The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (41 page)

An incident shortly after the two investigators left town further alienated the guards. Associate Warden Lee Connor decided to discipline a popular veteran guard who was in charge of the metal detector in the east prison yard, between the main penitentiary and prison industries. Each inmate was required to walk through the metal detector when he went to work each day, again at noon when he came back inside the main penitentiary for lunch, and later that afternoon when the work day ended. The detector was supposed to help the guard find knives, but it was so sensitive that it beeped whenever an inmate with a metal belt buckle or steel-tipped work boots walked through it. Frisking each inmate didn’t seem practical to the guard, so he simply waved most inmates through even if the machine beeped.

Connor thought the guard was being lazy, but rather than lecturing him, he sent Lieutenant Tracy Johns to watch him for two days. Stationed at a window in the prison hospital, Johns faithfully recorded the number of inmates the guard actually frisked, and turned the data over to Connor. There weren’t many, so Connor began the bureaucratic procedure to fire the guard. The guard protested and claimed that he knew based on his experience who needed to be frisked and who didn’t. He notified his union representative, who
immediately complained to Warden Matthews. According to the union contract, an employee was supposed to be told immediately if he had done something wrong. He was supposed to be given a chance to correct his behavior. He wasn’t supposed to be spied on for two days and then fired. Matthews agreed, and Connor was forced to keep the guard on, although he was moved to a different job.

Although Matthews had ruled in favor of the guard, the incident was damaging. “All he and Connor care about is getting a promotion, and if they can do it by catching one of us screwing up, they’ll do it,” a guard complained. Connor further hurt his credibility by assigning an inexperienced guard to the metal detector. This officer decided to search
every
inmate, causing the line of inmates trying to get to work to back up like rush-hour traffic. When the line at the detector was stalled for fifteen minutes one morning, nearly one hundred frustrated inmates protested by returning to their cells instead of going to work. Connor quickly switched guards at the detector, this time putting a veteran in charge. Like the original officer, the new man picked inmates at random to frisk.

The confusion at the metal detector and the Cuban investigation had caused morale to sink to such a degree that one of the lieutenants decided on his own to find out what was wrong. “Why is morale so low?” he asked in a questionnaire slipped in each guard’s mailbox.

Connor was furious when he heard about the questionnaire and immediately demanded that it be collected and destroyed. “Of course they’ll say morale is low when you phrase a question that way,” he explained.

“There is a feeling that Matthews and Connor don’t really know what they are doing,” a veteran guard said later, “and that means one of these days we’ll either have an escape or a riot and someone’s going to get hurt.”

As was his nature, Matthews remained upbeat and
positive as 1988 came to a close, but it was clear that he and Connor both needed a success.

Eddie Geouge gave them one.

As the unit manager in A cellhouse, Geouge was supposed to spend his time conducting unit team sessions and filing paperwork. But he was still an investigator at heart, and when an inmate was found badly beaten in a recreation room in A cellhouse in early November, Geouge decided to find out why. He had known for months that a group of strong-arm white convicts operated a poker game in the room, and he suspected that they were involved in drug dealing and extortion as well. He began monitoring their telephone conversations, and after listening to hours and hours of tape-recorded calls, he was able to identify the three inmates involved in the drug, gambling, and extortion ring. Each had foolishly bragged about making money while in prison. Two of the inmates were the muscle behind the game, the third was the brains. Geouge decided to check each of their prison accounts. Inmates were only allowed to have twenty dollars in cash. Any more than that had to be deposited in an account at the prison, from which the inmates could draw to buy goods at the commissary. Besides keeping track of how much money each inmate had, the accounting office kept a log that identified the names of family members or friends who sent money to the prison to be deposited in an inmate’s account.

Geouge noticed that the inmate with the “brains” had only one contact who regularly sent him money. It was a woman in New Jersey. Geouge jotted down her name and address and checked the records of the other two inmates in the ring. The same woman was making regular deposits in their accounts too. Geouge asked the FBI to examine the woman’s bank records. Based on his experience, Geouge figured that the woman was working as a “bank” for the prisoners. Whenever an inmate got into debt by playing poker or buying dope or being the victim of extortion, he contacted relatives or friends outside
the prison and asked them to send a check or money order to the woman in New Jersey. It wasn’t uncommon for inmates to maintain bank accounts outside Leavenworth, particularly drug dealers and Mafia figures. Sometimes the accounts were in the inmates’ names, but often they were under the names of their relatives or girlfriends. Either way, money that was withdrawn from these accounts could not be tracked by the bureau. After the woman in New Jersey received an inmate’s check, she deposited it in her account and then sent the three inmates in Leavenworth money orders that were automatically deposited into their prison accounts.

A few weeks after Geouge notified the FBI, an agent telephoned and told him that the woman in New Jersey was depositing as much as $10,000 per month into her checking account even though she was unemployed and didn’t have any visible source of income.

Geouge wasn’t surprised by what the FBI had discovered, but he was shocked at the amount that the ring in A cellhouse was collecting. The woman was taking in as much as $120,000 per year—all of it apparently from illegal activities inside the Hot House. Obviously, since the bureau limited the amount an inmate could receive in prison to $105 per month, the woman was only depositing a small portion of what the ring was getting into Leavenworth inmates’ accounts. Geouge figured the woman put the rest of the money into other bank accounts that the inmates controlled. The funds were probably used to buy drugs, which were then smuggled into prison by other outsiders.

