The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  “They’re lying, all of them.”

  “You know what was written in the jacket?”

  “How could I?” the inmate asked. “It wasn’t mine.”

  “Inside someone had written ‘Property of The Hated One.’ ”

  The inmate shrugged, unmoved.

  Geouge found him guilty, sentenced him to 120 days in the Hole, and recommended a transfer to Marion.

  For the next four hours, Geouge dispensed prison justice. Several convicts had been caught drinking homemade hooch, one had disobeyed an order, another had put a knife to an inmate’s throat and demanded sex. Besides those cases, Geouge had two others held over from a hearing a week before. One involved a bulky white inmate covered with tattoos, serving several life terms for murder. Guards had found a shank hidden in the bed in his cell, but he had told Geouge that the bed had been moved into his cell only a few hours before the knife was discovered. It was a replacement brought in because his bed was broken.

  “I never seen that knife before,” the inmate had claimed.

  The story seemed plausible, so Geouge had postponed making a decision until he had a chance to investigate the inmate’s story. He discovered that the bed had just been moved into the inmate’s cell as he had claimed.

  “I checked out your story,” Geouge said when the inmate was brought into the room.

  “Okay,” the inmate snarled.

  “Well, what you told me is the truth, so I’m expunging this charge and turning you loose.”

  The inmate was shocked. “Well, this is a first,” he said.

  “I figure you’ve been a shithead in other areas, but not this time,” Geouge replied.

  “Hell, Geouge,” the inmate said with a grin. “You know me. If I have a weapon, I’m going to use it.”

  “Get out of here,” Geouge said, “and don’t come back.”

  Geouge had conducted a second investigation on his own since the hearings last week. This case involved a convicted murderer who had demanded that he be moved into one of the cells above the prison hospital, where inmates who needed to be protected from other convicts were housed for their own safety. The inmate claimed he owed several thousand dollars in gambling debts and was going to be murdered unless he was moved to “PC”—protective custody.

  Geouge had been suspicious because the convict had been in various prisons for more than twenty years and clearly knew how to take care of himself. In fact, his prison file showed that he had been accused of shaking down weaker inmates and it listed him as a reputed hit man for a California motorcycle gang.

  Geouge had discovered that the inmate’s real motive in wanting to move into a cell above the hospital was money. He had reportedly accepted a contract to kill an inmate housed there who had disclosed a drug-smuggling operation in B cellhouse. Had Geouge agreed to the move, the inmate would have been able to complete the murder-for-hire.

  “I don’t believe your story,” said Geouge when the inmate was brought before him. “But if you’re really in danger, you’ll be safer here in the Hole, so we’ll just take this one day at a time.”

  The inmate was angry. “Hey, I demand you move me to PC.”

  “Hey,” Geouge replied in the identical tone of voice. “You don’t demand anything here. You’ll be safe in the Hole.” (A few days later, the inmate asked to be returned to the general population.)

  Geouge worked through lunch without taking a break. By late afternoon, he was ready to hear his final case of the day. It involved a twenty-nine-year-old black inmate from Washington, D.C., accused of gambling on Sunday football games.

  “I’m guilty,” the inmate replied when Geouge asked how he wished to plead.

  The case seemed rather simple. It had been a long day. Geouge’s secretary and the guards in the room were anxious to leave, but there was something about the convict’s docility that made Geouge decide to ask a few more questions.

  “Like to gamble?” Geouge asked.

  “I got nothing else to do to pass the time, man.”

  “Who’d you bet on last Sunday?”

  “Chicago. I always bet Chicago Bears.”

  “Then you lost?”

  “Yeah, fifteen bucks, and I only get sixteen a month working in industry.”

  “Well, we did you a favor by locking your butt up and keeping you from wasting any more money,” said Geouge.

  The convict chuckled. “I’ve been saving up for the Super Bowl,” he said candidly. “I love watching that Super Bowl especially if my Bears are in it.”

  “Jesus!” Geouge said as he read through the inmate’s record. “You’ve been busted for gambling several times and once for having more than the twenty-dollar cash limit in your cell.”

