The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  One way to make certain that poor employees were weeded out was by having good supervisors. The Hot House had always been a training ground for lieutenants and other midlevel managers, so the fact that guards there were disgruntled took on new significance.

  The speculation about Matthews’s being promoted ended abruptly in February when Quinlan chose R. Calvin Edwards, the warden at the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, to fill the regional directorship that was open. Edwards was black, and his selection was seen in the Hot House as a double strike against Matthews. Not only had he not gotten the promotion, but Quinlan had chosen another black manager before him.

  For his part, Matthews quickly voiced approval of Quinlan’s choice. “Edwards is a good man. I’m not disappointed. There will be other openings.”

  But later he acknowledged some self-doubt. “Sometimes I feel I missed something by not working as a correctional officer on a tier,” he explained. “I came directly in as a caseworker, and I think that makes it harder sometimes for officers to relate to me and me to them. I think some of the old-time guards here have trouble accepting me.”

  At Benny’s, the grunt guards celebrated when Matthews was passed over. “People are telling Quinlan what is really going on here, not just what Matthews wants him to hear,” said one.

  “Matthews worries too much about inmates, not enough about staff,” added another guard. “That wasn’t a big deal under Carlson, but it is now. Times are changing.”

  A Voice: DAVID HAM, LEAVENWORTH’S CAPTAIN

  Let me tell you about Slim. He was a big black inmate who was so well hung he could suck his own dick or screw his own butt. Hey, I’m serious now. I mean, this guy really could. Anyway, this white boy comes in to see me. He’s afraid of Slim because Slim is going to fuck him, so I tell this kid he’s got three choices—he can lock up [go into protective custody], get raped, or protect his manhood.

  Well, he starts crying. I mean, he’s got tears coming down his cheeks and he’s blubbering about how he don’t want to get raped, and how he’s afraid, and how I got to protect him from Slim.

  I pulled his jacket and read it and this puke is in prison because he kidnapped two boys, ages three and five, and took them up to a cabin and tortured them, repeatedly sexually raped and tortured them, and then killed them both.

  Now you tell me: how much sympathy do you think I’m going to have for some punk who does that to two innocent kids? I got children of my own, you know. How much would you have? And now this puke wants me to protect him from Slim.

  Can you imagine what it’s like to be put in a position where you have to make decisions like this every day? You get cynical. When you see how people act and what they do in here, you get callous. That’s why I’ve always believed that people in the corrections business really have a lot of love for human beings.

  I’m not joking now. You have to have a real love for your fellow man to put up with having shit thrown in your face and punks like that kid coming to you asking for your help. You have to have a lot of love in your heart to act professionally and do the right thing no matter what you feel.

  Chapter 49

  While everyone in Leavenworth speculated about Warden Matthews’s future, Steve Lacy was promoted to the rank of lieutenant and notified that he was being transferred to a medium-security prison in Phoenix, Arizona. Lacy was well-known because he was head of the prison’s shakedown crew, had worked at the prison eight years, and was married to Sharon Lacy, another prison employee. Lacy’s life centered around the Hot House. The tall Texas native couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t want to be, as he put it, “a cop.” Even as a schoolboy, he had thought of himself as a policeman. “You can look at some kids and say, ‘Yeah, little Johnny is going to grow up and be a thug ’cause he acts like one,’ and sure enough, he ends up in a penitentiary,” Lacy explained. “And then there are guys who grow up and get into it with the Johnnies of this world. They say, ‘No, you are not going to pick on this guy and you are not going to take his lunch money because I’m not going to let you do it. You just don’t do those things.’ I was one of them. I don’t like bullies and there have been times when I’ve seen someone who won’t stand up for himself and I have stepped in and stopped Johnny, because I knew I could.

  “Guys like me,” Lacy said, “grow up to be cops.”

