The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  The next day Tyler quit without giving the personnel office an explanation.

  Chapter 46

  WILLIAM POST

  The inmate informant’s hand was shaking as he lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and slowly blew the smoke out, calming his nerves.

  “They moved the date up,” he said. “They’re gonna bust out this Friday.”

  Lieutenant Bill Thomas could tell the man was frightened. He had reason to be. For the past several days, he had been providing Thomas with information about what he claimed was a major prison breakout being plotted jointly by two groups, the Black Liberation Army, a militant black gang, and The Order, a neo-Nazi white-supremacy group. The unlikely alliance planned to smuggle in several handguns, which they would use in an attack on the rear gate of the penitentiary where deliveries were made. When the inmates began shooting inside the compound, two vans carrying armed men were supposed to rush up to the back gate after a sniper had killed the tower guard there. They would scale the tower, where the controls for the double rear gates were located. Once inside, they would free the inmates and escape.

  It was a wild story, but Thomas, an eighteen-year bureau veteran, was convinced the informant was telling him the truth. He had always given reliable information in the past, and Thomas knew enough about the BLA and The Order to know neither would hesitate to launch such a bloody assault. But Thomas had no hard evidence and there was no time for him to get any. The escape was originally scheduled to take place in several weeks, but the inmate had just learned that the guns were being smuggled inside in two days, on January 5, with the escape now scheduled for Friday, January 6.

  “You got to move now,” the inmate told Thomas.

  “How are they bringing in the guns?”

  The snitch whispered, “The Catman.”

  William Post was sleeping when six guards rushed into his cell. At first, he thought he was dreaming.

  “Wake up!” one yelled.

  Post, who slept with his wristwatch on, looked at the dial. It was ten minutes after twelve, January 4, 1989. “I thought I’d overslept and it was noontime and I’d missed work,” he said later. “But when we walked out on the tier, there was no one else around, and it hit me that it was midnight—not noon—and I was being arrested.”

  “Where we going?” Post asked.

  “You know where you’re going,” Lieutenant Monty Watkins replied.

  “Why you guys doing this?”

  “You know why,” Watkins answered.

  Irritated, Post snapped, “Okay, sure—I know where and I know why.”

  He was taken to the Hole without any further exchange and within the next few hours, six more inmates joined him. A special squad of guards also hustled two inmates to an airstrip, where they were flown on a private plane to Marion. By noon, everyone in the Hot House knew about the arrests and that Bruce Carroll Pierce, age 30, and Richard Scutari, age 38, had been transferred to Marion during the night as punishment for being the alleged masterminds of the escape plot.

  When Thomas had learned the escape had been moved up, he had met immediately with Associate Warden Connor and Warden Matthews, who gave their approval for the arrests of Post and the six others, and the emergency trip for Pierce and Scutari. The informant had been moved to another prison for his own safety.

  Pierce and Scutari were members of The Order and both were serving long sentences for the murder of radio talk-show host Alan Berg. Pierce had fired the machine-gun burst that killed Berg on June 18, 1984, as he returned to his home in Denver, Colorado, after his nightly radio show. Scutari had been the lookout. Berg’s murder was supposed to be the first in a series of assassinations by members of The Order in their self-declared war against ZOG, an acronym for the “Zionist Occupational Government,” the catchall term The Order used to describe Jews, blacks, liberals, and anyone else its members didn’t like. They had killed Berg because he was a “liberal Jew.”

  Besides murder, Pierce and Scutari had also been found guilty of stealing $3.6 million during the robbery of a Brinks truck in northern California. Scutari had read the Ninety-first Psalm aloud to The Order members before the heist; Pierce had jumped onto the hood of the armored truck when it was forced off Highway 20 near Ukiah and had sprayed the windshield with bullets. Only half of the money had ever been recovered.

