The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (36 page)

Scott mailed his request to the appropriate court. If the judge ruled in his favor, it would be the ultimate irony: a convict legitimately beating the man at his own game with his own rules.

“Knife fight! Kitchen!”

Lieutenants Edward Pierce and Tracy Johns ran toward the kitchen when the alarm came over their portable radios. Johns had only been at the Hot House for a short time, replacing Shoats, and even though he came from Marion, Pierce wasn’t certain how the novice lieutenant would react to a knife fight. Some staff members were reluctant to step in between two fighting inmates, especially if they had knives.

As the two lieutenants burst through the kitchen doors, Pierce noticed that there were at least six prison employees watching the fight and none had done anything to stop it. The onlookers were food stewards, not guards, which meant they were paid to supervise inmate cooks and help prepare the meals. But that didn’t matter. Every male employee who worked inside the penitentiary was required by bureau regulations to react to emergencies and had been trained in how to stop fights. Every one of them. Later, when one of the stewards was asked why he hadn’t tried to stop the brawl, he said, “Most of us have wives and kids or grandkids. You tell me: Are you going to risk your life by stepping in front
of a knife when you have one lousy piece of shit trying to kill another lousy piece of shit?”

Lieutenant Pierce didn’t feel that way. “It’s my job to keep these assholes from killing each other, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to end up in some federal court somewhere trying to explain to a judge why I watched two inmates stab one another and didn’t do anything to stop them.”

Pierce had noticed something else as he entered the kitchen. Lieutenant Johns, longer-legged than Pierce, had passed him when they were racing to the fight, but when they reached the kitchen’s double doors, Johns had slowed down.

“We hit the door at the same time,” Pierce said, “and I wondered to myself, ‘Hey, what’s happening here?’ So I put Johns to a test. I said to myself, Okay, let’s see what you are made of,’ and I intentionally went for the victim. That left the guy with the knife for Johns. I wanted to see if Johns had enough guts to do what was necessary.”

Pierce knew both inmates. Drew McCabe, a stocky bank robber from Oklahoma, was swinging a large knife at a New Jersey crook named Nick Funicelli, who was unarmed and trying to block the blows with his arms. Blood spurted from at least a dozen cuts on Funicelli’s hands, forearms, face, and chest.

“
Put the weapon down!
” Pierce screamed as he dashed past McCabe and tackled Funicelli, knocking him to the floor. Pierce shielded the inmate’s body with his own.

McCabe lunged forward. Johns didn’t hesitate. He grabbed McCabe from behind, wrapped his arms around his chest, and jerked them up, forcing McCabe to raise his hands over his head. Johns locked his hands behind McCabe’s neck and fell to the floor, taking McCabe with him. As soon as they hit, the knife fell free and the food stewards rushed forward to help subdue McCabe.

McCabe was not injured and was taken to the Hole. But Funicelli was spitting up blood.

“I’m bleeding!” Funicelli screamed. “Why am I bleeding so much?”

“Hey, the medical staff is the only one who can tell you that!” replied Pierce, as he led Funicelli to the hospital.

“This guy had blood squirting out of every hole in his body,” Pierce recalled. “I got his blood all over my ears, shirt, pants, forehead, tie, tie tack, I mean, he was cut from asshole to appetite.”

A few hours later when Pierce was typing his report about the fight, he glanced at McCabe’s record and noticed that he only had four more months of his six-year prison sentence to serve.

“This asshole was practically out the front door,” Pierce said. Why had McCabe risked getting more time in prison when he was about to be released?

Over in the Hole, McCabe later explained that he had been forced to stab Funicelli. The trouble began three days earlier, he said, when an inmate rushed into his cell and said, “Hey, Funicelli says you’re a rat. He says you snitch to the cops to keep from going to the Hole. What are you gonna do about it?”

“What the fuck business is it of yours?” McCabe replied. “Keep your fucking nose out of it.”

But he was worried. “If I don’t do nothing, Funicelli is gonna keep telling everyone I’m a rat, and guys are gonna believe him, ’cause they’re gonna say, ‘McCabe must be a snitch or else he’d do something to shut Funicelli up.’ ”

McCabe said he tried to resolve the problem by asking a mutual friend to talk to Funicelli. “I wanted to know if Funicelli was willing to apologize. He was drunk when he said it, you know, and probably just shooting off his mouth. I figured it won’t be no big deal this way, if he apologizes. But no, when my friend asks Funicelli, the
dumb motherfucker repeats it. He calls me a snitch again.