Even though Geouge now understood what was happening, he didn’t have enough evidence to make a case. He couldn’t do anything but watch and wait. Then one afternoon an inmate asked to see Geouge in private. He explained that he wanted a transfer to a less secure prison closer to his home. Geouge knew the inmate was
a gambler and he suspected that he had played in the high-stakes game on the fourth tier.

“I don’t give nothing if I don’t get nothing,” Geouge later recalled saying.

“What do you want?” the inmate asked.

“The poker game on four gallery.”

It was a formidable request, because the white convicts running the game would probably kill anyone who turned them in. But the inmate agreed after Geouge assured him that he would be transferred from the Hot House before any arrests were made. The inmate not only gave Geouge all the information that he needed, but also disclosed that the poker game was rigged.

As soon as the informant was transferred, Geouge turned the case over to Lieutenant Torres Germany, who promptly took the three inmates to the Hole. The fact that they were arrested by Germany, not Geouge, made it even more difficult for the inmates to figure out how they had been caught. All of them were sent to Marion.

It was the biggest bust since Matthews became warden, and he and Connor were thrilled. Even Santa Claus couldn’t have brought them a better present.

Thomas Silverstein missed his art supplies. Alone in his isolation cell in the Hot House basement where the lights burned twenty-four hours a day, Silverstein needed something to keep his mind occupied, and drawing had always been his escape. Matthews and Connor came downstairs once a week to see him, and every time they opened the door and looked at him through the two rows of bars, Silverstein asked them for art supplies. Each week, they refused. Finally, Silverstein decided to, as he later put it, “play their stupid paperwork game.”

Any inmate who felt he was being treated unfairly by the bureau could complain by filing an administrative remedy appeal, commonly called a BP-9 form. It went directly to the warden, who had fifteen days to respond. If the inmate was unsatisfied with the warden’s answer, he could appeal it to the warden’s boss by filing a BP-10 form with the regional director. If the inmate felt the regional director’s answer was inadequate, he could file yet another form, a BP-11, with bureau headquarters.

Silverstein had never bothered filing written complaints because he suspected the process was a waste of time. But after he killed Officer Merle Clutts in Marion, the bureau had pointed out that there was absolutely no
proof that Clutts had been harassing Silverstein as he had claimed; Silverstein had never filed any formal complaint against Clutts, so therefore the bureau could find no logical reason for Silverstein’s attack.

This time, Silverstein filed a BP-9.

Matthews replied on the same day that Silverstein gave him the complaint.

Silverstein appealed to the regional director by filing a BP-10.

Regional Director Larry DuBois had thirty days to reply, but answered the complaint within a week:

Silverstein immediately sent a BP-11 to bureau headquarters. He pointed out in the appeal that he had been given art supplies while a prisoner in Atlanta and had never gotten into any trouble there. The answer from bureau headquarters was brief. It said:

Silverstein hadn’t really expected that anyone in the bureau would come to his aid, but he wanted to document the inconsistent way in which the bureau was treating him. In Atlanta, he had been given paints, brushes, even canvas.

“Why do they have to do this to me?” he asked. “They got my ass behind bars and they’re never letting me out. Isn’t that enough? Why do they have to pull this other shit?”

Silverstein claimed he was being punished by guards in other ways. Letters from his friends outside prison were delivered weeks after they had been written and some were never delivered at all. Photographs enclosed in letters from his relatives were missing when the letters were brought to his cell. One week dessert was missing from his dinner tray. When Silverstein asked about this, the guard who slipped the tray through the bars simply grinned. Silverstein accused him of eating the desserts
and the guard denied it, but after the accusation, the desserts reappeared.

Each time Silverstein felt he was being treated unfairly, he filed a written complaint. Warden Matthews rejected every one of them, as did the regional office and bureau headquarters. Before long, Silverstein had a file folder stuffed with more than a dozen rejected complaints.

Matthews insisted there was nothing unfair in how Silverstein was treated. “We should be able to explain everything we do in regard to Silverstein, and I think we can and have done exactly that in our BP-nines.”

Although Silverstein was losing his paper war in Leavenworth, he was able to obtain through the federal Freedom of Information Act a copy of a bureau investigative report confirming that guards in Marion had harassed him after Merle Clutts was murdered. In December 1983 he had been moved from Atlanta to Marion for a short period, to stand trial for Clutts’s death; and his claim that guards there had tormented him was later substantiated by an investigator sent to Marion by Director Carlson. According to the investigator’s report, guards played a radio outside Silverstein’s cell nonstop for two days as loudly as possible, beat on his cell door with wooden clubs, told Silverstein that they were going to kill him, and sprinkled salt, pepper, and “unknown foreign particles” on his food. As soon as Silverstein received a copy of that report, he filed a $1.75 million lawsuit against the bureau.

Because Silverstein was being kept in total isolation, the bureau required prison psychologist Dr. Thomas White to examine him once a month and file a report on his mental health. White normally spoke to him for only a few minutes. “It is not necessary to talk to him for a long time to determine whether or not he is suffering from mental distress,” said White.

“What kind of sick trip are you on?” Silverstein asked the psychologist one afternoon during his monthly
visit. “If I killed myself down here and people came in here to investigate, I mean normal-thinking people, not the sick ones you hire to work here, if normal people saw what you are doing to me—with the lights on twenty-four hours a day, not letting me have any visitors, never letting me go outdoors in the sunshine, and all this shit—they’d say, ‘Why’d you leave him down there locked up alone so long? Why didn’t you see this coming? Aren’t you the shrink? Don’t you know keeping a man in a cage all day with the lights on and without any other people around is really sick?’ What are you going to tell them, Doc? How you going to justify this?”