The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison Read Free Page B

was deadly.
    The collection of tattoos that adorned Scott’s arms, chest, legs, and even his hands was a sign that he was a professional convict. Daggers dripping blood, half-nakedwomen, even Donald Duck’s laughing face, were cut into his yellowish skin. These were not parlor tattoos, applied from patterns in rainbow colors. They were convict tattoos, carved freehand by cumbersome tattoo guns made from melted-down toothbrushes, sewing machine needles, and motors stolen from portable tape players. Even though they had been drawn by different inmates in different prisons at different times, each tattoo was done in the identical color: a bluish-green ink—the standard ink used for printing forms in prisons. In the outside world the tattoos would have made Scott look like a circus sideshow freak, but in Leavenworth they were badges of honor, particularly one tattoo cut directly over his heart. It was a cloverleaf with the numbers
6-6-6
printed over it. Even fish knew what that tattoo represented. It was the insignia of the Aryan Brotherhood, the most savage white prison gang ever formed. The three sixes referred to a mark given by “the beast”—the antichrist, or son of Satan—to the wicked as explained in the Book of Revelation, chapter 13, verses 16–18. The cloverleaf was a symbol of white supremacy.
    The fact that Scott’s chest bore the “triple sixes” was evidence that he was one of the gang’s earliest members, because it had abandoned the use of tattoos shortly after it was formed, when it realized that guards and the police used the tattoos to track gang members.
    The bureau’s Special Investigative Service (SIS), which operated much like the FBI inside prisons, had a thick file of alleged gang activity by Scott. The most damning was an affidavit given by a former AB gang member who had turned against his former friends in exchange for an early release and a new identity through the Justice Department’s witness-protection program. He had identified Scott as a top gang member and had implied that he had once been a gang “hit man,” although there was absolutely no proof that he was linked to any murders.
    Scott denied the hit-man charge and pointed outthat his entire criminal career consisted of only two felonies: a 1966 armed robbery and a 1975 bank robbery. That was it, yet the government had managed to keep him in jail for nearly three decades by tacking on extra time for various violations that it said Scott had committed while in prison.
    “My criminal record ain’t shit,” Scott complained, “but if you look at how they treat me, you’d think I was some sort of Jesse James or Godfather!”
    As a matter of fact, that is exactly how the bureau viewed him, and without apology. “He is definitely Aryan Brotherhood and once a convict becomes an AB, he is an AB for life,” the bureau’s gang expert, Craig Trout, explained. “What we are dealing with is a professional, lifelong criminal.… An AB member like Dallas Scott is actually doing a life sentence—only he’s doing it on the installment plan, serving a few years at a time.”
    After Scott had finished speaking to Hutchinson’s girlfriend, he had gone to wait outside Hutchinson’s cell.
    “She’s gonna do it,” Hutchinson announced when he returned from the phone call. “This week sometime.”
    Scott didn’t know whether or not to believe him, nor was he confident that the girlfriend really understood the seriousness of what was happening. Scott hadn’t been bluffing on the telephone. If she didn’t bring in the heroin, Hutchinson was going to be hurt. Scott couldn’t afford to let word leak out that he had paid $500 to the man and then simply let him off the hook when his girlfriend didn’t deliver. Every convict in Leavenworth would think that Scott was either getting soft or was afraid, in convict slang, to “make a move on Hutchinson” for fear of being punished by the guards. Either way, Scott would look weak and other