The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  Matthews insisted there was nothing unfair in how Silverstein was treated. “We should be able to explain everything we do in regard to Silverstein, and I think we can and have done exactly that in our BP-nines.”

  Although Silverstein was losing his paper war in Leavenworth, he was able to obtain through the federal Freedom of Information Act a copy of a bureau investigative report confirming that guards in Marion had harassed him after Merle Clutts was murdered. In December 1983 he had been moved from Atlanta to Marion for a short period, to stand trial for Clutts’s death; and his claim that guards there had tormented him was later substantiated by an investigator sent to Marion by Director Carlson. According to the investigator’s report, guards played a radio outside Silverstein’s cell nonstop for two days as loudly as possible, beat on his cell door with wooden clubs, told Silverstein that they were going to kill him, and sprinkled salt, pepper, and “unknown foreign particles” on his food. As soon as Silverstein received a copy of that report, he filed a $1.75 million lawsuit against the bureau.

  Because Silverstein was being kept in total isolation, the bureau required prison psychologist Dr. Thomas White to examine him once a month and file a report on his mental health. White normally spoke to him for only a few minutes. “It is not necessary to talk to him for a long time to determine whether or not he is suffering from mental distress,” said White.

  “What kind of sick trip are you on?” Silverstein asked the psychologist one afternoon during his monthly visit. “If I killed myself down here and people came in here to investigate, I mean normal-thinking people, not the sick ones you hire to work here, if normal people saw what you are doing to me—with the lights on twenty-four hours a day, not letting me have any visitors, never letting me go outdoors in the sunshine, and all this shit—they’d say, ‘Why’d you leave him down there locked up alone so long? Why didn’t you see this coming? Aren’t you the shrink? Don’t you know keeping a man in a cage all day with the lights on and without any other people around is really sick?’ What are you going to tell them, Doc? How you going to justify this?”

  White left the cell without replying. Later, in his office, he said that he thought some of the security measures that had been put into place for Silverstein were excessive, but the bureau had been so outraged by the murder of Clutts that it was impossible for anyone to change them.

  In his monthly report, White wrote:

  Silverstein voiced no problems or complaints of a psychological nature.… He is well organized in his thought content and appears to be doing well, showing no sign of debilitating emotional distress which would warrant a change in his housing at this time. He appears to be in relatively good spirits. His hygiene and general attitude appeared to reflect a satisfactory level of adjustment to his status … He is not viewed as a threat to himself at this time.

  A short time after Silverstein confronted White, guards noticed that he had printed the word FREEDOM in big letters on the wall of his stainless-steel shower stall. He had formed the letters by rubbing his fingers against the grime that had built up on the wall. The guards ordered Silverstein to clean the shower and remove the word.

  “Can’t,” he replied. “I don’t have any hot water to use to clean it.” The guards said later that they were genuinely shocked. For six months, Silverstein had been taking cold showers because no one had turned on the hot water valve into his cell. The guards claimed that this was an accident. When Silverstein was asked why he hadn’t complained about not having any hot water, he said, “I just figured it was one of their sick little trips.”

  After three months of denying Silverstein drawing materials, Matthews finally told the guards to give him colored pencils and a sketch pad. A few months later, he was given paints and brushes. They arrived without explanation.

  Now that he could work on his art, Silverstein stopped bickering with Matthews, Connor, and White. But his silence didn’t mean that he wasn’t angry. “I’m supposed to walk around like everything is cool and act like it ain’t personal, you know, like Matthews is just doing his job by keeping the lights on twenty-four hours, and Connor doesn’t really mean anything by not letting me go out into the sunshine. I’m not supposed to have hard feelings against them. Well, fuck that. It’s personal.”

  Silverstein spent most of December 1988 painting an oil portrait that showed a prisoner whose shirt had been ripped off. The prisoner was alone in a cell, bent down with his face touching the floor as if he had just been beaten. Silverstein called it “Solitary Confinement.”

  “I hate these guards,” he said, “and what they are doing to me.”

  When I told this to Matthews, he was not surprised, but he strongly disagreed when I suggested that the guards also hated Silverstein. “We are professionals doing our job. None of us likes what Silverstein did, but hate is too strong.”

  Eddie Geouge was not nearly as diplomatic. “If I could, I would execute that piece of shit and I would not lose a second of sleep. I would kill him because he is nothing but an animal, and as far as I’m concerned, he gave up the right to live in our society by believing he had a license to kill whoever he wanted. Who gave him the right to destroy so many? Murder is forever, and a person should have to pay the consequences for murder. They shouldn’t be allowed to come in here for a few years and then be released to kill again.”

  In the lieutenant’s office, David Ham, the new captain at Leavenworth, was passing around a Christmas card that someone had made as a joke on the bureau’s computer. It had a large, ornate cross on the cover along with a stained-glass church window. It was supposed to be for Silverstein. The cover said:

  “FOR YOU TOMMY! A CHRISTMAS CARD. JESUS LOVES YOU!”

  Inside, the card read: “EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE!”