  Three of the inmates taken to the Hole with Post were members of the Black Liberation Army, a sworn enemy of all whites. But necessity had made the two groups join forces, Thomas said. “They had a common bond. All of the inmates were doing heavy, heavy time, and they all wanted out.”

  The informant had told Thomas that the BLA was responsible for smuggling the guns in and that Pierce and Scutari were in charge of arranging the outside attack on the rear tower. That assault was going to be made by members of various white hate groups who considered Pierce and Scutari political prisoners and heroes. Post belonged to neither the BLA or The Order, but he had been recruited because he helped load trash from the prison kitchen into a truck that came into the penitentiary compound three times a week to remove refuse. The guns for the escape were supposed to be smuggled in on that truck and it was Post’s job to get them off and hide them.

  “Post was a pivotal player in the escape,” Thomas said. “He was in it as deep as you can get.”

  Thanks to the informant’s tip, Thomas was confident that all the inmates involved in the plot had been arrested before they were able to smuggle in any guns. But there was no way to tell if their friends outside the prison had heard about the arrests. As far as Thomas knew, they could still be planning to kill the rear tower guard at a predetermined time on Friday, January 6, and race up to the gate in their two vans. Not wishing to take any chances, Connor decided on January 5 that all guards in the gun towers were to wear bulletproof vests until further notice. The next morning, four guards dressed in military flak jackets and carrying automatic rifles sat in an unmarked car parked in front of the penitentiary. The engine was kept running so that they could respond within moments if there were an emergency. All day Friday, tower guards used binoculars to scan visitors and their vehicles as they arrived at the penitentiary. Inside the prison, guards used hand-held metal detectors to check inmates for weapons. One convict later complained that he had been searched seventeen times in less than three hours.

  By nightfall, Thomas and the guards began to relax. Nothing unusual had happened. The guards in the tower wore bulletproof vests over the weekend, but the four guards stationed in the car were ordered back to their regular posts. By Monday, the vests were back in storage.

  Post sat in the Hole for seven days before officials told him and the other six inmates why they had been arrested. Each was offered a deal. If any inmate was willing to testify in court against the others, he would not be charged with escape and would be dealt with more leniently.

  “We really don’t have sufficient evidence to prove what Pierce, Scutari, and Post were up to,” Thomas acknowledged, “at least not in a court of law.” Unless one of the inmates agreed to be a witness, none of the convicts could be charged with attempted escape in the federal courthouse in Topeka. “The only way we could have gotten enough proof to prosecute these inmates in a federal court,” Warden Matthews said, “is by letting them actually go ahead with their plan, letting them smuggle guns in here and attack the rear gate. Obviously, I am not going to jeopardize my people or inmates in order to make a case.”

  Post and the other inmates knew what was going on and they were suspicious whenever one of them was taken out of the Hole for questioning, worried that he might talk. When guards told Post that I wanted to speak with him and he agreed, one inmate yelled, “Hey, Post, why you talking to some writer?”

  “Because I want to,” Post replied.

  “Maybe you’re thinking of snitching.”

  “Maybe I am,” Post replied calmly, “and maybe I’m going to slip into your cell tonight and slit your throat, stupid motherfucker.”

  O
ther inmates laughed. Most had seen the two of us talking numerous times before.

  Post was led into an isolation cell near the front door of the Hole for our interview. Lieutenant Edward Pierce ordered guards to leave his hands cuffed behind his back even though we were separated by bars. That irked Post. “A few days ago, you and I were walking around the prison and no one thought anything of it,” he complained. “Now, I’m such a dangerous convict, I have to be handcuffed and kept in a cage when we talk. This is all part of the macho bullshit around here. They’re showing me they are in charge—as if I needed to be reminded.”

  Post said the escape plot was a hoax. “Some snitch made up the entire thing and they have fallen for it. Now, they’ve locked up everyone who they think might know something, and they are waiting to see who is going to be the first to snitch. They’re hoping someone will come in and tell them what they want to hear, and the really sick part is that someone will, because it’ll help him get a parole. They’ll just make something up.”