  “Yeah,” said the inmate. “That’s the only weekend I won.”

  Everyone in the room laughed. The convict’s honesty was a refreshing change. Geouge continued reading the file. “I see why you gamble,” he said. The inmate was serving a 125-year sentence for robbery, rape, and assaulting a police officer. He had already served seven years.

  “What else am I going to do in here?” the inmate asked. “I don’t have a chance to party like you do.”

  “Do I look to you like someone who likes to party?” Geouge replied gruffly.

  “No, uh, no sir, I mean, you look like you got something to go home to, sir. What the hell do I have to do to enjoy my time? I bet, but I don’t get over my head and I always pay up. My reputation is good, you ask anyone, I always pay and never cause trouble.”

  “Listen,” said Geouge, “we’re trying to tighten up on gambling because some guys are getting in over their heads, but I’m going to suspend this and turn you loose. The catch is, you got to maintain clean conduct for six months. If you’re caught gambling, you’re coming back to the Hole to serve time on this charge and any new charges. You understand?”

  “Thank you,” the inmate said. He stood to leave, but before he reached the door, Geouge stopped him.

  “Hey, I want you to do me a favor,” Geouge said. “Before you place your bet on the Super Bowl, come find me and tell me which team you’re backing, because with your record I want to bet on the other team.”

  The inmate appeared confused. He turned toward the door, then stopped and turned around as if he wanted to speak, only to turn toward the door once again and stop. And then he finally understood. Geouge was giving him a break. The veteran officer knew that the inmate wasn’t going to stop gambling, particularly with the Super Bowl coming up. But Geouge also understood, he said later, that sometimes a twenty-nine-year old inmate facing another 118 years in prison deserved a bit of compassion, particularly when he had told the truth at his hearing and was willing to take his punishment without complaint.

  “Hey, Geouge,” the inmate said as he stood in the doorway of the hearing room.

  “Yeah?” Geouge replied.

  “For a cop, you’re all right.”

  Chapter 45

  WILLIAM SLACK

  On Christmas Day, Warden Matthews decided to pay a surprise visit to the Cuban units. As he and Bill Slack walked from cell to cell wishing the detainees a Merry Christmas, one of them began to applaud. He said in broken English that he was showing his appreciation to Slack. Two weeks earlier, Slack had brought a Polaroid camera, white shirt, black tie, and sport jacket into the cellhouse. He told the detainees that they could each put on the clothes and have their picture taken in an area of the cellhouse where the cells and bars wouldn’t be visible. They could mail the pictures to their wives, friends, and family enclosed with Christmas cards that were being donated to them by a local card manufacturer. The Cuban said he had been in prison for seven years and this was the first photograph that he had been able to send home to his children.

  Slack grinned sheepishly, told the Cuban in awkward Spanish “Felices Navidad,” and continued down the tier with Matthews. Then the man in the next cell also applauded and suddenly the entire tier began clapping for Slack.

  As he
and Matthews walked up and down the five levels, inmates stood at the front of their cells cheering and applauding. Matthews was exuberant when he left the unit. Slack beamed with pride. Five days later, guards found a Cuban hanging from his cell. He had committed suicide.

  “This place is a roller coaster,” Slack said. “Highs and lows, highs and lows.”

  Because the suicide was the first by a Cuban detainee in Leavenworth since the Atlanta and Oakdale riots, nearly all the major newspapers and national television networks carried the story. Most claimed the Cubans being housed in the penitentiary were despondent. The Kansas City Star reported that Warden Matthews had ordered his staff to perform a “psychological autopsy” to determine why the Cuban had killed himself. But “to others, there was no mystery,” the newspaper wrote. It quoted George Crossland, cofounder of the Mariel Assistance Program, a support group for detainees and their families, saying, “These people have told me over and over and over they’d rather die than go back to Cuba.”

  Reporters assumed that the Cuban had killed himself because of the conditions at the penitentiary. It made for a powerful story, but it was not true. He had left a note, and in it he explained that he was committing suicide because he had just learned that he had the AIDS virus and his homosexual lover had left him.

