The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (39 page)

On the day before the visit, Matthews huddled with Associate Warden Connor to go over last-minute details. Quinlan would be met at the airport Tuesday night and driven to the warden’s house for a dinner with the penitentiary’s top staff. The next morning, he would be taken on a tour of the Hot House before being driven to Kansas City, where he was scheduled to speak at a Justice Department conference for U.S. attorneys.

Matthews wanted the prison tour to appear unplanned, but he and Connor had actually compiled a detailed account of where Quinlan and his entourage would go and what they would see. No detail had been
left to chance. Special cleaning crews had already been sent down the corridors that the group would walk along. Every floor had been scrubbed and polished, every wall freshly painted. Connor had assumed that sometime during the tour someone would ask to see the inside of a cell. He had decided to take the group through B cellhouse, where the cells were made of concrete blocks and had solid steel doors, not bars. Connor had selected several cells along the route and ordered them cleaned, painted, and stripped of any embarrassing nude photographs. Guards would make certain before the tour that the beds in each of these cells were made in military fashion.

Maintenance crews had been busy outside the penitentiary too. The front lawn had been mowed and was scheduled to be mowed again a few hours before Quinlan arrived. It would be cut twice, in different directions, to disguise any telltale mowing marks. New flowers had been planted. All the bushes had been trimmed. The yellow lines in the parking lot had been repainted, as had the wood trim in the lobby. There was so much painting being done that guards complained: anyone who stood still for longer than a minute risked being dabbed with enamel.

Matthews and Connor had also taken precautions when it came to inmates. Any inmate who guards thought might pose a threat, embarrass Quinlan, or cause any sort of demonstration during the tour was to be locked in the Hole during the visit. Just to be on the safe side, Connor told Matthews that five guards would walk well ahead of the tour group, out of sight. They would ensure that there were no large groups of convicts milling around or lying in wait to interrupt the tour. This advance group of guards would also alert staff members that the tour was coming, so no one would be surprised when the director appeared. Lieutenant Charlie Hill, the only Native American at the penitentiary, would walk a few feet ahead of the tour group with two other officers
to open all gates so Quinlan and the others wouldn’t have to wait. Connor had personally gone over the list of guards who would be on duty and within sight of the tour. Each would wear a clean white shirt and a black Bureau blazer. Any guards who were grossly overweight or consistently sloppy had been temporarily reassigned to areas out of view. The guards along the tour route were going to be young, athletically built, sharply dressed. Some would be blacks and Hispanics.

After the tour, Quinlan and his guests would eat lunch in the officers’ cafeteria. The room would be cleared of all but one or two guards before the dignitaries arrived, Connor explained, so they wouldn’t have to wait in line. The three inmate cooks, including Norman Bucklew, would be dressed in clean, white, pressed uniforms and would be wearing plastic gloves and chef’s hats, which they normally never wore. The tables would be covered with red-and-white checked tablecloths with fresh-cut flowers as centerpieces, rather than the ashtrays, metal napkin holders, and plastic ketchup and mustard squirt bottles that usually sat on the tabletops. Lunch would be sirloin steak.

After lunch, Quinlan would be escorted to the front lawn, where he would stand on a wooden platform built especially for his visit and answer questions from reporters, who would be fed pastries and coffee before Quinlan appeared.

As soon as the press conference was over, Matthews and the associate wardens would drive Quinlan and his guests to Kansas City in washed and waxed bureau cars. Over the weekend, Matthews and his top managers had made a practice run from the prison to the hotel where Quinlan was speaking to make certain that everyone knew the route.

After going over the arrangements with Connor, Matthews felt confident that his staff was ready. The following day, during his regular Tuesday meeting with department heads, Matthews gave final instructions.
“Nothing has a higher priority than this visit,” he said. “There is no reason for any of you to be talking on the telephone or
doing
anything else except standing at attention when Mr. Quinlan enters your area.”

The warden reminded the group that each of them was to bring a main dish to his house that night for the potluck dinner in Quinlan’s honor. “This is an opportunity for you to meet Mike socially,” he said. “It will be good for your careers.”

