The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (40 page)

“Farkas was a smooth, sophisticated, articulate guy,” Matthews recalled. “He dressed sharp, spoke well, and was intelligent. He changed my image, because before that I figured prison guards were a bunch of knuckle-draggers.” Matthews went to work at the prison as a summer intern and became hooked.

Years later Matthews would describe Farkas as his mentor when he first joined the bureau. At the time, Farkas was an oddity. The son of a prominent, well-to-do Jewish family from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Farkas had set out to study medicine in college, but had become fascinated with the criminal mind and the growing belief that convicts could be cured. The idea didn’t seem farfetched in the idealistic 1950s. After all, Jonas Salk had developed a vaccine for polio, the space age was dawning, and everything seemed possible. Farkas abandoned his medical studies, earned a master’s degree in the new field of “correctional management,” and, much to his family’s dismay, went to work in a state prison as a guard. Farkas was convinced that communication, not brute force, was the key to prison management, but he found few prison officials willing to listen. “No one saw much value in communication when I first started out,” Farkas recalled. “Most prisons operated under the Rule of Silence, which meant convicts couldn’t speak unless a guard asked them a direct question.”

Farkas joined the bureau because it paid more than state prisons did, and when Carlson became director in
1970, he brought Farkas to Washington for a two-year stint as his executive assistant. Carlson then sent Farkas to Tallahassee, and later as warden to the penitentiary in Lompoc before bringing him back to Washington to oversee UNICOR, the prison industries program. Until he retired in late 1988, the liberal Farkas remained an eccentric in the ultra-conservative bureau. He never tired of advocating communication rather than force in dealing with inmates. The notepad for inmate complaints that Matthews always carried was a testament to Farkas’s teaching.

After Matthews graduated from college, he moved to Terre Haute, Indiana, to attend graduate school. Farkas made certain that the penitentiary there hired Matthews full-time as soon as he finished his degree. At Terre Haute, Matthews was confronted for the first time with accusations from black inmates of “selling out to whitey.”

“At first, it bothered me, but I just didn’t buy it,” he recalled. “I’ve always believed there should be a consequence to your actions. You shouldn’t be able to weasel your way out of something simply because of your race or by claiming that you were poor or that you had a lousy home. I’ve always believed in following the law.”

Farkas had told Carlson about Matthews, and the director made certain Matthews was on a fast track. “The thing I liked about Bob Matthews was that he never tried to use the fact that he was black to get ahead,” Carlson recalled later. “But I knew our minority-recruitment program wouldn’t work unless blacks and other minorities saw that they had a future in the bureau, and the best way to show that was by promoting minorities as fast as possible into top jobs. Bob was one of the best minorities we had, so I promoted him quickly.”

Matthews was named the warden at the prison in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1981, after being in the bureau only eight years. His meteoric rise outraged some older
whites who were passed over. Matthews reacted by working harder than ever.

In February 1983, Carlson told Matthews that the Reagan administration, smarting from ongoing charges of racism, wanted to appoint a black as the U.S. marshal in Washington, D.C., the largest marshal’s office in the country. The White House had asked for Carlson’s help because it knew that he had actively recruited and trained minorities in the bureau. Carlson had recommended Matthews. But he cautioned the young warden about taking the job. The U.S. marshal and his deputies were supposed to provide security in the district’s courtrooms, take care of prisoners awaiting trial, track down anyone who had escaped or not shown up for trial, and serve eviction notices for landlords. But the office was in disarray. The previous U.S. marshal had lasted only two weeks before being fired by the White House, federal judges claimed the deputy marshals frequently brought the wrong defendants to court or mistakenly freed prisoners, and a ten-month probe by the FBI had revealed that some deputies had accepted bribes from landlords in return for short-cutting the eviction process.

Matthews agreed to accept the appointment, even though it meant transferring from the bureau to another agency within the Justice Department.

