The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (17 page)

“The cops will tell you that I’m a predator, but you try to find one person in twenty-three fucking years who I’ve preyed on. There are fifteen or twenty cases, guys who I have helped through the years. Ask any one of them and they will tell you, ‘Oh yeah, Carl, well, he’d probably fuck me if I let him, but he never pressed me out of anything. He’s my friend. He cared about me and helped me.’

“That’s what is pure.

“What do I want with Thomas Little? I want someone I can develop a friendship with. I want someone
who will say, ‘Hey, old Carl Bowles, society may think he’s a piece of shit, but he’s my friend. He is someone who I care about. He made a difference in my life.’ ”

Carl Bowles sounded sincere and he sounded convincing. At least Thomas Little thought so.

The Cuban prisoners, all 719 of them, arrived at Leavenworth in what seemed to be good spirits. Some flashed victory signs, others grinned. For thirteen days, the nightly news had broadcast footage about the riots and much of the coverage had been sympathetic toward the detainees. But their demeanor began to change as soon as they were placed in C and D cellhouses. “The Cubans had been babied and catered to in Oakdale and Atlanta,” explained Lieutenant Steven Myhand, one of two lieutenants put in charge of the cellhouses, now known collectively as the Cuban units. “We intended to show them who was boss here and that is exactly what we did.”

Always before, the Cubans had enjoyed the same privileges as U.S. inmates; in fact, they had often been treated better. Not at the Hot House. All visits between Cubans and their family members and friends were stopped. No nightly movies, no use of the prison gym or weight room, no educational classes, no jobs in the prison factories, no group religious services, no trips to the prison yard. The Cuban units were designed to be a miniature Marion. The inmates were locked in five-and-a-half-by-nine-foot cells, usually two men per cell, and
were only allowed outside three times each week for exercise. Even then, they were simply moved to a larger screened cage the size of a two-car garage. Once a week, each Cuban got a shower. Once a month, he could place one collect telephone call, but if no one answered or the line was busy, the phone was passed to the next man. The only goodies were generic cigarettes and writing supplies. If a Cuban had enough money, he could buy a small transistor radio strong enough to pick up Kansas City radio stations. Otherwise, a few Spanish books and magazines passed up and down the tiers were his only entertainment.

If all that was not enough to make life inside C and D cellhouses miserable, there was the never-ending noise. The roar of hundreds of men yelling from cell to cell reverberated inside the old buildings. It was as loud at three
A.M
. as at noon. The babble of Spanish was unintelligible to most of the guards, making the racket even more maddening. Like the screech of fingernails across a blackboard, the clamor scraped the nerves. Tempers flared.

“I don’t feel good about what we are doing here,” Matthews admitted one morning as he inspected the Cuban units. “This is basically a jail and I have never wanted to run a jail. But we have no choice.”

Not only had the Cubans caused $64.6 million in property damage and cost taxpayers another $48.8 million in funds spent to quell the riots, they had badly humiliated the bureau and committed an unforgivable sin. “These bastards took officers hostage,” a Hot House guard explained, “and they had to be taught a lesson.”

Warden Matthews and Associate Warden Smith stressed that all Cubans were to be treated as “humanely as possible.” But when the two men chose Lieutenant Phillip Harden Shoats, Jr., to oversee the Cuban cellhouses, they sent the Hot House guards a subtle message. The thirty-eight-year-old Shoats, one of only two black lieutenants at the prison, was known as a “hardball
lieutenant” with a reputation for being physical. “Shoats wasn’t the kind of guy who tried to resolve conflicts by talking,” recalled one guard. “He gave an inmate an order and he gave it only once. After that, he kicked butt.”

Shoats resembled Santa Claus in appearance. He weighed more than three hundred pounds, at least one hundred pounds too much for his six-foot one-inch frame. He always seemed to be smiling, too, ready with some joke. But his easygoing manner could turn into anger in a flash, and when that happened Shoats became a bully. Warden Matthews would later explain that he had chosen Shoats because he wielded “an iron hand inside a velvet glove.” “I needed someone who was cool under pressure, but firm,” Matthews said. “I felt Shoats was that man.”

