Born to Lose (49 page)

“After that, we're going up the stairs after leaving the basement,” recalled Cameron, “when the governor said, ‘I don't want to see that basement used again.' Brierly said, ‘But we have to have this … ,' but Shapp cut him off, saying again, spacing each word, ‘I don't want to see that basement used again.' Lt. Peterson and me looked at each other and just shook our heads.”

The next morning's press announcement jolted prison administrations statewide: “The basement section called the ‘hole,' a solitary confinement symbol of prison punishment for years, has been abolished at Western Penitentiary, according to Governor Milton J. Shapp, who disclosed that Warden Joseph Brierly agreed to closing the ‘hole.' Eliminating the medieval character at Western is part of a statewide prison reform program.”

On the day of the hole's closure, discipline in the Home Block, always tenuous, began to crumble. In the months following the governor's dictum, it fell primarily to Lieutenant Peterson, the ranking officer in the Home Block, to make the best of a bad situation. With little backing from the administration, however, and stymied by ever-changing policy, Walter Peterson's worries were great.

. . .

“Walter loved Asaline and Asaline loved Walter. Just neighborhood kids, they got sweet on each other at 13 or 14 and, oh lordy, neither of them ever looked at anyone else.” So spoke Oralee Coon, mother of Asaline.

“To go back a bit, our family came up here from the south,” explained Oralee. “My grandmother was a slave—this was Alabama—and my granddaddy was ‘mixed.'”

My father was very light, straighter hair. When we were kids, my father had land, a horse and buggy. No formal education, but he had skill. He knew how to handle things, so when I was comin' up we had some of everything. He owned a farm. Then in 1925 my father bought a new Ford. Now here it was my father, who had no schoolin' and couldn't count, had a new car and, by hard work, three little houses in the country. So we grew up fine. Now this is nothing compared to many white folk, but we lived well. Still, for us younger people, jobs were scarce and many blacks migrated north. The mills were the draw. My parents stayed on their land, but my husband and I came to Pennsylvania, here in Clairton. The town
was segregated but friendly. Blacks lived here, whites lived there, but we all interacted. A lot of the men got jobs at U.S. Steel. When we first got here, the mill's rate was four dollars a day.

William Coon gave a hearty laugh. “Maybe we were a bit poor, but everyone lived the same way, the whole neighborhood, but we were never hungry because we learned to eat what was prepared, and mother was great at making supper out of, well … whatever. We were very happy.”

“Of my children, Shirley came later,” said Oralee, “but Alvin, William, and Asaline were all born within a few years of each other, and to speak of Walter Peterson, well, he practically grew up in the house, too, and he was as much a son to me as my own boys. He was born the same month and year as my Asaline, in 1930. His family came up from Virginia and lived just down the road. Walter never knew his father, who was thought to be Puerto Rican. By the time Walter was born, the man had gone his way.”

“Yes, Walter was very fair, with blue eyes,” added Shirley. “He could easily have passed, but he always made it a point to let people know he was black.”

“So we all played and grew up together,” said William.

It was good times. The elementary schools were white or black only, but the high school was integrated, and here Walter excelled. Smart as a whip, he'd help out us kids with math. He ran track and threw discus. By this time he was a good-looking fella, a solid six-footer, active, and a churchgoing man. Asaline was an organist, and our Dad was the director of the choir. The church was our center.

Walter and Asaline graduated in '48. He joined the air force and was with the APs, a version of the army's MPs, and got home when he could, always straight back to Asaline, too. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before those two would marry.

“And that's just what happened,” said Shirley.

After Walter was home for good, he found a job in the mill then, yes indeed, married my big sister, his childhood sweetheart, on a perfect day in April 1957.

Asaline and my older brother, Alvin, were the backbone of our family. Dad died young and they stepped right in. We came to Asaline for guidance all the time. She was an absolute leader and, really, a pioneer
around here because she was the first black secretary for a company in Clairton called Picco. Then, again, she became the first black secretary for the Clairton School District. She was so good, so personable, she wound up secretary to the superintendent.

