The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  The trick to orchestrating a successful scam, Bowles continued, was in thinking three moves ahead, like a chess player. “You got to give your mark someplace to run. You got to get him to go where you want him to go.”

  One day at lunch, Bowles pointed to an unlikely pair of inmates sitting together at a nearby table. One was a bearded, long-haired former biker and convicted killer, the other a thin clean-shaven man in his mid-thirties. Bowles explained that the biker was being paid to be the thin inmate’s bodyguard. It seems the two men had arrived at Leavenworth a few months earlier aboard the same bus, and while they were being held on the fish tier, they became friends. Most nights, the biker stopped by the other man’s cell just to chat. A short time after both were released into the main prison population, two thugs burst into the thin inmate’s cell, knocked him to the floor, put a knife to his throat, and told him they were going to rape him. As they were pulling off his pants, the biker came along for one of his nightly visits and scared off the thugs. The terrified younger man realized that he needed someone to protect him, so he hired the biker. Each week, the thin inmate’s brother, who owned a small manufacturing plant in the Midwest, deposited a check into a savings account for the biker.

  What few inmates knew was that the biker, whom Bowles had known off and on for years, had paid the two thugs to terrorize the other man. During one of their first conversations, the thin inmate had foolishly mentioned that his brother was a successful businessman, and from that moment on, the biker had looked for a way to extort money from him.

  “You see, he gave the mark someplace to run, a way out of the corner, and the mark did exactly what he was supposed to do,” Bowles explained.

  When Little first met Bowles, the seasoned convict promised to tell him the secret of being able to walk around in the Hot House without being victimized. This is what Bowles said: “You got to learn how to draw a line. If some guy insults you every time you step out of your cell, first you got to ask yourself, ‘Is it me? Have I done something to deserve this disrespect?’ If you haven’t done anything, then you know he is trying to run over you and you must take it to him immediately. Get right in his face. ‘Hey, what the hell is going on here? Are you trying to fuck me? What is your problem, man? Look, we both got numbers in here, and hey, I’m willing to move halfway for you, but you have to move halfway for me. Now if you ain’t willing to do that, motherfucker, then you won’t be on this tier much longer.’

  “That is all you have to do because that is what is reasonable. You gave him an out. You said you’d move halfway. But you drew a line, and if you aren’t willing to draw that line and tell that motherfucker that you will make him pay if he crosses it, then you got no principles, you got no standing in here, you got no word, and you got no credibility.”

  Bowles had never read any books by Wall Street tycoons on the art of deal-making, but he understood raw power. “The only time a guy is going to pull up,” he explained, “is if he thinks fucking with you is going to cost him more than he will gain.

  “I’ve never had to stab another man in prison,” Bowles continued, “and I ain’t no beefed-up, big motherfucker. But I’ve always made it perfectly clear that if you try to hurt me or kill me, I’m not going to hesitate. I’m going to walk into one of those prison factories and I’m going to get myself a big hatchet and I’m going to walk right down center hall and no one, no one at all, is going to try to stop me unless he is a complete idiot. I will cut off your head with that ax and I’ll pay whatever consequences society demands, but there should never be the slightest fucking doubt in anyone’s mind that I will do that. Ever.”

  Bowles made it sound simple, and for him, it was.

  Chapter 19

  THE CUBANS

  In late May Cuban informants, paid off with extra packs of cigarettes, told guards in C cellhouse that a riot was being planned. It had been nearly six months since the Cubans had destroyed the prisons in Atlanta and Oakdale, and the detainees now realized that the concessions they had won by agreeing to a peaceful surrender hadn’t improved their lot. They were being held under harrowing conditions in the Hot House, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was going ahead with plans to deport them, and Washington bureaucrats had lost interest in their plight as soon as the riots had ended.

  The informants claimed their fellow detainees were planning to start trouble sometime during the week of June 12, when the INS was scheduled to announce the names of the first wave of Cubans to be sent home. This riot was going to be different from the December uprisings, the informants warned. A hostage would be executed to draw attention to the Cubans’ frustration, anger, and desperation.

