The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (46 page)

“Post was a pivotal player in the escape,” Thomas said. “He was in it as deep as you can get.”

Thanks to the informant’s tip, Thomas was confident that all the inmates involved in the plot had been arrested before they were able to smuggle in any guns. But there was no way to tell if their friends outside the prison had heard about the arrests. As far as Thomas knew, they could still be planning to kill the rear tower guard at a predetermined time on Friday, January 6, and race up to the gate in their two vans. Not wishing to take any chances, Connor decided on January 5 that all guards in the gun towers were to wear bulletproof vests until further notice. The next morning, four guards dressed in military flak jackets and carrying automatic rifles sat in an unmarked car parked in front of the penitentiary. The engine was kept running so that they could respond within moments if there were an emergency. All day Friday, tower guards used binoculars to scan visitors and their vehicles as they arrived at the penitentiary. Inside the prison, guards used hand-held metal detectors to check inmates for weapons. One convict later complained that he had been searched seventeen times in less than three hours.

By nightfall, Thomas and the guards began to relax. Nothing unusual had happened. The guards in the tower wore bulletproof vests over the weekend, but the four guards stationed in the car were ordered back to their regular posts. By Monday, the vests were back in storage.

Post sat in the Hole for seven days before officials told him and the other six inmates why they had been
arrested. Each was offered a deal. If any inmate was willing to testify in court against the others, he would not be charged with escape and would be dealt with more leniently.

“We really don’t have sufficient evidence to prove what Pierce, Scutari, and Post were up to,” Thomas acknowledged, “at least not in a court of law.” Unless one of the inmates agreed to be a witness, none of the convicts could be charged with attempted escape in the federal courthouse in Topeka. “The only way we could have gotten enough proof to prosecute these inmates in a federal court,” Warden Matthews said, “is by letting them actually go ahead with their plan, letting them smuggle guns in here and attack the rear gate. Obviously, I am not going to jeopardize my people or inmates in order to make a case.”

Post and the other inmates knew what was going on and they were suspicious whenever one of them was taken out of the Hole for questioning, worried that he might talk. When guards told Post that I wanted to speak with him and he agreed, one inmate yelled, “Hey, Post, why you talking to some writer?”

“Because I want to,” Post replied.

“Maybe you’re thinking of snitching.”

“Maybe I am,” Post replied calmly, “and maybe I’m going to slip into your cell tonight and slit your throat, stupid motherfucker.”

Other inmates laughed. Most had seen the two of us talking numerous times before.

Post was led into an isolation cell near the front door of the Hole for our interview. Lieutenant Edward Pierce ordered guards to leave his hands cuffed behind his back even though we were separated by bars. That irked Post. “A few days ago, you and I were walking around the prison and no one thought anything of it,” he complained. “Now, I’m such a dangerous convict, I have to be handcuffed and kept in a cage when we talk. This is all part of the macho bullshit around here. They’re
showing me they are in charge—as if I needed to be reminded.”

Post said the escape plot was a hoax. “Some snitch made up the entire thing and they have fallen for it. Now, they’ve locked up everyone who they think might know something, and they are waiting to see who is going to be the first to snitch. They’re hoping someone will come in and tell them what they want to hear, and the really sick part is that someone will, because it’ll help him get a parole. They’ll just make something up.”

As far as Post was concerned, he was a victim of circumstance. Because he worked at the trash dumpster and had struck up a friendship with Pierce, he had been included in the “escape fantasy.”

“Some snitch saw us talking, and thought, ‘Hey, why would a so-called nigger lover’—me—‘be talking to an Order guy, a white supremacist?’ We’re supposed to hate each other. Then he makes up this elaborate escape plot all because Pierce and I just like to debate one another.”