  As far as Post was concerned, he was a victim of circumstance. Because he worked at the trash dumpster and had struck up a friendship with Pierce, he had been included in the “escape fantasy.”

  “Some snitch saw us talking, and thought, ‘Hey, why would a so-called nigger lover’—me—‘be talking to an Order guy, a white supremacist?’ We’re supposed to hate each other. Then he makes up this elaborate escape plot all because Pierce and I just like to debate one another.”

  Several days passed, yet no inmate came forward to testify against his peers. Post had always hated prison. He wanted to be free. But like the others, he refused to rat. Since none of the inmates had confessed, federal prosecutors couldn’t file criminal charges against anyone, but the bureau had enough evidence to bring Post and the others before Eddie Geouge for a DHO hearing, and all of them were found guilty based on statements by Lieutenant Thomas and the informant. Post was told that he was being transferred to the penitentiary at Lompoc, California.

  “I don’t really care anymore,” Post said. “I mean, after the Parole Commission turned me down the last time, it became clear to me that they are going to make me do twenty or twenty-five years in prison for bank robbery. It doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do, whether I am good or bad, I am going to spend twenty-five years in prison.

  “Let’s be real frank here. If society had wanted me to make it, the parole board should’ve cut me loose when I was married [to Priscilla Kane], but they didn’t, so now, in my mind, I’ve been cutting the streets loose. They are no longer part of my life.”

  His only regret about leaving was the cats. “I was outside in the exercise area yesterday and I saw Tiger, and they say cats forget you and don’t miss you, but I saw Tiger and he runs over, so I reached out and petted him and he purred like he was saying, ‘Hey, where you been?’ ” Shortly after he was arrested, Post had sent word to Carl Bowles and asked him to feed the cats. Bowles, who worked in the west yard near the trash dumpster where Post kept his cat supplies, had agreed. “I know Carl will take care of Tiger for me,” Post said. “He’ll be okay. I’m weaning myself from Tiger too now. I have to.”

  A short time later, he was ordered to pack his personal belongings. We talked for a final time in the Hole about his life.

  “If I could keep only one memory or moment in my life and that was it—all the rest would be erased—I think the one moment that I would keep is the shootout with the police in Glendale. The experience of shooting it out with that cop was absolutely, totally, the most beautiful experience in my life. I’m not crazy. It was beautiful!

  “Do you know what happens in moments of extreme peril? Time slows down. Things seem to be in slow motion. You get tunnel vision. You get audio collapse and can’t hear things. Perhaps it is because I’m such a spin-out and have eighteen things going around in my mind at once. Maybe that focusing was good, but again, this is not an exaggeration, that moment of pure terror and peril was the absolute best. It was like they say when someone goes to the gallows. Every color is that much brighter, every smell that much stronger. It was that absolute shitty scariness of knowing that you could be killed at any second, that your life could be suddenly taken away, that made it so exhilarating.

  “The truth is, I’ve always liked living on the edge of madness, being the one out there—the one that they are trying to catch—the lone warrior who does his own thing, who answers only to himself.”

  By this time, the guards were ready to take Post.

  “There is an old prison saying,” Post said before leaving. “Whenever a guard gives you an order, a convict quietly thinks to himself, ‘Okay, boss, I understand. I know the rules. This is your prison, but they are my streets.’ In here, they got the keys. They can do what they want with me. The Parole Commission can continue to reject my appeals. But someday I’ll be out, someday I’ll be free, and they will be my streets again.”

  Post left. I later heard that the first thing he did when he arrived at Lompoc was ask if there were any cats around.

  Chapter 47

  THE LIEUTENANT’S OFFICE

  During the four o’clock count, when inmates were locked in their cells, three guards escorted a tall, muscular black inmate from the Hole, across the yard into the penitentiary, and down center hall. Two guards were standing on each side of the prisoner holding him by the arms; the third walked behind them. As the group reached the rotunda, several guards talking there became quiet. The inmate’s head fell forward and flopped from side to side. A string of drool hung from his mouth.

