The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (38 page)

Before O’Brien filed a written report, he briefed Carlson. “Norm looked at me and said, ‘Fire ’em both.’
That was it.” O’Brien waited a day and went back in to see Carlson. “I told him more about the situation,” O’Brien recalled, “but he didn’t change his mind. Norm was totally against brutality.” Still, O’Brien waited. “Finally, I went in for a third time and just blurted it out. I said, ‘Norm, that place is wild. The frustration level among staff is high. It demands some compassion.’ He listened to me for a while and said, ‘Okay.’ So we demoted the captain, and Eddie Geouge was suspended for two weeks and transferred to the penitentiary at Terre Haute [Indiana]. It was really a shame because Geouge was on the rise. He had been destined to move up the ladder.”

The Geouges felt victimized. “I am convinced the bureau really was trying to force me out,” said Geouge. “I think Carlson and the others expected me to quit or crawl into the woodwork and simply lay down.”

At Terre Haute, Geouge earned the highest job-performance evaluations possible, but did not receive a single promotion. “I felt very betrayed and very bitter for a long, long time,” said Pistol Geouge. “The bureau had always treated us as family, and then, because of this one mistake, everyone turned against us.”

Four years later, Geouge was sent to an even less desirable assignment, the prison in Oxford, Wisconsin. On January 29, 1984, the mutilated body of Boyd H. Spikerman, a guard who had worked at the prison less than six months, was discovered. Once again, Geouge put his investigative skills to work. Geouge quickly identified the murderer as Matthew Granger, a convicted killer and braggart who had killed Spikerman because he wanted to gain admittance to the Aryan Brotherhood.

Granger had hoped that by killing a guard—just as Silverstein and Fountain had done in Marion less than three months earlier—he would be accepted by the AB.

Like the dietician murdered in Atlanta, the guard had been chosen simply because he was convenient. Granger later bragged about the killing to a television
reporter. “I killed him about four different ways. I stabbed him, cut his eyes out, cut his throat out, strangled him, beat him with a fire extinguisher and flashlight, and stuck a ring of keys down his mouth.” And then Granger looked directly into the camera and said, “This has just begun for me. I’m only thirty-one years old. I got a lot of bodies to collect yet.”

Geouge received a special citation from the bureau for his investigation of the Granger murder. Ironically, it was Carlson who awarded it to him. When Carlson retired in July 1987, Geouge was promoted to the Hot House. A few weeks after he arrived, he found a bullet dangling from a piece of string tied to his mailbox outside his new home. Officers in Oxford called him later that day to tell him an informant had revealed that several inmates had put out a contract on Geouge and his family. The bullet was meant as a warning that the inmates knew where he lived. Geouge and his family took what precautions they could, but there was little to do but wait. Nothing happened.

Sometimes, Geouge said, when he thought about the long hours, low pay, danger, the lack of respect that guards received in most communities, and the daily grind of dealing with society’s violent psychotics, he wondered why he stayed on. But those moments never lasted long.

“Not everyone can do this kind of work,” he said, “but it’s always come easy to me and I enjoy it. Quite frankly, I think the traits that you need to be a good officer and the traits you need to be a good convict are very, very similar.

“I think I would make a good convict. I have the qualities you need—toughness, not being afraid of violence. I can handle that. But there is one big difference that separates us. Convicts are predators. They hurt other people. They take advantage of other people. They really only care about themselves. They don’t attack
the strong, they prey off the weak and helpless in our society and they destroy lives.

“I can be violent, just as violent as any inmate in here, if the situation demands that. I can even kill. I have killed many men. But I am not a predator, and that is what separates us from them. We don’t cross that line.”

“What’s happening?” Lieutenant Monty Watkins asked as Lieutenant Edward Pierce bolted past him in center hall toward the east yard.

“Deuces!” Pierce yelled, and Watkins immediately fell in behind him.