“I couldn’t believe the son of a bitch was doing this,” McCabe continued, “putting me in this sort of spot, ’cause I’m about to go home. But I got no choice now. You gotta understand that in here, you can’t let nothing slide. It don’t matter if you are ten years or ten minutes away from going home. If I let Funicelli get over on me, let him call me a rat, then all sorts of guys would’ve moved on me. I’d have guys telling me to bring ’em back ice cream cones from the commissary, telling me to do their laundry, and then bending me over and fucking me, ’cause word would go out: ‘Hey, McCabe won’t fight ’cause he’s about to go home.’

“I know these guys in here, and a lot of them is okay, but some are animals, and I mean dirty, stinking, rotten, filthy scum of the earth, and they’ll make your life one fucking long nightmare if you ain’t willing to draw blood. So you see, I didn’t really have a choice. I had to stab him.”

McCabe’s explanation and rationalization was of no concern to Pierce. “It’s an FBI matter now,” he said. Besides typing his report, Pierce filled out another piece of paper. It was a recommendation to the bureau’s regional office that Johns receive a $500 cash bonus for risking his life while on duty.

“Johns, why, he did me proud,” Pierce explained. “He showed he had what it takes to be a Leavenworth lieutenant.”

Norman Bucklew was drunk and itching for a fight when he slid into a metal folding chair in the television room on the fifth floor of A cellhouse. It was seven
P.M.
, and Thomas Little had just turned the channel to
America’s Most Wanted
, a weekly program that reenacted actual crimes and asked viewers to call a toll-free number if they could help solve them.

Little had asked the other ten convicts in the room if they objected to his tuning in the show. None had—but that was before Bucklew came in.

“This is a fucking snitch program,” Bucklew bellowed.

No one in the room reacted.

“Oh, looky, looky, there’s the rat number on the screen to call,” Bucklew continued. “Everyone grab a pencil and write down the rat number.”

Two or three inmates, sensing trouble, left.

“Fucking show is turning everyone into goddamn snitches. Shouldn’t be watching this motherfucker.”

An inmate sitting near Bucklew turned toward him. “You calling me a rat?” he asked angrily. “ ’Cause if you are, then we need to deal with it.”

“I’m saying this is a fucking rat program,” Bucklew
replied, not backing down. “And we shouldn’t be watching it. I’m not going to watch it.”

Bucklew left the room.

The next morning, Carl Bowles woke up angry.

“What fucking right does Bucklew have to tell me what I can and can’t watch on television?” he asked Little.

“C’mon, Carl, he was drunk and this ain’t worth the trouble,” Little replied.

For the rest of that morning, Bowles and Little avoided Bucklew, but that afternoon it was Little’s turn to get upset. He and a few other inmates went into the television room to watch the afternoon movie, but Bucklew had turned the channel to MTV, and even though he wasn’t in the room, no one wanted to risk changing the channel. They were afraid of him.

Each floor of A cellhouse had two television rooms and each was large enough to accommodate forty inmates. According to bureau policy, inmates were supposed to select programs based on a vote of the men who wanted to watch television. But this democratic process simply didn’t work. All the television rooms in the cellhouse were controlled by blacks except for the one on the fifth floor used by Bowles, Little, and Bucklew. No votes were taken in it; instead inmates wrote down their preferences on a sheet of paper hanging near the television. On this particular afternoon, Bucklew had claimed the afternoon time slot as his.

After several minutes of grumbling, Little marched up to the sign-up list and wrote the word VOTE across the entire page.

“Anyone who thinks they are running this television room is wrong,” he declared. “You can tell ’em to stick it in their ass. This is a public room.” Then he went to tell Bowles what he had done.

Within the hour, Bucklew confronted Little and Bowles in the television room.

“Carl,” Bucklew began, “I’ve known you for years
and I got all the respect in the world for you and I don’t disrespect you and I don’t mean to ever disrespect you.”

Then he turned and faced Little. “But you,” Bucklew said, his voice rising in anger, “you I don’t know, and you’re a fucking asshole.”