Several days passed, yet no inmate came forward to testify against his peers. Post had always hated prison. He wanted to be free. But like the others, he refused to rat. Since none of the inmates had confessed, federal prosecutors couldn’t file criminal charges against anyone, but the bureau had enough evidence to bring Post and the others before Eddie Geouge for a DHO hearing, and all of them were found guilty based on statements by Lieutenant Thomas and the informant. Post was told that he was being transferred to the penitentiary at Lompoc, California.

“I don’t really care anymore,” Post said. “I mean, after the Parole Commission turned me down the last time, it became clear to me that they are going to make me do twenty or twenty-five years in prison for bank robbery. It doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do, whether I am good or bad, I am going to spend twenty-five years in prison.

“Let’s be real frank here. If society had wanted me to make it, the parole board should’ve cut me loose when I was married [to Priscilla Kane], but they didn’t, so now, in my mind, I’ve been cutting the streets loose. They are no longer part of my life.”

His only regret about leaving was the cats. “I was outside in the exercise area yesterday and I saw Tiger, and they say cats forget you and don’t miss you, but I saw Tiger and he runs over, so I reached out and petted him and he purred like he was saying, ‘Hey, where you been?’ ” Shortly after he was arrested, Post had sent word to Carl Bowles and asked him to feed the cats. Bowles, who worked in the west yard near the trash dumpster where Post kept his cat supplies, had agreed. “I know Carl will take care of Tiger for me,” Post said. “He’ll be okay. I’m weaning myself from Tiger too now. I have to.”

A short time later, he was ordered to pack his personal belongings. We talked for a final time in the Hole about his life.

“If I could keep only one memory or moment in my life and that was it—all the rest would be erased—I think the one moment that I would keep is the shootout with the police in Glendale. The experience of shooting it out with that cop was absolutely, totally, the most beautiful experience in my life. I’m not crazy.
It was beautiful!

“Do you know what happens in moments of extreme peril? Time slows down. Things seem to be in slow motion. You get tunnel vision. You get audio collapse and can’t hear things. Perhaps it is because I’m such a spin-out and have eighteen things going around in my mind at once. Maybe that focusing was good, but again, this is not an exaggeration, that moment of pure terror and peril was the absolute best. It was like they say when someone goes to the gallows. Every color is that much brighter, every smell that much stronger. It was that absolute shitty scariness of knowing that you
could be killed at any second, that your life could be suddenly taken away, that made it so exhilarating.

“The truth is, I’ve always liked living on the edge of madness, being the one out there—the one that they are trying to catch—the lone warrior who does his own thing, who answers only to himself.”

By this time, the guards were ready to take Post.

“There is an old prison saying,” Post said before leaving. “Whenever a guard gives you an order, a convict quietly thinks to himself, ‘Okay, boss, I understand. I know the rules. This is your prison, but they are my streets.’ In here, they got the keys. They can do what they want with me. The Parole Commission can continue to reject my appeals. But someday I’ll be out, someday I’ll be free, and they will be my streets again.”

Post left. I later heard that the first thing he did when he arrived at Lompoc was ask if there were any cats around.

During the four o’clock count, when inmates were locked in their cells, three guards escorted a tall, muscular black inmate from the Hole, across the yard into the penitentiary, and down center hall. Two guards were standing on each side of the prisoner holding him by the arms; the third walked behind them. As the group reached the rotunda, several guards talking there became quiet. The inmate’s head fell forward and flopped from side to side. A string of drool hung from his mouth.

One of the guards explained what was going on. The night before, the inmate had thrown his dinner tray at Ray Moore, the senior guard assigned to the Hole. That morning, he burned the mattress in his cell. When guards moved him to another cell in the Hole, he stripped and somehow set his own clothes on fire. Guards called one of the prison’s three psychologists, who examined the inmate, said he was clearly “mentally unstable,” and recommended that he be moved to the bureau’s psychiatric ward at the medical center in Springfield, Missouri. It was where all mentally disturbed convicts were housed. Just before the four o’clock count, a team of guards went into the inmate’s cell and held him down so a physician’s assistant could
give him “the juice.” Most inmates feared this more than any other action. The first shot contained three hundred milligrams of the antipsychotic drug Thorazine, but that wasn’t enough to knock out the bulky convict. The second pop contained a slightly larger dose and it had done the trick.

