The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (31 page)

Carlson decided that Marion would remain permanently locked down after the guards and SORT teams restored order. He was not going to let the prison slip out of control again. Inmates remained confined in their cells twenty-three hours per day. Fountain was sent to a prison in Springfield, Missouri. Silverstein went to Atlanta. Both were put under “no human contact.”

Five years after the murder, as he sat in the basement of the Hot House recalling how he had stabbed Clutts, Silverstein said that he still thinks about the guard every day. “Even when I dream, Clutts is there. I thought killing him would put an end to it,” Silverstein explained, “but it hasn’t. He still haunts me. I think
about him a lot and I hate him because of what he made me do. He is responsible for me being locked like a wild animal in this cage. He made me give up my life. I didn’t know until after I killed him that there are a thousand Cluttses out there and all of them have a stick and all of them want to poke it at me.”

Silverstein refused to sleep on a mattress at Leavenworth, he said, because it had been his anger over the mattress that Clutts took from him in Marion that had finally driven him to kill the guard.

Upstairs in the warden’s office at the Hot House, a few hours after I finished talking to Silverstein, I watched as Robert Matthews pulled his notepad from his coat pocket during his regular four
P.M
. meeting with his executive staff and told them that Silverstein’s mail was being poorly copied.

“He is the only special inmate we have here and I don’t want him sending copies of his letters to some judge or court and getting us in trouble,” Matthews said. “Regardless of what he has done, we must accommodate him.”

The next day, Silverstein’s mail arrived on time and he was able to read each photocopy.

Within sixty days after his arrest on drug-smuggling charges, Dallas Scott was taken before the disciplinary-hearing officer at the Hot House. It was the officer’s job to decide whether Scott had violated any bureau regulations and, if so, to dispense punishment. Scott arrived with his hands handcuffed behind him. The hearing lasted less than five minutes.

“You are accused of attempting to smuggle heroin into a penal institution,” the officer explained. “How do you plead?”

“Not guilty,” said Scott. “I don’t know nothing about any heroin.”

The officer quietly read some papers in front of him and then announced, “I find you guilty.”

“Based on what?” Scott asked.

“Statements from people who know you did it,” the officer said.

“Can I see them?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think it would be in the best interest of the people involved, the confidential informants who have given statements about what you did.”

“Shit, you don’t have no evidence against me,” Scott declared. “This is a bum beef. You can’t prove anything.”

“If you don’t have anything further to say,” the hearing officer replied, “then I will pronounce sentence.”

Scott laughed.

He was sentenced to 65 days in the Hole, stripped of 485 “good days” that had been previously deducted from his prison sentence because of good behavior, and was told that he would be transferred to Marion.

Scott hated the transfer the most. “I’m not sniveling,” he said later. “I’ll do my time anywhere these bastards put me, but I’d hoped to stay in Leavenworth.”

A few hours after the hearing, Scott sat in the Hole and talked about the last time he had been in Marion. He was paroled from the prison in October 1983—the day before Silverstein and Fountain murdered Officers Clutts and Hoffman. Scott was a friend of Silverstein, Fountain, Greschner, Gometz, and Bruscino. As a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, he would have been in the middle of the trouble between the inmates and guards that followed the murders if he hadn’t been released the day before. As it turned out, after a series of farcical mishaps Scott got dragged into the Marion mess anyway.

The bureau gave Scott a one-way airplane ticket to Sacramento and $150 in cash on the Friday afternoon he was released. He didn’t get far, however, before he was in trouble. It started innocently enough when Scott’s flight made a layover stop at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. “I got a brother, sister, and brother-in-law there I hadn’t seen in years, so I gave them a call.” He had such a good time visiting with them that he decided to spend Friday night in Dallas and resume his trip the next morning, but when he showed up at the American Airlines ticket counter on Saturday, he was told his original ticket wasn’t any good. He had spent too much time in Dallas.

“I started getting real vocal and loud,” Scott recalled. “Customers are starting to gather around and I figured the agent will give me a ticket to shut me up, but she didn’t back down an inch.”

