The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

by Jonathan Kellerman

If the guard killings in Marion happened at any federal prison today, the perpetrators would almost certainly face the death penalty. Silverstein has suggested more than once that death would have been a more merciful option in his case.

  “Even though we may not execute people by the masses, as they do in other countries, our government leaders bury people alive for life in cement tombs,” he writes. “It’s actually more human to execute someone than it is to torture them, year, after year, after year.”

  SILVERSTEIN’S LAST TASTE of some kind of freedom came in the fall of 1987. Rioting Cuban prisoners broke into his special cell in the Atlanta federal penitentiary and set him loose. For one surreal week, he was able to roam the yard while the riot leaders dickered with federal negotiators over the release of more than a hundred prison staffers who’d been taken hostage.

  Then the Cubans jumped him, shackled him and turned him over to the feds. Surrendering Silverstein had been high on the BOP’s list of demands for resolving the situation, right up there with releasing all hostages unharmed.

  Contrary to the bureau’s expectations, Silverstein didn’t butcher any guards during his precious days of liberty. He didn’t harm anyone. He suggests the episode shows that he’s not the killing machine the BOP says he is, and that he could exist in a less restrictive prison without resorting to violence.

  The bureau isn’t convinced. He killed Clutts.

  Terrible Tommy says he’s changed. He claims to have gone 21 years without a disciplinary writeup. Other long-term solitaries go berserk, smearing their cells with feces and “gassing” their captors with shit-piss cocktails. Not him.

  “The BOP shrinks chalk it up as me being so isolated I haven’t anyone to fight with,” he writes, “but they’re totally oblivious to all the petty BS that I could go off on if I chose to. I can toss a turd and cup of piss with the best of ’em if I desired. What are they going to do, lock me up?

  “But I just have more self-control now, after 25 years of yoga, meditation, studying Buddhism and taking some anger-management courses. All that goes unacknowledged.”

  McMurray says her brother has learned a great deal about patience and suffering over the years. “He’s more like the brother I knew on the outside years ago,” she says. “I have spoken with the guards who deal with him every day, and they don’t have a bad thing to say about him. It’s the ones in administration who are trying to make it as difficult as they can for him.

  “But my brother has a spirit that is unbreakable. In Leavenworth, at least he could draw. It’s been more of a challenge for him in this situation, but he hasn’t let it break his spirit.”

  The bureau doesn’t care about his spiritual progress. He killed Clutts.

  Silverstein has told reporters that he wants to apologize to the families of the men he killed, “even though it was in self-defense.” He has recanted some oft-quoted lines from his interviews with Earley about “smiling at the thought of killing Clutts” and feeling the hatred grow every time he was denied a phone call or a visit. He says he regrets the grief he’s caused and no longer seethes with hatred.

  The bureau is unmoved by his repentance. He killed Clutts.

  Silverstein has been cut off from the operations of the Aryan Brotherhood for decades. His story is still told among the faithful, in an effort to keep his memory alive among the younger members, but he disputes that the group is a white supremacist organization. His own paintings include an ethnically diverse array of portraits. “I think it’s worth noting that Tommy is no longer a racist, if he ever was,” says Prison Legal News editor Wright.

  The bureau could give fuck-all. He killed Clutts.

  Twice a year, prison officials hold a brief hearing to review Silverstein’s placement in administrative segregation. For many years, the hearings were held in the corridor outside the Silverstein Suite in Leavenworth. Silverstein stopped attending because the result was always the same: no change. At ADX, he’s taken to filing grievances, claiming that the move has left him more isolated, with fewer privileges than ever before.

  “I am being punished for good conduct under ploy of security reasons,” he wrote last year in a formal appeal of his situation. “The goal of these units is clearly to disable prisoners through spiritual, psychological and/or physical breakdown.”

  In his response, Warden Wiley pointed out that Silverstein is provided with food and medical care, “daily contact with staff members” and access to television, radio and reading materials.

  “It’s ridiculous to call a nameless guard that shoves a food tray through the hole in the door…a source of meaningful ‘human contact,’” Silverstein fired back. “I request placement in general population.”

