The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (3 page)

The fact that Scott’s chest bore the “triple sixes” was evidence that he was one of the gang’s earliest members, because it had abandoned the use of tattoos shortly after it was formed, when it realized that guards and the police used the tattoos to track gang members.

The bureau’s Special Investigative Service (SIS), which operated much like the FBI inside prisons, had a thick file of alleged gang activity by Scott. The most damning was an affidavit given by a former AB gang member who had turned against his former friends in exchange for an early release and a new identity through the Justice Department’s witness-protection program. He had identified Scott as a top gang member and had implied that he had once been a gang “hit man,” although there was absolutely no proof that he was linked to any murders.

Scott denied the hit-man charge and pointed out
that his entire criminal career consisted of only two felonies: a 1966 armed robbery and a 1975 bank robbery. That was it, yet the government had managed to keep him in jail for nearly three decades by tacking on extra time for various violations that it said Scott had committed while in prison.

“My criminal record ain’t shit,” Scott complained, “but if you look at how they treat me, you’d think I was some sort of Jesse James or Godfather!”

As a matter of fact, that is exactly how the bureau viewed him, and without apology. “He is definitely Aryan Brotherhood and once a convict becomes an AB, he is an AB for life,” the bureau’s gang expert, Craig Trout, explained. “What we are dealing with is a professional, lifelong criminal.… An AB member like Dallas Scott is actually doing a life sentence—only he’s doing it on the installment plan, serving a few years at a time.”

After Scott had finished speaking to Hutchinson’s girlfriend, he had gone to wait outside Hutchinson’s cell.

“She’s gonna do it,” Hutchinson announced when he returned from the phone call. “This week sometime.”

Scott didn’t know whether or not to believe him, nor was he confident that the girlfriend really understood the seriousness of what was happening. Scott hadn’t been bluffing on the telephone. If she didn’t bring in the heroin, Hutchinson was going to be hurt. Scott couldn’t afford to let word leak out that he had paid $500 to the man and then simply let him off the hook when his girlfriend didn’t deliver. Every convict in Leavenworth would think that Scott was either getting soft or was afraid, in convict slang, to “make a move on Hutchinson” for fear of being punished by the guards. Either way, Scott would look weak and other convicts would quickly take advantage of him. If Hutchinson didn’t deliver, why should the inmates who gambled at the nightly poker game that Scott operated in the cellblock television room pay their debts? If Scott was reluctant to punish
Hutchinson for fear of getting caught by the guards, wouldn’t he be equally afraid of attacking someone who came into his cell and took his radio, shoes, mattress? Scott didn’t really have any choice. For Hutchinson’s sake, he hoped the girlfriend delivered.

The next afternoon, Scott was standing inside his cell near the front bars as required for the daily four o’clock head count. At Leavenworth, every inmate is counted at least five times a day to make certain no one has escaped. These counts are held at ten
P.M
., when inmates are locked in their cells for the night, and at midnight, three
A.M
., and five-thirty
A.M
., before the cells are unlocked for the day. Each afternoon at exactly four o’clock, inmates are required to return to their cells for the most important count of the day. It differs from the others because convicts are required to be standing up when guards pass by and count them. By making them stand, guards can be certain that they are counting a breathing human being, not a papier-mâché dummy tucked under the bedclothes. Because the inmates are locked in their cells for the four o’clock count, it is the easiest time during the day for guards to make arrests. Not only do they know where every convict is inside the prison, but they can also arrest an inmate without worrying about his friends jumping into the fray.

When Scott looked through his cell door, he spotted a group of guards coming down the tier. Instinctively, he lowered one shoulder and slightly bent his knees. Scott was no stranger to fistfights with guards. In the 1970s, he had beaten an associate warden in the prison yard. He was charged with assault by the bureau and given additional time to serve for that attack, but what wasn’t mentioned, Scott claimed later, was that after he was wrestled down and handcuffed, he was taken to the Hole and beaten by guards in retaliation. The officers at Leavenworth didn’t doubt his claim. It used to be common within the bureau for guards to give inmates an “ass-whipping” if they struck a staff member. If anything,
the beating made Scott more resolute. The only way for convicts to avoid being picked on was to fight back. “There are two sides in prison and only two. If one side gives an inch, the other side tries to grab two inches. That’s just how it is; you never willingly give up ground.”

