The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (45 page)

Reporters assumed that the Cuban had killed himself because of the conditions at the penitentiary. It made for a powerful story, but it was not true. He had left a note, and in it he explained that he was committing suicide because he had just learned that he had the AIDS virus and his homosexual lover had left him.

Fred Fry, the prison’s spokesman, knew the reason for the suicide, but he was prohibited by federal privacy laws from releasing the inmate’s medical records, so there was no way for him to correct the inaccurate news accounts.

The incident disturbed Slack, not because of the media’s faulty assumptions, but because he realized that the bureau hadn’t taken any special precautions to prevent AIDS from spreading inside the Cuban units. Whenever an American inmate showed advanced symptoms of AIDS, he was transferred to the bureau’s medical center in Springfield, Missouri. But Cubans with
AIDS were being kept in the same cellhouses as those not infected. Slack knew that homosexual activity among Cubans was rampant. He also knew that most Cubans didn’t know who had the disease. Yet, when Slack mentioned the potential danger of keeping all the Cubans with AIDS in the units, he was told that the bureau had no choice. Because of the riots, all Cubans who were considered to be troublemakers were to remain in the Hot House.

Slack began to worry about his guards. Whenever a Cuban was diagnosed as having AIDS, a notation was made in his prison file, though the acronym AIDS was never mentioned. Instead, the bureau wrote “body fluid precaution.” Guards working in the Cuban units were supposed to be familiar with the inmates’ files, but Slack knew that many of them never checked the records.

After the suicide, Slack made a point of reminding his guards about the threat of AIDS, particularly when they were responding to emergencies that involved a Cuban who was bleeding. Each guard was told to carry plastic surgical gloves with him and put them on when he came in contact with blood, but despite Slack’s warnings, few ever did.

A few weeks after the suicide in C cellhouse, the guards who had worked with the Cubans received good news. The bureau’s Office of Inspections finally announced that it could not substantiate any of the brutality charges filed by the former prison counselor at Leavenworth. The investigators, who had never spoken to any Cubans at the Hot House, said their probe had documented some isolated incidents which indicated Cubans were treated in ways “inconsistent with bureau policy,” but there was no evidence that Cubans had been systematically brutalized.

“This wasn’t really a surprise,” Warden Matthews said nonchalantly when he heard the announcement. “I knew all along that the charges were exaggerated.”

But at Benny’s that night, the guards who had been
under suspicion held a spontaneous celebration. More than one had been afraid that he would be reprimanded. “If I followed the best officer in Leavenworth around for a month, I could gather enough evidence on him to get him fired,” said one guard. “It’s not that you set out to screw up. It’s just that all of us are bound to make mistakes in this business, and that includes losing your temper and reacting sometimes in violation of bureau regulations.”

Another guard admitted that he had been one of the officers who had violated regulations. “I had a real loudmouth yelling and screaming on my tier and I couldn’t get him to shut up. He kept trying to start trouble. Finally, I sent my number-two officer to get something from the office downstairs so I could be alone. I ran down to the Cuban’s cell and called him up to the bars, and when he got there, I grabbed his throat and pulled his face up against the bars so he cracked his forehead real good. I said, ‘You dumb motherfucker, shut the fuck up,’ and, you know, after that he always kept quiet on my shift.” When asked if he had told the investigators that story, the guard laughed.

Someone suggested a toast to the late Phillip Shoats, Jr., and after a few seconds of embarrassed silence, several of Shoats’s defenders raised their beer cans.

“I don’t care what he did at home,” said one. “He was okay at work.”

A few minutes later, a guard mentioned Juan Torres, the suspected snitch.

“It’s payback time,” said one.

“We should jump that prick in the parking lot and whip his ass.”

“Don’t worry. He’ll get his. It’s just a matter of time. Everyone knows he’s a snitch, and someday he’ll get into a situation where he’s going to need someone backing him up, and when that happens, he’ll discover
there’s no one there—just like when we needed him to back us up and he wasn’t there.”

None of the guards thought that Torres was innocent. “It doesn’t matter how the investigation turned out. That fuck betrayed us all by talking.”