Oh, Walter and Asaline were wonderful together. I was 13 when they married. When Asaline worked I used to iron her clothes. One day while ironing, Walter was there. Something came on the TV about sex and I asked Walter what it meant. He turned red as a beet and said I ought to talk to Asaline about such things. Well, the next week Walter gave me a book he got from the library. He said, “Here, maybe this can answer some of your questions.” Walter … a quiet and thoughtful man.

If it wasn't the strikes, it was the intermittent layoffs that eroded stability for mill workers up and down the Monogahela Valley. Walter Peterson's tenure at the Clairton plant was no different. He and Asaline wanted children and a future less plagued with the uncertainties of mill work. So, recalled Oralee,

Walter started looking around, then he heard of openings at the penitentiary in Pittsburgh. This was in 1959 and things were changing a little, can't say they weren't, but police departments, the prison system, fire stations, it seemed, were closed to us, but didn't Walter go up there and get that job, didn't he just? Everyone was so happy. After some years he made sergeant; then, of all things, Walter was promoted to lieutenant. Oh my, white shirt with silver bars and a white cap, a real position of authority. This might be nothing to think of for white people, but for us this was truly a journey of a hundred years.

. . .

Hoss's racist conversations with Danny Delker and George Butler had proceeded from idle banter to intrigue, conspiracy, and finally, a pact to kill. Ensconced as they were in the Home Block, the three had plenty of time together, especially because of other changes in the block that followed the closure of the hole.

“The basement was just sitting there, dormant,” said Superintendent Gil Walters. “Now that its purpose was taken away by Governor Shapp, it was space that ought to be used somehow. To exercise the Home Block inmates we'd put them in a side yard, but in bad weather they'd be kept in. I decided to reopen the basement as a rec room where they could play cards or checkers. We put tables and chairs down there.”

Sgt. Cameron's view probably represented that of most Home Block officers:

So all of a sudden it comes down about this day room. They were washing their clothes down there, bringing their radios; oh man, nothin' was locked. They could go in and out, take their showers when they wanted. If it started to rain they could go back down and play chess. In and out. In and out. You gotta control the Home Block, 'cause if the Home Block blows, the [general prison] population will go in sympathy with them, then you got a goddamned riot. As long as the place was secure and controlled, ya know, even the things that was done in the Home Block, as long as it don't get out to the main population … but we had to go along.

Cameron's veiled allusion to “things … done in the Home Block” referred to unauthorized disciplinary measures that were indeed employed. Employed with cause, but employed. Sometimes there was no other way to maintain order.

Even to inmate John Keen, the Home Block was a dangerous place. A two-time killer, Keen was also an aggressive booty bandit:

We got liver on the menu about every couple weeks. You have to laugh, really, but liver was stolen from the refrigerators for personal use or to trade for cigarettes. You see, a guy would take the liver to his cell, cut a hole in his mattress then stuff that raw liver in there and just like that he got his woman for the night. For me though, there's plenty of the real thing walking around. My preference was the young white boys. Some can be cajoled, brought along by talking, small gifts, lingering walks in the yard, almost like courting. Other times you have to shove someone around a corner, then a quick knife to the throat. Of course, this takes the romance right outta things.

In late autumn of 1973, Keen was in the Home Block because of an aggressive record. “They'd put us down there, gave us a little leeway but that's where we stayed,” said Keen.

Hell yeah, everyone there was a stone killer, the top names, every mutha badass. I had two bodies on me, had my own fuckin' rep—and I was scared shitless.