Shoats’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Myhand, was the youngest lieutenant at the Hot House at age twenty-nine. He had only worked for the bureau for seven years, but his father was a retired officer with thirty-one years of experience, including stints at the federal prisons at Alcatraz and Leavenworth. The younger Myhand had grown up living in the shadow of penitentiary walls. He knew the lingo, the legends, the procedures. At the Hot House, Myhand had a reputation as an energetic, likeable “cowboy” who, like Shoats, preferred action to talk.

Neither Shoats nor Myhand received any special training in how to deal with the Cubans. They did not understand Spanish. They did not know which Cubans were killers and which were petty crooks, because the inmates had destroyed their prison records during the riots. Worse, there were only five or six guards who could speak Spanish well enough to interpret.

“Every Cuban is a shithead until he proves otherwise,” Shoats told the guards whom he handpicked to work with him, “and then he still is a shithead. Don’t take any chances.”

Trouble between guards and Cubans erupted very
quickly. A few days after the Cubans arrived, an inmate in C cellhouse filled a plastic cup with his own urine and feces, let it curdle for several hours, and then screamed until a guard rushed to his cell. The Cuban threw the contents into the guard’s face. Gagging, the guard backed away, trying to clear his burning eyes as the Cuban ducked into a corner of his cell to hide.

“You little bastard,” the guard yelled. Other guards kept him from attacking the Cuban.

“It’s time to show these shitheads we mean business,” Shoats declared. “No one throws piss and shit on my officers without paying a price.”

Shoats called in a SORT team of five specially trained guards who gathered outside the Cuban’s cell. Word of the guard’s “baptism” had spread through the cellhouse, sparking laughter and jeers from other Cubans. The guards unlocked the padlock, removed the chain draped through the door and bars, and slid open the heavy cell door. Inside, the Cuban had doused the floor with soapy water and smeared his body—naked except for undershorts—with soap. SORT attacked. The first guard hit the Cuban in the chest, knocking him onto the slippery concrete floor. Each of the other four grabbed a preassigned limb. Before the Cuban had time to react, he was lifted onto his bed and each arm and leg was shackled to rings on the bed frame. He remained chained down for eight hours.

“Getting shit and piss thrown on you became so common we called it ‘getting slimed,’ like in the movie
Ghostbusters
,” one guard explained later. “At first, we put the little bastards in a four-point position when they slimed us, but after a while, they just laughed at you. They would lay there chained down for eight hours and then get up and piss in a cup and throw it on your face again. You just wanted to smack ’em ’cause they acted like little kids.”

The bureau released an internal report after the riots that said the Cubans were the most unstable group
of prisoners ever put under its care. “Their extremes can go from violent homicidal rage to crying, loneliness, and suicidal behavior,” warned Dr. Bolivar P. Martineau, the report’s author. “At various times, you will be talking to a reasonable twenty-six-year-old person. Suddenly, that same individual can become a sophisticated, manipulative forty-year-old con artist; or he can turn into a three-year-old child with a raging temper tantrum who just happens to be five foot ten inches tall, weighs 180 pounds, and who is physically threatening you.”

But despite the slimings, the danger, and the dreadful working conditions, the Hot House guards were eager to work in the Cuban units. The reason was overtime. Warden Matthews was willing to pay any cost to keep the inmates under control. “I would rather pay for it now than have the Cubans burn down this institution like they did in Atlanta and Oakdale and pay for it later,” he explained.

At first the bureau sent in guards from other institutions to help ease the staff shortage at Leavenworth, but the Hot House guards objected, treated the newcomers shabbily, and resented their cutting into the overtime pie. The bureau responded by pulling the outsiders and letting Leavenworth guards work double shifts. Most guards did their regular job and then an additional eight hours. Overtime expenses doubled by $2 million the first year. One veteran employee earned $50,000 in overtime pay—more than his yearly salary. A joke soon spread through the Hot House:

Question: How can you tell who works in the Cuban units?

Answer: He’s the guy who is fucking nuts, but he’s driving a brand-new Bronco.

Nobody questioned the wisdom of having exhausted guards working with such incendiary prisoners.

The choice of Shoats to run the volatile Cuban units didn’t please everyone. When Lieutenant Torres Germany heard that Shoats had been put in charge, he grimaced.
Germany had been Shoats’s boss at the medium-security prison in La Tuna, Texas, before both men transferred to the Hot House. Another Leavenworth lieutenant, Charlie Hill, had also worked in La Tuna with Shoats and he, too, was worried.

