The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (30 page)

No single incident in the bureau’s history is as controversial as what happened next. Over the years, guards have made Officer Merle Eugene Clutts into a martyr and inmates have done the same with Silverstein. The men locked horns almost from the moment that they met.

By 1983, Clutts had worked for the bureau for nearly nineteen years, always as a guard at Marion. He had grown up in southern Illinois, had never left the area except for a short stint in the military, and wouldn’t have flinched at being described as a redneck cowboy. At age fifty-one, he had a watermelon belly, white hair cropped short, and the weathered looks of a man used to working outdoors on a farm. He didn’t talk much, preferred the company of the horses he raised on a few
acres outside Marion to most people, and didn’t take guff from anyone, whether from an inmate or a fellow guard.

Part of the reason Clutts was moved into the control unit in 1981 was because he wasn’t afraid of the inmates. Many other guards were. According to a special task force sent in afterward to investigate his death, most inmates in the control unit, including Silverstein and Fountain, lifted weights during the one hour when they were out of their cells. They also exercised in their cells by doing several hours of calisthenics each day, including hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups, until they became so strong that they could “virtually not be physically controlled by staff.” The inmates’ strength and violent backgrounds made many of the guards “reluctant to carry out their duties because of fear of personal liability,” the panel wrote.

Of all the inmates in the unit, Silverstein was perhaps the most notorious, particularly after he killed Cadillac Smith. Other convicts saw him as a defiant leader, unafraid of guards and the bureau. On the other side was Clutts, one of Marion’s tougher guards.

Convicted killer John Greschner, another member of the Aryan Brotherhood and Silverstein’s best friend in Marion at the time, had tangled with Clutts before Silverstein arrived at the control unit. “We’d bang heads, back up, and bang heads again, [but] I eventually backed up. I tried to figure out a way to navigate around Clutts. After I backed up, everything was cool; in fact, Clutts even did me some favors. But only after
I
backed up,” Greschner recalled. “When Tommy and Clutts started bumping heads, I told Tommy ‘You got to back up from this guy or it’ll get way beyond a “cop versus convict thing.” It will get personal.’ And that’s what happened. It got personal—real fast.”

To this day, Silverstein claims that Clutts set out to break him by harassing him in a dozen petty ways that most guards learn early in their careers. According to
Silverstein, Clutts passed him by when it was his turn to be the first to go into the recreation cage. He searched his cell more often than those of other prisoners and left it in a shambles each time. He would hang on to Silverstein’s mail and deliver a big bundle of it all at once after several days. At night, he would shine his flashlight in Silverstein’s eyes during the inmate counts. Worst of all, according to Silverstein, Clutts would intentionally smudge his artwork, later teasing him by saying, “I did a bit of work on your painting.”

Whether or not Clutts actually did these things is impossible to verify. The bureau denies it, of course, while Greschner and other inmates claim Silverstein is telling the truth.

“I remember hearing Clutts tell Tommy, ‘Hey, I’m running this shit. You ain’t running it. You’re a fucking prisoner! I’m the cop, who the fuck you think you are?’ ” Greschner recalled.

What isn’t disputed is that Clutts and Silverstein clearly disliked each other, and regardless of the cause, this dislike turned to a personal hatred—at least on Silverstein’s side.

“That guy was torturing me,” Silverstein said. “It was like I was a little kid again walking home from school and that bully [Gary] was picking on me. I’ve always attracted bullies, and I don’t know why, but I hate ’em and I hated Clutts. Everyone knew that Clutts and I had a thing.… Everyone always says how mean and nasty and rotten I am for killing him. They say he was just doing his job, blah, blah, blah—you know, because he put on a badge he’s somehow a saint. But it wasn’t like that. When someone starts to poke at you, after a while nothing matters anymore. All you think about is getting revenge, striking out. With me, it was Clutts.”

Inside the isolated Marion penitentiary, deeper still within the control unit, the so-called prison within a prison, Silverstein began to fixate on Clutts.

“From the time I’d hear his voice or see him come
to work, I’d be pacing my cell,” Silverstein recalled. “My whole day would be ruined.”

Silverstein became so frazzled that he couldn’t draw. When other convicts yelled to him, he didn’t answer. At night, he couldn’t sleep. All he could think about was Clutts—and getting revenge.

“It just kept building and building, and pretty soon, killing him was all I could think about. Every day, every night, every moment that I was awake, I just thought about how much I wanted to kill him. How much I wanted him dead.”

