The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (48 page)

Sharon Lacy told inmates not to call her by her first name and when one did, even though she was a secretary she saw to it that he was fired from his job. She also became the first woman in the prison’s history to write a shot that resulted in an inmate’s being taken to the Hole. She eventually became so uncomfortable working in industries that she moved to a new job in the administrative building away from inmates. She would have a similar job when she and Steve moved to Phoenix.

The fact that neither she nor Lacy had any friends other than their coworkers didn’t bother him, but it did Sharon. “It worries me because Steve’s dad was like that. All his life, all he did was work, work, work. He gave his life to the Customs Service, and suddenly it was over and he was retired and out of it. I ask Steve, ‘What happens when we retire? What happens when we are not part of
the bureau family anymore?’ But, so far, he doesn’t want anything else.”

She thought a lot about the “bureau family.” “People don’t understand bureau people, not at all. You can absolutely hate someone in the bureau, but if you go to Benny’s and there is a fight, everyone in the bureau will stand behind that person, even if they hate his guts. It doesn’t matter, because he’s one of them and everyone else is an outsider. And you should hear these guys talk. These guys thrive on violence. You should hear them talk about a killing and how the prison needs a good inmate stabbing. They are all like that. It’s addicting to them.”

Benny’s had a disc jockey playing records when the Lacys and a dozen of their friends arrived from the training center to continue the farewell celebration. The disc jockey had streaked blonde hair and wore a gold earring. Some guards joked about getting the earring for Steve Lacy to wear. One of Lacy’s pals told the DJ about the Lacys’ promotion and asked him to play a song just for Steve and Sharon to dance to. “Don’t make it any of that nigger music,” he warned, referring to rap songs. The DJ, somewhat intimidated, asked for a suggestion. Minutes later, the couple took the floor to the country-western sounds of “The South is Going to Rise Again.”

One of Lacy’s best friends had driven up from Texas to attend the party. He had been a guard at the Hot House, but had been promoted to lieutenant and transferred to a medium-security prison. Over a beer, he explained that going from a penitentiary to a kiddie joint hadn’t been easy. “I hope Steve does better than me,” he said. He had been accused of brutality five times. The last charge was filed after he ripped off an inmate’s shirt because the inmate had refused to strip for a search as ordered. “In Leavenworth, inmates are thankful to get steak,” he complained. “Where I’m working now, they take it back to the cook and tell him they want it medium-rare.”
(A few months later, the lieutenant was demoted and returned to Leavenworth as a guard.)

Lacy knew the transition was going to be difficult, especially since he had felt that Leavenworth was too easy on inmates. He was also aware of Sharon’s concerns about their lack of friends outside prison. But tonight was no time to dwell on problems. They planned to dance all night and then have breakfast at a local diner. “Not everyone is meant to do prison work,” Lacy said, and then, putting his arms around Lou, the guard who had taken him in when he first got his divorce, and the pal who had driven up from Texas to be with him, he added, “but if you stick around, you get addicted, you can’t stop and it takes over your life, and I can tell you right now, if I were asked, I’d follow these two guys into a group of inmates any time, any place, and I’d never have to worry about my back as long as they were with me, and they would do the same thing for me.”

“Damn right,” one said. The other nodded.

“I’d give my life for these guys,” he concluded, “and they would give up their life for me. And that isn’t something that many people can say.”

Shortly after lunchtime on March 10, a dark-haired man wearing a freshly ironed white shirt, pressed slacks, and a blue nylon jacket walked up to the guard who was working inside the prison rotunda and introduced himself.

“I’m a safety inspector from bureau headquarters,” the stranger explained. “Just finished checking B cellhouse.”

Visits by various federal inspectors were common at the Hot House and this stranger looked no different from any other inspector. He carried a folder filled with various official forms and he seemed friendly enough. For several minutes, the two men talked, and then the inspector asked the guard to unlock the door that led into the prison visiting room. The guard didn’t have a key but he called another guard who did. Once the inspector went through the steel door, the rotunda guard called the officers stationed inside the visiting room.

