The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

by Jonathan Kellerman

  The resulting book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, is one of the most vivid works of prison reportage ever published. Among several unsettling portraits of career criminals and their keepers, the most memorable character is probably one Thomas Silverstein, who was then being housed, a la Hannibal Lecter, in a zoo-like cage in Leavenworth’s basement, where the fluorescent lights stayed on around the clock to make it easier to watch him. Wild-haired and bearded—the BOP would not allow him a razor or a comb—Silverstein spent hours talking into Earley’s tape recorder, describing his violent past and the petty torments he claimed the guards were putting him through in an effort to drive him insane.

  Earley’s book made Leavenworth’s dungeon monster seem not only rational but quite possibly human. Granting a journalist unfettered access to him was a public relations blunder the BOP has been unwilling to repeat. Silverstein hasn’t been allowed to have a face-to-face interview with a reporter for the past fifteen years. When Westword recently asked to visit him, ADX warden Ron Wiley promptly denied the request, citing “continued security concerns.” But then, Wiley and his predecessors haven’t let any journalist inside ADX to interview any inmate since 2001 because of “continued security concerns.”

  Although he readily agreed to an interview with Westword, Silverstein isn’t a huge fan of the press, either. He remains friendly with Earley, but he’s learned to be wary of hit-and-run tabloid writers following in his wake, eager to write about “the most dangerous prisoner in America.” Most of what the outside world knows about him, if it pays any attention at all, is the fragmentary image presented in The Hot House; he’s a captive of his own legend, like some prehistoric insect trapped in amber. His letters seethe with contempt for lazy “plagiarists” who have simply appropriated snatches of Earley’s account as well as for those who’ve produced long magazine pieces or cheeseball cable programs about the Aryan Brotherhood that largely rely on the lurid tales of government snitches.

  “For some odd reason the media pees when Master snaps his fingers,” he wrote recently. “I wouldn’t call ’em ‘mainstream’ any more cuz there isn’t anything mainstream about ’em. They’re just lackeys for the powers that be.”

  Silverstein’s response to the “injurious lies” spread about him has been to launch his own information campaign at www.tommysilverstein.com. That’s right—America’s most solitary prisoner, a man who’s been inside since before the personal computer was invented and has never been allowed near one, has his own website, maintained by outside supporters who forward messages to him and post his responses.

  “He’s got a pretty impressive network,” says Terry Rearick, a California private investigator who has communicated with Silverstein by letter and phone over several years. After the two lost touch for a time, Rearick got a call from a woman in England on Silverstein’s behalf.

  The same woman posts regularly on the website, where Silverstein himself duels at length with his detractors. (A similarly heated debate has ignited over the wording of Silverstein’s entry on Wikipedia; his defenders and his critics alternately revise the account to suit their competing versions of his crimes.) Some visitors to his site dismiss him as a textbook psychopath. But Silverstein contends that if people understood the grim context in which the killings at Marion took place, the snitch games and psychological warfare and organized violence of prison life, they wouldn’t be so quick to demonize him.

  It’s a strangely disconnected argument—a garbled dialogue between cultures on different planets. Most of the visitors to his website know little about Silverstein’s world, just as he knows little about theirs. He’s been in prison for the past 32 years, and much of what he’s learned about life on the street since he was put in solitary in 1983 has come from reading or watching television. No American prisoner, not even Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, has ever been condemned to such a walled-off existence for such a long period of time. Many of Stroud’s years of solitary confinement were spent in relative ease at Leavenworth; he had not only frequent visitors, but also a full-time secretary. Even his seventeen-year stretch in Alcatraz allowed for much more daily communication with others than Silverstein has had.

  “I’m amazed that he’s not stark, raving mad,” says Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News, who’s corresponded with Silverstein for years and published some of his writing. “He’s been in total isolation for almost 25 years. The only people I can think of that have been held in anything remotely like this in modern times are some of the North Korean spies held in South Korea.”

  Yet the no-contact conditions imposed on Silverstein are becoming less unique by the day. There are now 31 supermax prisons in the country, with more under construction, including Colorado’s own 948-bed sequel to the current state supermax, known as Colorado State Penitentiary II. They are costly on several levels—the operational expense per cell can be double that of a less-secure prison, and the rate of mental illness in solitary confinement far exceeds that of the general prison population—but lockdown prisons are all the rage with a vengeful public. Increasingly, they are being used not for short-term punishment (disciplinary segregation) but for long-term confinement of hard-to-manage inmates (administrative segregation), whose privileges keep shrinking. Colorado, for example, no longer allows journalists to interview its supermax inmates except by mail.

  “The phenomenon is disturbingly common,” says David Fathi, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “If it’s disciplinary confinement, it’s finite—when you’re done, you’re done. But with administrative segregation, there’s a real lack of transparency about what a prisoner can do to earn his way out.”

  In the federal system, the past decade has seen the rise of “special administrative measures,” or SAMs, which are imposed on terrorists or other inmates whose communications with the outside world “could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons.” There are now at least two dozen SAMs cases in federal prisons, including Yousef and Zacarias Moussaoui, whose access to mail, phone calls, media interviews or other visits are extremely limited or banned outright. At present the restrictions must be approved by the U.S. Attorney General, but the Bush administration is considering changes that would allow wardens at ADX or other high-security prisons to designate inmates as terror threats and thus ban them from all media contact—even if they haven’t been convicted on terrorism charges yet, Fathi notes.