His fellow prisoners noticed that Silverstein had become obsessed. They couldn’t talk to him without his turning the conversation to Clutts. No matter what happened, if it was something bad, he accused Clutts of being behind it—even when some other guard was involved.

“I told Tommy, ‘Hey, man, when you kill a cop, you know it’s over. Your life is gone. You got to get some perspective here,’ ” recalled Ronnie Bruscino, a convicted murderer who was in a cell near Silverstein’s at the time. “Twenty years from now, every new guard will still know you are the one who killed a cop, because that’s something the guards never, never forget.”

Greschner said he, too, tried to discourage Silverstein. “If you do a cop, you are going to go on Birdman status,” he told him, a reference to the Birdman of Alcatraz, who killed a Leavenworth guard and was never released from prison.

But by this time it had reached the point where nothing else mattered to Silverstein except striking out at Clutts. “I knew that I had to do it. I had to kill him.”

Sometime in early October, Clutts removed the mattress in Silverstein’s cell and replaced it with another one. It is not clear why the mattresses were switched, but Silverstein saw the change as yet another attempt to torture him. Silverstein began plotting a way to kill the
guard, and he found plenty of help in carrying out his plan.

After Cadillac Smith was murdered, the bureau decided to handcuff prisoners in the control unit whenever they were taken out of their cells. The inmates would then be escorted by three guards to the shower stall or recreation cage.

The obvious time for Silverstein to attack Clutts was when guards released him from his cell. But he still would have to get out of the handcuffs, find a knife, and make certain that Clutts was trapped on the tier, or else Clutts would simply run off the tier to safety. Whispering to other convicts through the air vents in the back of their cells, Silverstein and his fellow gang members came up with a plan.

On Saturday, October 22, at 8:40
A.M
., guards took John Campbell, a reputed member of the Aryan Brotherhood, outside the control unit so he could exercise out-of-doors. A few minutes later, Campbell complained that he was cold and wanted to exercise in the inside cage that ran parallel to the tier. Guards moved him back indoors. From his cell, Silverstein shot Campbell a knowing smile. Step one of the murder plan had been accomplished.

At 9:30, Silverstein was ordered to cuff up so that he could be escorted to the stall for his weekly shower. He stuck out his hands without protest and a pair of handcuffs was snapped over his wrists. He was frisked as he stepped from his cell, no weapons were found, and three guards took him to the shower. As Silverstein walked down the tier, he continued to smile. Step two was going as planned.

Forty minutes later, Silverstein finished his shower. He had been hyped up, nervous, but like most other inmates in the unit he had always taken lengthy showers and he had kept to his routine today to avoid suspicion. Still wet, he called to the guards and was secretly pleased when he saw three of them coming down the tier to open
the locked shower door and escort him back to his cell. Clutts was one of the three. The third step had been accomplished.

Silverstein put out his hands to be handcuffed, and turned to walk down the tier. Officers William McClellan and John Mahan were on either side of him. Clutts would follow behind Silverstein. But as the four men began to walk down the tier, they heard a voice.

“Hey, Clutts, I need to talk to you.” It was John Campbell, the gang member in the indoor exercise cage.

Clutts turned and walked to the rear of the tier. Without knowing it, he had just completed step four of Silverstein’s plan. Clutts had been drawn away from the other two guards and was now standing at the end of the tier, as far away as possible from the exit and steel gate that separated the tier from the guards’ office.

As Officers McClellan and Mahan escorted Silverstein back to his cell, he stopped to chat with Randy Gometz, another gang member. Allowing Silverstein to stop at Gometz’s cell was against bureau regulations, but these encounters had become common practice in the control unit because guards were afraid to tell the inmates that they couldn’t stop to visit.

In a flash, Gometz reached through the bars and used a key to unlock Silverstein’s handcuffs. Then he lifted his shirt and Silverstein grabbed a shank tucked in the waistband of Gometz’s pants. Step five.

“Look out! He’s got a knife!” McClellan yelled as Silverstein spun around.

“This is between me and Clutts!” Silverstein screamed, and shot past the two guards.

“Clutts saw me coming and he froze for a second,” Silverstein said. “He knew I had him cornered.”

Clutts raised his arms to protect himself, but Silverstein’s knife jammed deep into his belly.