“Hey,” he warned, “you got a safety inspector from Washington coming your way.”

The inspector had to walk down a hallway in order to reach the visiting room. A guard was waiting to let him inside. The inspector examined the portable fire extinguishers hanging on the walls, asked the guards a few questions, jotted some notes in his folder, and then announced
that he was finished. He asked the guards to let him out the room’s front door, the same one that visitors used, and they obliged. Moments later, the inspector walked down the prison’s front steps to a waiting taxi.

It wasn’t until a few hours later that guards discovered the safety inspector was not a bureau employee from Washington. Robert A. Litchfield, a forty-two-year-old bank robber serving a 145-year sentence, had fooled them. He had literally talked his way out of prison. It was the first successful escape from the Hot House in twelve years.

Associate Warden Lee Connor was the first to hear that Litchfield was missing. Warden Matthews was in Kansas City getting a haircut and couldn’t be reached by telephone, so the guards in the control center called Connor when they discovered that the daily four o’clock count was one inmate short. At that point they hadn’t yet identified the missing inmate, and Connor’s first thought was that it was Norman Bucklew. When he found it was Litchfield, he was irritated but somewhat relieved. “When I heard the name, I knew this was the real thing and I felt sick,” said Connor. “But I also knew that Litchfield wasn’t going to leave a trail of dead bodies behind like a Carl Bowles or a Norman Bucklew would.”

Robert Litchfield was somewhat of a legend among law-enforcement agencies because of his ability to talk himself out of trouble. In February 1986, he had escaped from the bureau’s prison in Talladega, Alabama, by posing as a federal parole officer. There too he had walked out the front door.

After that escape, Litchfield robbed more than a dozen banks in Michigan, Georgia, and Florida, most of the time posing as a U.S. Treasury agent. Although he sometimes carried a BB gun during his robberies, he had never harmed anyone. He told police that one reason he was so successful at convincing people that he was a Treasury agent was because he wore a miniature American
flag in the lapel of his coat and a tie clasp made to look like a pair of tiny handcuffs. “That’s how all of those Treasury guys dress,” he said with a grin.

Litchfield proved just as talented at fooling the FBI as he was at tricking bank managers. Once during a robbery in Boise, Idaho, he looked outside and noticed that the building was being surrounded by FBI agents and the local police. Litchfield had locked the bank’s employees in a room but someone had sounded a silent alarm. When the FBI demanded over a bullhorn that the robber inside surrender, Litchfield calmly stepped out the front door. Agents grabbed him, but during the next few minutes, Litchfield convinced them that he was the bank’s security officer, not the robber. He volunteered to help them apprehend the real crook, who he said was still inside the bank. Litchfield drew a diagram of the bank for the FBI, described the robber, and even offered tips on how to sneak inside and free the hostages. As soon as the FBI turned its attention back to the bank, he slipped into his car and drove away.

That incident had so outraged the FBI that it put Litchfield on its Ten Most Wanted list, and the quick-talking robber was captured in May 1987 and sent to Leavenworth. There he had deliberately kept out of trouble and done his best to blend into the crowd. He wanted to remain faceless.

Most of the guards who worked in the prison had never heard of Litchfield, and few recognized his photograph when Connor posted it a few hours after the escape. By the time Warden Matthews returned to the penitentiary that night, Connor had figured out how Litchfield had gotten away. “He was smart enough to use us,” Connor told Matthews, “and we played right into his hands.”

No one was supposed to enter or leave the main penitentiary without the permission of the control center. The guards inside it were responsible for identifying everyone who passed through the prison’s steel gates.
But Litchfield bypassed the center by getting the rotunda guard to let him into the visiting room. Those who came and went inside the visiting room were the responsibility of the guards stationed in it, and they never bothered to ask Litchfield for identification because the rotunda guard had already telephoned and identified him as a safety inspector.

“We actually helped Litchfield escape,” Connor explained, “because we had one staff member in the rotunda telling another staff member in the visiting room that Litchfield was a safety inspector. We vouched for him.”