Whenever someone dialed the numbers 2-2-2 on an internal telephone, an alarm sounded in the control center. “Triple deuces” was only supposed to be dialed when an officer was in trouble. Every staff member was supposed to run to the phone that had been used to sound the alarm. The only guards exempted were those at posts considered too critical to be abandoned. As the two lieutenants exited from the main penitentiary and entered the east yard, they were joined by Lieutenant Tracy Johns.

Someone in the prison industries building had sounded the alarm at 10:50
A.M
., and as the three men bolted toward the building, they ran into a wave of convicts who just had been released from their jobs in the textile shop for lunch. Johns ordered the men to clear a path, and as they did, he yelled to the guard stationed at the metal detector in the east yard:

“Hold ’em here.”

An immediate groan rose from the inmates as they realized they were going to have to wait in the yard until the emergency was resolved. They were ordered to stop at the metal detector, which was located halfway between the industries building and the main penitentiary. Most sat down on the sidewalk and grass, a few pulled out smokes.

Shortly after the three lieutenants disappeared into the industries building, another thirty employees came running into the yard in response to the alarm. It is about fifty yards from the main penitentiary to prison industries, and the staff members had to pass the waiting inmates to get there.

“Here comes the cavalry!” one inmate cracked.

“Please, God! O-o-o-h-h-h, God, p-l-e-a-s-e let there be a body this time!” another convict said.

The guard at the metal detector, who was not supposed to leave his post when an alarm was sounded, acted as if he hadn’t heard the wisecracks.

About one minute later, a group of about twenty more staff members came into the yard, but they were moving much more slowly. These were stragglers; many were older men, some were fat and simply couldn’t keep up with the first group. But there were a few guards in this group who were young and in good condition. Some worked in remote areas of the prison and were late because they had come from far away, but one or two were always among the last to respond.

“Cowards!” one of the inmates said.

“Better hurry,” said another sarcastically. “Gonna miss the fun!”

“Run, fat boys, run,” heckled a third.

Once this group disappeared, there was nothing for the inmates to do but continue waiting. As always, the whites had grouped themselves away from the blacks. Earl Coleman-Bey, a burly black convicted murderer, drug dealer, and head of the D.C. Blacks gang, sat on the grass near the detector. “If you ever wanted some
hostages,” he said, “all you gotta do is sound deuces. These dummies will run right to you.”

“Shit, Earl,” another inmate volunteered. “Sound them deuces three or four times, and these fat mother-fuckers will be running around so much they’ll all be dead of heart attacks.”

The group surrounding Coleman-Bey laughed. The whites didn’t react.

Every inmate was expected to work unless he had a medical disability. The convicts waiting near the detector were among the six hundred inmates at the Hot House who had jobs in prison industries. They earned an average of $250 per month working eight hours a day at the print shop, textile shop, or furniture plant. They could earn incentive pay too, and vacation days, normally spent lounging around their cells.

Any inmate who didn’t want to work in UNICOR was assigned a job somewhere else in the prison. At best, he earned $75 a month painting the cellblocks, waxing and buffing floors, helping in the kitchen, or doing other odd jobs. Most of these men only worked about four hours a day, and about one third of them were assigned to what the convicts called “make work”—jobs created just to give them something to do.

The industries building at the Hot House was a four-story brick structure with three wings. The print shop was on the lower floors of the first wing, textile work was done on the upper floors, and the furniture factory was in the other two wings, together with a storage area and administrative offices.

Unlike jobs in the outside world, work assignments at UNICOR were often based on the length of an inmate’s sentence rather than on his educational background or skills. Men serving several life sentences with little chance of parole were taught the most complicated tasks and were often trained as equipment repairmen. Short-termers were given easily learned, routine work. It was not unusual for older convicts, who had been in
Leavenworth for years, to know more about the various presses, sewing machines, and assembly-line operations than the associate warden for industries who served on the warden’s executive staff.

None of the products made by convicts at Leavenworth could be sold to the public. That was one of the conditions Congress placed on the bureau when UNICOR was created. The politicians wanted to make certain that convicts wouldn’t take jobs away from the local community or compete with private industry. Inmates in the textile plant sewed together T-shirts for the army and canvas bags for the postal service. The print shop made nearly all the forms and stationery used by the bureau. Chairs, desks, and bookcases made by the furniture factory went to the cadet quarters at West Point or to other military installations.

