by Pete Earley
And if he is loyal, and never lost faith,
In each brother’s heart, will always be a place.
So a brother am I and always will be,
Even after my life is taken from me.
I’ll lie down content, knowing I stood,
Head held high, walking proud in the Brotherhood.
But while members might have rhapsodized about gang membership, the bureau claimed most members spent their time dealing and using drugs.
Although Scott would not admit he was a gang member, he did acknowledge that he was a career criminal. “It is how I make my living. It’s a job. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have any ethics or code that I live by. Most Square Johns don’t believe criminals live by any code or rules, but I do. You have to have standards, because they are the only things that set you apart from the real scumballs in here. You got to embrace something, some sort of principles, and if you keep those standards, you develop a reputation. Society may think you are a piece of shit, but in here, you are respected because everyone knows you are strong enough to stand by your own principles.… You see, in here, principles are the only things a man has. You are as good as your word.”
An avid reader of the late western novelist Louis L’Amour, Scott said he had patterned his conduct after that of the Old West. “I never rat. I don’t tell on anyone. I don’t say something to the weakest, smallest individual in here that I wouldn’t say to the biggest motherfucker. If I give another convict my word, I’ll keep it. I try to be professional when I do a job.”
None of these principles applied to guards or Square Johns. “You can lie and steal and scam a Square John because he is not part of the criminal society. It’s just like I am not really part of your society. Your society rejected me, doesn’t want to have anything to do with me, so I owe you nothing. It’s like there are two different worlds—your society and the criminal society—and those of us in the criminal world don’t have to follow your rules, only our own, and the rules that I choose to follow may be different from another convict’s.
“For example,” Scott continued, “I don’t rob mom-and-pop stores. I don’t think it is right to take a working-man’s money. That is bread out of his kid’s mouth. But a Safeway or bank, hey, who’s that really hurt? I don’t kill innocent people or shoot the place full of holes. But if some teller tries to play hero when I’m pointing a shotgun in his face, sure I feel bad about that, but it really isn’t my fault because I tried to be professional and plan the robbery and do a good job without anyone getting hurt. He’s the one acting like a fool trying to stop me.”
When I went to see Scott a few days later, he was unusually mellow. He had received an unexpected gift the night before, he whispered. A convict, later identified by guards as an AB wanna-be, had been sent to the Hole for arguing with a guard. What no one realized was that he had wanted to be arrested because he was carrying a package of marijuana in his rectum for Scott.
If anyone knew how difficult it was to get drugs into the Hot House, it was Scott. After all, he was in the Hole because of a botched heroin deal. The fact that his friends had sent him such a valuable present showed that he, as Scott put it, was “loved and respected.” I later learned that Scott’s use of those two words was no accident. They are the standard salutation that a member of the Aryan Brotherhood uses when he addresses another member. There was little question who had sent the package of marijuana.
A Voice: BANK ROBBER, AGE 45
They originally charged me with murder, kidnapping, and bank robbery, but I’m really just a bank robber with really bad luck. You see, my buddy and me were robbing this bank, and when we come outside there is a cop waiting across the street and he starts shooting. He shoots my buddy, but I don’t know he’s dead so I pull him into the car and drive away. When they bust me, they charge me with murder, kidnapping, and the robbery.
I ask my attorney, “How the hell can they do that? All I did was rob a bank.”
He says the law says if you are committing a felony and someone dies, a bank teller has a heart attack or something, you can be charged with murder. He tells me they charged me with murder because my buddy got killed.
He says the law says when I pulled my buddy into the car and drove off, I kidnapped him because I was taking a body from the scene of a crime. That’s how they got me for kidnapping.
He says the law says that I can be charged with all three even though I didn’t kill nobody and I didn’t kidnap nobody.
I say the law sucks.