Another guard added, “These headhunters will ruin your career, just like they did Geouge because he slapped a Cuban. Well, if an inmate even looks like he’s gonna take a shot at me, I’m getting in the first lick. No one pays us to be punching bags.”

The next day Slack happened to see Torres, and the lieutenant asked him if the pressure was off now that Internal Affairs had cleared the Cuban units. Torres said that someone was still writing the name SNITCH on his mailbox. When it came time for the quarterly staff rotation, Slack recommended that Torres be assigned to a guard tower rather than put into a cellhouse, where he would have to depend on other guards if there were a fight or stabbing. Connor agreed.

“I’m not going to let anyone drive me away,” Torres said later. “I’m not a coward, but this treatment really gets to you after a while.” Most guards, he said, refused to speak to him.

Despite Slack’s progress in the Cuban units, he still found the pressure frustrating. “This place swallows you up,” he explained. “Just communicating a simple request becomes a major task.” The stress of eighteen-hour days was beginning to show. At his wife’s urging, he decided to take a weekend off and go fishing. But as he was leaving one Friday afternoon, a guard nicknamed Beans because of his Boston accent came into Slack’s office with a “shot” that he wanted Slack to take action on. Beans claimed that a Cuban had refused an order and he wanted the inmate locked in an isolation cell as punishment.

Slack recognized the Cuban’s name and he knew that the detainee was not a troublemaker. He also knew that Beans was. Slack took the shot and slipped it in his
desk drawer. He would take care of it on Monday, he decided, when he had time to hear the inmate’s version. Beans looked angry when he left Slack’s office that afternoon.

Although the fish weren’t biting over the weekend, Slack returned on Monday relaxed. He had only been at his desk for a few minutes when guard Jacob Tyler came in carrying a knife.

“Hey, boss, I found this shank,” he said.

Slack picked up the weapon and examined it. It looked familiar.

“Where’d you find it?” Slack asked.

“Cell one-eighteen,” said Tyler.

Suddenly Slack remembered where he had seen the knife before, and he recalled the name of the Cuban assigned to cell 118. Slack knew that Tyler was lying.

“Want me to put the Cuban in isolation?” Tyler asked.

“No,” said Slack.

As soon as Tyler left, Slack called in Beans.

“What’s up, boss?” Beans asked.

“You planting shanks nowadays?” Slack replied, tossing the knife across his desk. Beans looked puzzled. “You need to tell your buddy that if he’s going to plant a shank, he shouldn’t pick one that’s already been turned in before.”

The knife that Tyler claimed to have discovered in the Cuban’s cell had been turned in to the lieutenant’s office several months earlier. By chance, Slack had been there when it was found. He remembered it because of its peculiar shape.

Beans seemed surprised. “I don’t know nothing, I swear,” he stammered. Then why had Tyler claimed that he had found the knife in the cell of the very same Cuban that Beans had reported on Friday?

Slack was ready to recommend that both guards be reprimanded, but first he sent Beans to talk to Tyler and find out what was happening. A short while later, Beans
returned. He admitted that he had been angry Friday and had complained to Tyler. At that point, Tyler had said, “I’ll fix that Cuban,” but Beans swore he hadn’t helped Tyler plant the knife.

Tyler came to Slack’s house that night and admitted taking the knife from the lieutenant’s office and lying about finding it in cell 118. He was trying to “help out” Beans, he said, and pleaded with Slack not to report him. All he had ever wanted to be was a guard. His grandfather had worked at the penitentiary and Tyler wanted to make the old man proud.
As
he talked, Tyler began to cry.

“It’s my life,” he said. “Don’t fire me.”

But Slack had done some checking on Tyler, and had learned that other lieutenants suspected him of planting knives in the past. Most guards consider themselves lucky if they find one knife every six months, but during one 6-week period, Tyler had turned in more than a dozen knives. Slack didn’t mind bending rules when it came to allowing a Cuban to keep extra granola bars, but he didn’t like a liar and he didn’t like anyone who planted evidence. He suggested that Tyler resign to avoid an investigation that would embarrass him and the bureau.

The next day Tyler quit without giving the personnel office an explanation.

The inmate informant’s hand was shaking as he lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and slowly blew the smoke out, calming his nerves.

“They moved the date up,” he said. “They’re gonna bust out this Friday.”

