of several obscene phone calls. “Guys would call and say, ‘Hey, snitch, how’d you like to suck my dick?’ and then hang up.”

  One of the guards who claimed Torres was a snitch was unapologetic when asked later at Benny’s why he was harassing him. “We want that son of a bitch gone and he’ll eventually get the message,” he explained. “The guy’s a rat. He tried to get us fired and put in prison.”

  Lieutenant Slack saw what was happening and he knew that Torres was being falsely accused. “I began putting out word that the rumor about him wasn’t true,” said Slack. “I put it out to people who I knew would pass it on down, but it was really up to Torres to prove he wasn’t a snitch, and that was going to take time. You see, there wasn’t much I could do. If he didn’t give any indication that he was a snitch, the other guards would accept him. But if he came running to me or Connor for help, then he would be marked forever as a snitch.”

  The guards were not only angry at Torres but at Matthews for notifying the Office of Inspections to begin with, rather than handling the charges himself, especially after Matthews made it clear that he didn’t believe any brutality had taken place. “Why in the hell did he put us through all this if he didn’t believe anything happened?” complained one.

  An incident shortly after the two investigators left town further alienated the guards. Associate Warden Lee Connor decided to discipline a popular veteran guard who was in charge of the metal detector in the east prison yard, between the main penitentiary and prison industries. Each inmate was required to walk through the metal detector when he went to work each day, again at noon when he came back inside the main penitentiary for lunch, and later that afternoon when the work day ended. The detector was supposed to help the guard find knives, but it was so sensitive that it beeped whenever an inmate with a metal belt buckle or steel-tipped work boots walked through it. Frisking each inmate didn’t seem practical to the guard, so he simply waved most inmates through even if the machine beeped.

  Connor thought the guard was being lazy, but rather than lecturing him, he sent Lieutenant Tracy Johns to watch him for two days. Stationed at a window in the prison hospital, Johns faithfully recorded the number of inmates the guard actually frisked, and turned the data over to Connor. There weren’t many, so Connor began the bureaucratic procedure to fire the guard. The guard protested and claimed that he knew based on his experience who needed to be frisked and who didn’t. He notified his union representative, who immediately complained to Warden Matthews. According to the union contract, an employee was supposed to be told immediately if he had done something wrong. He was supposed to be given a chance to correct his behavior. He wasn’t supposed to be spied on for two days and then fired. Matthews agreed, and Connor was forced to keep the guard on, although he was moved to a different job.

  Although Matthews had ruled in favor of the guard, the incident was damaging. “All he and Connor care about is getting a promotion, and if they can do it by catching one of us screwing up, they’ll do it,” a guard complained. Connor further hurt his credibility by assigning an inexperienced guard to the metal detector. This officer decided to search every inmate, causing the line of inmates trying to get to work to back up like rush-hour traffic. When the line at the detector was stalled for fifteen minutes one morning, nearly one hundred frustrated inmates protested by returning to their cells instead of going to work. Connor quickly switched guards at the detector, this time putting a veteran in charge. Like the original officer, the new man picked inmates at random to frisk.

  The confusion at the metal detector and the Cuban investigation had caused morale to sink to such a degree that one of the lieutenants
decided on his own to find out what was wrong. “Why is morale so low?” he asked in a questionnaire slipped in each guard’s mailbox.

  Connor was furious when he heard about the questionnaire and immediately demanded that it be collected and destroyed. “Of course they’ll say morale is low when you phrase a question that way,” he explained.

  “There is a feeling that Matthews and Connor don’t really know what they are doing,” a veteran guard said later, “and that means one of these days we’ll either have an escape or a riot and someone’s going to get hurt.”

  As was his nature, Matthews remained upbeat and positive as 1988 came to a close, but it was clear that he and Connor both needed a success.

  Eddie Geouge gave them one.

  As the unit manager in A cellhouse, Geouge was supposed to spend his time conducting unit team sessions and filing paperwork. But he was still an investigator at heart, and when an inmate was found badly beaten in a recreation room in A cellhouse in early November, Geouge decided to find out why. He had known for months that a group of strong-arm white convicts operated a poker game in the room, and he suspected that they were involved in drug dealing and extortion as well. He began monitoring their telephone conversations, and after listening to hours and hours of tape-recorded calls, he was able to identify the three inmates involved in the drug, gambling, and extortion ring. Each had foolishly bragged about making money while in prison. Two of the inmates were the muscle behind the game, the third was the brains. Geouge decided to check each of their prison accounts. Inmates were only allowed to have twenty dollars in cash. Any more than that had to be deposited in an account at the prison, from which the inmates could draw to buy goods at the commissary. Besides keeping track of how much money each inmate had, the accounting office kept a log that identified the names of family members or friends who sent money to the prison to be deposited in an inmate’s account.

  Geouge noticed that the inmate with the “brains” had only one contact who regularly sent him money. It was a woman in New Jersey. Geouge jotted down her name and address and checked the records of the other two inmates in the ring. The same woman was making regular deposits in their accounts too. Geouge asked the FBI to examine the woman’s bank records. Based on his experience, Geouge figured that the woman was working as a “bank” for the prisoners. Whenever an inmate got into debt by playing poker or buying dope or being the victim of extortion, he contacted relatives or friends outside the prison and asked them to send a check or money order to the woman in New Jersey. It wasn’t uncommon for inmates to maintain bank accounts outside Leavenworth, particularly drug dealers and Mafia figures. Sometimes the accounts were in the inmates’ names, but often they were under the names of their relatives or girlfriends. Either way, money that was withdrawn from these accounts could not be tracked by the bureau. After the woman in New Jersey received an inmate’s check, she deposited it in her account and then sent the three inmates in Leavenworth money orders that were automatically deposited into their prison accounts.

