The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

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The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison Page 37

by Pete Earley


  Lacy knew the transition was going to be difficult, especially since he had felt that Leavenworth was too easy on inmates. He was also aware of Sharon’s concerns about their lack of friends outside prison. But tonight was no time to dwell on problems. They planned to dance all night and then have breakfast at a local diner. “Not everyone is meant to do prison work,” Lacy said, and then, putting his arms around Lou, the guard who had taken him in when he first got his divorce, and the pal who had driven up from Texas to be with him, he added, “but if you stick around, you get addicted, you can’t stop and it takes over your life, and I can tell you right now, if I were asked, I’d follow these two guys into a group of inmates any time, any place, and I’d never have to worry about my back as long as they were with me, and they would do the same thing for me.”

  “Damn right,” one said. The other nodded.

  “I’d give my life for these guys,” he concluded, “and they would give up their life for me. And that isn’t something that many people can say.”

  Chapter 50

  Shortly after lunchtime on March 10, a dark-haired man wearing a freshly ironed white shirt, pressed slacks, and a blue nylon jacket walked up to the guard who was working inside the prison rotunda and introduced himself.

  “I’m a safety inspector from bureau headquarters,” the stranger explained. “Just finished checking B cellhouse.”

  Visits by various federal inspectors were common at the Hot House and this stranger looked no different from any other inspector. He carried a folder filled with various official forms and he seemed friendly enough. For several minutes, the two men talked, and then the inspector asked the guard to unlock the door that led into the prison visiting room. The guard didn’t have a key but he called another guard who did. Once the inspector went through the steel door, the rotunda guard called the officers stationed inside the visiting room.

  “Hey,” he warned, “you got a safety inspector from Washington coming your way.”

  The inspector had to walk down a hallway in order to reach the visiting room. A guard was waiting to let him inside. The inspector examined the portable fire extinguishers hanging on the walls, asked the guards a few questions, jotted some notes in his folder, and then announced that he was finished. He asked the guards to let him out the room’s front door, the same one that visitors used, and they obliged. Moments later, the inspector walked down the prison’s front steps to a waiting taxi.

  It wasn’t until a few hours later that guards discovered the safety inspector was not a bureau employee from Washington. Robert A. Litchfield, a forty-two-year-old bank robber serving a 145-year sentence, had fooled them. He had literally talked his way out of prison. It was the first successful escape from the Hot House in twelve years.

  Associate Warden Lee Connor was the first to hear that Litchfield was missing. Warden Matthews was in Kansas City getting a haircut and couldn’t be reached by telephone, so the guards in the control center called Connor when they discovered that the daily four o’clock count was one inmate short. At that point they hadn’t yet identified the missing inmate, and Connor’s first thought was that it was Norman Bucklew. When he found it was Litchfield, he was irritated but somewhat relieved. “When I heard the name, I knew this was the real thing and I felt sick,” said Connor. “But I also knew that Litchfield wasn’t going to leave a trail of dead bodies behind like a Carl Bowles or a Norman Bucklew would.”

  Robert Litchfield was somewhat of a legend among law-enforcement agencies because of his ability to talk himself out of trouble. In February 1986, he had escaped from the bureau’s prison in Talladega, Alabama, by posing as a federal parole officer. There too he had walked out the front door.

  After that escape, Litchfield robbed more than a dozen banks in Michigan, Georgia, and Florida, most of the time posing as a U.S. Treasury agent. Although he sometimes carried a BB gun during his robberies, he had never harmed anyone. He told police that one reason he was so successful at convincing people that he was a Treasury agent was because he wore a miniature American flag in the lapel of his coat and a tie clasp made to look like a pair of tiny handcuffs. “That’s how all of those Treasury guys dress,” he said with a grin.

