The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (2 page)

As punishment, Hicks was moved into an isolation cell in the prison’s Hole. His cellmate received a worse punishment. He was sent to the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, the harshest prison operated by the federal government. At Marion, prisoners were kept locked in one-man cells twenty-three hours a day and denied nearly all privileges.

“The only way guards find out anything in here is when someone snitches,” Bowles complained. “Someone had tipped off the cops to that helicopter plot, and it sure as hell wasn’t the guy who got shipped to Marion. After that I was certain Hicks was a snitch.”

When Hicks was released from the Hole, another white inmate took him in as his cell partner and sexual punk. Bowles knew this inmate. They were friends and Bowles was worried about him. He figured that Hicks
was going to do something to get the inmate into trouble. Bowles decided to investigate Hicks’s background and he began by visiting Harold Gooden.

Every prison has its oddballs, and at Leavenworth, Gooden was one of them. A convicted counterfeiter, he was the only inmate in the penitentiary who subscribed to
Architectural Digest
. Gooden was college-educated, an honorably discharged navy veteran, and a bearded, pipe-smoking, self-proclaimed prison philosopher who passed his time by writing what he claimed was an epic novel. He also had the largest magazine collection at Leavenworth, much of it not the convicts’ typical reading materials—
Penthouse
and
Hustler
—but old copies of the Sunday edition of
The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic
, and
Harper’s
. But these were not what Bowles had come looking for when he paused outside Gooden’s open cell door, knocked, and waited to be invited in, a sign of respect between convicts in prison.

“I need to borrow a few magazines,” Bowles explained.

“Help yourself, Carl,” Gooden told him. “Anything in particular?”

“True crime,” Bowles replied.

Besides his rows of highbrow publications, Gooden also kept a large collection of sleazy detective magazines. He subscribed to them, not because he enjoyed reading them, but to identify inmates who had committed particularly heinous sex crimes. After snitches, the most despised inmates in Leavenworth were child molesters, rapists, and other sexual deviants. Sex offenders gave criminals a bad name, convicts claimed. Most inmates either were married or had been, and many were fathers. Like men outside prison, they didn’t want their mothers, wives, and children to be victims of a deviant.

Bowles took a few magazines and returned to his cell, where he scanned them, but he found nothing of interest and returned to Gooden’s cell.

“Carl, I think you should check out this one,”
Gooden volunteered, handing Bowles a copy of
Inside Detective
. Page thirty-six was folded down, so Bowles turned to it. He saw a two-column, black-and-white photograph of a freckle-faced boy grinning into the camera. Above it was a headline:
STOP THE SEXUAL SADIST FROM ABDUCTING BOYS
! The story below said that the thirteen-year-old boy in the picture had been forced off a road while riding his bicycle on October 19, 1986, in Green Oak Township, Michigan. The driver had jumped from his Jeep, dragged the boy inside the vehicle, and sped away. A few days later, the youngster’s naked body was found abandoned in a forest. He had been sexually molested and strangled. When Bowles turned the page, the baby face of Jeffrey Joe Hicks stared up at him. The caption underneath the photograph read, “Hicks has a long history of molesting children sexually.”

Bowles closed the magazine, said “Thanks,” and took it back to his cell. There he read the entire story. It reported that Hicks had first gotten into trouble in January 1975, when he was sixteen, and abducted a twelve-year-old boy at knife-point, forced him to swallow several tranquilizers, and molested him. Despite the seriousness of the crime, Hicks was put on five years’ probation. Seven years later, he sexually assaulted two other youngsters, but was released on probation again. Only after he was accused of kidnapping and murder was he finally jailed. At his trial, Hicks’s attorneys admitted their client was guilty, but said he shouldn’t be sent to prison because he was himself a victim. Hicks had been raped as a child by a psychiatrist who was supposed to be treating him for deviant behavior, they said, and it was that molestation that caused him to attack young boys. Hicks testified in his own defense, describing how he had held his victim’s hands down and strangled the cyclist with his belt after abusing him. A jury ignored Hicks’s plea for mercy and sentenced him to life in prison, plus sixty-five to one hundred years.

Now Bowles knew why state officials in Michigan
had arranged for Hicks to serve his sentence in a federal prison rather than in a state institution. His crime was so monstrous and had attracted such wide publicity that Hicks would have been instantly recognized in a state prison and most likely would have been physically attacked or even murdered by other inmates. In the federal prison system, however, Hicks would be safe because he would be just another anonymous convict—unless, of course, someone put out word about his crime.