Chapter 10
THE LIEUTENANT’S OFFICE
An anonymous letter was waiting in Lieutenant Bill Slack’s mail slot when he came to work shortly before 7 A.M. one July 1987 day. As the operations lieutenant working the day shift, Slack was the equivalent of a desk sergeant in a police precinct. He poured himself some coffee and took his position behind the glass-topped desk, the biggest piece of furniture in the cramped lieutenant’s office. Besides the desk, the room contained a bench, a typewriter, and a row of metal file cabinets. Slack lighted the first cigarette of what would be two packs that day and began reading the letter.
Although he was only in his early forties, Slack seemed older. He was nearly bald, had a smoker’s hacking cough, and was no longer the trim-waisted marine he had been when he first joined the bureau direct from a combat tour in Vietnam. But it was his manner that set Slack apart. He was fatherly, always calm, slow to criticize. Many considered him the best desk lieutenant in the Hot House.
The anonymous letter contained one line: Loook undur matress B-215. The writer was either the world’s worst speller or intentionally trying to appear dumb. Slack telephoned Steve Lacy, head of the prison’s shakedown crew, and told him to search cell 215 in B cellhouse. Slack didn’t mention anything about looking under the mattress. He figured he shouldn’t have to.
Twenty minutes later, Lacy strutted into the lieutenant’s office with a “sissie shank,” a knife made by melting a toothbrush around a razor blade. It wasn’t much good for stabbing, but it could be used to slice someone’s face.
“Want me to bring in the shithead whose cell we found this in?” asked Lacy, who nearly always called inmates shitheads. Slack nodded, and a few minutes later, a white convict was led into the office by Lacy and two other guards.
Slack lifted up the sissie shank so the convict could see it and then dropped it safely in a desk drawer.
“Ever see that before?” asked Slack.
The inmate shook his head, and frowned.
“It was found under the mattress in your cell,” Slack continued.
“Those fuckin’ niggers!” the convict exclaimed. “They’re framin’ me, settin’ me up, I—”
“Watch your mouth,” snapped Slack, who didn’t tolerate racial slurs.
The convict caught his breath. The arteries pulsing in his neck looked like hot blue electric wires sheathed under skin drawn as taut as a drumhead.
“It’s a fuckin’ frame, Lieutenant! Can’t you see it?” he said.
Slack leaned back in his metal desk chair, which creaked like a rusty schoolyard teeter-totter.
“So what’s your version?”
The inmate glanced around. Two guards stood beside him. Lacy was directly behind.
“Lieutenant, can we do this in private?”
Some inmates will fight when brought to the lieutenant’s office. It’s a matter of pride to pop a guard before being dragged to the Hole. But Slack didn’t think the convict was looking to better the odds by getting him alone. For one thing, he didn’t need to. It was going to be a struggle for the three guards and Slack to handle him if he fought. The convict was a bulky bodybuilder.
“Okay. C’mon,” Slack replied, walking through a door at the back of the office. It led into a room normally used by the prison’s captain, but the Hot House was temporarily without one, so Slack slipped behind the desk and motioned the inmate to begin talking.
“These niggers stole my watch, okay?” he expla
ined. “I didn’t know at first who took it, but I let it be known I wanted it back. I had some friends put out word too, okay?”
“What friends?” Slack asked innocently.
“Don’t bullshit me, Lieutenant! You know what I’m talking about.”
Indeed, Slack knew. The convict ran numbers for a group of car thieves, pimps, extortionists, and bank robbers from the deep South known as the Georgia Boys. It was the Georgia Boys who put out word that the watch had better be returned or someone was going to get stabbed.
“The niggers who took my watch got a guy to bring it to me to apologize, you know. This guy, he says to me, ‘Hey, no hard feelings, huh?’ to see if I’m going to retaliate and I tell ’im ‘No, everything is cool as long as I got my watch back.’ ”
Slack smirked.
“Hey, I’m serious. I’m a peaceful guy. I mean, I got my watch back, so what the fuck, who cares? But these niggers must’ve figured I was going to get even so they planted that shank in my cell and then tipped you off. Someone dropped a kite [letter] on me, didn’t they?”