  Litchfield proved just as talented at fooling the FBI as he was at tricking bank managers. Once during a robbery in Boise, Idaho, he looked outside and noticed that the building was being surrounded by FBI agents and the local police. Litchfield had locked the bank’s employees in a room but someone had sounded a silent alarm. When the FBI demanded over a bullhorn that the robber inside surrender, Litchfield calmly stepped out the front door. Agents grabbed him, but during the next few minutes, Litchfield convinced them that he was the bank’s security officer, not the robber. He volunteered to help them apprehend the real crook, who he said was still inside the bank. Litchfield drew a diagram of the bank for the FBI, described the robber, and even offered tips on how to sneak inside and free the hostages. As soon as the FBI turned its attention back to the bank, he slipped into his car and drove away.

  That incident had so outraged the FBI that it put Litchfield on its Ten Most Wanted list, and the quick-talking robber was captured in May 1987 and sent to Leavenworth. There he had deliberately kept out of trouble and done his best to blend into the crowd. He wanted to remain faceless.

  Most of the guards who worked in the prison had never heard of Litchfield, and few recognized his photograph when Connor posted it a few hours after the escape. By the time Warden Matthews returned to the penitentiary that night, Connor had figured out how Litchfield had gotten away. “He was smart enough to use us,” Connor told Matthews, “and we played right into his hands.”

  No one was supposed to enter or leave the main penitentiary without the permission of the control center. The guards inside it were responsible for identifying everyone who passed through the prison’s steel gates. But Litchfield bypassed the center by getting the rotunda guard to let him into the visiting room. Those who came and went inside the visiting room were the responsibility of the guards stationed in it, and they never bothered to ask Litchfield for identification because the rotunda guard had already telephoned and identified him as a safety inspector.

  “We actually helped Litchfield escape,” Connor explained, “because we had one staff member in the rotunda telling another staff member in the visiting room that Litchfield was a safety inspector. We vouched for him.”

  “Connor was under incredible pressure,” recalled Dan McCauley, an officer who worked with Connor the night of the escape. “He was taking the escape hard. He was angry and embarrassed. He blamed himself. But Matthews was amazingly calm and diplomatic. ‘Name me a penitentiary where someone hasn’t escaped,’ he said. He was really cool about the entire thing and his composure calmed people down.”

  Fourteen days later, Litchfield robbed a bank in Tucker, Georgia, by posing as a gas company inspector and convincing the employees that there was a dangerous gas leak in the building. He hustled them into a conference room, locked them inside, and stole $38,000 from the vault.

  Two weeks after that robbery, U.S. marshals surprised him as he stepped off an elevator at an exclusive condominium in Pensacola Beach, Florida. His face was swollen and bruised from plastic surgery that he had undergone only a few days earlier. The surgery had so changed his appearance that a deputy from Kansas had to be flown to Florida to identify him. The plastic surgeon was later quoted as saying that Litchfield asked to look like the movie star Robert De Niro. Litchfield received an additional thirty-five-year sentence for the escape and the Tucker bank robbery. This time, the bureau put him in Marion.

  “If the officers had followed proper procedures, Litchfield would not have escaped,” Matthews said later, “but I think things were running so smoothly that our people were lulled to sleep. It’s been twelve years since an escape, two and a half years since a murder. We were simply too relaxed, and that’s partly my fault because I want things around here to be laid back.”

  After
that incident, Connor wrote himself a note that he kept in the top drawer of his desk. It was a list of his priorities as associate warden. It read, 1. NO ESCAPES! 2. No staff members hurt! 3. No convicts hurt … He wrote another note the next day and slipped it next to the first one. It read, 1,200 ASSHOLES. Connor decided he had spent too much time worrying about the Cuban units, not enough thinking about the American prisoners. “It’s a reminder to me that I got twelve hundred assholes besides the Cubans to watch.”

  Staff morale was affected for weeks. Normally friendly guards avoided speaking to inmates. Any violation of prison rules, no matter how slight, was dealt with harshly. At Benny’s, guards drank their beers in uncharacteristic silence. “Leavenworth’s pride was really, really hurt,” Connor said. “Everyone felt bad.” Matthews agreed. “I think the way Litchfield escaped made it worse. He just walked out the front door and really rubbed our faces in it. In some ways, it would have been better for staff morale if he’d gone over the wall in a blaze of gunfire.”

