The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (26 page)

Hudson thought about quitting. She was afraid to go back inside the penitentiary compound. But she decided that she wasn’t going to let the rapist end her career. She worked in the administration building for a year before returning to a job inside the penitentiary that required her to be in contact with inmates. “I am glad that I am doing something to help keep criminals locked up,” she said. “Most of these inmates don’t have any conscience. They think they can just do whatever they want and then walk away. If it weren’t for the bureau
and the people who work for it, that would be true.”

Peggy Hudson had watched Brittany Monet and had considered telling her about how dangerous the Hot House was and how quickly someone could be attacked. But Hudson decided not to. It was just as well. Monet said later that knowing about the rape wouldn’t have changed her mind about asking guards to escort her. “I’m not naive,” she said. “I know this is a dangerous place, but I can also take care of myself. I don’t need a babysitter.”

Norman Bucklew had noticed Monet the first time she came into the officers’ cafeteria, where his job was cleaning tables. The thirty-nine-year-old convicted murderer was sure he could seduce her. Most women found Bucklew handsome. He had short, curly salt-and-pepper hair, a mustache, unflinching steel-gray eyes, and a muscleman’s build. But it was his confident, even arrogant manner that made him noticeable. Bucklew had the air of a Boston Brahmin. When he was later asked why he had been so certain he could seduce Monet, he laughed. “A young filly,” he said, “doesn’t chase after a weak or crippled horse. She picks the strongest stallion in the pack and runs after him.”

For her part, when she first met Bucklew, Monet had been curious enough to go back to her office and read his prison file.

The next day, Bucklew was standing outside the cafeteria when Monet came to lunch.

“So you’re from New York,” he said, obviously pleased that he had managed to discover where Monet had grown up.

“So you’re from New Jersey,” she retorted with equal cockiness.

From that moment on, they began a game of quiet flirtation. Whenever Monet was too busy to come to the cafeteria, Bucklew fixed her a special plate and had one of her coworkers deliver it. On the days that she did
make it to the cafeteria, he brought her ice cream for dessert. One afternoon, Monet found rose petals hidden in her napkin.

The attraction growing between them did not go unnoticed by guards. Monet would later note that she had not violated any bureau regulations by talking to Bucklew. But she acknowledged that she found him appealing. “If anything ever happened at work and I needed someone to protect me, I would depend on him, not the officers,” she said. “I think they would have been scared and they wouldn’t have protected me from being raped or killed. But I honestly believe he wouldn’t have let anyone touch me.” When asked later about Monet’s comments, Bucklew said she had been “halfway” correct. “No one is gonna rape a broad while I’m around,” he explained. “I won’t permit that to happen. But hey, if there’s a riot and all the hacks are being slaughtered, then that would be okay. See, she’s a hack, and if all of them is being killed, then it’s nothing personal. It’s a convict-versus-hack thing. But rape her? No way. I would stop that.”

Three months after she began work at the Hot House, Monet was fired. Her termination notice, ironically, came nine days after she received her first pay increase and promotion. Warden Matthews’s termination letter said she was being fired because “numerous staff members have complained to your supervisor regarding your uncooperative and/or unreceptive attitude towards them.” He told the union president that Monet was “not cut out” for prison work.

Monet appealed her dismissal to the federal board that oversees personnel complaints. She pointed out that she had received superior performance ratings and had not been warned or received any counseling about her “uncooperative” attitude. She also claimed that the real reason she was being fired was because she had refused to have sex with an associate warden at the prison. Just before her complaint was scheduled for a hearing, Monet
agreed to drop it in return for an undisclosed cash settlement from the Justice Department. The associate warden named in Monet’s complaint later denied her accusation. “The truth is, she should never have been hired here,” he said. “She didn’t fit in. I think she had a mothering complex, you know; she wanted to be a mother to the convicts. It probably had something to do with her big breasts.”

Bucklew was disappointed when he heard that Monet had been fired. “That broad had heart, and if she had stuck around, we would have eventually gotten together,” he said. “I know it, and after I had a bit of that pussy, I would have gotten her to bring me a gun or a few hacksaw blades, and you know what?—a broad like that would have done it because she would have been in love, and when a broad’s in love, it’s only natural for them to want to help. I’m gonna miss her.”