  He took his appeal to the regional office, then to headquarters, where it was swiftly denied. “You are serving three consecutive life terms plus 45 years for bank robbery and murder, including the murder of Bureau of Prisons staff,” an administrator noted. “You are a member of a disruptive group and an escape risk. Your heinous criminal and institutional behavior warrant a highly individualized and restrictive environment.”

  Wiley declines to comment on Silverstein’s treatment at his prison. Last spring, a group from Human Rights Watch was allowed to tour certain areas of ADX. The group wasn’t let in Z-Unit, where Silverstein lives, or anywhere near A-Unit—the “hole,” where most disciplinary cases are housed. But they saw enough to realize that the staffers who bring meals “do not converse regularly, if at all, with the inmates.” Despite claims that clinical psychologists checked on prisoners every other week, “several inmates said they had not spoken to a psychologist in many months,” and such conversations tended to be brief.

  The group also reported that many ADX prisoners are trapped in a catch-22 predicament—they’ve been sent there directly after sentencing but have never been provided any opportunity to “progress” to a less restrictive setting because of the nature of their crime. Every placement review finds that the “reason for placement at ADX has not been sufficiently mitigated.”

  “No matter how well they behave in prison, they cannot undo the past crimes that landed them in prison, generally, and then ADX, specifically,” Human Rights Watch director Jamie Fellner wrote to BOP director Harley Lapin.

  Some crimes, it seems, are beyond redemption.

  Silverstein got a copy of the do-gooders’ report and immediately fired off a letter to the group, suggesting that they come see him in Z-Unit if they want the real story about the government’s “failed and draconian penal system.”

  No one from the group has come to see him yet. Silverstein waits for them in his box within a box. He knows that the bureau just wants to bury him and that he turned the key himself. But he also knows he didn’t build that box all on his own.

  His earliest possible date of release is eighty-eight years away. He has nothing but time.

  ALAN PRENDERGAST is a staff writer at Westword and author of The Poison Tree: A True Story of Family Violence and Revenge. He teaches journalism at Colorado College and has written about crime and punishment for Rolling Stone, Outside, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and other publications.

  Coda

  I have written several stories about operations at ADX since the prison opened in 1994, but access has become a sore point since the September 11 attacks. The warden’s refusal to permit a face-to-face interview with Tommy Silverstein prompted me to ask now many journalists had been allowed to visit prisoners there since 2001. No one at ADX would tell me, but after several months a Freedom of Information Act request provided the answer: zero. Shortly after I reported that every inmate press interview request had been denied for almost six years, prison officials organized a “media tour”—but steered the visitors clear of Silverstein and Z Unit.

  In November 2007, student lawyers at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law filed a lawsuit in federal court on Silverstein’s behalf, claiming that his twenty-four years of solitary confinement amounts to cruel and unusual pu
nishment. Silverstein and his supporters continue to protest his situation on his website, but his “no contact” status remains unchanged. In fact, he’s never had a chance to read “The Caged Life.” Warden Wiley denied him access to a copy of the article, claiming that its dissemination would compromise security because it mentions other inmates and contains information about escort procedures. I still receive letters from Silverstein, but it’s hard to imagine a day when we might actually meet.

  Pamela Colloff

  BADGES OF DISHONOR

  FROM Texas Monthly

  BEFORE THE CASE OF Border Patrol agents Ignacio “Nacho” Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean became a cause célèbre—that is, before there were calls for congressional hearings, high-level resignations at the Department of Justice, and presidential pardons—most didn’t make the newspaper at all. The facts of the story might never have come to light if not for a phone call between two middle-aged women who had grown up together in a village in Mexico. In late February 2005, Macaria Aldrete-Davila called her old friend Gregoria Toquinto from her home in Chihuahua and said that her son had crossed into the United States illegally near the West Texas town of Fabens. Border Patrol agents had pursued him, and he had fled on foot. An agent had shot him in the backside as he ran from them, toward the Rio Grande. Her son had managed to limp back to Mexico, but he still had a bullet lodged in his groin and was in need of medical attention. Gregoria, who was living in El Paso, listened to her friend’s story. Then she called her son-in-law, who happened to be a Border Patrol agent.