Lieutenant Bill Thomas could tell the man was frightened. He had reason to be. For the past several days, he had been providing Thomas with information about what he claimed was a major prison breakout being plotted jointly by two groups, the Black Liberation Army, a militant black gang, and The Order, a neo-Nazi white-supremacy group. The unlikely alliance planned to smuggle in several handguns, which they would use in an attack on the rear gate of the penitentiary where deliveries were made. When the inmates began shooting inside the compound, two vans carrying armed men were supposed to rush up to the back gate after a sniper had killed the tower guard there. They would scale the tower, where the controls for the double rear gates were located. Once inside, they would free the inmates and escape.

It was a wild story, but Thomas, an eighteen-year bureau veteran, was convinced the informant was telling
him the truth. He had always given reliable information in the past, and Thomas knew enough about the BLA and The Order to know neither would hesitate to launch such a bloody assault. But Thomas had no hard evidence and there was no time for him to get any. The escape was originally scheduled to take place in several weeks, but the inmate had just learned that the guns were being smuggled inside in two days, on January 5, with the escape now scheduled for Friday, January 6.

“You got to move now,” the inmate told Thomas.

“How are they bringing in the guns?”

The snitch whispered, “The Catman.”

William Post was sleeping when six guards rushed into his cell. At first, he thought he was dreaming.

“Wake up!” one yelled.

Post, who slept with his wristwatch on, looked at the dial. It was ten minutes after twelve, January 4, 1989. “I thought I’d overslept and it was noontime and I’d missed work,” he said later. “But when we walked out on the tier, there was no one else around, and it hit me that it was midnight—not noon—and I was being arrested.”

“Where we going?” Post asked.

“You know where you’re going,” Lieutenant Monty Watkins replied.

“Why you guys doing this?”

“You know why,” Watkins answered.

Irritated, Post snapped, “Okay, sure—I know where and I know why.”

He was taken to the Hole without any further exchange and within the next few hours, six more inmates joined him. A special squad of guards also hustled two inmates to an airstrip, where they were flown on a private plane to Marion. By noon, everyone in the Hot House knew about the arrests and that Bruce Carroll Pierce, age 30, and Richard Scutari, age 38, had been transferred to Marion during the night as punishment for being the alleged masterminds of the escape plot.

When Thomas had learned the escape had been
moved up, he had met immediately with Associate Warden Connor and Warden Matthews, who gave their approval for the arrests of Post and the six others, and the emergency trip for Pierce and Scutari. The informant had been moved to another prison for his own safety.

Pierce and Scutari were members of The Order and both were serving long sentences for the murder of radio talk-show host Alan Berg. Pierce had fired the machine-gun burst that killed Berg on June 18, 1984, as he returned to his home in Denver, Colorado, after his nightly radio show. Scutari had been the lookout. Berg’s murder was supposed to be the first in a series of assassinations by members of The Order in their self-declared war against ZOG, an acronym for the “Zionist Occupational Government,” the catchall term The Order used to describe Jews, blacks, liberals, and anyone else its members didn’t like. They had killed Berg because he was a “liberal Jew.”

Besides murder, Pierce and Scutari had also been found guilty of stealing $3.6 million during the robbery of a Brinks truck in northern California. Scutari had read the Ninety-first Psalm aloud to The Order members before the heist; Pierce had jumped onto the hood of the armored truck when it was forced off Highway 20 near Ukiah and had sprayed the windshield with bullets. Only half of the money had ever been recovered.

Three of the inmates taken to the Hole with Post were members of the Black Liberation Army, a sworn enemy of all whites. But necessity had made the two groups join forces, Thomas said. “They had a common bond. All of the inmates were doing heavy, heavy time, and they all wanted out.”

The informant had told Thomas that the BLA was responsible for smuggling the guns in and that Pierce and Scutari were in charge of arranging the outside attack on the rear tower. That assault was going to be made by members of various white hate groups who considered Pierce and Scutari political prisoners and heroes.
Post belonged to neither the BLA or The Order, but he had been recruited because he helped load trash from the prison kitchen into a truck that came into the penitentiary compound three times a week to remove refuse. The guns for the escape were supposed to be smuggled in on that truck and it was Post’s job to get them off and hide them.