“Connor was under incredible pressure,” recalled Dan McCauley, an officer who worked with Connor the night of the escape. “He was taking the escape hard. He was angry and embarrassed. He blamed himself. But Matthews was amazingly calm and diplomatic. ‘Name me a penitentiary where someone hasn’t escaped,’ he said. He was really cool about the entire thing and his composure calmed people down.”

Fourteen days later, Litchfield robbed a bank in Tucker, Georgia, by posing as a gas company inspector and convincing the employees that there was a dangerous gas leak in the building. He hustled them into a conference room, locked them inside, and stole $38,000 from the vault.

Two weeks after that robbery, U.S. marshals surprised him as he stepped off an elevator at an exclusive condominium in Pensacola Beach, Florida. His face was swollen and bruised from plastic surgery that he had undergone only a few days earlier. The surgery had so changed his appearance that a deputy from Kansas had to be flown to Florida to identify him. The plastic surgeon was later quoted as saying that Litchfield asked to look like the movie star Robert De Niro. Litchfield received an additional thirty-five-year sentence for the escape and the Tucker bank robbery. This time, the bureau put him in Marion.

“If the officers had followed proper procedures, Litchfield would not have escaped,” Matthews said later, “but I think things were running so smoothly that our people were lulled to sleep. It’s been twelve years since an escape, two and a half years since a murder. We were simply too relaxed, and that’s partly my fault because I want things around here to be laid back.”

After that incident, Connor wrote himself a note that he kept in the top drawer of his desk. It was a list of his priorities as associate warden. It read,
1. NO ESCAPES! 2. No staff members hurt! 3. No convicts hurt
 … He wrote another note the next day and slipped it next to the first one. It read,
1,200 ASSHOLES
. Connor decided he had spent too much time worrying about the Cuban units, not enough thinking about the American prisoners. “It’s a reminder to me that I got twelve hundred assholes besides the Cubans to watch.”

Staff morale was affected for weeks. Normally friendly guards avoided speaking to inmates. Any violation of prison rules, no matter how slight, was dealt with harshly. At Benny’s, guards drank their beers in uncharacteristic silence. “Leavenworth’s pride was really, really hurt,” Connor said. “Everyone felt bad.” Matthews agreed. “I think the way Litchfield escaped made it worse. He just walked out the front door and really rubbed our faces in it. In some ways, it would have been better for staff morale if he’d gone over the wall in a blaze of gunfire.”

Matthews and Connor instituted an array of new security precautions. But Matthews didn’t dwell on the escape. Instead, he went to work rebuilding staff confidence and morale. With the enthusiasm of a high school coach giving a pregame pep talk, he made a point of stopping to talk to guards as he made his rounds, bragging about the great job that each was doing, reciting the merits of the Leavenworth staff. No one liked the fact that Litchfield had gulled them, Matthews preached, but
every so often the inmates were going to get away with something. “It’s unfortunate but inevitable.”

“I didn’t want the staff to get so down on themselves that they began doubting their abilities,” he later explained, “because that would only result in more problems.”

By the beginning of April, most of the gloom had dissipated, and Matthews had gained a new popularity. Even his harshest critics were complimentary about the way he had handled the Litchfield escape, and they felt the sort of kinship with him that develops whenever people share a harrowing experience. Warden Matthews had been passed over for a promotion and so had most of the Hot House guards at some point during their careers. Matthews had been badly embarrassed by the escape, but instead of using the guards as scapegoats, he had accepted full responsibility. Most importantly, he had defended Leavenworth. It was still the best institution in the federal system, he bragged, with the finest staff in the bureau. And he had said this over and over again, with the conviction and enthusiasm of a man who seemed genuinely to believe what he was saying.

An incident at Benny’s a few weeks after the escape illustrated the newfound respect for Matthews. Two guards from Marion, who had brought a prisoner to Leavenworth earlier that day, joined three Hot House guards for drinks after work. At one point during the conversation one of the outsiders asked, “Hey, what’s it like working for a nigger warden?”

The remark was not the first racial slur made around the table that evening, although it was the first reference to Matthews. Unlike the other racial epithets, however, this one was challenged.