  On January 14, a going-away party was held for the Lacys at the Officers Training Center, a meeting hall across from the penitentiary. It was a beer-and-potato-chips affair, with the men clustered around a silvery keg in a corner by the front door while the women sat at folding tables. Both Lacys wore blue denim jeans, cowboy boots, and western shirts. The crowd was diverse. Roy Moore, a wiry, balding, gray-bearded guard who rode a Harley Davidson motorcycle, arrived wearing a black Harley Davidson T-shirt and matching hat, with a knife hanging from his belt. Moore was a tough-talking, beer-guzzling, popular thirty-nine-year-old guard who had embarrassed Matthews when he first arrived and was giving a tour to a regional director. At the time, Moore was assigned to the rear gate and was not supposed to allow anyone to pass unless the person showed him a bureau identification card or he recognized his face. When Matthews and Larry DuBois appeared at the gate, Moore didn’t recognize the regional director, so he asked to see his identification card. DuBois didn’t have it, but Matthews jokingly offered to vouch for his boss. Moore wasn’t impressed. “Sorry, bureau policy says I can’t let you through. You might be holding the warden hostage.” Matthews was not amused, though he persuaded Moore to open the gate. The story had endeared Moore to his fellow guards, particularly at Benny’s where it became a legend.

  Moore was one of fifty-seven employees who came to the party. All were white except for one older black guard who stopped by for a few minutes to congratulate Lacy but didn’t stay or mingle. Warden Matthews didn’t attend. Instead, he sent Connor to say a few words. No one was surprised. Lacy was one of O’Brien’s old guard and he didn’t think much of Matthews’s management style. As far as Lacy was concerned, the bureau was too soft and it was managers like Matthews who were responsible. “Jesus Christ, these inmates get to see first-run movies, have HBO and Las Vegas-style entertainment. It’s bullshit. If I want to go to college, I have to pay for it, but these assholes can go to college free and my tax dollars pay for it. It’s bullshit,” he repeated.

  The Lacys’ going-away party was run by Wayne Smith, who now worked in the regional office in Kansas City but had been the captain at the Hot House under O’Brien. Sharon Lacy had worked as Smith’s secretary. “We’re here tonight to say good-bye to Pee-Wee and Pumpkin,” Smith began. Pumpkin was clearly Sharon, but he wasn’t certain why Steve Lacy was called Pee-Wee. Smith then turned the platform over to one of Lacy’s friends, who recounted a raucous and fictitious story about Lacy’s pre-marriage days that ended with a woman describing his potency in “pee-wee” terms. That speaker was followed by other friends who roasted the couple with more stories filled with sexual innuendo. There were gag gifts and the standard employee farewell gift for every Leavenworth guard—a huge brass ball, as in “It takes brass balls to work at Leavenworth.” Sharon Lacy’s boss in the business office recalled how she had tricked him, as part of an office prank, into believing that he was being sued for sexual discrimination. In retelling the story, the speaker made a racist slur, but the crowd enjoyed the tale, and when it came time for Sharon and Steve to react to the hour’s worth of barbs, they gave as many one-liners as they had taken.

  And then Steve Lacy turned serious. “I just want you all to realize the good old days, they’ll come back,” he said. “You can count on it.” Lacy was referring to a time in the bureau’s history, he explained later, “when officers had more rights than inmates” and the Hot House was “really a penitentiary, not a nursery school.” It was a time when you didn’t have “inmates crawling up on Daddy’s knee at meals to snivel,” a slap at Warden Matthews’s practice of jotting down inmate complaints during mainline.

 
After the formal program, most of the men gathered around Ralph Seever, the legendary lieutenant who had spent his career at Leavenworth and was revered by guards as the best there ever was. As it so often did, the talk turned to Thomas Silverstein, and Seever recalled the first time that he had met Silverstein and how, in his view, he was not much different from other murderers. Inmates, Seever explained, expect guards always to tell them no and to punish them when they violate the rules. It’s all part of the game. “But you never want the relationship to get personal,” he warned. Whenever an inmate believes for some reason that the natural conflict between convicts and officers is personal, his ego is at stake, and in a penitentiary, image is a thousand times more important than reality. The fact that Seever attended the Lacys’ party was a tribute. If Seever thought highly of Lacy, then the veteran guards in Leavenworth knew he was all right.