  So began a Department of Homeland Security internal investigation that uncovered what appeared to be a straightforward case of two federal agents shooting at a man as he ran away and then concealing their actions. Investigators found that Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila had put his hands in the air and tried to surrender, but Compean—instead of apprehending him—had swung at him with the butt of his shotgun. Aldrete-Davila had bolted, and as he ran, Compean and Ramos had fired at him fifteen times, with Compean stopping to reload his Beretta as he tried to hit his mark. Neither agent announced the shooting over the radio or informed his supervisor of what had happened; the official report about the pursuit made no mention of their firing their weapons. And rather than secure the area so that evidence could be preserved, Compean had retrieved most of his spent shell casings and tossed them into a ditch. Only when questioned by investigators a month later did he offer the explanation that he and Ramos had acted in self-defense; Aldrete-Davila had been “pointing something shiny” that “looked like a gun.” A federal jury, which heard both agents’ testimony, rejected their version of events and convicted them on five out of six criminal charges, including assault, obstruction of justice, and civil rights violations.

  That might have been the last word on the case, except that when talk radio shows, CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, and conservative blogs picked up the story, they glossed over nearly all of the most damning facts presented at trial. Set against the backdrop of the national debate over immigration, a new narrative emerged, one in which Ramos and Compean were recast as “American heroes,” unjustly persecuted by a government that cared more about amnesty for illegal immigrants than about border security. The story line advanced by pundits and bloggers focused on Aldrete-Davila’s own illegal activity, since he had been ferrying a large load of marijuana when he had crossed paths with Ramos and Compean. (The agents had not known this when they fired their weapons; the marijuana was discovered only after the shooting, in a van Aldrete-Davila had abandoned when he fled.) The jury had taken this into consideration and had still chosen to hand down guilty verdicts. But the stark contrast between Aldrete-Davila’s fate and that of Ramos and Compean inspired outrage. Two Border Patrol agents were being sent to prison, while a dope smuggler—who had been granted immunity by federal prosecutors in exchange for his testimony—walked free.

  This seemingly perverse logic provoked a backlash from conservatives who had grown frustrated with the Bush administration’s handling of border issues, prompting Ann Coulter to pen an acid assessment of the case titled “No Drug Smuggler Left Behind!” U.S. attorney Johnny Sutton, a Bush appointee, was excoriated for prosecuting the agents—and even branded “Johnny Satan” by Houston talk radio show host Edd Hendee—while bloggers hailed Ramos and Compean as “political prisoners” in a modern-day Dreyfus affair. Lou Dobbs opined about the case on more than one hundred broadcasts, calling it an “outrageous miscarriage of justice” and “an appeasement of the Mexican government.” Anti-illegal immigration activists like the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps staged rallies and raised money for the agents’ defense funds, and more than 370,000 Americans signed an online petition demanding presidential pardons. Republican congressmen known for their law-and-order credentials argued on the House floor that the agents were guilty of nothing more than “procedural violations” for failing to report the shooting, and U.S. representative Ted Poe, of Humble, commended them for their actions. “We ought to give both of these Border Patrol agents medals and send them out there to bag another one,” he said.

  Entangled in the heated politics of illegal immigration, the facts of what had actually happened down by the river were cast aside, and the victim’s identity as a drug smuggler overshadowed the misconduct of the officers who had shot at him. Of the nearly 14,000 federal agents who patrol U.S. borders, it was Ramos and Compean who were held up as heroes. In an interview this summer, and in handwritten letters from prison that followed, Ramos was thoughtful and articulate about his time with the Border Patrol, longing for the days when he kept watch over the Rio Grande instead of a seven-by-thirteen-foot cell. Yet he was unrepentant about his actions on February 17, 2005. It was his bullet that had permanently maimed, and nearly killed, Aldrete-Davila, but Ramos felt that any prison time for him and his fellow agent was unwarranted. “If anything, Compean and I should have gotten an administrative punishment—if that,” he told me. “As for Aldrete-Davila, you know what? He got what he deserved.”