“Robert Matthews was walking into a lion’s den,” recalled Roger Ray, now the U.S. marshal in the eastern district of Virginia, who was brought in to serve as Matthews’s top deputy. “Can you imagine how the staff felt when they were told that someone from the Bureau of Prisons was coming in to clean up a federal marshal’s office? Who the hell did he think he was?”

On the first day, nearly all 106 employees called in sick. Ray telephoned deputies in Virginia for help. Matthews was unfazed.

“Bob called all of us in top management into his office one day and told us to write out our goals. Everyone just looked at each other and wondered what the
hell this guy was talking about, because none of us had ever been asked to do that before,” said Ray. The next afternoon, Matthews asked each of them what he had done to meet those objectives. Every day after that, in his afternoon close-out sessions, he asked them for an accounting of that day’s activities and how they had met their goals. He was applying the identical techniques to the marshal’s office that he had learned as a warden, the same procedures that he would later use at Leavenworth. “Bob wanted action. He wanted progress, and he demanded perfection, and if you didn’t want to give one hundred percent, he got rid of you,” Ray said.

After several turbulent months, the marshal’s office started operating smoothly. Morale was good. The office was performing its various jobs well. Even the old, dirty cells where prisoners were held by marshals before trials had been cleaned and painted. “He was an absolute stickler for sanitation and renovation,” recalled Ray.

Despite the improvements, Matthews was still not satisfied. He decided to reduce the office’s five-year backlog of unserved eviction notices. Thousands of D.C. residents were living in apartments and houses without paying their rent because their landlords couldn’t get the federal marshals to serve eviction papers. It was an unpleasant, sometimes dangerous task and it had always had a low priority in the office. During the spring of 1984, Matthews devised a plan to serve notices on three thousand tenants. The office had been serving less than one eviction notice per week, and he intended to average three hundred. A special crew of heavily armed U.S. marshals wearing bulletproof vests marched up to the doors of the rental properties and began serving notices to stunned tenants. As the marshals stood by, crews hired by the landlords dragged the tenants’ personal belongings into the street. One tenant was so upset that he fired a shotgun through the locked door of his apartment, killing a landlord. The murder made front-page
news, and tenant groups protested to the mayor, but Matthews refused to budge.

“The worst evictions,” recalled Matthews, who watched several of them, “were the ones that involved small kids. Sometimes the kids were home alone and we had to move them and their stuff outside. Other times the kids would come home from school and find their stuff piled by the street curb. That was hard for me to handle.”

Still, he continued his campaign. “I had raised my right hand and pledged to follow the law, and what I was doing was the law. I was acting in my official capacity. I had to get those notices served and that’s what I did.”

Once tenants realized that they might be evicted, hundreds flocked to pay their overdue bills. The media attention subsided and the five-year backlog was eliminated in four months.

In January 1985, Matthews voluntarily resigned as marshal and returned to the bureau. The White House, stunned by his performance, awarded him the highest honor given by the Justice Department for public service.

At the Hot House, Matthews knew that guards didn’t like his focus on sanitation and inmate communication. But he had dealt with disgruntled employees before, especially in the U.S. marshal’s office. “There is always anxiety during my first year, because I have specific goals that I want to accomplish, and while it is not my intent, some of the staff aren’t going to like or understand those goals,” he explained. “But I am certain that over time they will see that what I am doing is in the best interests of everyone.”

At Benny’s the guards weren’t so sure.

At Warden Matthews’s request the Office of Inspections sent two investigators, Phil Potter and Jim Schenkenberg, from Washington, D.C., to the Hot House in late 1988 to determine whether Cuban prisoners had been brutalized by Lieutenant Phillip Shoats, Jr., and his men. When they arrived, both investigators appeared to be sympathetic.

“We realized it was going to be frustrating to the officers to have us come in and second-guess them,” said Schenkenberg, “so we tried to be sensitive.” Potter, a former lieutenant who had dealt with Cubans in Atlanta in 1984, told guards that he understood how difficult these prisoners could be. “I knew where these officers were coming from. But I told them, you don’t cover up if someone’s crossed the line. You admit you made a mistake and people will understand. It’s the people who try to hide errors who get into trouble.”

