In 1987, summer slipped quickly into fall at the Hot House, the weeks passing without incident, until Friday, November 20. Shortly after nine A.M., Associate Warden Richard Smith got a telephone call from the bureau’s regional headquarters. Within seconds, he knew there was going to be trouble, big trouble, from an unlikely source.
Fidel Castro had just agreed to take back as many as 3,000 Cubans who were now sitting in federal prisons. These were Cubans who had sought political asylum in the United States in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift but had not qualified because they were either criminals or mentally ill. Getting rid of them after nearly eight years was great news to Smith. But when he was told that the State Department planned to announce their impending deportation at noon that same day, Smith was appalled. Cuban inmates would be enraged by the announcement. A few of them at the Hot House had told Smith that they would butcher a guard, if necessary, to keep from being sent back. They knew that such a murder would result in their spending their lives in prison. But it would be an American prison, not a Cuban one, and that was worth killing for.
The time of the State Department press conference gave Smith less than three hours to figure out what to do with the Hot House’s thirty-five Cubans. They weren’t really much of a threat, he decided. But as he put down the receiver he wondered what the wardens at the federal prisons in Atlanta, Georgia, and Oakdale, Louisiana, must have been thinking. Together, those two facilities held 3,000 Cubans.
What could they possibly do in so short a time to prepare for the violence that was sure to come? Smith also wondered how people at the State Department could be so reckless.
The so-called “Cuban problem” had actually begun in the spring of 1980, when thousands of Cubans swarmed the Peruvian embassy in Havana seeking to escape Cuba’s crumbling economy. A furious Fidel Castro announced that any Cubans who wanted to desert their homeland could, but only if they left through the tiny port of Mariel. No Central American country would accept the refugees, however, so there was no place for them to go until then-President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would welcome the Cuban refugees with “open arms and an open heart.”
Virtually overnight, 125,000 Cubans made the ninety-mile journey from Mariel to Florida ports, where they completely overwhelmed immigration agents. To make matters worse, Castro thumbed his nose at the U.S. during the height of the boatlift by emptying his country’s prisons and mental hospitals into Mariel. Months later, the Immigration and Naturalization Service would calculate that Castro had released 23,000 “undesirables,” yet federal agents were only able to stop 210 of them at Florida ports. Many of the others were arrested during the months that followed, and were turned over to the INS for deportation. But Castro refused to take them back, so the INS had no choice but to house them in makeshift detention camps, mostly at old army bases. After numerous demonstrations and riots in the camps, the Justice Department forced the bureau to turn the penitentiary in Atlanta into a prison for Cubans.
In the beginning, Atlanta held only 1,844 men, but as the months passed, Cubans streamed into the badly dilapidated prison at an average of 100 new inmates per month. Worse, not all of the Cubans being sent to Atlanta were criminals or mentally ill. INS guidelines were so poorly written that even Mariel Cubans who had no criminal backgrounds were detained for deportation if they were stopped by police for any reason, even traffic violations. This contributed to even more overcrowding. As the number of Cubans skyrocketed, the bureau became alarmed. Finally, a federal judge in Atlanta ordered the Justice Department to establish some sort of review process so that Cubans who were not dangerous could be released. On paper, the procedure sounded good, but it couldn’t and didn’t work. Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan had promised to slash the federal budget, and funds for halfway houses and other social programs that the Cubans needed were the first to go. A federal study would later reveal that only fifty Cubans out of two thousand declared ready for parole were actually released. A second setback for the Cubans and the bureau came when a federal appeals court ruled in 1983 that they were not protected by the U.S. Constitution because they were not U.S. citizens. That meant they could be held in prison indefinitely until Castro agreed to take them back, no matter what their crime.