“He ain’t feeling no pain now,” said James Luongo, one of the escorting guards, as he passed us in the rotunda.

“Hey, maybe I should get some juice,” another guard joked. “It looks like good shit.”

The convict was led outside into the afternoon sunshine and down the front steps of the prison, his feet dragging helplessly a step or two behind him. His eyes were open but unfocused. The guards lifted him into the backseat of a waiting van. His cuffed hands fell loosely into his lap, his head fell forward, and his mouth continued to drool.

“I hope he don’t shit his pants,” said one of the guards assigned to ride in the van with the prisoner to Springfield. “They sometimes do that, you know. They just lose it after they get the juice, and you have to ride all the way to Springfield smelling that shit.”

“At least he ain’t gonna cause us any trouble,” said another guard.

They all laughed.

Word that Warden Matthews had prevented an escape by The Order and the Black Liberation Army spread through the bureau, and within days there were rumors around Leavenworth that he was going to be promoted. It wasn’t only the escape attempt. Matthews had heard from various officials that Director Quinlan had been pleased with his visit. By mid-January the speculation that Matthews would soon be named to a regional director’s post was so widespread that most employees accepted it as fact. Larry Munger, the penitentiary’s personnel director, confidently predicted one day at lunch that Quinlan would make the announcement about Matthews “within a week.”

At the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, however, there was no such certainty about Matthews. Some there thought that his dismissal of Jerry O’Brien’s associate wardens had been poorly handled. Others had heard that morale among the guards was terrible. In the past, neither of these complaints would have caused much of a fuss. Former director Norman Carlson ran the bureau along military lines when he was director. Employees followed orders like foot soldiers. Wardens were expected to be dynamic leaders unafraid of occasional
grumbling by the troops. At least that is what Matthews had been taught.

But J. Michael Quinlan had a somewhat different view. After he became director on July 1, 1987, he announced that his top priority was improving the working conditions for employees. Almost immediately, he proved he was serious by giving them the right to list their job preferences when it came time for transfers. Nearly one fourth of all bureau employees were required to move from one prison to another on an average of once every two years. In the past, they had never been asked if they had a preference. Carlson believed that some jobs within the bureau, especially those at prisons in desolate areas, were so unappealing that no staff members would ever volunteer for them, so transfers were based on what was best for the bureau, not individuals. Quinlan himself had quietly resented never being asked his preference.

There was a good reason why Quinlan had made keeping employees happy such a priority. As had been predicted during Carlson’s last year as director, the bureau was expanding, and Quinlan understood that it needed to make itself attractive if it wanted to recruit first-rate employees.

“We have to be careful in the sort of staff members we choose,” Quinlan explained. “The problem is that a lot of people come into this business because they have always wanted to have power over another human being for whatever reason—early childhood development problems or whatever—and that requires retraining and a heavy emphasis on what is and what is not acceptable.”

One way to make certain that poor employees were weeded out was by having good supervisors. The Hot House had always been a training ground for lieutenants and other midlevel managers, so the fact that guards there were disgruntled took on new significance.

The speculation about Matthews’s being promoted ended abruptly in February when Quinlan chose R. Calvin
Edwards, the warden at the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, to fill the regional directorship that was open. Edwards was black, and his selection was seen in the Hot House as a double strike against Matthews. Not only had he not gotten the promotion, but Quinlan had chosen another black manager before him.

For his part, Matthews quickly voiced approval of Quinlan’s choice. “Edwards is a good man. I’m not disappointed. There will be other openings.”

But later he acknowledged some self-doubt. “Sometimes I feel I missed something by not working as a correctional officer on a tier,” he explained. “I came directly in as a caseworker, and I think that makes it harder sometimes for officers to relate to me and me to them. I think some of the old-time guards here have trouble accepting me.”