Norman Bucklew flipped several sizzling pork chops over on the grill in the officers’ cafeteria and checked the big pot of spaghetti boiling nearby. It was Sunday afternoon, two days after Brittany Monet’s firing, and Bucklew was fixing his weekly spaghetti feast for his buddies. Within an hour, six inmates would join him at the same yellow Formica tables that Bucklew cleaned during the week for the guards. The inmates would devour plates of pasta covered with Bucklew’s special tomato sauce.

No one in the bureau liked to talk about it, but over the years it had become a custom at the Hot House for the inmate cooks to take over the kitchen for themselves on Sundays. There was no way for the bureau to feed 1,200 inmates three times a day during the week without the help of inmate cooks, and most of these men, like Bucklew, could have earned three times their regular $75 per month salaries by working in prison industries. They chose the lower-paying kitchen duty because they wanted to eat well, and on Sundays they did.

Technically, the kitchen was closed. Inmates had to make do on Sunday morning with a brunch of coffee, milk, and pastries, and a dinner of cold cuts and bread.
But behind the kitchen’s stainless-steel doors, the inmate cooks divided themselves, as always, along ethnic lines and the mammoth kitchen took on the atmosphere of a church bazaar. Black inmates ate fried chicken with thick white gravy in one area; a handful of Chicanos dined on tortillas and refried beans in another. Bucklew and his crew ate spaghetti and pork chops in the officers’ cafeteria. It was the most private of all the unofficial dining spots, a separate room big enough for about thirty people built between the kitchen and the inmate dining hall.

During the week, the cafeteria was off-limits to inmates. It was the guards’ private lounge. For $1.25, they could take as much as they wished from a large salad bar, or choose between two hot entrees, soft drinks, tea, coffee, milk, freshly baked rolls, fresh pies, and cakes. But despite the bargain prices and bountiful selection, the cafeteria was rarely crowded. Years ago, an inmate had been caught urinating into a steam kettle filled with beans bound for the staff dining room. There were stories about convicts ejaculating into sandwiches or spitting in them before serving them to guards. To quiet such fears, the bureau had installed a short-order grill in the cafeteria itself so that employees could watch their food as it was cooked. But that wasn’t enough for many of them. They stayed away.

As soon as he arrived, Bucklew locked the front entrance to the cafeteria because he didn’t want to be bothered by other inmates or the guards on the Sunday shift. There was a certain irony to having an inmate lock guards out of their own cafeteria and that made Bucklew chuckle as he fussed over his spaghetti sauce. The highly seasoned sauce was his specialty, and it was so good that the Mafia honchos in B cellhouse had been known to send wiseguys to the kitchen to ask politely for a plate.

A bank robber from New Jersey named Artie provided the garlic bread; another bank robber made the onion and tomato salad. Sometimes they even had wine.

“I’m a thief,” Bucklew boasted as he stirred his sauce. “I don’t think robbing a bank is wrong. I will never think it is wrong. If I want to take the money in a bank, then I’m going to take it, and if you catch me and put me in prison, I’m not going to sniffle about being in the pen. But don’t try to tell me what I did was wrong and don’t tell me I got no integrity. I’ll tell you what having no integrity is. It’s claiming you’re
not
a thief and then coming into this dining room every day, like these hacks do, and eating lunch without paying for it. Beating the pen out of a buck twenty-five—now
that’s
having no integrity.”

Guards were supposed to put a ticket inside a clear Plexiglas box at the head of the serving line before eating. Bucklew had made a practice of standing in view of the box so he could tell which guards had paid and which had simply passed their hands over it without depositing a ticket. Officials later acknowledged that the cafeteria frequently served more meals than there were tickets for, but they said the amount was insignificant.

Like most other inmates, Bucklew hated guards. “They are my sworn enemy. The lowest form of life,” he said, “even worse than cops.” When Bucklew was a teenager growing up in New Jersey, he had heard over his car radio one afternoon that a hitchhiker had just shot a state police officer and was on the run not far from where Bucklew lived. Bucklew drove immediately to the area being searched. “I wanted to find that guy and give him a ride,” Bucklew said. “Anybody who killed a cop was okay with me.”