  Warden Matthews and Associate Warden Connor immediately began planning for the worst. Guards in the Cuban units were ordered to inspect the locks on each cell door and examine the chains that were wrapped through the doors and cell bars to make certain none had been cut. All keys in the two cellhouses, except for those that were absolutely essential, were removed, and the keys that were left were split up among the guards so that the Cubans would have a difficult time collecting all of them.

  As the week of June 12 approached, the noisy cellhouses grew quieter. Guards noticed that the Cubans cleaned their plates at every meal regardless of what was served. They were obviously hoarding food.

  On the morning of June 11, Warden Matthews told his associate wardens that he had decided to implement what he described as a “divide and conquer” plan. The INS had given him a list of the 205 Cubans at the Hot House who were going to be deported. These unlucky inmates represented less than one-third of all the detainees. “I want to move all the Cubans who are going to get their deportation notices into C cellhouse,” Matthews said. “We will move the others into D cellhouse.”

  Obviously, the Cubans scheduled for deportation were the ones most likely to riot. But the others, Matthews explained, still had a chance of being recommended for parole by the INS. They had a lot to lose if they participated in a riot, because the INS would immediately add their names to the list of deportees.

  “If my plan works,” said Matthews, “we shouldn’t have any trouble with the Cubans in D cellhouse, just the ones in C, and that means we will only have to concentrate on one group.”

  He wanted the Cubans divided that same night. Shortly after four in the afternoon, Lieutenant Monty Watkins began handing out riot gear to the members of the SORT squad. Each man was issued a black helmet that looked like the one worn by Darth Vader in Star Wars, a black jumpsuit, and a padded black vest much like those used by baseball umpires. Associate Warden Connor had told Watkins to keep the SORT team in the basement, out of the inmates’ sight but ready to respond within seconds if trouble erupted when the detainees were being shuffled between C and D cellhouses.

  Shortly after midnight, when most of the American convicts were asleep, a special squad began moving Cuban prisoners one by one. Each detainee was handcuffed before he was taken from his cell and escorted by a covey of guards to a new cell either in C or D cellhouse. None of the Cubans knew at this point why they were being moved, and none of them resisted. By dawn some two hundred had been relocated.

  Both prisoners and guards remained edgy throughout the day of June 12. Guards paired up. “Every time you ran down the tier because some Cuban was yelling, in the back of your head you wondered, Well, is this it? Is the shit storm about to kick off?” one guard said. But there were no unusual incidents.

  On June 13, INS officials began notifying the 205 Cubans in C cellhouse that their requests for asylum had been denied and they were going to be returned to Cuba. As the INS workers broke the news, guards in D cellhouse went from cell to cell assuring the detainees there that they were not on the deportation list.

  Almost immediately, the mood in D cellhouse relaxed. Across the rotunda, however, in C cellhouse the Cubans became sullen. During the next two days, guards worried. “It’s weird,” said one. “No one is getting slimed. We haven’t had to four-point anyone
in their cell. It’s like there is some kind of lull going on.”

  On June 16, a Cuban in C cellhouse started a fire in his cell and yelled, “Vamos a hacerlo!” (Let’s do it!) Guards sounded an alarm and raced down the tier. The fire was quickly extinguished and the Cuban moved into a waiting cell, where he was chained in a four-point position. More than forty employees, an unusually high number, had responded to the alarm. They had expected other Cubans to join in the ruckus, but none did.

  The next day, a Friday, Matthews met with his associate wardens and stressed the need to keep the Hot House operating as routinely as possible. “We don’t want to take any privileges away from the American convicts or get them upset,” he said. “We don’t want to be fighting both groups at the same time.”

  That evening the guards assigned to the prison auditorium reported a record attendance by the U.S. inmates at the nightly movie. The film was Friday the 13th—The Final Chapter, and whenever the indestructible villain impaled another teenage victim, the inmates cheered.