When it came to guards, Scott said he followed a simple philosophy. “If they are respectful, I return respect. If they speak in a courteous manner, I will speak in a courteous manner, but if they want to start that silly shit, then I’m going to push back—hard.”

When the cell door popped open, Scott took a deep breath and made fists. But the lieutenant in charge of the guards said matter-of-factly, “We need you to come with us.”

If the guards had wanted to fight, they would have rushed him. Scott stuck out his hands to be handcuffed. He was marched down the tier as other inmates pressed their faces to the bars and watched. Scott strutted along, holding his head up proudly.

“You are being charged with attempting to smuggle contraband inside a federal penitentiary, to wit, two point seven three grams of heroin,” the lieutenant on duty explained once Scott was downstairs inside the lieutenant’s office, a room that serves the same role inside the prison as a police headquarters. “Got anything to say?”

“This is bullshit,” Scott replied. “I didn’t do a fucking thing and I don’t know anything about any heroin.”

The lieutenant didn’t bother asking any further questions. Guards escorted Scott to the Hole, where he continued to fume.

“This is a bum beef,” he told the guards there. “Total bullshit.” For days he complained, and then one morning he got some news from a friendly guard. The FBI had a copy of the tape-recorded telephone conversation of Scott threatening Bill Hutchinson’s girlfriend, the guard told him.

“No one has my voice on tape,” Scott insisted.
“They may have someone’s voice on tape, but they will never be able to prove it is mine.”

They might not have to, the guard said. The word circulating among the guards was that inmate Bill Hutchinson had been whisked out of Leavenworth during the night and taken to another prison so that Scott couldn’t get to him. Hutchinson and his girlfriend had cut some sort of deal with the FBI, according to the guard. They had agreed to testify against Scott in return for a plea bargain.

If the guard was waiting for Scott to react, he was disappointed.

“Fuck the government,” Scott said. “This is a bullshit charge. I don’t know nothing about any heroin.”

As he walked briskly around the blacktop track in the prison yard, William Post felt hopeful. The federal Parole Commission was reviewing his request for leniency and Post was optimistic about his chances. After all, he had served fifteen years of his forty-five-year sentence for bank robbery, and most parole boards turned a criminal loose after he completed one-third of his prison term. Post also had an exemplary record while in prison. He had earned a college degree in psychology, participated in thirty-four psychotherapy group sessions (a prison psychologist had described Post as “a highly motivated and cooperative individual who has made a positive contribution to the group”), and he had kept out of trouble. A prison counselor had even congratulated the forty-two-year-old convict for “gaining significant insight into his behavior” and “making an excellent institutional adjustment.” Surely with that kind of record, the Parole Commission would grant him his freedom.

As a rule, Post didn’t think about the outside world. “You got to cut yourself off from such thoughts,” he explained. “You have to deal with the reality of where you physically are, not daydream about the streets.”

But as he strode along the outdoor track that July
1987 day, Post let his mind wander. He thought about what he would do when he was freed, where he would go, and then, in a flash, he recalled the crime that had landed him in Leavenworth.

It was supposed to be an easy heist. At least, that is what Post and his partner, Gary Tanksley, thought when they burst through the doors of a bank in Dearborn, Michigan, waving pistols and screaming at the tellers and customers to get down on the floor. At most, the robbers figured, it would take five minutes to grab the cash and escape. It was not the first time they had robbed banks together and they had perfected their technique.

Leaping over the counter, Tanksley scooped bills from the tellers’ drawers while Post hustled the bank manager into the vault and ordered him to open the safe. But during the excitement neither robber had taken time to check behind a door near the front entrance. It looked as if it were a storage closet, but it actually opened onto stairs that led to an employee lounge in the basement. Seconds before Tanksley and Post had entered the bank, a security guard had gone down the stairway into the lounge for a cup of coffee, and now he was on his way up. As soon as he opened the door and saw the customers on the floor, he realized a robbery was under way. Pulling the door closed, he put down his coffee and slipped out his revolver. But Tanksley had spotted him. When the guard opened the door for a second time, Tanksley was waiting, and leveled his pistol at the guard’s head.