  It had been the U.S. Air Force that first sent Steve Lacy to Leavenworth. His father was a U.S. Customs agent and Lacy was anxious to emulate him. “I was taught that there is right and there is wrong,” Lacy recalled. “There is no gray and I believe that, and if I am fortunate enough to have children, they will be raised the same way. You learn the rules and you play by those rules and it doesn’t matter if you like them or not. There is only ‘Yes sir’ and ‘No sir’ and that’s how things should be.” Lacy joined the military after high school graduation and was sent to Korea as a military policeman. He earned a reputation there for being a tough, streetwise cop and made a series of sensational drug busts, but he was always cynical about his job and his bosses, and this so irritated his commanding officer that Lacy was eventually reassigned to guard duty at the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth. Most would have hated the job. He loved it. After he was discharged, Lacy worked for the town of Leavenworth as a police officer until there was an opening at the federal penitentiary. He reported to work in July 1983.

  Just as in the military, Steve Lacy’s frequently acid tongue made some supervisors cringe. “I’m not prejudiced when it comes to inmates,” Lacy liked to say. “I hate all of them the same.” Another favorite: “If you don’t like what I’m doing, then fuck you, and if you have any friends, then fuck them too.” Lacy prided himself on “telling things just like they are, not how some big shot wants them.” While his personality often was annoying, none of his bosses questioned his dedication. He was the first to volunteer, the first to accept risky assignments. When he wasn’t at work, he was at Benny’s with other off-duty guards. “My work comes first,” he said. “It comes before family, wife, everyone, and it has to be that way, because in this business, every officer’s life depends on his fellow officer being there to back him up. If the telephone rings, then I’m on my way to the penitentiary no matter what time or what I am doing.”

  Lacy married for the first time shortly after he went to work at the Hot House. It didn’t last. “My wife would want me to talk about what had happened at work when I got home, but that was the last thing I wanted to do,” Lacy recalled. “She really didn’t understand all the shit that goes on in here and I got tired of trying to explain it. I got so I just wouldn’t say nothing because I didn’t want to yap to her about it.” How could Lacy explain over pork chops and green beans at dinner what it felt like to surprise a convict in his cell who was “sucking his own dick”? How could he tell her about the inmate who raped another inmate with a broom handle and then beat him unconscious? How could he describe how it felt to carry an inmate to the prison hospital after he had been stabbed and had blood squirting out of his chest all over your hands and chest? Worse, how could Lacy explain to her how much he loved working in the prison and how he’d much rather be there than sitting at home with her watching television at night?

  “I stood at work one day and watched John Greschner and another inmate kill this snitch. They had waited seven years—seven years—to get him and they were stabbing him right in front of me in center hall,” Lacy said. “They had shanks so big they looked like swords.” Lacy had tried to tell his wife about the stabbing. “I was sitting at the dinner table and I said, ‘I saw a man lose his life today. I watched the whole thing,’ but she really didn’t understand.” Angry, Lacy had gone to Benny’s to be with his buddies. They understood.

  When Lacy decided to get a divorce, it was Lou, a fellow guard, who offered him his spare bedroom. When Lacy needed someone to talk to, it was his buddies at Benny’s who sat by his side, got him drunk, took him home. And when Lacy began dating again, it was these same friends who organized the “hog” contest, a monthly competition in which each guard tried to find the ugliest woman he could to ask out on a date. They would bring her to Benny’s for everyone to see and then afterward return to Benny’s and vote on who had the worst-looking date. The winner got to drink all night for free. Steve Lacy couldn’t think of a single friend he had who didn’t work at the Hot House. “The reason we tend to socialize together is because no one else really understands what we do,” he said. “Civilians look down on us, but when they need someone to protect them, they come running. When I was a cop on the streets, I waited and counted once to see how long it would take someone to say thank you. It was six months. Six months before someone actually thanked me for putting my butt on the line.” Lacy and his friends were society’s guardians, he said. “In our world, there are only two sides: them and us, and there’s a bunch more of them than us.”