All during Tuesday, various guards were pulled from their jobs and sent to Kansas City International Airport to ferry U.S. attorneys to their downtown hotels. That night at Benny’s, several guards complained about being used as chauffeurs. They had heard stories about the extremes that other wardens had gone to when a director visited. One warden at a prison in the Northeast had poured flour over the dirty snow by the prison entrance so that it would look nice when the director visited. But the Hot House staff had always prided itself on being above such antics. They groused that asking guards to serve as drivers was certainly something that former warden Jerry O’Brien would not have done.

Then, after all the planning, Quinlan missed his flight Tuesday night and couldn’t come to the warden’s house for dinner. Matthews was disappointed. He had planned the dinner as a favor to his top managers, but when they arrived at his house and heard the news, most of them didn’t seem to mind. Jackets came off, ties were loosened, everyone ate and then gathered around the bar in the large family room downstairs. One associate warden’s wife got tipsy. Through the patio doors, the group watched as a terrific thunderstorm lit up the sky, giving them a panoramic view of the Hot House situated directly below the hill where Matthews lived. Five times during the storm, bolts struck lightning rods on the penitentiary’s dome, but none of the charges did any damage. Nothing, it seemed, could faze the old penitentiary.

Quinlan arrived at Leavenworth promptly the next
morning, accompanied by a high-ranking Justice Department official, Frank Keating, as well as two U.S. attorneys from Missouri and Kansas. They were hustled into Matthews’s office where a table of fruit, pastries, juice, and coffee was waiting. Matthews gave each visitor a gold-plated key from the prison attached to a mahogany plaque inscribed with his name.

The tour went just as Matthews and Connor had planned. When one of the U.S. attorneys asked to see the inside of a cell, Connor quickly volunteered, “Let’s look in this one,” and the door to one of the previously prepared cells was opened.

There was only one incident that hadn’t been choreographed. As the group walked past a television room in B cellhouse, one of the attorneys looked at the movie being shown.

“I didn’t know they watched movies like that!” he said.

The cable-television show was R-rated and showed a couple engaged in sex.

“Well, sir, they can watch whatever is on cable,” an embarrassed guard replied.

Matthews sat with Quinlan during lunch. Norman Bucklew eyed them from behind the food serving line. He had overheard guards talking about Quinlan’s visit weeks earlier, and he had decided on the morning of the director’s visit that he would make a point of talking to Quinlan at lunchtime. Bucklew wanted to know why inmates in Leavenworth couldn’t buy portable televisions for their cells. “I know of at least three or four murders that have happened while I’ve been in the joint because of fights over televisions,” Bucklew had explained earlier. “They let us buy radios, why not small televisions? I decided to jam him about them that day.”

Bucklew had rehearsed his speech several times and was ready when Quinlan came through the serving line, but Quinlan had been talking and Bucklew didn’t want to rudely interrupt. Bucklew kept waiting and waiting
but there never seemed to be an opportune moment to approach the director while he was eating.

As soon as he finished, Bucklew started toward him. But Quinlan was already standing and starting to leave, and Bucklew didn’t want to chase after him. And then it happened. Without explanation, Quinlan stopped, turned around, and walked directly over to Bucklew.

“Excellent meal,” Quinlan said. “Thank you.”

Bucklew was less than a foot away. The director had spoken to him first. There wasn’t any reason why Bucklew couldn’t ask about the televisions. But as he stood there dressed in his paper chef’s hat and plastic gloves, he simply nodded and looked embarrassed. Quinlan turned and walked away.

A few minutes later in Matthews’s office, Quinlan, the two U.S. attorneys, and Frank Keating briefly discussed what each of them intended to say to the media at the press conference that Matthews had set up.

Quinlan said he wanted a discussion about a new bureau program that forced convicts to pay their court fines. In the past, he explained, no one ever checked to make certain that convicts paid up. But recently the bureau had started warning inmates that they might jeopardize their chances at parole if they didn’t pay their fines, and, so far, more than $12 million had been collected.