Clutching the magazine in his hand, Bowles walked toward the prison law library where he planned to photocopy the article. He would post copies on the bulletin boards in each cellblock. But before he reached the copying machine, he decided to tell Hicks’s cell partner about his discovery. He walked directly to the cell, entered without knocking, and tossed the magazine to Hicks’s cellmate. Hicks wasn’t there.

“Why, that little fucker!” the inmate snapped when he saw the photograph.

Bowles took back the magazine and started back toward the library. Midway down the tier, he spotted Jeffrey Hicks coming toward him. Hicks had been doing his cellmate’s laundry and was carrying several carefully folded items. Bowles grinned and kept walking until Hicks was close, then lifted the magazine so that Hicks was suddenly face-to-face with his own photograph.

“You little bastard!” a voice yelled from behind Bowles. It was Hicks’s cellmate, who had come charging out on the tier.

Terrified, Hicks dropped the laundry, spun around, and bolted toward the two guards stationed near the tier stairwell. They hustled him out of the cellblock.

There was no longer any need for Bowles to make copies of the story, but he made one for himself anyway. “I spread the word about Hicks because I wanted everyone to see how the cops in here work,” he said. It wasn’t the fact that Hicks was a sexual deviant that bothered Bowles. It was the fact that he was a snitch. “The guards
will deny it, but I know exactly what happened,” Bowles said later. “Some hack from Michigan called up a lieutenant here and said, ‘Hey, I got a prisoner and I got to get him out of my state institution before someone kills him.’ Now a lieutenant here says, ‘Well, why should we take him? Does he cooperate?’ and the guy in Michigan says, ‘Fuck yes, he’ll cooperate, because if he don’t we’ll tell everyone he’s a baby-raper and they’ll kill his ass.’

“When Hicks gets down here, the lieutenant says, ‘Hey, boy, we will put you in population, but at the same time you got to come to us every once in a while and tell us things, because if you don’t, then someone might just slip up and let folks know your past.’ Don’t you see what happens next? Suddenly, some lieutenant is breaking up a big helicopter escape.”

Lieutenant Gallegos discounted Bowles’s scenario. “He’s telling how he operates, how he thinks, how he manipulates people,” said Gallegos. “We don’t do that. No one forced Hicks to say or do anything. Believe me, we don’t have to do anything to force these guys to snitch. Most will tell on each other in a second.”

Prison officials acknowledged that they had accepted Hicks from state officials in Michigan because he would have been harmed in a state prison. But they denied that Hicks had been planted in Leavenworth or coerced into providing Gallegos information. “This prisoner was sent to Leavenworth because of the length of his sentence,” a prison spokesman said. “We felt he needed to be placed in a high-security environment.” A few days after Bowles exposed Hicks, however, the young inmate was quietly transferred to a lower-security federal prison in another state. “The prison grapevine is such that we had to move this prisoner to a much lower security prison,” an official explained. “Otherwise his past would have been exposed and he would have been in danger.”

Bowles saw things differently. “I don’t care what they say, they used Hicks and now they are rewarding
him by moving him to an easier joint. That’s how both sides work in this place. When someone weak like Hicks comes in, then each side preys on him.”

A short time after Hicks had gone, Bowles heard through the grapevine that another fish was coming to Leavenworth, and that he, like Hicks, was scared. No one knew why prison officials were sending Thomas Edgar Little to a maximum-security penitentiary. Little had never been to prison before and he was young and weak.

Bowles figured Thomas Little was someone he wanted to meet.

Dallas Earl Scott sounded mean as he spoke into the telephone. “Now this has already gone on for a week and a half,” the forty-two-year-old convict complained. “The position you’re putting people in, particularly your boyfriend, Bill, you’re putting a lot of pressure on him … and a lot of people are beginning to get upset.”

Scott had emphasized the word
upset
He was trying to make it clear to the woman on the other end of the line that her boyfriend, Bill, was going to be hurt if she didn’t do what Scott had asked. Scott didn’t want to come right out and say this, because he knew all prison telephone calls were recorded. A card posted above the phone warned:
ATTENTION: ALL INMATE TELEPHONE CALLS ARE MONITORED AND TAPE RECORDED
.