It got so loose because the people in power were tryin' this therapeutic
thing. They were gonna be buddy-buddy with us, give us more trust. They had that thing for years where they beat up on people. Now, let's face it, they wouldn't beat you up for nothin', but if you did somethin' wrong, you were gettin' an ass-whoopin', wasn't no rap on it. They did this for years and maybe thought it wasn't workin' so they'd try somethin' else. We got more yard, could walk around free in the Home Block a lot. They even made the guards play basketball with us. This was a big change, because before, you wasn't even allowed to talk to a guard, a silence rule, but now we're jabberin' all the time, which really pissed off the guards. And yeah, we'd bring reefer in all the time in our shoes. We'd walk to and from visits without bein' shook down.

The prison's swiss cheese security or, better put, sanctioned permissiveness allowed the murder plot of Hoss and his pals to roll on. The open basement provided the place, but were it not for another crucial factor, all calculations would have come to a halt.

“You see, the basement itself had a safety feature,” said Lt. Charles “Kozak” Kozakiewicz, the security chief. “About halfway from the door to the row of cells, there were floor-to-ceiling bars that ran the length of the basement. This meant that when staff went down there, the inmates were on the other side of the bars. Even though the inmates down there were playing cards instead of getting punished, that didn't make them any less treacherous. You have to understand that any staff working a prison is virtually always outnumbered, so the bars were crucial for protection. But now we learn the bars are to be dismantled.”

This decision, like many other recent changes from the administration, frustrated the old-school Lt. Kozak with the wrongheaded thinking of his superiors. With eighteen years in, Kozak's stature inside the walls was considerable. “I tried to treat inmates with respect,” said Kozak, “but still had my run-ins, and got the scars to prove it. Stabbed, kicked, held hostage, busted vertebrae … neck still aches in damp weather.” But Kozak was far from an easy mark. It was usually the other way around.

“If we was up to somethin', we made sure Kozak wasn't around,” said inmate Keen. “I seen that man rumble many times in the Home Block. He'd hit you so hard in the head, your feet would swell up.”

“I was there from the fifties, remember now,” said Kozak. “In my career I can say I've never seen at Western a greater concentration of cutthroats, white and black, at one time. We had trouble keeping everyone in check, and that's why taking out those protective bars was pure lunacy.”

Issue of the bars aside, another new order further hampered the staff's efforts to keep order in the Home Block. U.S. District Judge Wallace Gourley had mandated that inmates have at least two hours of exercise outside their cells. This was never a problem except in the Home Block. As the numbers swelled there, Walters was forced to exercise the inmates in groups of four, instead of singly or in pairs, a safer practice. In poor weather, as many as four could now congregate in the basement. If his officers felt hamstrung by the administration, Walter's own bosses in Camp Hill provided little but shifting sand under his feet. Further, dissension was growing
within
his administration. Mistrust was pervasive.

“I felt pretty much on my own,” said Walters. “I trusted Kozak and some others but we often banged heads. I understood Kozak's thinking as security chief. Much going on must have rubbed him the wrong way.

“The basement as a punitive measure should not have been closed down, but to whom could I protest? Is there someone higher than the governor? And sure, in hindsight that rec room was a blunder, but when it opened up there were all sorts of regulations about the place but these were largely ignored by the officers who ran it.” As for the removal of the bars in the basement, Walters added meditatively, “Inside that rec room, I would have not myself ordered the bars torn down, but it may have gone through me. I might have given the order but I think it was an agreement reached at a much higher level than mine.”

Walters's explanations may be perfectly credible, but at least some of the rules broke down when unsupported by other rules or policy. “You have to remember,” said CO Ron Horvat, “the concerns of the officers had been routinely thwarted for some time. I think gradually there came a resigned acceptance of the situation.”

With the removal of the bars, another piece had fallen into place for the conspirators. And as their theoretical plan become more concrete, Hoss and his pals picked their victim. They ruled out all whites. They could choose a black inmate but that was too small-fry. So wasn't it fortuitous that Lt. Walter Peterson, a rare black officer, was running the Home Block? They would kill him.

Even after the decision to kill Peterson, someone might have developed cold feet or a change in the circumstances might raise obstacles that would cause the plan to fizzle. But just at this time, a series of events fueled the conspirators' rage and racist resentment.