Faced with drastic overcrowding at Atlanta, the bureau built a $17 million “Alien Detention Facility” in Oakdale in 1986. The only security at the forty-seven-acre camp was a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence, but the bureau said additional security wasn’t needed because only Cubans who were about to be paroled would be confined there. Seven months later, the bureau reluctantly added a second twelve-foot fence to the camp, dropped razor wire between the two fences, and announced that overcrowding at Atlanta was so bad that violent Cubans were going to be shipped to Oakdale. The mood at the camp changed dramatically. When it opened, the camp had averaged one incident per month, usually a fistfight. By the fall of 1987, it was reporting thirty to thirty-five serious incidents each week, including attacks on guards.
When Richard Smith’s telephone rang at the Hot House with news that Castro had suddenly agreed to begin taking back the Cubans, the Oakdale camp held 1,039 prisoners. It had been designed for a maximum of 574.
The bureau would later compare Oakdale to a pile of dry kindling drenched with gasoline. All that was missing was a match, and the State Department was about to strike one.
Normally, Warden Matthews would have received the telephone call about the Cubans, but he was out of town and had left Smith in charge. Smith didn’t shrink from the job. He ordered the lieutenants to round up every Cuban detainee in the prison and lock them up in separate cells so they couldn’t cause any trouble. The real leader of the Cubans in Leavenworth, however, was an American. Osiris Morejon had been born in Cuba, but was a naturalized citizen and had lived in Florida for more than twenty years before he was arrested for drug trafficking and murder. In 1981, Morejon and nine other Cubans raided the hideout of another drug trafficker and seized more than two tons of marijuana. In the process, Morejon executed the two men who were supposed to be guarding the stash, and also shot an innocent passerby who happened upon the robbery. At the Hot House, Morejon had ingratiated himself with some guards because he was one of the few Cubans who spoke English well enough to be understood. But while he was jovial and friendly, guards suspected that he was extorting money from Cubans who didn’t understand English and was casting himself in the role of a Cuban godfather.
Edward Geouge was in charge of Morejon’s cellhouse, and when Smith told Geouge that five members of the prison’s Special Operations Response Team (SORT) were being sent to round up Morejon, the crusty officer suggested an alternative.
“Hell, Dick, why don’t I just go have a talk with Mr. Morejon?” he asked. “I figure the worst he can do is try to kill me.”
Smith thought Geouge was kidding but he wasn’t. Without waiting for any backup, Geouge walked down to Morejon’s cell.
“Morejon, we got to lock you up,” he said. “I don’t know how long it’s going to be for. It could be a day or it might be forever, but you are going to be locked up and that’s not negotiable. Now, let’s do it.”
Geouge held up a pair of handcuffs. Morejon, who was sitting on his bunk, looked perplexed.
“What for?” he asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Geouge replied. “Now, cuff up.”
Morejon rose. He was taller than Geouge. His arms were three times as thick. For a few seconds, he glared at the smaller man.
“I said cuff up, and I don’t aim to say it again,” Geouge commanded.
Morejon stuck out his hands.
A few hours later, Smith got another frantic telephone call from the regional office. Inmates at Oakdale were rioting, the camp was burning, an unknown number of guards were being held hostage. How long would it take for Leavenworth to send its SORT team—some twenty men—to Louisiana?
“They’re on their way,” Smith replied.
The next question was tougher. How long would it take for the Hot House to be ready to house the Cubans from Oakdale once the riot ended?
* * *
Like Richard Smith, Oakdale Warden J. R. Johnson had been notified that the State Department was going to announce the deportation agreement. But unlike Smith, Johnson didn’t have any way to lock up his Cuban prisoners. At Oakdale, inmates lived in dormitories, not individual cells. Johnson had ordered his staff to quiet the prisoners’ fears by handing out a printed memorandum:
Cubans at Oakdale can help their chances to gain community release through continued positive behavior and respect towards staff and other detainees.
Just in case the memo didn’t work, Johnson ordered an additional fifty guards to stand by. All day Friday, he had walked through the camp reassuring the Cubans. None seemed to be alarmed, he later noted in his daily journal. But that night a drunk Cuban prisoner stumbled into the inmate dining room, and when guards tried to arrest him, other Cubans began overturning tables and smashing dishes. The guards retreated and let the drunk return to his dormitory.