For some reason, he didn’t fire. The guard did. His bullet ripped into Tanksley’s shoulder, ricocheted off a bone, and severed his aorta. Blood spurted from the exit wound in his chest as he fell dying. Hearing gunfire, Post dashed from the vault just in time to see the guard swing around. Post ducked behind a counter and began firing. The guard dived back into the stairwell and pulled the door shut. Post riddled the door with rounds from his
.357 Magnum handgun. The metal-piercing slugs splintered the wood as the guard raced down the steps to safety.

Post ran over to Tanksley. “Blood was squirting out of his chest like a spigot,” Post recalled. “I mean, blood is everywhere, and I swear he’s got a big red halo around him.”

Post had taken $21,000 from the vault and Tanksley was still clutching a bag of cash from the teller drawers. But as Post reached for it, he suddenly jerked back his hand. “It was crazy but I thought, ‘Man, I’m not reaching down in all that blood.’ ” Instead, he dashed outside to a waiting getaway car.

A few hours later, Post was captured, and on April 24, 1973, he was turned over to the bureau. Had the bank robbery been his only crime, he might have received a lighter sentence than forty-five years, one month, and seventeen days. But his criminal record dated back to 1953, when, only eight years old, he stole a car and ran away from home. As he grew older, he was arrested for robbery, burglary, assault, car theft, and assorted petty crimes. By fifteen, Post was described by a court psychologist as a “psychopathic delinquent with highly destructive impulses and no apparent motivation for altering his behavior.” Over the next twenty-seven years, Post only spent a combined total of one year as a free man. That was it—
one year
—between the ages of fifteen and forty-two. Every other moment was spent in some sort of incarceration.

At Leavenworth, Post was known simply as the “Catman” because he took care of six cats that lived inside the prison. No one knows exactly when the cats arrived. Probably they were brought in to catch mice, but before long there were so many cats running around the cellhouses that they had become a nuisance, and guards began talking about getting rid of them. The inmates protested. There were rumors that for every cat killed, a guard would be slain. A compromise was reached. As
long as an inmate took care of the cats and the feline population was kept to a reasonable number, they could stay.

Post was the prison’s second catman. He fed the cats each morning and night, paid their veterinary bills out of his meager earnings from his prison job, and badgered guards into taking kittens home as pets. Since Post had taken over the job in 1982, he had found homes for more than one hundred kittens. His entire day revolved around the cats. In the mornings, he worked at the trash dumpster behind the kitchen, one of the filthiest jobs at the prison, but the best for collecting meat scraps. In the afternoon, he played with the cats in the yard. His antics were so lighthearted that other convicts often gawked as Post chased the cats, mimicking their shrill meows, or lay on his back on the ball field tossing a kitten in the air above his chest like a father playing with a toddler. His favorite cat was Tiger. When asked why he bothered with the cats, Post replied, “Because I’m a militant heterosexual. I love pussy!” Most guards—and inmates—figured he was nuts.

He did little to discourage that opinion. He was the scruffiest inmate in Leavenworth. Most days, the rail-thin Post wore faded army dungarees, tattered black tennis shoes, a soiled T-shirt, and a light purple jogging jacket with gaping holes in the elbows. A bright red cowboy bandanna was wrapped around his unwashed, shoulder-length brown hair and he wore a full unkempt beard and sunglasses with mirror lenses that hid his bright blue eyes. His nose was flat, as if it had been smashed several times and rebuilt with fewer and fewer pieces.

Post lived in a one-man cell that was as unkempt as he was. Washed and filthy clothes were strewn together on his unmade bed. Old issues of
Guns & Ammo
lay on the floor. Used yellow legal pads peeked from cardboard boxes crammed with envelopes, crumpled papers, and tattered paperback books. Guards were always getting after Post to clean up his cell; some even threatened to
assign him extra work around the cellhouse if he didn’t straighten up the mess. Such threats would usually prompt him to pick up a few things, but within minutes after guards had checked his cell, it was as messy as it had been before.