Bucklew was twenty-five when he went to prison for the first time, in May 1974, to begin serving a life term for the murder of an armored-car guard during a bungled robbery. He was put in one of the oldest prisons in America, the state prison in Trenton that had first opened in 1797. As far as Bucklew was concerned, it hadn’t changed much. “It was like a fucking dungeon,” he recalled. “It was noisy and dirty and there were cockroaches
everywhere and rats and I’m thinking, hmmm, this is it. This is my fucking home for the rest of my life!”

Two days after he arrived, an older inmate invited Bucklew to a meeting of the “Lifers’ Club.” It began much like a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, with each man standing, giving his first name, and then telling how much time he had served.

“The first one says, ‘I got twenty-two years down,’ and the next says, ‘I got twenty-five years in,’ and on and on,” Bucklew recalled, “and I’m thinking, ‘Shit, these guys have done some serious time in this rat hole.’ ”

When the meeting ended, an inmate stopped Bucklew.

“Hey, ain’t you the kid who robbed the armored car?”

“Yeah,” Bucklew replied proudly, “that’s me.”

“I robbed one myself back in 1950. Killed a guard too.”

“We talked for a while,” Bucklew remembered, “and then it hit me. This dude had done twenty-four calendar years—
twenty-four
—in prison. I thought, ‘I’m in trouble. I’m in serious trouble here. They are going to make me stay here for at least twenty-five years,’ and then I thought, ‘Fuck this, if my legal appeal is rejected, I’m going to escape.’ ”

Nearly two years later, Bucklew lost his appeal. He immediately went to work planning an escape. It had been fifteen years since anyone had successfully escaped from Trenton, although several had tried. Sitting on his bunk, Bucklew looked at every inch of his cell. There were only two openings: the air vent, which was much too small, and the toilet. When Bucklew walked over to the toilet and got down on his knees, he noticed that the water pipes leading to it passed through a steel plate welded to the back wall of the cell.

The next morning when he was released to the prison yard for exercise, he offered an inmate who worked in the carpentry shop a bag of marijuana in return
for a hammer and chisel. He got the tools a few days later. Bucklew then jammed a piece of wood into the lock on his cell door so that it wouldn’t work. Later that day, guards sent an inmate orderly to knock off the weld and the bolts on the lock so that a locksmith could fix it. Once again, Bucklew used marijuana as a bargaining chip and convinced the inmate to take his time breaking open the lock. Disconnecting the toilet, Bucklew got out his hammer and chisel and began removing the weld from the plate on the wall. “I timed my licks with my hammer to his, lick for lick, so the guards couldn’t hear me.” By the time the inmate had sprung open the lock, Bucklew had finished chiseling the weld from the plate. Bucklew had bought several marshmallow-filled candy bars from the prison commissary, and he chewed them and used the goo as putty to replace the weld. He painted the sticky mixture silver so it looked as if the plate was still welded in place, and slid the toilet back in position.

Working in the dark later that night, Bucklew disconnected the pipes that led to his toilet and pulled off the steel plate. Beneath it was a nine-by-seventeen-inch-square hole that led through the concrete wall into an open space between Bucklew’s cell and the cell directly behind it. The space was filled with pipes and electrical wires. Bucklew stuck his hand into the hole, but couldn’t reach the other side. He stuck his leg in, too, and couldn’t touch it. He now knew that the space was big enough for him to crawl into, although he didn’t know where it led. “I couldn’t fit through the hole, though,” Bucklew recalled, “I was too big. I started running, and quit eating. Every day, all I ate were two tins of sardines, a half orange, and four crackers.” Bucklew weighed 220 when he started his crash diet. He calculated that he needed to lose at least 30 pounds to make it through the opening in the wall.

One day while dieting, Bucklew was in the prison law library typing a letter when he decided to replace the
machine’s ribbon. He couldn’t free it from the machine, so he decided to break it. Despite his tremendous strength, Bucklew couldn’t tear the ribbon. “That sucker was made out of nylon—just like a rope.” He began stealing a few typewriter ribbons each week and wove them into rope back in his cell.