  Silverstein isn’t a SAMs case. He still has his website and his mail (although he claims it’s frequently withheld or “messed with” in other ways). But he may be the prototype of what the government has in mind for other infamous prisoners—to bury them in strata of supermax security to the point of oblivion.

  Responding in letters to questions about the psychological impact of his isolation, Silverstein struggles to find the right words. “Trying to explain it is like trying to explain what an endless toothache feels like,” he writes. “I wish I could paint what it’s like.”

  In an article a few years ago, he called solitary confinement “a slow constant peeling of the skin, stripping of the flesh, the nerve-wracking sound of water dripping from a leaky faucet in the still of the night while you’re trying to sleep. Drip, drip, drip, the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, constantly drip away with no end or relief in sight.”

  IN A DARWINIAN WORLD, predators have to adapt or die, just like their prey. Tommy Silverstein arrived in the federal prison system at a critical phase of its evolution, when the number of inmate assaults on other inmates and staff was rising sharply and officials were looking at the idea of control units as a way to neutralize the growing threat posed by prison gangs. Silverstein quickly became a symbol of the problem—and the inadequacy of the proposed solution. It’s not a stretch to say that the Marion control unit helped to make him what he became, just as the mayhem that erupted there helped to reshape the American prison system.

  Before he reached the nether regions of the BOP, Si
lverstein’s criminal career had been thoroughly unremarkable. Born in 1952 in California, he’d grown up in a middle-class neighborhood in Long Beach, but he was bullied by other kids who thought he was Jewish. (According to The Hot House, Silverstein’s biological father was a man named Thomas Conway, whom his mother divorced when Tommy was four years old; she later married a man named Silverstein.) As a teenager, he ripped off houses for money to buy drugs; his sister, Sydney McMurray, says he was battling a heroin addiction and problems with his volatile, controlling mother.

  “We were taught never to throw the first punch, but never to walk away from a fight,” McMurray recalls. “My brother started getting into trouble because he was running away from a violent environment at home. Then he got into drugs, and he became a brother I never knew.”

  Silverstein graduated from burglary to armed robbery. He was soon arrested for a series of hold-ups—pulled with Conway and another relative—that yielded less than $1,400. He was sentenced to a federal prison for fifteen years. He was 23 years old, and his life on the streets was already over.

  At Leavenworth, Silverstein became closely associated with Aryan Brotherhood members who allegedly controlled the heroin trade inside the prison—close enough that when convict Danny Atwell was found stabbed to death, supposedly because he’d refused to be a mule for the heroin business, Silverstein and two other AB members were charged with the murder. In 1980, he was convicted at trial on the basis of shifting testimony from other inmates and sentenced to life in prison. A federal appeals court later ruled that much of the testimony should never have been allowed and threw out the conviction. But by that time, Silverstein was in the Marion penitentiary and facing more murder charges.

  Marion opened in 1963, the same year that Alcatraz closed. It was intended to be not just a replacement for the Rock but an improvement, with a more open design and modern rehabilitation programs. Yet by the late 1970s, it had the most restrictive segregation unit in the BOP; not coincidentally, it was also the most violent prison in America, a dumping ground for gang leaders and crazies. Between 1979 and 1983, the prison logged 81 inmate assaults on other inmates and 44 on staff; 13 prisoners were killed. BOP reports issued in 1979 and 1981 proposed turning the entire facility into a “closed-unit operation.”

  Confined to a one-man cell in the control unit 23 hours a day, Silverstein says he spent much of his time learning how to draw and paint. “I could hardly read, write or draw when I first fell,” he explains. “But most of us lifers are down for so long and have so much time to kill that we actually fool around and discover our niche in life, often in ways we never even dreamt possible on the streets. We not only find our niche, we excel.”

  Prison officials worried that Silverstein was finding his niche in other areas, too. Long-simmering disputes between white and black gangs had a way of coming to a boil in the control unit. In 1981, D.C. Blacks member Robert Chappelle was found dead in his cell. He’d apparently been sleeping with his head close to the bars and had been strangled with a wire slipped around his neck, plied by someone exercising on the tier. Silverstein and another convicted killer, Clayton Fountain, received life sentences for the crime; inmates who testified for the prosecution claimed the two had boasted of it.

  Silverstein has always denied killing Chappelle. (Another inmate later claimed to have done the deed, but investigators found his confession at odds with the facts.) Yet even if he hadn’t been convicted in court, the suspicion that he was responsible was sufficient to trigger more violence. Shortly after the slaying, the BOP saw fit to transfer one of Chappelle’s closest friends, D.C. Blacks leader Raymond “Cadillac” Smith, to the Marion control unit from another prison. Within days, Smith had tried to stab Silverstein and shoot him with a zip gun. Silverstein and Fountain responded by cutting their way out of an exercise cage with a piece of hacksaw blade and paying a visit to Smith while he was in the shower. Smith was stabbed 67 times, in what Silverstein still describes as an act of convict self-defense.

