The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (22 page)

“I’m the asshole in here, right?” Bowles continued. “You put me in this madhouse for twenty-three fucking years. You put me in here with a bunch of fools who are more demented than I am and then you send in even bigger fools to guard us. Every day I have to deal with society’s scum. Every day I have to deal with guards who are complete idiots. There is a guard working right now on this tier who comes in here every day pissed off because his old lady is fucking some other guy. That’s not my fault. I ain’t fucking his old lady. But
I
have to deal with his anger.
I
have to adjust for his moods. I got no choice. Yet you expect me to respect this guy ’cause he’s a ‘correctional officer.’ Bullshit!

“And then one day Dick Smith shows up and he is a halfway reasonable and intelligent man and he says, ‘Carl, I want you to take care of these flowers. Keep it pretty.’ It’s not much. Listen, I know it’s just a fucking flower bed, but it’s
my
fucking flower bed! He gives me something to be responsible for, something I can do to prove that, yes, I may be a no-good motherfucker, but at least I can take care of flowers.

“And I don’t care, quite frankly, if the fucking director of the Bureau of Prisons walks down here and says, ‘Bowles, I took your flowers because I’m the director and I don’t think we need flowers anymore.’ I’d say, ‘Well, there is no doubt in my mind that you can do that and you have done it, but it don’t mean a fucking thing to me, not in my heart, because you can’t make it right.’ ”

Bowles stopped talking. For several minutes we sat in silence. All you could hear were the noises outside the cell. An inmate shouted down the tier. “Hey, man, check that dryer. See if my laundry’s done.”

“Fuck you, man, check it yourself, think I’m your fucking maid?” came the reply.

Another inmate walked past reading a letter he had just received. Someone opened the door to the television room and for a few seconds the screams of Bon Jovi escaped from MTV.

Everywhere else, life inside the prison was going on as normal, but inside this cell time had stopped. Little looked down from his bunk at Bowles, but the older convict didn’t respond. He sat on a metal chair in the center of the cell, drained of emotion. There was an uneasy silence. It was impossible to tell what Bowles was thinking.

The cell that Bowles and Little shared in the newly remodeled A cellhouse was unique because the afternoon sun actually fell inside it. On this particular day, the sunlight struck Bowles’s stubbled face, giving it a jaundiced look. He appeared tired and old.

The cell was one of the neatest that I had seen. The magazines on the metal locker were not simply stacked together. They had each been turned face-up and their edges were flush. The sheets and blankets on the bunk beds had been pulled tight, military fashion. Both men’s shoes and slippers were lined up as if they had been placed there by a maid. There were two bulletin boards on the wall and both contained the obligatory nude pinups, but Little’s board was dominated by an intricate pencil drawing that, he explained later, was a diagram of a futuristic atomic fallout shelter that he had drawn. Bowles had a drawing too. It showed a man on his knees, his hands tied behind his back. The man’s head had just been sliced off by a sword. Bowles had drawn blood dripping from the neck.

“See, the truth is that when society sent me here, it
really
didn’t
think my life was important,” Bowles said. “The truth is, you bastards just didn’t have the nuts to hit me in the head with that hammer and throw me in the dump. You put me in here and you wrote me off. You said, ‘Don’t ever let this motherfucker out,’ and that ain’t right.

“If you want to fuck me, come in here and say, ‘Carl, we’re going to fuck you and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ But don’t lie to me. Don’t tell me my life is worth saving. Don’t tell me what I do in here matters when the truth is no one really gives a shit what Ido.

“Whether I act good and take care of those flowers or fuck up and start stabbing people—the truth is no one really gives a fuck, ’cause to the outside world, I’m dead and you folks are never letting me out.”

By the next morning, Bowles had cooled off. “Do you know how many wardens have come and gone since I’ve been here?” he asked. “Look, these people have caused me to bounce off the walls long enough. I’m never touching another flower again for these fuckers.”

I asked Connor later that day about his decision to fire Bowles, and he quickly assured me that it had nothing to do with his personal clashes with Richard Smith. “No other inmates are allowed to have their own private gardens. Why should Carl Bowles get one? Maybe Dick Smith felt comfortable with that contradiction, but I don’t.”