Seventy staff members worked at UNICOR. Many of them had started out as guards but had switched because they could earn better pay at UNICOR and work regular hours. The fact that UNICOR supervisors made more money and worked better hours irked most guards, and some didn’t associate with them. But what really caused tension between the guards and the supervisors was the atmosphere in prison industries. It was not uncommon for inmates to call their supervisors by their first names or join them for coffee breaks. No self-respecting guard ever allowed an inmate to get that friendly. The reason such familiarity was tolerated in UNICOR was because its staff needed the inmates’ cooperation in order to meet production deadlines. Whenever inmates felt they were being abused by a manager, they slowed down.

Technically, the UNICOR employees were responsible for guarding the inmates as well as supervising them, but there was little need for tight security inside the building even though many of the inmates worked with tools that could have easily been used as weapons. This was because the inmates genuinely wanted to earn
money for themselves or their families and they didn’t want to do anything on the job that might shut down the program or get them fired. The bureau had closed UNICOR operations in the past when it felt the inmates were too rebellious or when there were repeated problems in a factory.

In appearance, the three plants at the Hot House looked no different from any print, textile, or furniture-manufacturing operation outside the walls. But there were subtle reminders of where they were located.

“We were sewing together T-shirts,” an inmate recalled, “and I had just about filled my basket. I was going to turn it in to my boss. We were way behind, so we were getting a bonus for every basket we did over our normal quota. Anyway, I got up to take a piss, and when I come back my basket is empty. I mean, as soon as I turned my back, these shitheads I worked with stole every one of my T-shirts for their baskets.”

The triple-deuces alarm that had brought Lieutenants Pierce, Watkins, and Johns running into the building to help rescue a staff member was another reminder. But when the men burst into the textile shop, they didn’t find an emergency. The room was empty except for rows of industrial sewing machines and yards of canvas ready to be cut into mailbags. Obviously, one of the convicts now sitting outside the building by the metal detector had sneaked into the floor supervisor’s office and dialed the alarm moments before he and the other men had been released to go to lunch. It was impossible to guess why. It was against the rules for inmates to use any telephones without permission except for the pay phones in the cellhouses. The inmate might have been playing a prank, responding to another inmate’s dare, or he might have had some other reason. Perhaps a friend of his had wanted to move some drugs or hooch in one of the cellhouses and had asked the inmate to set off the alarm in the industries building to distract the guards. The three lieutenants could only guess.

They returned to the prison yard and Johns told the guard manning the metal detector to let the inmates proceed to lunch in the mess hall. As Johns watched them file through the detector, another call came through on his radio. An inmate had cut himself with a knife in the kitchen and was hurrying out into the yard on his way to the prison hospital. Johns was told to make certain that the wound was an accident.

The bleeding inmate had run through center hall and had left a trail of red drops on the white tile floor. Two women employees who worked in the administration building were on their way to lunch at the officers’ mess when they noticed the blood. An inmate coming down the hall in the opposite direction had seen it too and he bent down, touched his index finger to one of the spots, and swirled it into a larger circle on the floor. He glanced at the two approaching women and stood up so that he was facing them. He raised his blood-smudged index finger, making an obscene gesture, and then slowly licked the blood from it with his tongue.

Grimacing, the two women hurried past him.

The inmate laughed, and continued his walk down center hall.

Putting Slack in charge of the Cubans had proved to be a good decision. Warden Matthews was pleased. In fact, he felt things were going well overall. The penitentiary floors were shiny, all the cellblocks had been painted, inmates were talking to him, and he had his own crew of associate wardens in place. So there was really no reason for him to overreact when he learned that Bureau Director J. Michael Quinlan was coming to visit on September 27. But he did. As soon as Matthews heard about the visit, he called his associate wardens together and they started planning for the event with such intensity that guards began to joke that “Jesus Christ himself” was coming.