  One of the guards explained what was going on. The night before, the inmate had thrown his dinner tray at Ray Moore, the senior guard assigned to the Hole. That morning, he burned the mattress in his cell. When guards moved him to another cell in the Hole, he stripped and somehow set his own clothes on fire. Guards called one of the prison’s three psychologists, who examined the inmate, said he was clearly “mentally unstable,” and recommended that he be moved to the bureau’s psychiatric ward at the medical center in Springfield, Missouri. It was where all mentally disturbed convicts were housed. Just before the four o’clock count, a team of guards went into the inmate’s cell and held him down so a physician’s assistant could give him “the juice.” Most inmates feared this more than any other action. The first shot contained three hundred milligrams of the antipsychotic drug Thorazine, but that wasn’t enough to knock out the bulky convict. The second pop contained a slightly larger dose and it had done the trick.

  “He ain’t feeling no pain now,” said James Luongo, one of the escorting guards, as he passed us in the rotunda.

  “Hey, maybe I should get some juice,” another guard joked. “It looks like good shit.”

  The convict was led outside into the afternoon sunshine and down the front steps of the prison, his feet dragging helplessly a step or two behind him. His eyes were open but unfocused. The guards lifted him into the backseat of a waiting van. His cuffed hands fell loosely into his lap, his head fell forward, and his mouth continued to drool.

  “I hope he don’t shit his pants,” said one of the guards assigned to ride in the van with the prisoner to Springfield. “They sometimes do that, you know. They just lose it after they get the juice, and you have to ride all the way to Springfield smelling that shit.”

  “At least he ain’t gonna cause us any trouble,” said another guard.

  They all laughed.

  Chapter 48

  ROBERT MATTHEWS

  Word that Warden Matthews had prevented an escape by The Order and the Black Liberation Army spread through the bureau, and within days there were rumors around Leavenworth that he was going to be promoted. It wasn’t only the escape attempt. Matthews had heard from various officials that Director Quinlan had been pleased with his visit. By mid-January the speculation that Matthews would soon be named to a regional director’s post was so widespread that most employees accepted it as fact. Larry Munger, the penitentiary’s personnel director, confidently predi
cted one day at lunch that Quinlan would make the announcement about Matthews “within a week.”

  At the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, however, there was no such certainty about Matthews. Some there thought that his dismissal of Jerry O’Brien’s associate wardens had been poorly handled. Others had heard that morale among the guards was terrible. In the past, neither of these complaints would have caused much of a fuss. Former director Norman Carlson ran the bureau along military lines when he was director. Employees followed orders like foot soldiers. Wardens were expected to be dynamic leaders unafraid of occasional grumbling by the troops. At least that is what Matthews had been taught.

  But J. Michael Quinlan had a somewhat different view. After he became director on July 1, 1987, he announced that his top priority was improving the working conditions for employees. Almost immediately, he proved he was serious by giving them the right to list their job preferences when it came time for transfers. Nearly one fourth of all bureau employees were required to move from one prison to another on an average of once every two years. In the past, they had never been asked if they had a preference. Carlson believed that some jobs within the bureau, especially those at prisons in desolate areas, were so unappealing that no staff members would ever volunteer for them, so transfers were based on what was best for the bureau, not individuals. Quinlan himself had quietly resented never being asked his preference.

  There was a good reason why Quinlan had made keeping employees happy such a priority. As had been predicted during Carlson’s last year as director, the bureau was expanding, and Quinlan understood that it needed to make itself attractive if it wanted to recruit first-rate employees.

  “We have to be careful in the sort of staff members we choose,” Quinlan explained. “The problem is that a lot of people come into this business because they have always wanted to have power over another human being for whatever reason—early childhood development problems or whatever—and that requires retraining and a heavy emphasis on what is and what is not acceptable.”