  Chapter 40

  When the disciplinary-hearing officer at Leavenworth retired in late 1988, Warden Matthews recommended Eddie Geouge for the job and the bureau’s Regional Director DuBois agreed. Geouge was happy with the promotion. In his mind, it meant the reprimand that he had received eight years earlier for backhanding a Cuban prisoner had finally been forgiven.

  Carl Bowles and Thomas Little were also exuberant at the news that Geouge was no longer going to be in charge of A cellhouse. They were even more pleased when Matthews appointed Lieutenant Torres Germany as the new cellhouse manager. They had always gotten along well with Germany and felt he would be more receptive than Geouge to Little’s plea for a transfer. They were right. Little walked out of his next unit team review smiling. With Geouge gone, the team had recommended Little for a transfer. Warden Matthews quickly approved it. He was eager to see Bowles and Little separated. Within a week, the bureau notified Little that he soon would be moved to a new medium-security prison opening in Marianna, Florida.

  Little had spent eighteen months in the Hot House. From the day that he first arrived at Leavenworth, all he had wanted was to get out. Yet now that he was finally being transferred, he was depressed.

  “Carl and I stayed up talking on the night before I was scheduled to go,” Little said. “It was so emotional. We talked about everything he had taught me, about how I should carry myself, about all the things we had been through together, and I told him, I said, ‘Carl, you are my father now.’ I said, ‘My real father never cared about me, but you do, so I am making you my father and I am your son.’ ”

  The next morning, Bowles gave Little some parting advice. “When you get to Marianna,” he said, “be careful, keep your mouth shut, and don’t trust anyone.”

  Both men laughed. It was the same advice that he had given Little when they first met.

  As Little told Bowles good-bye, the young inmate couldn’t help but notice that the convicted killer, one of the most dangerous inmates in the entire federal system, had tears in his eyes.

  A few hours later, Little walked down the front of the penitentiary to a bus that took him to the U.S. marshal’s jet at the Kansas City airport. Guards ordered Little and seve
ral other inmates to wait on the runway as several fish were escorted off the airplane and into the bus for its return trip to Leavenworth. Little watched each one pass by and enter the bus just as he had done a year and a half before.

  Little said later that he wasn’t certain that he was actually leaving Leavenworth until the plane was in the air. “I kept waiting for someone to say they had made a mistake and I was going back.”

  As he stared out the window, Little realized that the pilot was swinging northwest of the airport and was about to fly over Leavenworth. He looked down. Far beneath him, the penitentiary’s silver dome reflected the morning sunshine.

  Chapter 41

  DALLAS SCOTT

  Dallas Scott was reading a western novel in his cell at Marion when he received a packet of legal documents from Sacramento. The papers were a response to the motion he had filed to overturn his 1976 bank-robbery conviction. U.S. Magistrate John Moulds had read Scott’s petition and ruled that the legal issues he raised were worthy of investigation. Moulds had ordered the U.S. attorney’s office and Scott to prepare for a special hearing in Sacramento at which both sides would present their arguments.

  Scott was thrilled. Most petitions filed by convicts are quickly rejected by the courts. Moulds’s decision showed that the issues Scott raised were important enough to make the possibility of overturning his conviction real. But there was one bit of information in the packet that Scott didn’t like. Moulds had told Scott to hire an attorney to represent him at the hearing because the court was not willing to bring Scott there. Scott had planned on representing himself. He didn’t trust lawyers, especially any whom he could afford.

  A few days later, a guard stopped outside his cell with another packet. A grand jury in Topeka, Kansas, had issued a sixteen-count indictment against Scott, charging him with attempting to smuggle 2.75 grams of heroin worth $500 into Leavenworth. Under the new drug-trafficking laws that Congress had recently passed, Scott faced up to sixty years in prison and four million dollars in fines.

  “Get your stuff packed,” a guard told him. “You’re going back to Leavenworth for the trial.”

  Scott quickly scribbled a note to his daughter, Star, telling her that he was being transferred. He had not seen Star, who was in her early twenties, for five years, but they corresponded regularly, and in his last letter Scott had been optimistic about his chances of eventually being released.

  “I sure hated to tell her that the old man was back in a jackpot again,” he recalled later. “I reckon she knows by now, though, that if there are any sinking ships anywhere around, I will find one and jump aboard.”

  By the time Scott finished the letter, a group of guards had assembled outside his cell to escort him down to a waiting van. His pals, John Greschner and Ronnie Bruscino, wished him luck as he walked past their cells.

  He was going to need it.

  Chapter 42

  WILLIAM POST

  For reasons that no one at Leavenworth quite understood, inmates rarely had trouble finding women willing to correspond or visit them. Surprisingly often, these relationships led to marriage. The third Thursday of each month was reserved for weddings in the prison visiting room and there were at least two every month, sometimes more. Many of the brides had never known their husbands outside prison. Some of them married inmates who had no chance of parole. Because the bureau did not permit conjugal visits, many of the marriages were never consummated. But it didn’t matter. Every morning just before eight o’clock, a steady stream of women, often dressed in their Sunday best and with children in tow, congregated outside the prison entrance waiting to visit inmates.

