The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (35 page)

Lighting yet another cigarette, he continued: “Technically, yeah, we could have gone in there and chained him down. And sure, I’m certain his cellmate gave him back the five bars after we left, so he’s still got too many granola bars in his cell. But what I did made sense, and it worked, and no one got hurt—and that’s worth something, or at least, it should be worth something too.”

As soon as Dallas Scott was assigned a cell at Marion, he began searching for some legal loophole that would help him overturn his 1976 conviction for bank robbery. He really didn’t think he had much of a chance. He wasn’t a lawyer, didn’t have much education, and the trial had taken place more than a decade earlier. But none of that mattered. Scott needed to find something to occupy his time at Marion, something to give him some hope. Otherwise he would slowly go crazy being locked all day in a cell.

Life at Marion was designed to be monotonous, and it was. Scott’s world consisted of fifty-one square feet of living space that came equipped with a mattress, toilet, locker, sink, mirror, small black-and-white television, and radio.

Scott got up each morning at six
A.M
. when breakfast was slipped through the bars. He ate, watched the morning news, and went back to bed until ten o’clock, when he did an hour of exercise and then ate lunch. He’d watch the afternoon movie shown on the prison’s closed-circuit channel, and then turn off the television and work on his legal appeal. He refused to watch soap operas.

“Guys in here are crazy about their soap operas,” Scott explained. “Some guys have watched them for years, and they get so caught up in them they won’t come out of their cells when it’s time for recreation ’cause they don’t want to miss them.”

Scott liked having a television, but he also considered it a trap. “It’s a tool that they use to pacify you,” he said. “You got to learn how to turn off that television or else you will sit all day in front of it and forget what prison is all about. You become a lamb, which is exactly what the administration wants.”

Scott would turn the set on around dinnertime and watch the national news. He used to watch a game show before the news, but he stopped in protest when a black man appeared as a contestant.

At some point during the day, Scott would be released with seven other inmates to exercise outside his cell. On nice days, the group played basketball outdoors in a wire-enclosed cage. But sometimes Scott would use the time to take a shower or walk along the tier talking to other inmates through the bars of their cells.

Scott’s return to Marion had been a family reunion of sorts. Gang members John Greschner and Ronnie Bruscino were still there, as were other inmates whom Scott had known for more than a decade. None of these inmates was well-known outside the bureau, certainly not like some of Marion’s notorious prisoners such as John A. Walker, Jr., the head of a family spy ring that sold secrets for eighteen years to the KGB; Edwin Wilson, the CIA “Death Merchant” who supplied plastic explosives to Libyan terrorists; or Joseph Franklin, the Ku Klux Klansman convicted of killing two black men and suspected of at least thirteen other racist murders. Within the bureau, however, Scott and his crowd were considered much more trouble.

“Most inmates come into prison, follow the rules, do their time, get something out of it, and never come back,” explained Marion’s warden, Gary L. Henman.
“But some inmates come in and actually form their own prison culture. These men refuse to conform or follow rules. They want to conduct business in here just like when they are on the streets. They want to steal, sell drugs, whatever, and they are very disruptive.”

For some convicts, in a twisted sense, being housed in Marion was an honor. “When you’re a kid,” explained Greschner, who was sent to a reformatory when he was nine, “you got to have some sort of role model, and the baddest motherfuckers at the reformatory—the guys who tried to escape and didn’t take any shit—those were the people I admired.” When he was nineteen, Greschner was considered to be such a sophisticated criminal that he was sent by Minnesota officials to a state prison even though he was under twenty-one and therefore eligible for a youth facility. “I liked it. I felt totally comfortable in the environment. I was around older guys who I’d heard about for years and years, and they were like heroes to me.” Now at age thirty-eight, Greschner was the convict that younger thugs looked up to.

Scott saw himself much the same way. “I know it sounds silly that some guy like me locked in a cell is a role model, but the reason these youngsters see me or Tommy Silverstein as a role model is because we stick by certain principles. I always tell these youngsters about Tommy and try to make them understand that Tommy did something he had to do and we don’t feel like he was wrong to do it. It’s important for us and these younger kids to remember Tommy, because he’s gonna be down a long, long time, and it’s important that we keep him in our thoughts.”

Each man had to find his own way to beat the drudgery of Marion. Some simply slept as many as twenty hours per day. As the years inched by, it became harder and harder for long-term inmates to recall what being on the streets was like. The highest suicide rate in the bureau was among white men in their early twenties,
and Scott was convinced that one reason was that they hadn’t learned how to “do time.” In order to survive Marion, a man had to learn this. Scott knew how and so did Greschner, who had spent a cumulative total of thirteen years locked in various Holes or in a cell at Marion. “To be healthy, you need to interact with other people, and when you lose that, when you are in isolation or locked up by yourself day after day, all you got is what you are carrying around in your own head,” Greschner explained. “After a while you start losing the extra baggage. You learn you don’t need all the things that society says you need to survive and be happy. Your world starts shrinking. The memories get old and you start losing your identity. Eventually you hit rock bottom, where it is just you and your own demons, and the isolation forces you to examine yourself, your fundamental foundation of who you really are.

“Some people get to that point and find there is nothing there, so they string themselves up. Others break and bail out. They flip over because they are weak and can’t take it anymore. But some get down to rock bottom and discover who they are.

“For me,” Greschner continued, “what I found was a hard, cold ball. I discovered that all I really needed to survive in this world is the will to live and a knife.”