  On Saturday morning, June 18, Associate Warden Connor received word that a handful of Cubans at the penitentiary in Lompoc, California, had tried to instigate a riot. They were being flown to the Hot House and would be coming that afternoon. Connor had them moved into individual cells in C cellhouse as soon as they arrived. At 10:30 P.M., three of the troublemakers from Lompoc began ripping up the plumbing in their cells. Water gushed across the floor into the tier. They began screaming “Vamos a hacerlo!” just like the inmate earlier in the week. But this time, all the detainees joined in. Within seconds, cups, magazines, toilet paper, light bulbs, even clothing, came flying out of the cells. Some Cubans broke the pipes in their cells, others started fires. Matthews and Connor, who had gone home for the night, hurried back to the penitentiary, as did members of the SORT team. Some Cubans had rubbed their plastic toothbrushes against the concrete floor to sharpen the handles. “Watch your eyes,” a guard yelled. “Don’t let them poke you in the face.”

  Amid the flooding water, rising smoke, debris, and screams, Connor calmly took charge. He sent Lieutenant Watkins and the SORT team to deal with the Lompoc troublemakers. He ordered the water in cells that were flooding turned off. He sent guards to the basement to collect tear-gas canisters and gas masks. He told other guards to get fire extinguishers and stand ready.

  Watkins, a bulky Vietnam combat veteran, led five members of his SORT team down the tier. Urine and feces splashed against the clear plastic facemasks attached to their riot helmets. When they stopped at the cell of a former Lompoc prisoner, Watkins yelled, “Cuff up!”

  “Fuck you!” the Cuban replied.

  Watkins didn’t bother unlocking the padlock that secured the chain wrapped through the cell door. He snipped it with bolt cutters, opened the cell door, and ordered his team to attack. Within seconds, the Cuban was chained to his bed. Watkins and his squad moved on.

  During the next half hour, the SORT squad chained twelve prisoners to their beds. When Watkins came to the thirteenth cell and gave the order “Cuff up,” the detainee stepped forward and stuck out his wrists. It was over. Two hours later, Matthews, Connor, and the SORT team went home.

  When Matthews inspected C cellhouse at 9 A.M., all the debris from the riot had been cleaned up by Cuban orderlies.

  “Some of our Spanish-speaking guards heard the Cubans talking,” Matthews explained later that day. “They said we were too well prepared. They didn’t think we would be ready for them.” And then, with pride, he added, “I guess they learned that this is Leavenworth and we do things differently here.” A short time later, Matthews called the guards from the Cuban units together in the prison chapel. Some were worried that they were going to be fired because rumors about staff brutality were still circulating through the Hot House. When they arrived at the chapel, they found a table covered with warm apple-filled pastries and coffee. Matthews thanked them for “upholding Leavenworth’s reputation as a can-do penitentiary” and made a point of shaking each man’s hand.

  “Unfortunately,” Matthews told them, “I’m afraid this was only the first round.”

  A Voice: LIEUTENANT BILL KINDIG

  (Recalling the July 31, 1973, riot at Leavenworth, in which Officer Wayne L. Selle was murdered by inmates.)

  I was the first person to reach Selle. I lifted him up, and when I did, my arms squeezed some of the air out of his chest and he made a groaning sound. I thought he was still alive and I started talking to him and yelling to the other officers to help me. When I realized he was dead, I figured he’d died in my arms and it really bothered me.

  I kept wondering if there wasn’t something I should have done to save his life. I had nightmares about it later, you know, me coming up to him, grabbing him, him being alive and then dying in my arms. I couldn’t sleep because I kept seeing his face. They could have killed any one of us. They didn’t have anything against Selle. He was just there, so they stabbed him. The prison doctor told me he had been hit so many times there wasn’t anything I could have done and that made me feel better, but I still couldn’t shake the image of his face.