  Matthews and Connor instituted an array of new security precautions. But Matthews didn’t dwell on the escape. Instead, he went to work rebuilding staff confidence and morale. With the enthusiasm of a high school coach giving a pregame pep talk, he made a point of stopping to talk to guards as he made his rounds, bragging about the great job that each was doing, reciting the merits of the Leavenworth staff. No one liked the fact that Litchfield had gulled them, Matthews preached, but every so often the inmates were going to get away with something. “It’s unfortunate but inevitable.”

  “I didn’t want the staff to get so down on themselves that they began doubting their abilities,” he later explained, “because that would only result in more problems.”

  By the beginning of April, most of the gloom had dissipated, and Matthews had gained a new popularity. Even his harshest critics were complimentary about the way he had handled the Litchfield escape, and they felt the sort of kinship with him that develops whenever people share a harrowing experience. Warden Matthews had been passed over for a promotion and so had most of the Hot House guards at some point during their careers. Matthews had been badly embarrassed by the escape, but instead of using the guards as scapegoats, he had accepted full responsibility. Most importantly, he had defended Leavenworth. It was still the best institution in the federal system, he bragged, with the finest staff in the bureau. And he had said this over and over again, with the conviction and enthusiasm of a man who seemed genuinely to believe what he was saying.

  An incident at Benny’s a few weeks after the escape illustrated the newfound respect for Matthews. Two guards from Marion, who had brought a prisoner to Leavenworth earlier that day, joined three Hot House guards for drinks after work. At one point during the conversation one of the outsiders asked, “Hey, what’s it like working for a nigger warden?”

  The remark was not the first racial slur made around the table that evening, although it was the first reference to Matthews. Unlike the other racial epithets, however, this one was challenged.

  “The man you’re referring to happens to be warden of the best penitentiary in this fucking system,” a Hot House guard replied coldly, “and around here, we call him Warden Matthews or Mr. Matthews.”

  Thinking the statement was a joke, the two outsiders began to laugh, but when they realized the others were serious they stopped, and for several seconds there was a strained silence at the table. The subject was dropped. What made the exchange noteworthy was that the guard who defended Matthews had only a few weeks earlier used the same racist terminology to describe the warden. Later, when he was reminded of this in private, the guard said, without the slightest touch of embarrassment or shame, “Hey, Matthews may be a nigger, but he’s our nigger now, and I’m gonna back him. He’s earned my respect.”

  Chapter 51

  DALLAS SCOTT

  Shortly after Dallas Scott was taken from Marion to the Hole in Leavenworth, he felt sharp pains in his stomach. When he tried to get out of his bunk, his legs went out from under him and he had to crawl to the toilet. There was blood in his vomit. At first he figured he had food poisoning, but when no one else in the Hole became ill, he knew that it was his chronic hepatitis flaring up.

  Scott had been sick like this before. Two years earlier, his legs, ankles, and feet had swollen to nearly double their normal size and he had become so ill that doctors sent him to the bureau’s medical center in Springfield, where he was bedridden for three months. As Scott lay shivering in his bunk in the Hole, he decided that he was about to die. Years of drug and alcohol abuse were finally about to kill him. Yet, even though he continued to vomit and shake, he refused to let the guards take him to the hospital. The only professionals that Scott trusted less than lawyers were doctors, especially those who worked for the bureau. He sipped water to prevent dehydration, and stubbornly remained in his cell.

  One afternoon, a guard brought him a certified letter from the U.S. magistrate in Sacramento who had agreed to review Scott’s motion for a new trial on his 1976 bank robbery conviction. Inside was a ten-page ruling, but Scott only got through the first paragraph before he was swearing.

  His appeal had been rejected. His claim that he had been denied a fair trial because prosecutors had never told him about the mysterious fingerprints on the robbery weapon and because part of his trial transcript had not been recorded were “unfortunate” mistakes, the magistrate wrote. But they were also “harmless.”