A short time later, several guards decided to go after him. They marched to the dorm, but the Cuban prisoners intervened and the guards retreated again. Humiliated, they then covered up what really had happened by downplaying the incident in their nightly report.
A special task force appointed several months after the riot at Oakdale would later point to the dining-room and dormitory fracases as pivotal. The cover-up was the first error. The second error was retreating twice. “The Cuban detainees seemed to keep pushing the boundaries of bureau control and testing reactions,” the task force wrote. “Evidently, staff were not perceived as taking a firm stand.”
What happened the next day, Saturday, November 21, is hotly disputed by Warden Johnson and his own staff. Several guards told the task force after the riot that Johnson was warned repeatedly that between two hundred and three hundred Cubans were planning to crash the camp’s front entrance at dinnertime to escape. The task force report noted that Cuban prisoners had started to prepare for trouble. Some began hoarding food, others were seen putting on several layers of clothing. A few even taped magazines to their abdomens, chests, and backs, a common device to help deflect blows from nightsticks or knives. The task force wrote:
Information about these peculiar events was transmitted to the lieutenants and to the acting captain, who stated that he, in turn, informed the warden. The warden has no recall of these events being reported to him, although his log reflects he was contacted every half hour.
When the shift changed at four o’clock on that Saturday, the acting captain decided on his own to send all the women guards out of the camp. He also moved the fifty extra guards into the front entrance, but kept them out of sight. During the next two hours, nothing out of the ordinary was reported, but at 6:50 P.M., a mob of more than two hundred screaming Cubans rushed the entrance. The extra guards jumped into view and fired tear gas. Surprised, the prisoners retreated, giving guards trapped in the camp time to evacuate, but they regrouped within minutes and attacked again, this time hurling back the tear-gas canisters. Some Cubans swung broken mop handles. The guards were forced back. Now the only barrier between the Cubans and the outside world was a one-sixteenth-inch-thick sheet of Plexiglas.
Warden Johnson sent twenty officers armed with .12 gauge shotguns and .38 caliber revolvers into the entry-way. They were less than four feet from the angry Cubans pounding on the Plexiglas. The guards waited nervously. They would be overrun if the Cubans broke through. A tiny crack appeared on the glass, and as the Cubans beat it, the crack inched its jagged way across the barrier in the shape of a lightning streak.
“If they break the glass,” Johnson was later quoted by the task force as saying, “shoot until you have no ammunition left.”
For several minutes the guards stood ready as the Cubans slammed against the barrier, but it did not give way.
Elsewhere in the compound prisoners tried to cut through the wire fences, but were stopped by guards wielding shotguns. Others lit fires or grabbed guards as hostages. Outside the camp, Lieutenant Charles Marmelejo donned an inmate’s clothing and slipped inside. With the help of several American convicts who worked in the camp, Marmelejo led nine employees to safety before he was recognized by the Cubans and forced to stop his risky treks inside.
Guards Rick Nichols, Alvine Brandon, and Colton Duplechain weren’t so lucky. Surrounded by angry Cubans, they took refuge in the camp’s control center, which was located inside the compound, and watched helplessly as inmates set the building on fire. Dense smoke filled the booth. The three guards gasped for air. When they could no longer stand it, Nichols punched the button that opened the electronic door. Nothing happened. He pushed it again and again, but it still refused to function. Nichols began slamming it with his fist. The smoke was so dense it was impossible for him to see his partners. Finally the door burst open and Duplechain stumbled outside armed with a stun gun, which shoots a nonlethal but hard-hitting beanbag. He aimed it at the Cubans, who backed away. Nichols came out next, but Brandon didn’t appear. Still gagging, Nichols went back inside the smoldering center and found Brandon collapsed on the floor. He pulled her to safety, and with Duplechain’s help, the three made their way through the Cubans to the fence.