Scott’s brother-in-law, standing next to him, was embarrassed and he offered to buy Scott a new ticket. On his way to the gate, Scott stopped to telephone his wife in Sacramento so she’d know he was on his way.

“I finish the call and hustle to the gate and there are two guys in American Airlines blazers standing by the door watching me, and when I get about ten feet away, they shut the door in my face. I said, ‘Boy, am I glad to get on this plane,’ and this guy says, ‘We are through boarding, sir.’ I can’t believe it, but these sons of bitches won’t let me pass. Now, I’m wondering, ‘What the hell is it with these people?’ I think maybe that bitch at the counter told them to shut the door in my face.”

Irritated, Scott walked back to the public telephones and called his house to tell his wife that he’d missed the flight. Then he returned to the ticket counter and squared off with the same agent with whom he had argued before. Once again, they exchanged angry words, but the agent booked Scott for a later flight. Scott called home with the new flight information and then wandered into an airport lounge, swallowed a few drinks, and lost track of time. When he realized his flight was about to leave, he dashed to the same gate where he had been earlier and slipped onto the airplane. As he was fastening his seat belt, he heard the crew announce that the airplane was bound for Atlanta, Georgia. As the passengers laughed, he rushed down the aisle and off the airplane. Scott had not flown much and had incorrectly assumed that all flights for Sacramento left from the same gate. Again, he found himself across from the ticket agent.

“I’ve been out of prison for less than forty-eight hours, and I’ll admit I was paranoid, but by this time, I’m convinced this bitch is screwing with me,” Scott said. “I
figure she’d changed that gate on purpose. I am angry. I mean, I got steam coming out of my ears.”

Scott unleashed a string of profanity that only ended when the agent gave him another new ticket. He marched to a pay telephone and called his house. Thomas Silverstein’s girlfriend, who happened to be staying with Scott’s wife at the time, answered, but before he could give her his new flight information, Scott felt a tap on his shoulder.

“I turn around and see this little bitty guy in a seersucker suit,” Scott recalled. “I look at him—and he comes to my shoulders—and he tells me to hang up the telephone. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Who the hell are you?” Scott demanded.

“Airport security,” the man replied, pulling a badge from his pocket.

“Hey, look, pal,” Scott said, jabbing the air with a finger in front of the man’s face, “the best thing that you can do right now is get the fuck away from me. I’ve just about had it with you fools!”

Scott turned around. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on here,” he said in the telephone, but before he could finish the sentence, the security guard grabbed the receiver and tried to take it away. Scott backhanded the guard, knocking him across the corridor.

“Get the fuck away from me!” Scott yelled.

Four other security guards who had been standing by jumped Scott, and the fight was on. It wasn’t until two Dallas policemen arrived that he was finally subdued.

“I called my sister from jail, and by this time I am so embarrassed. It’s like I’m forty-some years old and I’m thinking, my brother and sister got to be wondering, ‘God, we leave this guy by himself for one half hour and he is in jail again!’ I figure they’re thinking I’m some sort of nut.”

Scott’s sister pleaded with police to release Scott, and after she paid his fine, he was escorted to the airport
and accompanied by two security guards on the Sunday afternoon flight to Sacramento.

Meanwhile, Scott’s wife had not gotten word that her husband was spending Saturday night in a Dallas jail, so she had been waiting all night at the airport. When Scott disembarked, he discovered that she had taken a number of amphetamines to stay awake and was in no condition to drive. Even so, they drove off from the airport, and soon were hopelessly lost. “We musta made seven hundred U-turns and I’m a nervous wreck. Cars are zipping by and I am holding on the dash for dear life.” That was when he first saw the police car. He told his wife to slow down. “I can’t believe what she does. She decides we’re going the wrong way and makes a U-turn right in front of this cop. She damn near hits him. I think, ‘Shit, I haven’t even made it home yet and I’m about to get arrested for the second time!’ ” The police pulled them over, but Scott managed to talk his way out of the mess and they were both released on the condition that they take a taxi home and leave their truck by the freeway.

By the time the cab got Scott home, it was Monday morning and he was supposed to report to his parole officer. Scott called an outlaw biker friend to give him a ride, and as they were going downtown, they got into an accident and Scott’s left foot was injured. But he managed to make his first appointment, limping into the parole office. Only then did he hear that Silverstein and Fountain had murdered two guards in Marion and the prison had been locked down.