The woman that Scott was trying to frighten had promised to bring 2.73 grams of heroin into Leavenworth. Scott had paid $500 to buy the drug from his contacts in Sacramento, California, and had paid another $500 to the woman’s boyfriend, Bill Hutchinson, an inmate who claimed that he could get the drug smuggled safely inside. Hutchinson had seemed so confident that his girlfriend would agree to be a “mule” that Scott had arranged for the drug to be mailed directly to her
from California, assuring his financial backers in prison that the heroin was on its way.

But Hutchinson’s girlfriend balked. She was refusing to bring in the heroin, and Scott was indeed upset. Earlier that morning, he had confronted Hutchinson, and it had been Hutchinson’s idea to use the telephone located inside the cellhouse to call his girlfriend and then put Scott on the line to intimidate her. Inmates at Leavenworth are allowed to use cellhouse telephones whenever they wish without first asking for permission from a guard. But they can only dial collect calls, and a prison computer automatically logs the number and records the entire conversation. Hutchinson had told his girlfriend that he was in trouble and then handed Scott the telephone receiver.

“Pressure is being put on Bill, you see,” Scott said carefully. “You got him, ah, well … he’s in a spot, because you said yes from jump street and that triggered a lot of things. That leaves him holding the bag … and now you got cold feet.”

Scott had sounded threatening at first. Now, his voice became sympathetic. “Look, I can understand why you are scared and I appreciate that, but we got to get this thing resolved.… If you just do what Bill asks you, it’s not going to be near as bad as you think.… In your mind, you got pictures of being beaten with rubber hoses and being dragged off. That’s not gonna happen.…”

Hutchinson had explained the procedure to her. The heroin was delivered inside a balloon, no different from those used at children’s birthday parties. She was supposed to hide it in her vagina, like a tampon. Once inside the prison visiting room, she would step into the women’s bathroom, remove the balloon, and conceal it in her mouth. Visitors were allowed to kiss an inmate once when a visit began and once when it ended. The balloon would be exchanged during the first kiss. Hutchinson would swallow it and either regurgitate it later
when he was alone in his cell or reclaim it after it passed through his system.

“It’s just a simple matter of boom, boom, and that’s it,” Scott continued. “Believe me, this thing happens a thousand times a year. Don’t make monsters in your mind.”

Scott decided he had said enough, but before he handed the phone back to Hutchinson, Scott decided to remind the woman that her boyfriend was in trouble.

“Now, I’m sure you understand what goes on in here,” Scott said firmly. “You know, this place, well, it’s dangerous.…”

Had Scott been talking to the girlfriend in person, there wouldn’t have been any need for him to make thinly disguised verbal threats. Scott was intimidating even when he didn’t intend to be. A bank teller had once described him during a trial as being “really mean-looking,” and it fit. Scott had been in prison off and on for twenty-four years, and his body language sent out a signal as clear as a diamondback’s rattle. He was built like a pit bull. Short, with massive shoulders made hard by weight lifting, Scott wore his ink-black hair combed back in the greasy pompadour style popular among bikers in the 1950s when Scott was a teenager. A nearly fatal heroin habit acquired in prison and an incurable liver disease brought on by hepatitis had left his skin jaundiced, his face gaunt. There were dark circles under his eyes, and when he became angry, his black eyes shone with rage.

Ironically, among his convict pals Scott was considered easygoing, funny, street-smart, and, as much as an inmate could be, devoted to his wife, son, and daughter. But even his closest friends knew better than to double-cross Scott. There was no question in anyone’s mind that he was deadly.

The collection of tattoos that adorned Scott’s arms, chest, legs, and even his hands was a sign that he was a professional convict. Daggers dripping blood, half-naked
women, even Donald Duck’s laughing face, were cut into his yellowish skin. These were not parlor tattoos, applied from patterns in rainbow colors. They were convict tattoos, carved freehand by cumbersome tattoo guns made from melted-down toothbrushes, sewing machine needles, and motors stolen from portable tape players. Even though they had been drawn by different inmates in different prisons at different times, each tattoo was done in the identical color: a bluish-green ink—the standard ink used for printing forms in prisons. In the outside world the tattoos would have made Scott look like a circus sideshow freak, but in Leavenworth they were badges of honor, particularly one tattoo cut directly over his heart. It was a cloverleaf with the numbers
6-6-6
printed over it. Even fish knew what that tattoo represented. It was the insignia of the Aryan Brotherhood, the most savage white prison gang ever formed. The three sixes referred to a mark given by “the beast”—the antichrist, or son of Satan—to the wicked as explained in the Book of Revelation, chapter 13, verses 16–18. The cloverleaf was a symbol of white supremacy.