  “Everyone knew what was going on and no one did anything to keep us apart,” he told Earley. “The guards wanted one of us to kill the other.”

  At the time, there was no federal death penalty for inmate homicides—and not much the system could do to Silverstein, who was already serving multiple life sentences in the worst unit of the worst prison the BOP had to offer. But some staffers, concerned about Silverstein’s outsized rep among white inmates, apparently did their best to keep him in check. In the months that followed Cadillac’s death, Silverstein began to regard Officer Merle Clutts, a bullheaded regular of the control unit, as his chief tormentor.

  Silverstein has given different explanations about what Clutts did to deserve such attention. Clutts trashed his cell during shakedowns and withheld mail; he smudged his artwork and taunted him; he even tried to set him up for attack by other inmates, Silverstein has suggested. Silverstein claims he told Earley “the whole story,” but only pieces made it into The Hot House. Earley won’t comment, saying he no longer discusses Silverstein with other reporters because of past misunderstandings.

  The BOP has denied that Clutts harassed Silverstein. Whatever the source of the feud might have been, there’s no question that Silverstein became fixated on Clutts. One study by Harvard psychiatrist Stuart Grassian suggests that prisoners in control units sometimes experience “the emergence of primitive, aggressive fantasies of revenge, torture, and mutilation” of the guards who watch over them.

  Silverstein thought about Clutts, and he thought about the difficulties involved in getting to his enemy when he was allowed out of his cell only one hour a day, shackled, escorted by three guards.

  Locked down for life, he had a mountain of time to consider the problem.

  ONE DAY IN SOLITARY is pretty much like another. Prisoners have different strategies for filling up their days, but there are always more days to come.

  In his cell at Florence, 54-year-old Tom Silverstein usually rises before dawn, catches up on letters and reads, waiting for the grand event that is the delivery of his breakfast. He goes to rec for an hour, comes back to the grand event that is lunch, showers and cleans his cell. Time for some channel-flipping on the small black-and-white TV, in search of something fresh amid the religious chatter and educational programs he’s watched over and over. More reading, some yoga. Then dinner, more TV—he’s a sucker for Survivor, Big Brother and other “reality-type shows”—and so to bed.

  When he was in the Silverstein Suite at Leavenworth, Silverstein had access to paintbrushes, pens and other art supplies. At ADX, he’s only permitted pastels, colored pencils and “cheap-ass paper,” he reports; consequently, he hasn’t drawn a lick since he’s been there. He says that every few weeks, he’s moved from the cell with the heavily meshed window to one with no window at all, then back again a few weeks later. There are rare, glorious interruptions in the routine—a visit with sister Sydney last May, an occasional lawyer checking in. Visitors sit in a booth outside the cell and talk to him on a phone; he sits shackled on the other side of a glass partition and talks back. But these dazzling bursts of conversation quickly fade into a muddle. Did the last lawyers come before or after his sister? Silverstein isn’t sure.

  “It’s all a blur, a dream state of mind,” he writes. “Like my memories. When I venture back to my yesterdays, it’s hard to distinguish fact from fiction.”

  Yet there is one memory, one day that stands out from all the rest—the day that started it all. Twenty-four years later, Silverstein is still in the position of analyzing, defending and regretting the act that has defined his fate. But nothing can explain away the act itself, a murder that was meticulously planned and ruthlessly executed.

  Marion wasn’t designed to be a supermax. Control unit prisoners had to be shackled and escorted to the shower every day, and the guards permitted them to have brief conversations with other inmates in cells along the way. On October 22, 1983, Silverstein was on his way back from his shower when another inm
ate in a rec cage called over one of his three escorts—Merle Clutts. Now flanked by only two guards, Silverstein paused at the cell of one of his buddies, Randy Gometz, and struck up a conversation.

  Before the guards knew what was happening, Gometz had reached through the bars, uncuffed Silverstein with a hidden key—and supplied him with a shank. Silverstein broke away from the guards and headed toward Clutts, now isolated at the far end of the tier. “This is between me and Clutts!” he shouted.

  He stabbed the officer forty times before the dying Clutts could make it off the tier. Hours later, Silverstein’s friend Clayton Fountain pulled the same handcuff trick and attacked three more guards in the control unit, fatally wounding Robert L. Hoffman Sr.

  Two federal officers slaughtered in one day, on what was supposed to be the most secure unit in the entire BOP, sent the system into shock. The bureau’s response was to forge ahead with the long-considered plan to turn all of Marion into a control unit while whisking Silverstein and Fountain into even more restricted quarters. (Fountain died in 2004 at the age of 48.)

  For years prison activists attempted to challenge the Marion lockdown in court, charging that the prison staff set about beating other prisoners and subjecting them to “forced rectal searches” as payback for the deaths of Clutts and Hoffman. In 1988, a federal judge ruled that the inmate accounts of staff brutality were simply not credible.

  By that point, Silverstein and the bureau were already on the road that would lead to ADX—a place where communication among inmates, and physical contact between inmates and staff, could be strictly controlled and all but eliminated.