Slack didn’t reply. He asked questions, he didn’t answer them.
“Who were the guys who stole your watch?” Slack asked.
“Some niggers.”
“Do these individuals have names?”
“Suspect so,” the convict said.
“So what are they?” asked Slack.
The convict shrugged. “C’mon, Lieutenant, I’m no rat.”
Slack asked a few more questions but didn’t learn anything. He motioned the convict back into the outer office where Lacy and the others were waiting.
“As crazy as it sounds,” Slack said, “I happen to believe you. But I still got to lock you up. If I let you go, how do I know you aren’t going to leave this office and go stick one of these guys for trying to frame you?”
The inmate smiled.
“Now, let’s say a man of your fine character decides that he’s above all that,” Slack continued. “Let’s say I let you go and you don’t seek revenge. What do you think the guys who tried to frame you are going to do? They’re going to figure you are pissed, so they are going to try to stick you before you stick them. Either way, someone’s going to get hurt, so I got to lock you up.”
“Hey, don’t do me no favors,” the inmate snapped.
Lacy put handcuffs on the inmate and led him out.
“My gut feeling is he’s telling the truth,” Slack said. “But he could be lying. He might have written that letter to me himself. He might have put that shank under his own mattress because he wanted to go to the Hole.”
Sometimes inmates get into debt or into an argument with another convict. They know that they are going to end up either stabbing someone or getting stabbed, so they set up their own arrest. That way they can be taken to the Hole, where they will be safe without losing face with their peers.
Whether or not the convict was framed or had planned his own arrest ultimately didn’t matter, Slack said. Unless the inmate told the guards who had stolen his watch, he was going to be found guilty of having a weapon in his cell—a serious offense that would result in his spending an additional six months in prison and being transferred to Marion. But the inmate was caught in a catch-22. “He really can’t say who framed him,” Slack explained, “because if he tells, he’d be snitching, and he’s not going to risk being labeled a rat. The truth is that we really don’t know what is happening here,” Slack admitted, “and there is no way to find out.
“The bottom line is that we come in here every day, do our jobs, and go home. These inmates are here twenty-four hours a day, and this is their home and their world. We only think we know what is happening, and most of the time we probably don’t have any clue to what really is going on.”
The remainder of the shift was uneventful, and at four o’clock, Slack turned over the operations desk to Lieutenant Edward Pierce. Slack still had an hour’s worth of paperwork to complete before he went home, but Pierce was in charge. At age thirty-five, with a handlebar mustache and salt-and-pepper hair, Pierce had the sort of ruggedly handsome face seen in cigarette advertisements. Self-confident, some would say cocky, he ran his shift like a rooster overseeing the henhouse. Some guards never catch on to prison life. They lack the intuition that the best lieutenants have. Pierce had seemed to understand prisons from the first time he stepped into one. Yet, despite his abilities, he was not well-liked by supervisors. They said he lacked “polish.” Pierce thought there was a different reason: because, in his words, “I don’t kiss ass.” His buddy, Lieutenant Sandels, had tried to school him in diplomacy, but it wasn’t in his nature. “If a man is wrong, you got to call him no matter who he is,” said Pierce. This sounded more gallant than it often was.
Pierce loved working the shift from four to midnight. “All you have to do is your job, not all the Mickey Mouse political bullshit that goes on when the brass are here.”
At night, Pierce was literally in charge of the entire penitentiary and as soon as the mess hall finished serving dinner at six o’clock, the phones in the lieutenant’s office began ringing.
“Hey, boss, I got two inmates here who want to swap mattresses,” a guard in C cellhouse told him. “Can they do that?”
“As long as one ain’t pressing the other out of his, it’s okay with me,” said Pierce, reminding the guard to make certain that both inmates really wished to swap.
Seconds later, another guard called. He had caught two inmates shooting craps in a cell, but when he tried to arrest them they had eaten the evidence.
“What evidence?” Pierce asked.
The inmates had made dice out of sugar cubes, the guard explained, which they swallowed when the guard caught them.