Fifty-four guards had been in the camp when the Cubans rioted. Twenty-six made it out. The others were hostages. As Johnson and his men watched, helpless, one of their coworkers was paraded through the compound in a laundry cart pushed along by whooping Cubans who beat on the side of the cart with sticks.
The Hot House was in the midst of a $13 million renovation of A cellhouse when the Oakdale riot started. This cellhouse was one of the two massive cellblocks at the front of the prison, and Smith estimated that it would take about three months for the renovations to be completed. They could begin moving Cuban prisoners in then, he told his superiors.
“I heard a big sigh on the telephone when I said that,” Smith recalled, “so I suggested an alternative.” If cost was no object, the bureau could kick out the private contractors, authorize around-the-clock overtime pay, and turn over the renovations to the Hot House’s own staff of maintenance men. Those crews, plus workers flown in from nearby federal prisons, could finish the cellhouse in as little as three weeks, Smith predicted, but the cost to taxpayers would be horrendous. For several seconds the phone line was quiet, and then Smith got his answer.
“Go ahead and do it.”
Then it was Smith’s turn to sigh. “I was told the job would have to be done not in three weeks but three days!”
The bureau needed all the extra cells it could find. Not only was Oakdale burning, Smith was told, but the Cubans in Atlanta had started to riot.
When his Cuban prisoners first heard the State Department’s announcement on Friday, Atlanta’s warden, Joseph Petrovsky, was able to convince them that they wouldn’t gain anything by causing problems. But on Saturday they learned from newscasts that Oakdale was in flames, and grew restless. On Monday morning, they rioted and took hostages. Then a Cuban armed with a large homemade knife attacked a guard in the prison yard. He was shot in the head and killed instantly by a guard firing from one of the gun towers. For the next ten minutes, guards shot down into the yard. Five Cubans were hit. The shooting stopped only when inmates inside the main penitentiary threatened to begin killing hostages. In only a matter of minutes, the Cubans had seized control of the Atlanta prison too and captured 106 employees.
Every available welder, locksmith, carpenter, and painter at the Hot House was put to work in A cellhouse. There were no breaks. Employees didn’t go home to sleep. When a guard finished his shift, he reported to A cellhouse and was handed a paintbrush. Maintenance crews from other prisons were hustled in. Warden Matthews hurried back from his meeting in California to help supervise. He and Associate Warden Smith quickly decided it would be foolish to put Cubans in the cellhouse once the riots ended and the renovations were complete. Some of the locks hadn’t been tested. More important, why should the Cubans be rewarded by getting the newest and nicest cellhouse at the Hot House?
Instead, the U.S. prisoners living in the hopelessly outdated C and D cellhouses would be moved. There was no question in Matthews’s mind about whom he would put in charge of the refurbished cellhouse. That job would go to Edward Geouge, and the dangerous convicts that Geouge oversaw would have first priority when it came to cells.
“We told the American convicts that they were getting the best cellhouse in the prison,” Smith recalled. “We also told them that we had planned to do a real thorough shakedown for weapons and other contraband but because of the Cuban riots we needed their cooperation.” Smith offered the prisoners a deal. “If they were willing to move from C and D cellhouses into A cellhouse without causing any problems, then we were willing to ease up on the shakedown.”
Overnight more than 550 convicts, as well as all of their private belongings, were moved into A cellhouse without a single incident. Without pausing, the work crews raced into the now-empty C and D cellhouses. Bunks were welded to the walls. All mirrors, wooden desks, and bulletin boards were stripped from the cells. Matthews and Smith didn’t want anything left in a cell but a bunk, fireproof mattress, sink, and toilet.
Smith had learned that Cuban prisoners frequently crammed the locks in Atlanta with hundreds of match-heads. The sulfur from the matches reacted like dynamite when packed tightly in the locks and ignited. Other Cubans were skilled at picking locks. Smith had his guards bring in spools of heavy steel chain, which was cut into three-foot lengths. A piece of chain was brought to each cell, wrapped around the cell door and bars, and then padlocked, making it impossible for the door to be opened without first removing the chain.