The best way to “do time,” Scott and Greschner explained, was by “beating the man.” Pour breakfast cereal in the sink in your cell, add water, and let it curdle for several days. It will become potent enough to get you drunk. You’ve just beat the man. Remove the thin steel wire from inside an eyeglass case and rub it against the bars. It will saw through them. You’ve just beat the man. Take the plastic wrap covering your food and roll it tight around a toothbrush. Heat it with matches until it becomes hard, and then spend several hours rubbing it against the floor, making its edges sharp. You’ve just made yourself a plastic knife and beat the man. All of these things had been done at Marion at one time or
another, and just when guards were certain they had seen it all, convicts like Scott and Greschner would come up with proof that they hadn’t. Greschner recently hid a piece of hacksaw blade up his nose. “This is the best fucking thing you have done in a long time, Greschner,” a guard marveled when the blade was removed.

Beating the man was lesson number one. Lesson two was to feed off the hate. “Anything they do that doesn’t kill you in prison, should make you stronger,” Scott explained. “The more they try to break you, the more you want to beat them.” Pure, unadulterated hate could sustain a man for years. Hate gave a convict a thirst for revenge and a will to survive, if for no other reason than simply to deny his captors the satisfaction of beating him. This was why the convicts were constantly belittling guards, Scott said. Even in prison, they had found someone to look down on. Every day was a contest of wills, a game of “them versus us,” a challenge.

“I don’t care what your track record is for the last twenty or thirty years, a man can wake up in the morning and, for whatever reason, throw in the towel and give up,” said Scott. The opposite was just as true. Every day that an inmate survived in prison without breaking, he had won a silent victory. He had beat the man.

Armed with a dictionary, Scott began plowing through the yellowed transcript of his trial, reading each word, studying every objection made by the lawyers and the judge’s rulings. Each morning, afternoon, and night, Scott scoured lawbooks. Because much of what he read was lawyer gibberish, Scott frequently would look up each word’s definition. He spent weeks going over and over his trial transcript, and when he finished, he was disheartened. He hadn’t found any glaring errors.

And then Scott made an amazing discovery. One of the documents that he had obtained was the pre-sentence report prepared for the judge who had sentenced him. The report was written by a parole officer who had routinely outlined Scott’s family history, cited his previous
crimes, and recommended that Scott receive the maximum eighteen-year sentence. But buried in the report was a bit of information that Scott had never known. It was about the gun that was introduced at his trial as the weapon used during the crime.

Scott had been charged with robbing a bank on December 12, 1975, near his home in Sacramento. A lone gunman had walked into the bank, fired a pistol into the ceiling, and scooped the cash out of the tellers’ cages. The police had stopped Scott a short time later while he was driving his truck, and had found a black-and-white shirt and .38 caliber revolver underneath the driver’s seat. The bank robber had worn a black-and-white shirt, and a ballistics check showed that Scott’s pistol was the same caliber as the one fired into the bank ceiling. Those two pieces of evidence had been enough to convince the jury at his March 1976 trial that he was guilty.

What Scott learned for the first time as he sat in his prison cell at Marion was that the Sacramento police had found someone else’s fingerprints on the pistol.

Scott quickly realized that his attorney had made a critical error during the trial. The attorney had asked the police whether Scott’s fingerprints were found on the gun, and the detective who testified said they were not. But the attorney had
not
asked whether someone else’s fingerprints were found, and neither the detective nor the U.S. attorney had volunteered that information.

The pre-sentence report also revealed that the police had found several fingerprints inside the bank that they believed belonged to the gunman, yet “no similarities were found between these latent prints and fingerprints of Dallas Scott.”

The fact that someone else’s fingerprints were found on the gun was significant, Scott claimed, because he frequently loaned
his
truck to his friends, most of whom had criminal records. Had his attorney known about the fingerprints, he could have argued that someone
besides Scott had borrowed the pickup, found the pistol under the front seat, and used it to rob the bank.

There was another tidbit of information in the record that Scott found interesting. The black-and-white shirt that was discovered in his truck had short sleeves. None of the bank tellers who testified at the trial had described the gunman as having tattoos, yet Scott’s arms were covered with them, and in a short-sleeved shirt, they would have been easy to spot.

The trial transcript provided Scott with one more discovery. After the U.S. attorney introduced the gun as evidence, Scott’s attorney had objected. He claimed the gun and shirt had been seized illegally because the police had searched the truck without a warrant. The judge heard the complaint, overruled it, and then adjourned the trial for the day because it was getting late. When Scott reached page 375 of the trial transcript, he realized that the court reporter had not transcribed his attorney’s objection and the judge’s ruling on it. That meant the official transcript was incomplete. “This was crucial,” Scott claimed later, “because my appeal was handled by a different attorney, who had not been at my trial.”

Scott felt optimistic. He believed he had found two reasons for a judge to set aside his conviction and order a new trial. If that happened, Scott figured the robbery case would most likely be dismissed. After all, the robbery had taken place in 1975 and Scott was certain that most of the witnesses wouldn’t remember enough to testify against him at a new trial.

Scott began writing a “request for relief.” In it, he claimed that federal prosecutors had failed to disclose evidence favorable to him (the fingerprints on the gun), that the official court transcript was incomplete (since his attorney’s objection and the judge’s ruling were missing), and that his attorneys had done an inadequate job of representing him.

Scott buttressed his request by painstakingly listing other legal precedents. “
See Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S.
83
,” Scott wrote, and “
Bauman v. U.S. Ca (Ariz.) 1982, F2d. 565
.” To make certain that he hadn’t missed any applicable cases, Scott added, “
See also the fourth and eighth amendments to the United States Constitution!
” Before mailing his petition, Scott added a final personal note to the judge. He didn’t have any money, he explained, nor did he have the “experence to muddy clear waters with wiley tricks.” His only experience inside a courtroom was as a defendant, but he had spent twenty-two years in prison because he had been found guilty of breaking “the law.” Now, for the first time, he said, “the law” was on his side.