  The unidentified fingerprints found on the pistol could have belonged to Scott’s wife, since Scott had testified earlier that the gun belonged to her. The fingerprints at the bank thought to be the robber’s could have belonged to customers. “Although this court does not condone the prosecution’s failure to disclose the fingerprint information … it is unlikely that the fingerprint evidence would have made any difference in Scott’s ultimate conviction,” said the ruling. There was other evidence that pointed to Scott. Several witnesses had testified that the robber talked in a “funny way,” and Scott had a unique Texas accent. The most common denomination of money stolen from the bank was one-dollar bills, and two hours after the robbery, Scott had redeemed a citizen’s-band radio from a pawn shop by paying $45 in one-dollar bills. The magistrate acknowledged that such evidence was circumstantial, but when it was added together it “pointed towards Scott as the robber.” There was no comment about why none of the witnesses had mentioned Scott’s prison tattoos when they described the robber. Apparently, the magistrate had thought this unimportant.

  The fact that part of the court transcript was missing also wasn’t sufficient grounds for a new trial, the ruling stated, because the material wasn’t that relevant to the trial.

  “I had been stretched out flat on my back for four days, about half-expecting ‘Old Scratch’ to come knocking at the door,” Scott recalled, “but when they hit me with the deal from California, I shot straight up off the bunk, cussed, stomped around the cell for a while, then hit the shower and spent sixteen hours digging through my trial transcripts, briefs, case law, notes, et cetera. Suddenly, I felt pretty good. You see, I knew this asshole was wrong. I had them beat at their own game and I wasn’t going to die before I proved them wrong.”

  Scott went to work on an appeal of the magistrate’s ruling. He also sent an angry letter to the attorney whom the magistrate had forced him to hire. Scott had borrowed $5,000 from friends outside the prison in order to comply with the order that he be represented at the court hearing. The attorney had filed all the proper court documents and had represented Scott before the magistrate, but Scott was unsatisfied with his performance and he wanted him to know it. “You are a spineless coward and lying piece of shit,” Scott wrote, in a letter firing the lawyer. These were some of the nicer terms he used.

  By the time Scott had finished mailing the proper forms to appeal the magistrate’s ruling, it was time for him to be tried in Topeka on the drug-smuggling charges. He wanted to act as his own attorney in the case, but this judge
wouldn’t allow it either, and Mark Works, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer fresh out of a Topeka law school, was assigned to the case. Works, who had never before represented an inmate and had little experience in criminal cases, didn’t have much to work with, especially after federal prosecutors played the tape recording of Scott’s telephone call threatening Bill Hutchinson’s girlfriend.

  Scott had always denied that it was his voice on the tape, but there was no mistaking his accent when prosecutors played the tape for the jurors. By the second day of the trial, he realized he was losing and he asked that Works be fired as his attorney. The judge denied his request. Scott then announced that he wanted to call several inmates from Marion to testify on his behalf, as well as some from Leavenworth. Federal prosecutors immediately claimed that Scott was simply trying to give his buddies a chance to get away from Marion so they could attempt an escape. When the judge denied the request, Scott threw down his pencil and shouted, “This is bullshit! This motherfucker is denying all my witnesses.” Two U.S. marshals scrambled to the defense table. The next day, the judge permitted Scott to call several inmates, but only from Leavenworth.

  The jury found Scott guilty and the judge sentenced him to 210 months (17.5 years) and a fine of $750 for attempting to smuggle $500 worth of heroin into the prison. Under the new drug-sentencing laws, Scott had to serve at least fifteen years of the sentence, and it wouldn’t start until he had completed the six years that were still hanging over his head from his conviction for his 1976 bank robbery.

  Back in the Hole at the Hot House, Scott was incredulous. The trial was “a railroad job,” he complained, not because he was innocent (evidence at the trial proved otherwise), but because he didn’t feel the judge and prosecutors had played fair. “If I’d have been able to defend myself or could’ve afforded an expensive lawyer, I’d have gotten off,” Scott complained. “This is what sucks about this bullshit system of ours. I should get to play by the same rules as everyone else, but because I don’t have the money and am tagged as a prison gang member, I don’t. When you’re in a supermarket with a ham in your arms and there are six people in front of you each with a ham, and the clerk says, ‘That will be five dollars,’ to each of them and then she comes to you and says, That will be fifteen dollars,’ that is not fair. You should have to pay the same price as everyone else. But everyone always wants me to pay more.”

 

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