Yards and yards of chain-link fence were hauled inside and welded onto the outside of each tier. Smith also had steel doors built at each end of every level—in effect, making each of the five floors into a separate cage. Still not satisfied, he ordered the crew to install a second door in the entrance of each cellhouse. This made it impossible for anyone to enter either C or D cellhouse without passing through two heavy metal gates.
After three days of nonstop work, the Hot House was ready to begin receiving Cuban prisoners. A weary but proud Smith called bureau headquarters in Washington to report that Leavenworth had completed the impossible. He expected to be congratulated. Instead he got another jolt. The bureau had originally told Smith that two hundred Cubans would be sent to Leavenworth. Now, that number was being changed. With both Oakdale and Atlanta still in flames, the bureau had decided that it needed a new permanent home for the rioting Cubans. Smith was told to expect at least seven hundred Cubans, perhaps even more.
At bureau headquarters in Washington, Director Quinlan made it clear that he would negotiate a peaceful end to the riots rather than launch a Rambo-style attack to rescue the hostages. This patient approach took time, and during the days that followed, Quinlan was in constant contact with a crew of FBI specialists brought in to negotiate with the Cubans.
There was one bureau official, however, who was more worried about an American inmate running loose in Atlanta than about the Cubans. Craig Trout, the bureau’s gang expert, considered Thomas Silverstein a “deadly wild card.” Of the 44,000 inmates in the federal system, none was more despised by prison officials than Silverstein. Nor was there an inmate more revered by white convicts.
“Terrible Tom” Silverstein was accused of committing four grisly murders, all in federal prisons. One of the inmates he killed was Raymond “Cadillac” Smith, at the time the most powerful D.C. Black in prison. That killing alone had made Silverstein, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, into a celebrity among white gang members. But it was the savage stabbing of a guard, Merle E. Clutts, at Marion in 1983 that so infuriated the bureau that they put Silverstein under what was known as “no human contact,” the harshest conditions permitted by law.
Since the Clutts slaying, Silverstein had been housed in a special isolation cell in Atlanta where he was completely sealed off from all other inmates. The lights in his cell were kept on twenty-four hours a day, and during the first nine months that he was in Atlanta, Silverstein was not permitted a television, radio, newspaper, magazine, book, or writing material. Provided only with meals and a single set of clothing, which he wore, Silverstein was given nothing else to help pass the time. He sat alone in an empty cell with two guards watching his every move. Out of respect to Officer Clutts, the guards refused to speak to him.
Over time, the bureau had eased the restrictions slightly and had given Silverstein drawing pencils and paper, but he remained totally cut off from other inmates and the outside world. Now, he was loose. The Cubans had broken into his hidden cell and freed him. Trout figured that Silverstein would seek revenge. “I was concerned that Silverstein would go on a kamikaze mission and simply start slaughtering hostages,” recalled Trout. “He was certainly capable of it.”
While others concentrated on the negotiations, Trout focused on locating Silverstein. There were plenty of reported sightings. A friendly Cuban told guards that Silverstein was building a motorized hang glider which he planned to use to soar over the penitentiary’s walls at night. The bureau immediately instructed its guards to shoot anyone who came flying over the walls. Another story had Silverstein attempting to tunnel out under the walls. At one point, an FBI agent excitedly claimed that Silverstein was about to emerge from a tunnel. A heavily armed SWAT team raced to the spot, but he never surfaced. A few minutes later, an FBI sniper claimed that he had seen Silverstein on the roof of the prison hospital about to use his hang glider. Another agent interrupted. He had seen Silverstein at the prison’s back gate. And so it went. The bureau’s apprehensiveness about Silverstein can be seen in a confidential memo written by Warden Petrovsky on November 28, which told guards what to do once negotiators convinced the Cubans to surrender. The memo, made public now for the first time, read:
Thomas Silverstein is a psychopathic killer and the most dangerous individual on the compound. It is not likely Silverstein will surrender and may hide out as long as he can. Once he is found, regardless of when and where, any action on his part other than total submission and surrender should be interpreted as a maneuver to assault and he should be shot without hesitation.