Having “disrespected” Little to his face, Bucklew stepped outside the television room and waited for Little to join him. But it was Carl Bowles who came through the door.

“Why did you call Tom an asshole?” Bowles asked calmly.

“Because he spoke behind my back,” Bucklew replied.

“As long as I’ve been around Tom, and as much as I’ve been around him, I’ve never heard Tom say nothing behind your back,” said Bowles, “and he won’t say nothing behind your back that he won’t say to your face.”

“Then why ain’t he out here right now?” Bucklew demanded.

“ ’Cause I told him not to come out.”

“Well, the only reason, and I mean the only reason why I’m letting this ride is out of respect to you,” Bucklew said. “The kid I don’t respect.”

This is how Bowles later recalled his reaction. “I told him, ‘Hey, don’t cut Tom any room because of me. Tom catches what he catches. If he disrespects you, then you take it to him and deal with it. I got no problem with an ass-kicking, but I ain’t gonna stand by and let you kill my friend over a fucking television show. That’s stupid for both of you. It’s not a killing offense. An ass-whipping, sure, but a killing over a television show? It don’t call for no killing.’ ”

Both men went to their cells.

Although Bowles had promised that he wouldn’t interfere, both he and Bucklew knew that Bowles probably would have no choice but to step in if Bucklew attacked Little. This was because of the nature of the Hot House. While Bowles and Little insisted that they were only
friends, other inmates looked upon Bowles as Little’s guardian. If Bowles stood by and watched Bucklew beat Little, other inmates would think that Bowles was afraid of Bucklew. They would begin insulting him as well as Little. The code required that Bowles would have to kill Bucklew if he raised his hand against Little. Bucklew understood all these consequences. He would have to kill Bowles before he could touch Little.

A few hours after the confrontation in the television room, Little knocked on Bucklew’s cell door and quietly asked to come inside. He had come, he said, because Bowles had sent him to deal with the problem.

This is how Bucklew later recalled the conversation. “Listen, kid,” Bucklew began, “you got no respect coming from me, ’cause you’re riding on Carl. If it weren’t for Carl, you’d have thirty niggers lining up to fuck you.”

Little tried to turn the conversation to the television room, but Bucklew refused.

“You’re a punk,” said Bucklew. “I talk to Carl, not you.”

He then dismissed Little.

For the next several days, Bucklew and Bowles watched each other. Each was waiting for the other to make a move. In the Hot House, no one fought by the Queensberry Rules, especially convicted killers such as Bucklew and Bowles. “In here, there’s no ‘Put up your dukes’ bullshit,” an inmate explained. “When guys like a Bucklew or a Bowles get into a fight with another inmate, it only lasts a few seconds, ’cause they are going to rip out a guy’s windpipe with their first blow and rip off his nuts with their second.”

For his part, Little stayed close to Bowles. In fact, he never left his sight. All of this was going on, of course, without the guards having any idea that the two murderers were facing off against each other.

And then fate intervened. Late one night, a guard caught Bucklew’s winemaking partner drinking in his cell. As Bucklew watched, the guard hustled the inmate
down the tier toward the Hole. Bucklew knew that his friend had hidden a large plastic container of hooch in his cell and he wanted to get it before the guard came back. But Bucklew needed a “jigger,” someone to watch for the guard. The only white inmates available were Bowles and Little. Bucklew asked them to help and they agreed.

“Helping him had nothing to do with our disagreement,” Little later recalled. “I hoped he’d drop dead, but this was a convict-versus-police thing with the wine and I wasn’t going to do anything to get him busted.”

No one mentioned the television-room incident again. Years earlier, such a peaceful standoff would have been unlikely. But neither Bowles nor Bucklew wanted to be sent to Marion, and both realized that a fight between them could only end with one of them dead.

But Bowles also understood that Little’s trouble with Bucklew was a prologue to what was to come, and in a sense, it was his fault. He had taught Little that the only way a convict got respect in prison was by being willing to kill. Like a child taking his first step, Little was now beginning to test Bowles’s theory. He emulated Bowles. But there was a major difference between the teacher and student: no one questioned that Bowles was a killer, but Little had never killed anyone and the other inmates still saw him as Bowles’s sissy.