The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison Read Free

two guards stationed near the tier stairwell. They hustled him out of the cellblock.
    There was no longer any need for Bowles to make copies of the story, but he made one for himself anyway. “I spread the word about Hicks because I wanted everyone to see how the cops in here work,” he said. It wasn’t the fact that Hicks was a sexual deviant that bothered Bowles. It was the fact that he was a snitch. “The guardswill deny it, but I know exactly what happened,” Bowles said later. “Some hack from Michigan called up a lieutenant here and said, ‘Hey, I got a prisoner and I got to get him out of my state institution before someone kills him.’ Now a lieutenant here says, ‘Well, why should we take him? Does he cooperate?’ and the guy in Michigan says, ‘Fuck yes, he’ll cooperate, because if he don’t we’ll tell everyone he’s a baby-raper and they’ll kill his ass.’
    “When Hicks gets down here, the lieutenant says, ‘Hey, boy, we will put you in population, but at the same time you got to come to us every once in a while and tell us things, because if you don’t, then someone might just slip up and let folks know your past.’ Don’t you see what happens next? Suddenly, some lieutenant is breaking up a big helicopter escape.”
    Lieutenant Gallegos discounted Bowles’s scenario. “He’s telling how he operates, how he thinks, how he manipulates people,” said Gallegos. “We don’t do that. No one forced Hicks to say or do anything. Believe me, we don’t have to do anything to force these guys to snitch. Most will tell on each other in a second.”
    Prison officials acknowledged that they had accepted Hicks from state officials in Michigan because he would have been harmed in a state prison. But they denied that Hicks had been planted in Leavenworth or coerced into providing Gallegos information. “This prisoner was sent to Leavenworth because of the length of his sentence,” a prison spokesman said. “We felt he needed to be placed in a high-security environment.” A few days after Bowles exposed Hicks, however, the young inmate was quietly transferred to a lower-security federal prison in another state. “The prison grapevine is such that we had to move this prisoner to a much lower security prison,” an official explained. “Otherwise his past would have been exposed and he would have been in danger.”
    Bowles saw things differently. “I don’t care what they say, they used Hicks and now they are rewardinghim by moving him to an easier joint. That’s how both sides work in this place. When someone weak like Hicks comes in, then each side preys on him.”
    A short time after Hicks had gone, Bowles heard through the grapevine that another fish was coming to Leavenworth, and that he, like Hicks, was scared. No one knew why prison officials were sending Thomas Edgar Little to a maximum-security penitentiary. Little had never been to prison before and he was young and weak.
    Bowles figured Thomas Little was someone he wanted to meet.

Chapter 2
DALLAS SCOTT
    Dallas Earl Scott sounded mean as he spoke into the telephone. “Now this has already gone on for a week and a half,” the forty-two-year-old convict complained. “The position you’re putting people in, particularly your boyfriend, Bill, you’re putting a lot of pressure on him … and a lot of people are beginning to get upset.”
    Scott had emphasized the word
upset
He was trying to make it clear to the woman on the other end of the line that her boyfriend, Bill, was going to be hurt if she didn’t do what Scott had asked. Scott didn’t want to come right out and say this, because he knew all prison telephone calls were recorded. A card posted above the phone warned: ATTENTION: ALL INMATE TELEPHONE CALLS ARE MONITORED AND TAPE RECORDED .
    The woman that Scott was trying to frighten had promised to bring 2.73 grams of heroin into Leavenworth. Scott had paid $500 to buy the drug from his contacts in Sacramento, California,