  William Post had gotten married while in prison, and he still wore his wedding ring although the marriage had been dissolved. He met his bride in 1979, six years after he went to prison in Marion for bank robbery and learned that Glenda Thomas had died from a drug overdose. By that time, Post had managed to move from Marion to the state prison in Folsom, California, where he was serving time for the robbery of the all-night market and his shootout with Glendale police. Post had been corresponding with his niece while at Folsom, and in August she convinced her best friend, Priscilla Kane, to go with her to visit “Uncle Bill.”

  Kane was twenty-five, had been married eleven years, and lived in Stockton with her husband and two small children, Carey and Kimberly. From the moment she met Post, she was intrigued. He looked much different from the way he was to appear years later in Leavenworth. While in Folsom, Post was meticulous about his appearance. “You could have cut bread with the creases in his pants,” Kane recalled. “He even ironed his T-shirts.”

  The two women had to visit with Post via a telephone in a booth in which inmates were separated from visitors by a Plexiglas window. When Kane asked Post why he was not permitted to meet visitors in person like other convicts, he explained that he was being punished because a woman had been caught smuggling him a handcuff key a few days before.

  When she returned to her home, Kane began receiving daily letters from Post. Her husband thought it was funny that she was corresponding with a bank robber, but Kane soon found herself sharing the most intimate details of her life with her new pen pal. “A man in prison can focus completely on you, and Bill did just that,” Kane recalled. “I used to get long, beautiful letters. I’d never met a man I could talk to on such a high intellectual level. He challenged my mind. It used to take me an hour just to look up the words in the dictionary that I wanted to use to answer his letters.”

  Years later Kane would look back upon those days when she first met Post and describe herself as “perfect prey.” She had had a miserable childhood. Her father had sexually abused her older sister and then had abandoned the family when the police were notified. Kane’s sister developed anorexia and died. Kane married at age fifteen to escape from home, only to have her marriage turn sour. She and her husband still lived together, but slept in separate bedrooms.

  Shortly after Kane met Post, doctors discovered that she had cancer of the uterus, and performed a hysterectomy. “Bill had flowers sent to me and called me on the phone every day I was in the hospital,” she recalled. “He always had time to listen to me and he told me exactly what I wanted and needed to hear. He said I was beautiful, that I was still sexy and desirable after the operation. He told me I was extremely important to him.”

  In 1980, Kane divorced her husband. She was in love with Post. Twice each week, she and her children drove to Folsom to be with him. A guard took her aside one afternoon. “You’re not like most women who come here,” he said. “You got a nice family, well-mannered kids. Do yourself a favor and stay away from Post.” The advice irritated Kane. “Bill was so gentle and loving, especially with my children,” she recalled. “They adored him. They loved him as if he were their real father, and he really was helping me discover who I was and gain self-confidence. I was sure he was different from other inmates.”

  One day while Kane was waiting for Post to be brought into the visiting room, she overheard a guard talking to a woman. “Today’s not your day to visit inmate Post,” the guard said, turning the woman away.

  As soon as Post came into the room, Kane described what she had heard and Post confessed. The visitor was Cynthia Post. He had known her for more than one year. They had met each other through an advertisement in a white-supremacy magazine, he said. The woman had fallen in love with him, quit her job, sold her home in Tennessee, moved to California to be near him, and changed her last name to his. She had been visiting Post on the days that Kane and her children stayed at home.

  “He told me it was over between them,” she recalled, “and that he loved me and my children. I was so head over heels in love, I just accepted that.”

  Cynthia Post confronted Kane and her children when they came out of prison that same day.

  “I want you to know you are getting into more than you think,” Cynthia Post said.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kane replied, expecti
ng an angry exchange.

  Instead, Cynthia Post burst into tears, and Kane felt so sorry for her that she embraced her. “You don’t know what you are getting into,” Cynthia Post repeated. “He’ll use you and then just throw you away.”

  Kane refused to think the worst of Post. “I really believed that Bill loved me, really, really and truly loved me, so I just ignored everything that would normally make a person suspicious,” she said. “I finally had found someone who loved me for who I was. Who accepted me and encouraged me.”

  Kane was thrilled when Post asked her to marry him. But when she told Post’s niece, who had introduced them, the woman was outraged. “She came to see me at my house carrying a stack of love letters from Bill,” Kane said. “He had been courting her too.” Kane drove to Folsom and demanded an explanation. But Post was again persuasive enough to convince her that he loved only her and on February 5, 1982, they were married at Folsom Prison.

  Post had told Kane that the parole board considered married convicts a much better parole risk than those without families, and Kane quickly became a relentless advocate for her husband. Six years later, officials at Folsom would still remember Priscilla Kane Post as the woman who “drove us all nuts about getting her husband a parole.”

  Post was paroled from the state prison a short time later, but was immediately turned over to the bureau to finish his sentence for bank robbery, and was transferred to Leavenworth.

  Kane wanted to follow him, but she became ill, was bedridden for several months, lost her job, and spent what savings she had. Despite those problems, Kane felt confident that she would be able to rebuild her life with her husband after the federal Parole Commission considered his appeal in June 1983. She was sure that Post would be paroled,