“I just went off,” Silverstein later recalled. “I just started stabbing him over and over and over again. Clutts tried to hit me, but I didn’t even feel it. I’m not
hearing nothing. I’m not feeling nothing. I don’t know what is going on around me. All I know is that I got a knife and I am jabbing it as fast as I can into Clutts. All I see is his hands moving and me stabbing him and everything else is blank.”

Despite his wounds Clutts managed to push Silverstein to one side during the attack, and struggled down the tier. Officer McClellan hurried forward, grabbed him, and helped him toward the steel gate at the front of the tier where they would be safe. Just as they were about to go through it, Silverstein caught up with them, grabbed Clutts’s shoulder, jerked him down onto the floor, and began punching him again with the knife.

Officer Mahan, who was standing on the other side of the gate, reached through the bars and smashed a nightstick against Silverstein’s head. Silverstein staggered back, and McClellan and Mahan pulled Clutts off the tier and slammed the steel gate shut. Clutts’s chest was covered with blood. He had been stabbed forty times.

“This ain’t against cops!” Silverstein yelled, the knife still in his hand.

“Drop the shank,” ordered a lieutenant who had just arrived at the cellblock.

Silverstein refused. “I honestly believed that they were going to kill me, and I was not going to give up without a fight.”

For several minutes the lieutenant talked to Silverstein, finally convincing him to put down the shank and lock himself in his cell.

“I felt that a huge weight had been lifted off me,” said Silverstein. “I was so happy Clutts was finally dead.”

Unpardonable though the killing of a guard was, at this point Clutts’s murder remained an isolated incident, but that quickly changed. Prison officials decided against sweeping the entire control unit for weapons. Instead, they moved Silverstein into an isolation cell and decided to continue operating the control unit as usual.

Eight hours later, Officers Robert L. Hoffman, Sr., Jerry L. Powles, and Roger D. Ditterline were taking Silverstein’s friend, Clayton Fountain, back to his cell from the recreation cage when Fountain stopped to talk to another inmate, who repeated the earlier process by unlocking Fountain’s handcuffs and giving him a shank.

Fountain spun around and yelled, “You mother-fuckers want a piece of this? Come on!”

He then attacked all three guards, stabbing Ditterline first. Powles was second in line. Fountain knocked him to the floor. In a courageous act, Hoffman helped Ditterline off the tier and then went back inside, unarmed, to rescue Powles. Hoffman grabbed his fellow officer and began pulling him to safety as Fountain continued to stab both of them. As soon as the two guards were on the other side of the steel gate, out of Fountain’s reach, Hoffman collapsed. He died a few minutes later in the arms of his son, who also worked as a guard at the prison. Because of Hoffman’s valor, Ditterline and Powles both survived. Fountain, meanwhile, danced up and down the tier. He later was overheard telling other inmates that he wasn’t going to let Silverstein get ahead when it came to “dead bodies.”

Never in the history of the bureau had two guards been slain on the same day in the same prison. Director Carlson was outraged. “The murder of an officer can never be justified,” he recalled. “Even if Clutts was harassing Silverstein, and I don’t believe that he was and there was never any proof that he was, that still didn’t give Silverstein the right to murder him.”

Marion was clearly slipping further out of control.

Even though the murders had taken place in the control unit, Warden Miller ordered inmates throughout the prison locked in their cells until further notice. Then, two days later, he lifted the order. He still believed that Marion could be operated as an open institution. Within a few days, an inmate was murdered, this time in the general prison population, and four inmates attacked a
group of guards. Miller declared a state of emergency, every prisoner was locked in his cell, and Leavenworth’s SORT team was sent to Marion to help restore order.

John Greschner, Ronnie Bruscino, and other inmates at Marion would later claim in a class-action lawsuit filed against the bureau that Marion’s guards and the SORT team from the Hot House beat and tortured them in retaliation for the murders of Clutts and Hoffman. After listening to testimony from ninety witnesses and reviewing 150 pieces of evidence during twenty-eight days of trial, a federal magistrate would later conclude that there was “no credible evidence” to prove inmates had been abused. “This is not to say that there may not have been isolated incidents of excessive force,” Magistrate Kenneth J. Meyers wrote, but given the circumstances at Marion after the murders, “an extra push or shove would be understandable.” He noted that guards were being attacked, doused with feces and urine, fires were being set by inmates, cells were being destroyed, and officers were being told that they would be killed. The magistrate also specifically criticized Greschner and Bruscino, whom he described as “not credible witnesses.” He wrote: “This litigation was conceived by a small group of hard-core inmates who are bent on the disruption of the prison system.…”