But neither Germany nor Hill said anything, nor did they share their uneasiness with Warden Matthews. Shoats was well-liked at Leavenworth. He had done a good job there, and Germany and Hill said later that they really had no grounds to question his ability. Besides, the warden at La Tuna was fully aware of what Shoats had done there and Shoats had already been verbally disciplined for the mistakes he made. Both Germany and Hill knew that there was nothing written in Shoats’s personnel file about his past errors. Both men felt they had no choice but to keep quiet.

When asked about Lieutenant Shoats’s past, Don (DJ.) Southarland, the warden at La Tuna, said, “In this business, you are going to make mistakes. Everyone will. That’s how you learn. Phillip had some weaknesses, but he always gave one hundred percent, was totally loyal to the bureau, and was a pretty dang good officer. I was proud to have him working for me.”

The first time Southarland had to reprimand him verbally was in 1985 when Shoats lost his temper on a bus transporting convicts. He and two other guards were escorting thirty prisoners across the Texas desert late at night when one convict began stirring up the others. Within minutes, all thirty were rocking the bus back and forth. Shoats ordered the driver to pull off the road, and when the bus stopped, he opened the wire cage that separated him from the inmates, charged inside, grabbed the loudmouthed convict, and dragged him off the bus. Shoats took a .12 gauge shotgun with him. He later claimed that he merely “talked shit” to the inmate. The inmate claimed that Shoats threw him down and jammed the barrel of the shotgun into his mouth.

After several minutes, Shoats brought him back into the bus, chained him in his seat, and taped his mouth shut.

When Southarland heard what had happened, he called Shoats into his office. “You played right into the bastard’s hands,” Southarland later recalled saying. “No one in the world is going to believe you didn’t threaten that guy. You violated security taking him off that bus. Even I believe you got him off the bus to threaten him.”

“I came real close to busting Phillip for that stupid trick,” Southarland said later. But he didn’t.

A short time later, Shoats’s thirteen-year-old daughter knocked on the door of the bureau-provided house where Torres Germany and his wife lived. They were neighbors of the Shoatses. The girl had a black eye and bruised face, and she claimed her father had beaten her. A county child-abuse investigator was called, and once again, Shoats ended up in front of Warden Southarland for a lecture.

“Phillip told me that he had gotten angry and slapped her around a bit,” Southarland said later. Shoats had surprised his daughter kissing an older boy in his car. “I felt Phillip had a good reason to punish her, but I chewed his ass out for the way he did it and he told me that he was sorry,” Southarland said. “He had just gotten carried away.”

“I honestly believe his heart was in the right place,” Southarland added. “Every day he dealt with inmates who had not been disciplined at home, and I think Phillip had a tendency to overreact. He didn’t want his kids to end up like those inmates.”

The county child-abuse investigator wasn’t as understanding, particularly when other employees told her that there were rumors Shoats frequently hit his two sons. The investigator started asking questions, and when Warden Southarland heard that she was querying staff members, he became upset. “I told them that they couldn’t just walk around on a federal prison reservation
knocking on doors asking questions about Shoats’s personal life,” Southarland recalled. “In fact, we had a pretty heated discussion about what they could do and couldn’t do on federal property.” Southarland said later that he told the county investigator that he would have guards physically remove her from federal property if necessary. The county stopped its investigation.

Nonetheless Shoats’s behavior sparked rumors among staff members. When his wife, Elke, and the children moved into a motel, the gossip increased. A few days later, they returned to the prison reservation. The Shoatses decided in the spring of 1987 to ask for a transfer to Leavenworth to start fresh.

At the time, the warden at the Hot House, Jerry O’Brien, needed a lieutenant. Still, he was suspicious because Shoats was willing to move laterally and that was unusual. O’Brien telephoned La Tuna. “The warden told me everything was hunky-dory with Shoats and praised him highly, so I hired him,” O’Brien said later. Shoats arrived on June 7, 1987, only one month before O’Brien retired and Warden Matthews took charge. The new warden knew absolutely nothing about what had happened in La Tuna, nor would he learn about Shoats’s past—until it was too late.