Pierce roared, and told the guard to assign them some extra chores around the cellhouse rather than take them to the Hole.
An alarm sounded: “Fight on B-cellhouse stairs!” Pierce bolted from his desk. Guards usually carry a two-way radio or a body alarm that emits a high-pitched squeal when punched. Whenever an alarm sounded, all guards were supposed to run to the source unless they were assigned to a job that couldn’t be abandoned even in an emergency. Pierce ran down center hallway, into the rotunda, and up the B-cellhouse stairs, but both convicts had vanished by the time he got there. The guard who had sounded the alarm had gotten a glimpse of one of them but wasn’t certain who it was. Naturally none of the inmates loitering in the stairwell had seen anything.
When Pierce got back to the lieutenant’s office, a guard was waiting with a drunk convict. The inmate had been drinking a concoction made from bread, oranges, water, and sugar, left in a plastic bag for four days to ferment. Pierce gave him a breath test and sent him to the Hole. The phone rang. An inmate in C cellhouse had just ripped his sink from the wall and the entire tier was flooding. “Well, turn off the water,” Pierce ordered. “Damn rookies,” he said, hanging up the receiver. “They call me instead of turning off a valve.” As Pierce poured himself a cup of coffee, he overheard two convicts yelling outside in the hall in front of the commissary.
“He’s got my ice cream!” one complained when Pierce appeared.
“That’s a fucking lie, Lieutenant! I don’t owe you nothing, man,” the other replied, grasping a half-eaten ice cream cone in his hand.
“Lieutenant, I’m telling you, if he takes another lick of that ice cream, I’m gonna break his face,” the first inmate threatened.
The other inmate defiantly began to lift the cone to his mouth.
“Just hold it right there,” Pierce ordered. The inmate lowered the cone. A few minutes later, Pierce had resolved the argument and both convicts walked away.
Fights, flooded cells, drunk inmates, the ice cream spat—no one would care the next morning that Pierce had handled each of these problems. They were trivial events, remembered only because he would have to file paperwork about them. Yet, even the most insignificant confrontation could swiftly escalate into violence at the Hot House. Convicts had k
illed over a pack of cigarettes.
“Some college-educated pencil-pusher making five times my salary in some big corporation fucks up and the only thing that happens is that the company loses some money,” said Pierce. “I fuck up and there are bodies on the floor.”
The threat of violence underlies every action and reaction in prison. Pierce liked to compare prison work to riding a motorcycle. Most rides were routine. But sometimes late on a sweltering summer night, a rider would find himself on one of those endless flat Kansas two-lanes with only the lights of a distant farmhouse pricking through the prairie blackness. Leaning forward, you could screw the throttle, ignore the red-and-green rpm gauge, let your instincts tell you when to shift gears. At 75 mph, the wind stings the naked face. At 95 mph, eyes squint, teeth clench. A rider must lean low, squeeze his thighs against the gas tank, keep the front tire on the white center stripe. At 105 mph, there is no time to think, no time to pause, only to react, and at 110 mph, there is not even time to do that. At that speed on a motorcycle, a rider simply shoots blindly ahead into the blackness. And then it happens, that strange feeling when pure elation and sheer terror join. Some call it pushing yourself to the edge, riding the lip of the envelope.
Being a lieutenant at the Hot House was like that, Pierce said. Routine, even boring, and then suddenly you were flying at 110 mph into the blackness never knowing for certain just where this ride would go or how it would end.
Pierce loved it.
Unlike Slack, he dreaded sitting behind a desk, and he looked for any excuse to leave the lieutenant’s office. He could be reached by radio during emergencies. Tonight, he walked to the Hole, where a veteran convict was about to be escorted to the prison hospital. Some five years earlier, the inmate had gotten drunk, smeared his body with butter, broken a mop handle into two pieces, and screamed at guards until they finally rushed him. Pierce had been the first through the cell door that night and had been hit in the head with one of the sticks. They had not spoken since that fight.