  THIRTY-TWO MILES southeast of El Paso, Fabens hardly looks like the kind of place that could inspire a national media storm. The Wrangler jeans factory, once its biggest employer, moved to Costa Rica nearly two years ago, and now Fabens is just another fading West Texas town. Roosters crow in the heat of the afternoon; dust devils twist down Main Street. The train rattles by every now and then, on its way elsewhere. At lunchtime, farmers rest their white straw hats beside them at Margarita’s Café, trading news over warm bowls of caldo. Otherwise, the town is quiet. South of the blinking red stoplight, Fabens reverts to farmland, and cotton fields and pecan orchards stretch out for miles toward the Rio Grande. The jagged blue contours of mountains rise in the distance, across the river in Chihuahua—a constant reminder, from any vantage point in town, that Mexico is always near.

  Ignacio Ramos arrived in Fabens as a recruit in 1995, when the local Border Patrol station was staffed by just twelve agents. (By the time Aldrete-Davila was shot a decade later, the number of agents had grown to more than eighty.) Fabens was transitioning from a quiet spot on the river into a busy crossing point, an unintended consequence of an initiative that the Border Patrol had launched two years earlier. Operation Hold the Line had succeeded in stemming the flow of illegal immigrants into El Paso, but it had not ended the problem. Human traffic had only shifted away from the city, moving southeastward to border towns like Socorro, San Elizario, and Fabens. As the tide of people and narcotics moved in, Ramos—and later Jose Alonso Compean, who was assigned to the Fabens station as a recruit in 2000—“worked the line,” patrolling the river for illegals and dope. Ramos would sometimes conduct surveillance for hours, concealed behind brush or in fields that had grown high with cotton. “I would have guys drop me off and leave me out there, and I would hide in the bushes or trees or canals,” he wrote to me from prison. “Sometimes it paid off, sometimes it wouldn’t, but it’s what kept the job interesting and a thinking game, as well. You were always trying to be a step ahead, or at least
even with the dopers.”

  Ramos, who is 38, and Compean, who is 7 years his junior, had followed nearly identical paths into the Border Patrol. Growing up in working-class neighborhoods on the east side of El Paso, they had each been the first in their families to graduate from high school. Both had dabbled in college and then joined the military. Both had eloped with their longtime girlfriends and had three children. Ramos coached Little League; Compean, T-ball. But for all that they had in common, they could not have been less alike. Ramos, who was tall and well built, was a seasoned agent who liked to do things his way, shrugging off paperwork and butting heads with his supervisors over Border Patrol policies that he felt reined him in. Compean, who was five feet four and heavyset, was quiet and reserved. Working the line—which required him and Ramos to keep a high profile on the river to “push back” would-be immigrants—could be tedious, but catching dope smugglers was exhilarating and earned them bragging rights around the station. (Compean’s wife, Patty, had filled a photo album with Polaroids of him posing beside narcotics loads that he had helped intercept.) According to one colleague, Ramos and Compean focused on finding narcotics to the exclusion of illegals and called themselves “the drug shift.”

  One such shift fell on February 17, 2005, and for Compean, it had started off slowly. Local smugglers usually moved dope the same way: Backpackers would carry sacks of marijuana across the river—in Fabens, the water is shallow enough to walk across—and load them into empty vehicles that traffickers had left on the U.S. side. Drug mules would then cross over from Mexico and drive the loads to nearby stash houses. Though marijuana was smuggled through the area nearly every day, that morning had passed without any unusual activity. According to trial transcripts and Department of Homeland Security investigative reports, a break in the monotony came early that afternoon: Sensors were tripped at a location known for drug trafficking that the Border Patrol called Area 76. Squinting into his binoculars from his post on the Rio Grande, Compean observed a van speeding away. “Did you guys copy?” he called over the radio. “There is a blue van leaving at 76, going pretty quick.”