At Trout’s urging, FBI negotiators asked the Cubans to surrender Silverstein as a sign of good faith. It worked. On November 30, the Cubans poured chloral hydrate, stolen from the prison pharmacy, into Silverstein’s morning coffee. When this failed to knock him out, more than a dozen Cubans surprised him and wrestled him to the ground. FBI Agent D. H. Rosario was monitoring radio broadcasts (the Cubans were using portable radios taken from hostages) when he heard an excited Cuban yell, “We got him! Come and get him, now, now, now!” Rosario rushed a team of U.S. marshals to the door that led into the prison yard. The Cubans had used a pair of handcuffs and leg irons taken from guards to restrain Silverstein. After the FBI dragged him away, a Cuban called Rosario on the radio and asked if the FBI would return the shackles. Rosario laughed. Later, he told reporters that the capture of Silverstein was a turning point in the negotiations. Each side had breathed a “sigh of relief” once Silverstein was in chains.
Craig Trout knew exactly where he wanted to put Silverstein. The day after his capture, the prisoner was hustled to Dobbins Air Force Base and taken by private flight to Kansas. A handpicked crew from the Hot House was waiting. Associate Warden Smith had never met Silverstein, but Smith had known Officer Merle Clutts personally and had attended Clutts’s funeral. “As far as I am concerned, Silverstein is a cold-blooded, bloodthirsty, worthless killer,” Smith said.
Even though he prided himself on being professional and objective, Smith was looking forward to seeing Silverstein’s reaction when he was taken to the special isolation cell that had been prepared for him deep in the bowels of the Hot House. It had been constructed years ago as a concealed holding cell for “hot” prisoners whose location needed to be kept secret, usually because the Mafia had put out a contract on their lives. It was the worst cell in the penitentiary. Its walls and roof were made of one-inch-thick steel. The cell was buried underneath the rotunda in a section of the basement that hadn’t been used for years. It was so isolated that you could not hear any of the familiar sounds of prison life—no human voices, toilets flushing, doors clanging shut, televisions blaring. Nothing.
The cell itself was just as desolate. There was no bed, only a platform of concrete blocks with a thin mattress on top. There was no mirror, only a metal sink, a shower stall, and a toilet without a lid.
There were no windows in the cell, no way of telling whether it was day or night or cold or hot outside, or spring, summer, fall, or winter. The only link to the world was a small black-and-white television set. It was not there out of kindness. Smith had installed the television to make Silverstein obey. If he refused to follow an order, the guards would shut it off.
Because Silverstein was considered a prime escape risk, Smith planned to have two guards sit outside his cell and watch him around the clock. Obviously, they wouldn’t be able to see him unless the lights in his cell were left on. They would burn twenty-four hours a day.
In effect, Silverstein was being put into an empty fluorescent-lit cage. The lights would never be dimmed, the temperature would never change, the only sounds would come from the prisoner himself or the television.
On the night that the legendary killer arrived, Smith was waiting. Although Silverstein was six foot three inches tall, and weighed two hundred pounds, he did not seem as big as he had been portrayed. He was pale and apparently had been drugged before the flight. He didn’t resist, wasn’t belligerent, and didn’t react to the cell as a horde of officers escorted him down into the Hot House basement. Without muttering a word, Silverstein stepped inside the cage, turned his back on Smith and the others gawking at him, curled up on the floor, and went to sleep.
The riots at Oakdale and Atlanta ended after thirteen days. In the Hot House, Smith’s telephone rang again. The voice on the other end was concise.
“They’re on their way.”