Even though the program was the bureau’s idea and had nothing to do with Frank Keating’s office in the Justice Department, Quinlan bowed to political protocol and urged that Keating be the first to explain the program and its success.

“I think I’ll say something like ‘Crime doesn’t pay, but criminals do,’ ” Keating said.

“That’s really great,” Quinlan replied.

Now ready, the group started to walk outside, but Matthews stopped them. The only reporter waiting was Connie Parish from
The Leavenworth Times
. No one else
had shown up. She was invited inside the warden’s office.

“This is the brainchild of one of Mike’s wardens.…” Keating said, recalling the history of the program as it had been explained to him minutes before. Keating paused and then added, “It proves, I guess, that crime still doesn’t pay, but criminals do.”

Everyone chuckled.

Matthews was exuberant a few hours later, after Quinlan was gone. “This proves Leavenworth really rises to the occasion,” he said. “I think Mike was impressed, particularly since not many inmates ran up to him with complaints.”

“Some people can’t understand why anyone would choose to work in a prison,” Warden Matthews explained one afternoon. “They just figure we can’t get jobs anywhere else, but I believe it takes a certain calling just like the ministry takes a certain calling. In fact, I think this
is
my calling. I’ve always believed that deep down, I am doing exactly what I was supposed to do. My profession is also my ministry.”

It was not odd for Matthews to describe his job as a ministry. His grandparents had raised him, and Matthews’s grandfather was a self-trained Baptist preacher. During the day, the old man worked as a foreman in the Florida citrus groves. At night, he preached. Most nights, his grandson was with him.

“Many times I was the only kid in church. Sometimes I was the usher, other times I would recite verses from the Bible,” Matthews recalled. But as he got older, Matthews began to resent being dragged to church. “I promised myself that I’d never force my children to attend church,” he said. Still, he and his family were regular members of a Baptist congregation in Leavenworth. “I feel I’m missing something if I don’t go to church each Sunday. I feel guilty.”

As a child growing up in segregated Fort Pierce, Florida, the only white man that Matthews ever spoke to was an insurance agent who came by each week to personally collect a few dollars in premiums. At one point, Matthews told his grandmother that he wanted to be a state policeman when he grew up because he liked their uniforms. She laughed. “Honey, only white people can be state policemen,” she told him. Matthews immediately put the idea out of his mind.

Later, in the 1960s when Martin Luther King, Jr., was being jailed, civil-rights workers were being slain, and Southern white sheriffs were unleashing attack dogs and firing water hoses at blacks as they demonstrated against segregation, Matthews told his grandparents that whites seemed more like devils than human beings. They corrected him. It was just as wrong to judge white people by the color of their skin as it was for whites to judge blacks, he was told. In his grandparents’ house, people were judged according to whether they were good or evil, moral or immoral. Race had nothing to do with it.

Matthews enlisted in the air force after high school because he couldn’t afford college. Four years later, with help from the GI bill, he enrolled at Florida A & M University, a predominantly black school in Tallahassee. He didn’t have any idea what he wanted to major in, but when he was a sophomore, an event at the Attica State Correctional Facility in New York changed that.

On September 9, 1971, inmates at Attica rioted. Four days later, the racially motivated uprising ended when 1,500 state police and other law-enforcement officers staged an air and ground attack on the inmate-controlled prison. Nine guards being held hostage and twenty-eight prisoners were killed during the melee. Although Attica was a state prison, Bureau Director Norman Carlson would later describe it as a “watershed” in the corrections field. “Suddenly, the entire country became interested in prison reform and started demanding changes.”

Attica had exploded, in part, because nearly all of the guards were white and many of its prisoners were black. The bureau, Carlson realized, was also largely white. In 1970, 93 percent of its employees were white, while 65 percent of its inmates were white, and 35 percent were minorities. Carlson launched an aggressive minority-recruitment campaign and Gerald M. Farkas, an associate warden at a minimum-security prison in Tallahassee, turned to Florida A & M University for recruits. Matthews was the first student Farkas went after.