Connor continued: “Bowles was referring to certain tools as ‘my tools.’ I was hearing people, including the warden, referring to Bowles as ‘Lieutenant Bowles.’ Comments like that mean something in here. Our environment dictates that an inmate and correctional officer will never be friends. We have to live on separate sides of the street. Even though people were joking about Bowles being a lieutenant, he was beginning to cross that street. Officers were letting down their guard.”

I told Connor about Bowles’s reaction, his speech
about responsibility, how much he had enjoyed the garden. Connor chuckled. “What you got to realize about someone like Carl Bowles is that there is always an ulterior motive. The reason he had that garden was not because he liked gardening but because he was using it as part of some scheme. Maybe he was using it to hide dirt from a tunnel he is digging, maybe he was hiding a shank there, maybe he was simply growing himself a tomato to sell, I can’t tell you, but I know Bowles, and I know he was up to something.

“The bottom line is that I decided it was time for Mr. Bowles’s world to come crashing in on him,” said Connor. “With someone like Bowles, it’s good to shake them up every once in a while, and remind them of where they are and who is in charge.”

Connor’s statement sounded harsh. “What people from the outside world don’t understand,” he quickly added, “is that inside here, convicts put on their best face because they want you to feel sorry for them. You see them in a cell and you imagine yourself in that cell and you feel awful about it.

“But you got to remember that Carl Bowles killed three people simply because he wanted them dead, and you will never convince me that you can change a Carl Bowles. If I were the judge in the chair, I wouldn’t care whether Carl could be rehabilitated, because what he did is so heinous that there is just one payment, either death or to keep him away from people forever. Period. You sure as hell aren’t going to find me shedding tears because Carl Bowles lost his vegetable garden.”

Now that Bowles and Little were out of work, they began spending more time in the recently remodeled Hot House exercise room. Warden Matthews had purchased several new stationary bicycles, weight benches, and other equipment for the inmates. Bowles had designed a weight-lifting program for Little. He was schooling him in other ways as well.

“Carl has opened my eyes to things I’d never seen
and most people never see in here,” Little explained one afternoon. “You look around, the guards look around, and everyone thinks they see what is going on, but they really don’t see shit. Believe me, Carl sees things going on that you can’t even imagine.”

In the short time that they had been cellmates, Bowles had already shown Little several scams. A few cells down the tier from their cell was a convict-run store where inmates could buy soft drinks, cigarettes, crackers, fruit, pornography, and even jogging suits. It was against bureau regulations for convicts to stockpile goods from the prison commissary in their cells and then barter or sell them to other inmates. But stores like this could be found on nearly every tier at the Hot House. They were frequented by inmates because the commissary was only open a few hours each day, there was always a long line of customers waiting to get in, and inmates were prohibited from spending more than $105 per month. Moreover, the commissary didn’t give anyone credit. Convict-run stores were always open, there were never lines, there was no limit on spending, and most gladly offered credit. That was because the stores charged one hundred percent interest. If an inmate took a can of Coke on credit, he owed the store two cans of Coke the very next day.

Most convict-run stores were run by “clerks” who worked for a “backer.” It was the backer’s job to put up enough money to stock the store and, more importantly, supply the muscle when an inmate didn’t pay. The clerk took the risk of getting arrested by the guards for operating a business, although guards rarely bothered them unless a convict got too greedy and stockpiled his cell with so many items that it became obvious what he was doing. In those cases, most guards would step in because they didn’t want to run the risk of being chastised by a lieutenant or captain who happened by and noticed that an inmate’s cell was overflowing with goods.

Bowles had pointed out various prison bookies, ex-plained
which gangs controlled the drugs, and told Little about the male prostitutes who charged a carton of cigarettes for sex. These were all small scams and most guards knew as much about them as the inmates did. Occasionally, a guard would bust a convict for some minor offense, but in Bowles’s eyes, these routine, petty crimes were inconsequential.