  I had his blood on my pants, and the next day when I got up, I wore those bloody pants even though my wife told me I shouldn’t wear them. I walked right into the visiting room wearing those bloody pants and no one said a word to me all day about how I shouldn’t have worn them. I had to wear them. Wayne Selle was a good and decent guy, and he was dead. They had killed him, and the next day, it was like everything was back to normal, like nothing even happened the day before. That made me angry. Damn it, something had happened. A man had been stabbed to death for no reason. He had died and now everyone was acting like nothing even happened. The inmates in the visiting room were laughing and talking to their visitors and the other officers were going about their jobs and no one was saying anything. That’s why I wore those pants. I wanted people to know that I knew Selle had died and that everything wasn’t normal and that Wayne Selle’s death had meant something. It wasn’t something I was going to forget.

  As a teenager Thomas Little thought being a criminal was glamorous. After he was arrested and three inmates in a county jail tried to rape him, he learned otherwise. And then the novice bank robber’s luck got even worse. Little was sent to Leavenworth.

  Thomas Silverstein had never killed anyone until he found himself in a federal prison, and was quickly accused of three inmate murders. After he stabbed a prison guard to death, he was put in a basement cell where the lights were never dimmed and all he could hear was the buzz of the fluorescent bulbs.

  William Post’s scruffy appearance and eccentricity made inmates and guards regard him as wacky. But Post had a superior IQ and came from a stable middle-class family, which made psychologists wonder: Why had he been drawn into a life of crime?

  Triple-murderer Carl Bowles first got into trouble when he was eight years old, and his prison record filled two thick files. Yet after spending nearly twenty-three years in various prisons, he insisted that all he wanted was a friend.

  Dallas Scott had only been convicted of two bank robberies, but guards considered the tattooed convict to be one of the most dangerous men in Leavenworth because of his suspected membership in the Aryan Brotherhood, the most feared white gang there.

  Front view of Leavenworth. The first federal penitentiary ever built, it was designed to resemble the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., with a grand silver dome that dominates the Kansas landscape. (Debra Bates-Lamborn)

  Warden Robert Matthews was the youngest warden ever put in charge of Leavenworth. He was also the first black warden there. Matthews said it didn’t matter. He soon discovered that it did. (J. J. Zeman)

  Warden Matthews talking with an inmate. Whether “standing mainline” in the dining hall or walking from cell to cell, Matthews made it a priority to be available to the prisoners. (J. J. Zeman)

  During his seventeen years as director, Norman Carlson made the federal Bureau of Prisons into the most modern prison syst
em in the world. (Bureau of Prisons photo)

  J. Michael Quinlan, who was Carlson’s choice to succeed him, was only the fifth director to run the Bureau of Prisons. He inherited an agency that was on the brink of doubling in size. (Bureau of Prisons photo)

  Inside the prison industries building, an inmate performs his job. In 1986 Leavenworth prisoners produced $27 million worth of goods, netting a $5 million profit. (Debra Bates-Lamborn)

  In the penitentiary yard, convicts play handball against thirty-foot brick walls. The gun tower at the right is one of six, manned at all times by watchers under orders to “shoot to maim” if necessary. (UPI/Bettmann)

  When Cuban refugees seized control of the Atlanta penitentiary on November 23, 1987, they took hostages and set fires. Firefighters used long ladders to spray water over the prison wall. (UPI/Bettmann)

  FBI SWAT teams entered the Atlanta penitentiary early on November 24. When the riots in Atlanta and the Oakdale, Louisiana, prisons finally ended, 719 Cubans were transferred to the C and D cell houses in Leavenworth. (UPI/Bettmann)

  D Cellhouse in Leavenworth, in which many of the Cubans were housed. It had been set for renovation until the riots intervened. From their cells prisoners could watch television on the sets fixed to the wall on the left, installed at Lt. Bill Slack’s request after he was put in charge of the Cubans. Below, on the right, is a recreation cage. (Debra Bates-Lamborn)