  After his divorce, Lacy secretly began dating Sharon, who was then working as Captain Smith’s secretary in the lieutenant’s office. She was in her early twenties and had grown up in the Leavenworth area. She was extremely popular. She was outgoing and, as a coworker later put it, perky, with long brown hair, ivory skin, and an attractive figure. She was smart, too.

  When other employees discovered that Lacy was dating her, there were problems. “Some of the lieutenants began writing negative reviews of Steve, because they didn’t like him crossing that staff/management line,” Sharon Lacy recalled. “That stopped when we decided to get married.” In order to avoid possible conflicts, Sharon transferred out of the lieutenant’s office—management—to a job in prison industries. She had worked in industries before, when she first came to work at the prison in September 1984, but she had trouble adjusting to the work environment this time. The fact that convicts were looked upon as coworkers and called supervisers by their first names bothered her. “I had read reports and these inmates’ jackets. I’d sat through disciplinary hearings,” she recalled. “I was surprised some of those inmates were still alive after reading what they had done. I still thought like a cop, and the staff in industries got upset with me. They’d tell me, ‘Hey, you got to get along with these inmates or else they won’t work. You got to treat them better.’ They tried to deprogram me, but I refused to go back to their level because I had seen the real side of these men and most were monsters.”

  Sharon Lacy told inmates not to call her by her first name and when one did, even though she was a secretary she saw to it that he was fired from his job. She also became the first woman in the prison’s history to write a shot that resulted in an inmate’s being taken to the Hole. She eventually became so uncomfortable working in industries that she moved to a new job in the administrative building away from inmates. She would have a similar job when she and Steve moved to Phoenix.

  The fact that neither she nor Lacy had any friends other than their coworkers didn’t bother him, but it did Sharon. “It worries me because Steve’s dad was like that. All his life, all he did was work, work, work. He gave his life to the Customs Service, and suddenly it was over and he was retired and out of it. I ask Steve, ‘What happens when we retire? What happens when we are not part of the bureau family anymore?’ But, so far, he doesn’t want anything else.”

  She thought a lot about the “bureau family.” “People don’t understand bureau people, not at all. You can absolutely hate someone in the bureau, but if you go to Benny’s and there is a fight, everyone in the bureau will stand behind
that person, even if they hate his guts. It doesn’t matter, because he’s one of them and everyone else is an outsider. And you should hear these guys talk. These guys thrive on violence. You should hear them talk about a killing and how the prison needs a good inmate stabbing. They are all like that. It’s addicting to them.”

  Benny’s had a disc jockey playing records when the Lacys and a dozen of their friends arrived from the training center to continue the farewell celebration. The disc jockey had streaked blonde hair and wore a gold earring. Some guards joked about getting the earring for Steve Lacy to wear. One of Lacy’s pals told the DJ about the Lacys’ promotion and asked him to play a song just for Steve and Sharon to dance to. “Don’t make it any of that nigger music,” he warned, referring to rap songs. The DJ, somewhat intimidated, asked for a suggestion. Minutes later, the couple took the floor to the country-western sounds of “The South is Going to Rise Again.”

  One of Lacy’s best friends had driven up from Texas to attend the party. He had been a guard at the Hot House, but had been promoted to lieutenant and transferred to a medium-security prison. Over a beer, he explained that going from a penitentiary to a kiddie joint hadn’t been easy. “I hope Steve does better than me,” he said. He had been accused of brutality five times. The last charge was filed after he ripped off an inmate’s shirt because the inmate had refused to strip for a search as ordered. “In Leavenworth, inmates are thankful to get steak,” he complained. “Where I’m working now, they take it back to the cook and tell him they want it medium-rare.” (A few months later, the lieutenant was demoted and returned to Leavenworth as a guard.)