But extortion, contract murders, major drug smuggling, and escape plots were serious, and Bowles prided himself on being able to spot them long before other inmates or the guards did. One morning he pointed out a fish to Little and predicted that someone would soon make a move on the fat white middle-aged convict who had been sent to prison for bilking investors out of several million dollars through a land-fraud scheme. Just as Bowles had predicted, two D.C. Blacks were arrested by the guards a few days later for trying to extort money from the inmate. They had pushed him down a flight of stairs and threatened to kill him unless he paid them $50 per week. The inmate had rushed to the lieutenant’s office and spilled his story to the guards. The two D.C. Blacks were put in the Hole and their victim was moved into a special cellblock over the prison hospital known as the protective-custody unit, where weak inmates, snitches, and sexual deviants were housed for their own safety. It was a classic example, Bowles told Little, of how
not
to extort someone.

“Even a mouse is going to fight if you push him into a corner,” Bowles lectured. “You got to understand that if a guy is weak, he’s always going to take the easiest way out of a situation. This guy ran to the cops.”

The trick to orchestrating a successful scam, Bowles continued, was in thinking three moves ahead, like a chess player. “You got to give your mark someplace to run. You got to get him to go where you want him to go.”

One day at lunch, Bowles pointed to an unlikely pair of inmates sitting together at a nearby table. One
was a bearded, long-haired former biker and convicted killer, the other a thin clean-shaven man in his mid-thirties. Bowles explained that the biker was being paid to be the thin inmate’s bodyguard. It seems the two men had arrived at Leavenworth a few months earlier aboard the same bus, and while they were being held on the fish tier, they became friends. Most nights, the biker stopped by the other man’s cell just to chat. A short time after both were released into the main prison population, two thugs burst into the thin inmate’s cell, knocked him to the floor, put a knife to his throat, and told him they were going to rape him. As they were pulling off his pants, the biker came along for one of his nightly visits and scared off the thugs. The terrified younger man realized that he needed someone to protect him, so he hired the biker. Each week, the thin inmate’s brother, who owned a small manufacturing plant in the Midwest, deposited a check into a savings account for the biker.

What few inmates knew was that the biker, whom Bowles had known off and on for years, had paid the two thugs to terrorize the other man. During one of their first conversations, the thin inmate had foolishly mentioned that his brother was a successful businessman, and from that moment on, the biker had looked for a way to extort money from him.

“You see, he gave the mark someplace to run, a way out of the corner, and the mark did exactly what he was supposed to do,” Bowles explained.

When Little first met Bowles, the seasoned convict promised to tell him the secret of being able to walk around in the Hot House without being victimized. This is what Bowles said: “You got to learn how to draw a line. If some guy insults you every time you step out of your cell, first you got to ask yourself, ‘Is it me? Have I done something to deserve this disrespect?’ If you haven’t done anything, then you know he is trying to run over you and you must take it to him immediately. Get right in his face. ‘Hey, what the hell is going on here?
Are you trying to fuck me? What is your problem, man? Look, we both got numbers in here, and hey, I’m willing to move halfway for you, but you have to move halfway for me. Now if you ain’t willing to do that, motherfucker, then you won’t be on this tier much longer.’

“That is all you have to do because that is what is reasonable. You gave him an out. You said you’d move halfway. But you drew a line, and if you aren’t willing to draw that line and tell that motherfucker that you will make him pay if he crosses it, then you got no principles, you got no standing in here, you got no word, and you got no credibility.”

Bowles had never read any books by Wall Street tycoons on the art of deal-making, but he understood raw power. “The only time a guy is going to pull up,” he explained, “is if he thinks fucking with you is going to cost him more than he will gain.

“I’ve never had to stab another man in prison,” Bowles continued, “and I ain’t no beefed-up, big motherfucker. But I’ve always made it perfectly clear that if you try to hurt me or kill me, I’m not going to hesitate. I’m going to walk into one of those prison factories and I’m going to get myself a big hatchet and I’m going to walk right down center hall and no one, no one at all, is going to try to stop me unless he is a complete idiot. I will cut off your head with that ax and I’ll pay whatever consequences society demands, but there should never be the slightest fucking doubt in anyone’s mind that I will do that. Ever.”