The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (13 page)

“Ever see that before?” asked Slack.

The inmate shook his head, and frowned.

“It was found under the mattress in your cell,” Slack continued.

“Those fuckin’ niggers!” the convict exclaimed. “They’re framin’ me, settin’ me up, I—”

“Watch your mouth,” snapped Slack, who didn’t tolerate racial slurs.

The convict caught his breath. The arteries pulsing in his neck looked like hot blue electric wires sheathed under skin drawn as taut as a drumhead.

“It’s a fuckin’ frame, Lieutenant! Can’t you see it?” he said.

Slack leaned back in his metal desk chair, which creaked like a rusty schoolyard teeter-totter.

“So what’s your version?”

The inmate glanced around. Two guards stood beside him. Lacy was directly behind.

“Lieutenant, can we do this in private?”

Some inmates will fight when brought to the lieutenant’s office. It’s a matter of pride to pop a guard before being dragged to the Hole. But Slack didn’t think the convict was looking to better the odds by getting him
alone. For one thing, he didn’t need to. It was going to be a struggle for the three guards and Slack to handle him if he fought. The convict was a bulky bodybuilder.

“Okay. C’mon,” Slack replied, walking through a door at the back of the office. It led into a room normally used by the prison’s captain, but the Hot House was temporarily without one, so Slack slipped behind the desk and motioned the inmate to begin talking.

“These niggers stole my watch, okay?” he explained. “I didn’t know at first who took it, but I let it be known I wanted it back. I had some friends put out word too, okay?”

“What friends?” Slack asked innocently.

“Don’t bullshit me, Lieutenant! You know what I’m talking about.”

Indeed, Slack knew. The convict ran numbers for a group of car thieves, pimps, extortionists, and bank robbers from the deep South known as the Georgia Boys. It was the Georgia Boys who put out word that the watch had better be returned or someone was going to get stabbed.

“The niggers who took my watch got a guy to bring it to me to apologize, you know. This guy, he says to me, ‘Hey, no hard feelings, huh?’ to see if I’m going to retaliate and I tell ’im ‘No, everything is cool as long as I got my watch back.’ ”

Slack smirked.

“Hey, I’m serious. I’m a peaceful guy. I mean, I got my watch back, so what the fuck, who cares? But these niggers must’ve figured I was going to get even so they planted that shank in my cell and then tipped you off. Someone dropped a kite [letter] on me, didn’t they?”

Slack didn’t reply. He asked questions, he didn’t answer them.

“Who were the guys who stole your watch?” Slack asked.

“Some niggers.”

“Do these individuals have names?”

“Suspect so,” the convict said.

“So what are they?” asked Slack.

The convict shrugged. “C’mon, Lieutenant, I’m no rat.”

Slack asked a few more questions but didn’t learn anything. He motioned the convict back into the outer office where Lacy and the others were waiting.

“As crazy as it sounds,” Slack said, “I happen to believe you. But I still got to lock you up. If I let you go, how do I know you aren’t going to leave this office and go stick one of these guys for trying to frame you?”

The inmate smiled.

“Now, let’s say a man of your fine character decides that he’s above all that,” Slack continued. “Let’s say I let you go and you don’t seek revenge. What do you think the guys who tried to frame you are going to do? They’re going to figure you are pissed, so they are going to try to stick you before you stick them. Either way, someone’s going to get hurt, so I got to lock you up.”

“Hey, don’t do me no favors,” the inmate snapped.

Lacy put handcuffs on the inmate and led him out.

“My gut feeling is he’s telling the truth,” Slack said. “But he could be lying. He might have written that letter to me himself. He might have put that shank under his own mattress because he wanted to go to the Hole.”

Sometimes inmates get into debt or into an argument with another convict. They know that they are going to end up either stabbing someone or getting stabbed, so they set up their own arrest. That way they can be taken to the Hole, where they will be safe without losing face with their peers.

Whether or not the convict was framed or had planned his own arrest ultimately didn’t matter, Slack said. Unless the inmate told the guards who had stolen his watch, he was going to be found guilty of having a weapon in his cell—a serious offense that would result in his spending an additional six months in prison and being transferred to Marion. But the inmate was caught in
a catch-22. “He really can’t say who framed him,” Slack explained, “because if he tells, he’d be snitching, and he’s not going to risk being labeled a rat. The truth is that we really don’t know what is happening here,” Slack admitted, “and there is no way to find out.