“You are going to be under surveillance for a while,” his parole officer warned him. Both the FBI and a special California prison-gang unit had decided to monitor him because of the events at Marion and his membership in the Aryan Brotherhood.

Back home, Scott began getting collect calls from gang members in various prisons asking about Silverstein, Fountain, and others at Marion. Some callers
claimed that guards from Leavenworth’s SORT team were beating inmates. Amid the hubbub, Silverstein himself telephoned Scott.

“Now Tommy knows that he is being bugged and he knows a lot of people are getting a lot of heat about what he did in Marion,” Scott recalled. “Tommy wants to take the heat off of them, so he is trying to explain that it was an independent act between him and that guard he killed, Clutts. He killed the guy for specific reasons and it wasn’t any gang thing, it was personal, just between the two of them. Well, I can’t just leave this alone, you know. I got to open my big mouth, ’cause I figure they are still going to kill him, so I tell Tommy, ‘Yeah, everybody understands that it was a personal thing between you and Clutts,’ and then I say, ‘And those folks better understand too that you are not suicidal, meaning that if anything happens to you, then it’s not going to be a personal thing anymore. I’m out here in the street where I can move around and you’re my brother, man, you know what I mean?’ As soon as I hung up, I got to thinking, ‘What the hell did I just say?’ I mean, it’s not like I don’t have enough problems of my own.”

Bureau officials would later cite that telephone call as evidence that Scott intended to seek revenge on behalf of the Aryan Brotherhood for the way inmates were treated at Marion.

At about this time, an ex-convict whom Scott had met in Folsom State Prison years earlier arrived at Scott’s house looking for a place to stay. He and Scott quickly struck a deal. Since it was now November, the convict, who was in failing health and in his sixties, could sleep on the sofa in return for stealing Christmas presents for Scott’s family. “He was a pretty good booster,” Scott recalled. “I’d drive him to a shopping center and he’d come out every so often with whatever I ordered.”

One morning, Scott walked into the living room
around eleven o’clock and noticed the old man was still lying on the couch even though the room was filled with noisy kids and three women. An argument broke out between two of the women and one of them threw a telephone at the other, but it missed its target and hit the old man in the head. He still didn’t budge. Scott walked over to the couch and checked the old man’s pulse.

“Hey, this guy’s dead!” Scott announced.

“He ain’t dead,” Scott’s wife said. “You’re playing a trick.”

One of the women in the room picked up the man’s arm.

“Shit! He
is
dead!” she said.

Scott asked if anyone had killed him. “Hell no, we didn’t kill him,” one of the women replied.

“Well,” Scott explained, “if he died of natural causes, all we have to do is call the fire department and tell them to come get the body.”

No one volunteered to make the call. Meanwhile, one of the women started searching the corpse’s pants looking for money. “This gal is trying to get a ring off this guy’s hand and I couldn’t believe it,” Scott recalled. “I mean, this ring is something out of a bubble-gum machine, that’s how cheap it is, and this nut is going to break his finger to get it off this old coot.”

“You’re gonna make it look like someone killed him,” Scott complained. “Leave him alone.”

Scott finally convinced his teenage son to call the fire department.

The elderly man’s death made Scott even more nervous about the police. Everywhere he went that day, he felt he was being followed. “I couldn’t conduct any business,” he said. Police later claimed that Scott was selling drugs.

The next morning, Scott and his wife put a suitcase in their truck and headed toward Texas, although he wasn’t supposed to leave Sacramento without first clearing
it with his probation officer. “I was just going to disappear.”

They had gotten as far as Southern California that night, when Scott began spitting up blood and his wife rushed him to the University of California at Irvine Medical Center, where he registered under an assumed name. He was given a blood transfusion and listed in critical condition for six days. A blood vessel that led to the liver had burst, causing the internal bleeding. When doctors opened up Scott to repair it, they found that he had chronic hepatitis caused by severe cirrhosis of the liver. At best, they told him, he had ten years to live.