  Fred Fry, the prison’s spokesman, knew the reason for the suicide, but he was prohibited by federal privacy laws from releasing the inmate’s medical records, so there was no way for him to correct the inaccurate news accounts.

  The incident disturbed Slack, not because of the media’s faulty assumptions, but because he realized that the bureau hadn’t taken any special precautions to prevent AIDS from spreading inside the Cuban units. Whenever an American inmate showed advanced symptoms of AIDS, he was transferred to the bureau’s medical center in Springfield, Missouri. But Cubans with AIDS were being kept in the same cellhouses as those not infected. Slack knew that homosexual activity among Cubans was rampant. He also knew that most Cubans didn’t know who had the disease. Yet, when Slack mentioned the potential danger of keeping all the Cubans with AIDS in the units, he was told that the bureau had no choice. Because of the riots, all Cubans who were considered to be troublemakers were to remain in the Hot House.

  Slack began to worry about his guards. Whenever a Cuban was diagnosed as having AIDS, a notation was made in his prison file, though the acronym AIDS was never mentioned. Instead, the bureau wrote “body fluid precaution.” Guards working in the Cuban units were supposed to be familiar with the inmates’ files, but Slack knew that many of them never checked the records.

  After the suicide, Slack made a point of reminding his guards about the threat of AIDS, particularly when they were responding to emergencies that involved a Cuban who was bleeding. Each guard was told to carry plastic surgical gloves with him and put them on when he came in contact with blood, but despite Slack’s warnings, few ever did.

  A few weeks after the suicide in C cellhouse, the guards who had worked with the Cubans received good news. The bureau’s Office of Inspections finally announced that it could not substantiate any of the brutality charges filed by the former prison counselor at Leavenworth. The investigators, who had never spoken to any Cubans at the Hot House, said their probe had documented some isolated incidents which indicated Cubans were treated in ways “inconsistent with bureau policy,” but there was no evidence that Cubans had been systematically brutalized.

  “This wasn’t really a surprise,” Warden Matthews said nonchalantly when he heard the announcement. “I knew all along that the charges were exaggerated.”

  But at Benny’s that night, the guards who had been under suspicion held a spontaneous celebration. More than one had been afraid that he would be reprimanded. “If I followed the best officer in Leavenworth around for a month, I could gather enough evidence on him to get him fired,” said one guard. “It’s not that you set out to screw up. It’s just that all of us are bound to make mistakes in this business, and that includes losing your temper and reacting sometimes in violation of bureau regulations.”

  Another guard admitted that he had been one of the officers who had violated regulations. “I had a real loudmouth yelling and screaming on my tier and I couldn’t get him to shut up. He kept trying to start trouble. Finally, I sent my number-two officer to get something from the office downstairs so I could be alone. I ran down to the Cuban’s cell and called him up to the bars, and when he got there, I grabbed his throat and pulled his face up against the bars so he cracked his forehead real good. I said, ‘You dumb motherfucker, shut the fuck up,’ and, you know, after that he always kept quiet on my shift.” When asked if he had told the investigators that story, the guard laughed.

  Someone suggested a toast to the late Phillip Shoats, Jr., and after a few seconds of embarrassed silence, several of Shoats’s defenders raised their beer cans.

  “I don’t care what he did at home,” said one. “He was okay at work.”

  A few minutes later, a guard mentioned Juan Torres, the suspected snitch.

  “It’s payback time,” said one.

  “We should jump that prick in the parking lot and whip his ass.”

  “Don’t worry. He’ll get his. It’s just a matter of time. Everyone knows he’s a snitch, and someday he’ll get into a situation where he’s going to need someone backing him up, and when that happens, he’ll discover there’s no one there—just like when we needed him to back us up and he wasn’t there.”

  None of the guards thought that Torres was innocent. “It doesn’t matter how the investigation turned out. That fuck betrayed us all by talking.”