“The bottom line is that we come in here every day, do our jobs, and go home. These inmates are here twenty-four hours a day, and this is their home and their world. We only think we know what is happening, and most of the time we probably don’t have any clue to what really is going on.”

The remainder of the shift was uneventful, and at four o’clock, Slack turned over the operations desk to Lieutenant Edward Pierce. Slack still had an hour’s worth of paperwork to complete before he went home, but Pierce was in charge. At age thirty-five, with a handlebar mustache and salt-and-pepper hair, Pierce had the sort of ruggedly handsome face seen in cigarette advertisements. Self-confident, some would say cocky, he ran his shift like a rooster overseeing the henhouse. Some guards never catch on to prison life. They lack the intuition that the best lieutenants have. Pierce had seemed to understand prisons from the first time he stepped into one. Yet, despite his abilities, he was not well-liked by supervisors. They said he lacked “polish.” Pierce thought there was a different reason: because, in his words, “I don’t kiss ass.” His buddy, Lieutenant Sandels, had tried to school him in diplomacy, but it wasn’t in his nature. “If a man is wrong, you got to call him no matter who he is,” said Pierce. This sounded more gallant than it often was.

Pierce loved working the shift from four to midnight. “All you have to do is your job, not all the Mickey Mouse political bullshit that goes on when the brass are here.”

At night, Pierce was literally in charge of the entire penitentiary and as soon as the mess hall finished serving
dinner at six o’clock, the phones in the lieutenant’s office began ringing.

“Hey, boss, I got two inmates here who want to swap mattresses,” a guard in C cellhouse told him. “Can they do that?”

“As long as one ain’t pressing the other out of his, it’s okay with me,” said Pierce, reminding the guard to make certain that both inmates really wished to swap.

Seconds later, another guard called. He had caught two inmates shooting craps in a cell, but when he tried to arrest them they had eaten the evidence.

“What evidence?” Pierce asked.

The inmates had made dice out of sugar cubes, the guard explained, which they swallowed when the guard caught them.

Pierce roared, and told the guard to assign them some extra chores around the cellhouse rather than take them to the Hole.

An alarm sounded: “Fight on B-cellhouse stairs!” Pierce bolted from his desk. Guards usually carry a two-way radio or a body alarm that emits a high-pitched squeal when punched. Whenever an alarm sounded, all guards were supposed to run to the source unless they were assigned to a job that couldn’t be abandoned even in an emergency. Pierce ran down center hallway, into the rotunda, and up the B-cellhouse stairs, but both convicts had vanished by the time he got there. The guard who had sounded the alarm had gotten a glimpse of one of them but wasn’t certain who it was. Naturally none of the inmates loitering in the stairwell had seen anything.

When Pierce got back to the lieutenant’s office, a guard was waiting with a drunk convict. The inmate had been drinking a concoction made from bread, oranges, water, and sugar, left in a plastic bag for four days to ferment. Pierce gave him a breath test and sent him to the Hole. The phone rang. An inmate in C cellhouse had just ripped his sink from the wall and the entire tier was flooding. “Well, turn off the water,” Pierce ordered.
“Damn rookies,” he said, hanging up the receiver. “They call me instead of turning off a valve.” As Pierce poured himself a cup of coffee, he overheard two convicts yelling outside in the hall in front of the commissary.

“He’s got my ice cream!” one complained when Pierce appeared.

“That’s a fucking lie, Lieutenant! I don’t owe you nothing, man,” the other replied, grasping a half-eaten ice cream cone in his hand.

“Lieutenant, I’m telling you, if he takes another lick of that ice cream, I’m gonna break his face,” the first inmate threatened.

The other inmate defiantly began to lift the cone to his mouth.

“Just hold it right there,” Pierce ordered. The inmate lowered the cone. A few minutes later, Pierce had resolved the argument and both convicts walked away.

Fights, flooded cells, drunk inmates, the ice cream spat—no one would care the next morning that Pierce had handled each of these problems. They were trivial events, remembered only because he would have to file paperwork about them. Yet, even the most insignificant confrontation could swiftly escalate into violence at the Hot House. Convicts had killed over a pack of cigarettes.

“Some college-educated pencil-pusher making five times my salary in some big corporation fucks up and the only thing that happens is that the company loses some money,” said Pierce. “I fuck up and there are bodies on the floor.”

