Lieutenant Torres Germany had eased off his investigation of brutality in the Cuban units after Shoats’s death. The guards in the units had closed ranks and Germany’s probe had hit a dead end. But when he arrived at work one morning in the summer of 1988, Germany found a counselor from the Cuban units waiting to speak to him. Besides a case manager, each inmate, including the Cubans, had a specific counselor assigned to him when he first entered the Hot House. It was his job to help the inmate with any personal problems that might arise. The counselor claimed that Cubans in C cellhouse were being physically abused by guards. Germany handed him a legal pad and pen, and asked him to write down every incident of abuse that he knew about. Without hesitating, the counselor began scribbling and had soon filled up several pages. He not only wrote down incidents that he had personally seen, but also stories that he had heard. Among his most serious charges were that Lieutenant Shoats had hit Cuban inmates while they were in handcuffs, and that other guards had chained inmates onto mattresses soaked with feces and urine, dragged handcuffed inmates from their cells, and denied Cuban prisoners food. Guards had even planted knives in some of the Cubans’ cells, he charged.
When the counselor finished writing his statement, Germany interrogated him, and the counselor admitted that he had personally despised Shoats. “I was glad when I heard Shoats had been killed,” the counselor said. “It was one of the happiest days in my life.”
Germany took the counselor’s statement to the warden’s office. Matthews didn’t believe a single one of the accusations. “I felt they simply weren’t true, because I had been in that cellhouse too many times to have missed all these things,” Matthews explained later. “You must remember, I talked to Cuban prisoners once a week during my rounds and none of them had ever complained about the sort of charges that were being made. Not one single complaint.”
Even so, Matthews notified the bureau’s Office of Inspections in Washington, D.C., the equivalent of a police department’s internal-affairs office, and asked that they send an investigative team to Leavenworth.
Calling in a group of outsiders to investigate the Cuban units was not going to help Matthews’s already sagging popularity with the Hot House guards. But the warden wasn’t about to have his career ruined or the bureau embarrassed by ignoring the counselor, only to discover too late that he had leaked his charges to the media or notified some congressional subcommittee. Besides, Matthews said, if any of the accusations did turn out to be true, he wanted the guards caught and punished.
Besides notifying the Office of Inspections, Matthews decided to change the leadership inside the Cuban units. As Matthews looked at his list of lieutenants, he focused on one name—Lieutenant William “Bill” Slack, Jr., the operations lieutenant.
“What I liked most about Slack was his maturity,” Matthews said later. “He had lots of experience and he was low-key and patient, yet he was tough enough to get the job done.”
Matthews knew, however, that putting Slack in charge of the Cubans was going to make some bureau officials nervous. No one had ever said anything publicly to Matthews, but the bureau was still a small enough agency for most employees to know or know of one another, and nearly everyone in the bureau understood that the name Slack had a dark cloud hanging over it.
Warden Matthews didn’t like to take chances, but he wanted the best man for the job, and that was Slack. He buzzed his secretary and told her to ask Associate Warden for Custody Lee Connor to come to the warden’s office. Matthews had two announcements: an investigative team was coming in to probe the counselor’s charges of brutality and Lieutenant Bill Slack was being put in charge of the Cubans.
As he waited for Connor, Matthews hoped he was making the right choices.