  Another guard added, “These headhunters will ruin your career, just like they did Geouge because he slapped a Cuban. Well, if an inmate even looks like he’s gonna take a shot at me, I’m getting in the first lick. No one pays us to be punching bags.”

  The next day Slack happened to see Torres, and the lieutenant asked him if the pressure was off now that Internal Affairs had cleared the Cuban units. Torres said that someone was still writing the name SNITCH on his mailbox. When it came time for the quarterly staff rotation, Slack recommended that Torres be assigned to a guard tower rather than put into a cellhouse, where he would have to depend on other guards if there were a fight or stabbing. Connor agreed.

  “I’m not going to let anyone drive me away,” Torres said later. “I’m not a coward, but this treatment really gets to you after a while.” Most guards, he said, refused to speak to him.

  Despite Slack’s progress in the Cuban units, he still found the pressure frustrating. “This place swallows you up,” he explained. “Just communicating a simple request becomes a major task.” The stress of eighteen-hour days was beginning to show. At his wife’s urging, he decided to take a weekend off and go fishing. But as he was leaving one Friday afternoon, a guard nicknamed Beans because of his Boston accent came into Slack’s office with a “shot” that he wanted Slack to take action on. Beans claimed that a Cuban had refused an order and he wanted the inmate locked in an isolation cell as punishment.

  Slack recognized the Cuban’s name and he knew that the detainee was not a troublemaker. He also knew that Beans was. Slack took the shot and slipped it in his desk drawer. He would take care of it on Monday, he decided, when he had time to hear the inmate’s version. Beans looked angry when he left Slack’s office that afternoon.

  Although the fish weren’t biting over the weekend, Slack returned on Monday relaxed. He had only been at his desk for a few minutes when guard Jacob Tyler came in carrying a knife.

  “Hey, boss, I found this shank,” he said.

  Slack picked up the weapon and examined it. It looked familiar.

  “Where’d you find it?” Slack asked.

  “Cell one-eighteen,” said Tyler.

  Suddenly Slack remembered where he had seen the knife before, and he recalled the name of the Cuban assigned to cell 118. Slack knew that Tyler was lying.

  “Want me to put the Cu
ban in isolation?” Tyler asked.

  “No,” said Slack.

  As soon as Tyler left, Slack called in Beans.

  “What’s up, boss?” Beans asked.

  “You planting shanks nowadays?” Slack replied, tossing the knife across his desk. Beans looked puzzled. “You need to tell your buddy that if he’s going to plant a shank, he shouldn’t pick one that’s already been turned in before.”

  The knife that Tyler claimed to have discovered in the Cuban’s cell had been turned in to the lieutenant’s office several months earlier. By chance, Slack had been there when it was found. He remembered it because of its peculiar shape.

  Beans seemed surprised. “I don’t know nothing, I swear,” he stammered. Then why had Tyler claimed that he had found the knife in the cell of the very same Cuban that Beans had reported on Friday?

  Slack was ready to recommend that both guards be reprimanded, but first he sent Beans to talk to Tyler and find out what was happening. A short while later, Beans returned. He admitted that he had been angry Friday and had complained to Tyler. At that point, Tyler had said, “I’ll fix that Cuban,” but Beans swore he hadn’t helped Tyler plant the knife.

  Tyler came to Slack’s house that night and admitted taking the knife from the lieutenant’s office and lying about finding it in cell 118. He was trying to “help out” Beans, he said, and pleaded with Slack not to report him. All he had ever wanted to be was a guard. His grandfather had worked at the penitentiary and Tyler wanted to make the old man proud. As he talked, Tyler began to cry.

  “It’s my life,” he said. “Don’t fire me.”

  But Slack had done some checking on Tyler, and had learned that other lieutenants suspected him of planting knives in the past. Most guards consider themselves lucky if they find one knife every six months, but during one 6-week period, Tyler had turned in more than a dozen knives. Slack didn’t mind bending rules when it came to allowing a Cuban to keep extra granola bars, but he didn’t like a liar and he didn’t like anyone who planted evidence. He suggested that Tyler resign to avoid an investigation that would embarrass him and the bureau.