Despite these assurances, the guards who had worked with Shoats considered both inspectors to be “headhunters” and didn’t trust them. While Potter and Schenkenberg conducted their probe, these guards launched an investigation of their own. Word had leaked out that someone had given Warden Matthews a written account of brutality in the Cuban units, as well as the names of guards who were allegedly involved. This was
true, of course. The prison counselor who had first raised the charges had written such a statement. But that counselor no longer worked for the bureau. He had transferred to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, another branch of the Justice Department, and had left the prison several weeks before the inspectors arrived. Because the counselor was gone, none of the guards suspected him as the informant. Instead, they looked for someone within their own ranks who they figured had, in their words, “snitched.” It didn’t take long for them to find a suspect. Officer Juan Torres, a quiet man in his early thirties, had worked at Leavenworth for only six months and had barely known Shoats, but Torres had never been accepted by the other guards. He was a loner who didn’t stop at Benny’s after work for a beer with other guards. He spoke Spanish and had been seen joking and chatting with Cuban prisoners. He wasn’t from the Leavenworth area; he had been recruited in Arizona, where the bureau had gone to hire Hispanics. Most important of all, Torres was viewed as a do-gooder because he was a devout Roman Catholic and a guard who went by the rule book.

“We all figured he was the weak link,” said a guard, “but we weren’t certain until he was interviewed by the headhunters.”

Without realizing it, Schenkenberg and Potter had inadvertently aided the guards in their search for the snitch. Schenkenberg had conducted his interviews in an upstairs office of the administration building while Potter had done his in an office next to the warden’s. It was impossible for a guard to enter either room without first being seen by the men working in the prison control center, and each time Potter or Schenkenberg called someone in for questioning, the guards in the center wrote down that man’s name and timed the interview.

Torres held the record—ninety minutes with Potter.

Each night after work, the guards who had worked for Shoats gathered at Benny’s to review the names on
the control-center list. Nearly all, they decided, could be trusted to follow the so-called “blue code,” an unwritten pact between law enforcement officers that requires them to never say anything incriminating against a fellow officer. Everyone, that is, except for Torres.

As soon as Potter and Schenkenberg completed their investigation and left Leavenworth, the guards decided to test their theory, but rather than ask Torres point-blank about what he had told Potter, they decided to take a subtle approach.

“I was eating lunch with some guys,” Torres recalled later, “when one of them asked if we would tell on someone if we saw him thump a Cuban. Everyone else said they wouldn’t, but I didn’t say nothing. This guy pressed me and I said, ‘Hey, I ain’t losing my job or going to prison because of someone else.’ After that, people began calling me a snitch.”

Torres soon found himself being shunned by his peers. No one wanted to work on the same tier as he did. Most avoided speaking to him. One morning when he went to his mailbox outside the lieutenant’s office, he found the word SNITCH written over his name. He tore the name tag off and replaced it with TORRES, but an hour later the word SNITCH was back. That night, he got the first of several obscene phone calls. “Guys would call and say, ‘Hey, snitch, how’d you like to suck my dick?’ and then hang up.”

One of the guards who claimed Torres was a snitch was unapologetic when asked later at Benny’s why he was harassing him. “We want that son of a bitch gone and he’ll eventually get the message,” he explained. “The guy’s a rat. He tried to get us fired and put in prison.”

Lieutenant Slack saw what was happening and he knew that Torres was being falsely accused. “I began putting out word that the rumor about him wasn’t true,” said Slack. “I put it out to people who I knew would pass it on down, but it was really up to Torres to prove he
wasn’t a snitch, and that was going to take time. You see, there wasn’t much I could do. If he didn’t give any indication that he was a snitch, the other guards would accept him. But if he came running to me or Connor for help, then he would be marked forever as a snitch.”

The guards were not only angry at Torres but at Matthews for notifying the Office of Inspections to begin with, rather than handling the charges himself, especially after Matthews made it clear that he didn’t believe any brutality had taken place. “Why in the hell did he put us through all this if he didn’t believe anything happened?” complained one.