The threat of violence underlies every action and reaction in prison. Pierce liked to compare prison work to riding a motorcycle. Most rides were routine. But sometimes late on a sweltering summer night, a rider would find himself on one of those endless flat Kansas two-lanes with only the lights of a distant farmhouse pricking through the prairie blackness. Leaning forward,
you could screw the throttle, ignore the red-and-green rpm gauge, let your instincts tell you when to shift gears. At 75 mph, the wind stings the naked face. At 95 mph, eyes squint, teeth clench. A rider must lean low, squeeze his thighs against the gas tank, keep the front tire on the white center stripe. At 105 mph, there is no time to think, no time to pause, only to react, and at 110 mph, there is not even time to do that. At that speed on a motorcycle, a rider simply shoots blindly ahead into the blackness. And then it happens, that strange feeling when pure elation and sheer terror join. Some call it pushing yourself to the edge, riding the lip of the envelope.

Being a lieutenant at the Hot House was like that, Pierce said. Routine, even boring, and then suddenly you were flying at 110 mph into the blackness never knowing for certain just where this ride would go or how it would end.

Pierce loved it.

Unlike Slack, he dreaded sitting behind a desk, and he looked for any excuse to leave the lieutenant’s office. He could be reached by radio during emergencies. Tonight, he walked to the Hole, where a veteran convict was about to be escorted to the prison hospital. Some five years earlier, the inmate had gotten drunk, smeared his body with butter, broken a mop handle into two pieces, and screamed at guards until they finally rushed him. Pierce had been the first through the cell door that night and had been hit in the head with one of the sticks. They had not spoken since that fight.

“Old Thunderbird,” Pierce said, calling the inmate by his nickname, “was just letting off steam. It wasn’t personal on either of our parts.”

Pierce fell in with the three young guards taking Thunderbird to the dentist, where he would be fitted with false teeth. At least once a week, the dentist stayed late into the evening to handle patients who were busy working in the prison factories during the day or who for
some other reason couldn’t come into the hospital during regular hours.

“What’s Mama gonna say when you get home and pull those choppers out?” Pierce chided him.

“Shit, Lieutenant, her pussy ain’t gonna taste no different.”

Pierce left them at the hospital entrance and strolled into the prison yard, where he took a seat on the concrete bleachers. An after-dinner Softball game was under way. He sat by himself midway between a group of black inmates perched along the top row and a cluster of Italians sitting on the bottom row.

The black inmates were from Washington, D.C., and were known simply as “D.C. Blacks.” They were one of the most difficult groups at Leavenworth for guards to control. Because it has limited jail space of its own, the nation’s capital sends a disproportionate number of inmates into the federal system, and most are black, a reflection of the city’s predominantly black population. At the Hot House, D.C. Blacks were the largest single ethnic group from any single city, making up 10 percent of the overall population, and nearly all were well-schooled in violence. D.C. Blacks were especially notorious as “locker-knockers”—petty thieves who ransacked the personal lockers of other inmates—and for pressuring new inmates for sex.

The dozen Italians sitting below Pierce were Mafia “wiseguys.” Each wore prison-issued white shorts and cotton shirts, but their clothing had been pressed and was brand-new. Some smoked William Penn cigars at fifty cents apiece, the highest-priced stogies in the commissary. Gold chains dangled from their necks, and a stack of graphite tennis rackets, the most expensive item a convict could special-order at the Hot House store, was nearby. Even though they were watching the ball game, each of the wiseguys was sitting so he could face and hear an older convict in the group. Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo didn’t say much, but when he spoke, his
comments either brought a solemn nod or a boisterous laugh, depending upon which was appropriate. Corallo was the boss of the New York-based Lucchese crime family, a real-life Mafia godfather, and no one at the Hot House bothered him. Not that anyone had reason to. He was a perfect gentleman. In prison, a Mafioso did his time as quietly as possible because it improved his chances for parole. There was only one time anyone could remember that a Mafia member got into trouble, and that had happened at the penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where Mafia members are frequently housed because of its proximity to New York City. A guard, for some reason, began harassing a wiseguy. Every day the guard searched the inmate’s cell, went through his mail, and frisked him as he walked the compound, until the wiseguy had simply had enough. One day a visitor from outside the prison came to see the wiseguy. The guard saw the visitor slip something into the wiseguy’s hand.