  A few weeks after Geouge notified the FBI, an agent telephoned and told him that the woman in New Jersey was depositing as much as $10,000 per month into her checking account even though she was unemployed and didn’t have any visible source of income.

  Geouge wasn’t surprised by what the FBI had discovered, but he was shocked at the amount that the ring in A cellhouse was collecting. The woman was taking in as much as $120,000 per year—all of it apparently from illegal activities inside the Hot House. Obviously, since the bureau limited the amount an inmate could receive in prison to $105 per month, the woman was only depositing a small portion of what the ring was getting into Leavenworth inmates’ accounts. Geouge figured the woman put the rest of the money into other bank accounts that the inmates controlled. The funds were probably used to buy drugs, which were then smuggled into prison by other outsiders.

  Even though Geouge now understood what was happening, he didn’t have enough evidence to make a case. He couldn’t do anything but watch and wait. Then one afternoon an inmate asked to see Geouge in private. He explained that he wanted a transfer to a less secure prison closer to his home. Geouge knew the inmate was a gambler and he suspected that he had played in the high-stakes game on the fourth tier.

  “I don’t give nothing if I don’t get nothing,” Geouge later recalled saying.

  “What do you want?” the inmate asked.

  “The poker game on four gallery.”

  It was a formidable request, because the white convicts running the game would probably kill anyone who turned them in. But the inmate agreed after Geouge assured him that he would be transferred from the Hot House before any arrests were made. The inmate not only gave Geouge all the information that he needed, but also disclosed that the poker game was rigged.

  As soon as the informant was transferred, Geouge turned the case over to Lieutenant Torres Germany, who promptly took the three inmates to the Hole. The fact that they were arrested by Germany, not Geouge, made it even more difficult for the inmates to figure out how they had been caught. All of them were sent to Marion.

  It was the biggest bust since Matthews became warden, and he and Connor were thrilled. Even Santa Claus couldn’t have brought them a better present.

  Chapter 39

  THOMAS SILVERSTEIN

  Thomas Silverstein missed his art supplies. Alone in his isolation cell in the Hot House basement where the lights burned twenty-four hours a day, Silverstein needed something to keep his mind occupied, and drawing had always been his escape. Matthews and Connor came downstairs once a week to see him, and every time they opened the door and looked at him through the two rows of bars, Silverstein asked them for art supplies. Each week, they refused. Finally, Silverstein decided to, as he later put it, “play their stupid paperwork game.”

  Any inmate who felt he was being treated unfairly by the bureau could complain by filing an administrative remedy appeal, commonly called a BP-9 form. It went directly to the warden, who had fifteen days to respond. If the inmate was unsatisfied with the warden’s answer, he could appeal it to the warden’s boss by filing a BP-10 form with the regional director. If the inmate felt the regional director’s answer was inadequate, he could file yet another form, a BP-11, with bureau headquarters.

  Silverstein had never bothered filing written complaints because he suspected the process was a waste of time. But after he killed Officer Merle Clutts in Marion, the bureau had pointed out that there was absolutely no proof that Clutts had been harassing Silverstein as he had claimed; Silverstein had never filed any formal complaint against Clutts, so therefore the bureau could find no logical reason for Silverstein’s attack.

  This time, Silverstein filed a BP-9.

  I’ve been in prison thirteen years and have never been denied drawing materials. I’m an artist and this is how I occupy my endless hours in a cage and express my love and appreciation to my loved ones who have stood by me all these years … I promise not to harm, hurt, or threaten, etc., anyone with my drawings or cause any undue concern to those who have denied me them.

  Matthews replied on the same day that Silverstein gave him the complaint.

  Your status at USP Leavenworth will remain as indicated upon your arrival to include a denial of art material in your cell. Your activity during the riot at USP Atlanta is being investigated and a final determination will be made upon the termination of the investigation. Your request is denied.

  Silverstein appealed to the regional director by filing a BP-10.

  With just a pencil and regular writing paper, I’ve stretched my imagination to the max and it’s beyond me what my drawings have to do with an investigation in Atlanta. It seems denying me this innocent-enuf pastime puts the cart before the mule in that I’m being punished before a case has even been brought against me.

  Regional Director Larry DuBois had thirty days to reply, but answered the complaint within a week:

  A review of this matter reveals that the warde
n’s response to your request for administrative remedy (BP-9) fully addressed the issues you have raised.… Your regional administrative remedy appeal (BP-10) is denied.

  Silverstein immediately sent a BP-11 to bureau headquarters. He pointed out in the appeal that he had been given art supplies while a prisoner in Atlanta and had never gotten into any trouble there. The answer from bureau headquarters was brief. It said:

  The warden and regional director have responded to your concern and we affirm their responses.… Your appeal is denied.

  Silverstein hadn’t really expected that anyone in the bureau would come to his aid, but he wanted to document the inconsistent way in which the bureau was treating him. In Atlanta, he had been given paints, brushes, even canvas.

  “Why do they have to do this to me?” he asked. “They got my ass behind bars and they’re never letting me out. Isn’t that enough? Why do they have to pull this other shit?”

  Silverstein claimed he was being punished by guards in other ways. Letters from his friends outside prison were delivered weeks after they had been written and some were never delivered at all. Photographs enclosed in letters from his relatives were missing when the letters were brought to his cell. One week dessert was missing from his dinner tray. When Silverstein asked about this, the guard who slipped the tray through the bars simply grinned. Silverstein accused him of eating the desserts and the guard denied it, but after the accusation, the desserts reappeared.

  Each time Silverstein felt he was being treated unfairly, he filed a written complaint. Warden Matthews rejected every one of them, as did the regional office and bureau headquarters. Before long, Silverstein had a file folder stuffed with more than a dozen rejected complaints.