Stories from the Old Yard: Book One

By J.M. Fitzmaurice

In his book Stories from the Old Yard: Book One, the Murders, J. M. Fitzmaurice chronicles two decades of brutal murder inside the MAX-custody federal penitentiaries at Lompoc, California, and other Bureau of Prisons facilities. From Lompoc to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and Florence, Colorado, to Marion, Illinois, Fitzmaurice reveals the backstory behind the brutal killings carried out in medieval fashion by deadly prison gangs and ruthless predators on the federal penitentiary circuit. Interlaced with humanity, humor, and compassion, Stories from the Old Yard is much more than regurgitated investigative reports—it captures the courage and heroism of the young men and women who risk their lives daily to protect one another and Convict Nation alike! Some of these BOP staff gave their lives in this mission, and Fitzmaurice pays them the tribute they earned by making the ultimate sacrifice! The afterword includes a sneak peek from book two, More Stories from the Old Yard!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647019280

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Stories from the Old Yard

Book One

J.M. Fitzmaurice

Copyright © 2020 J.M. Fitzmaurice

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-64701-927-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64701-928-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The Old Yard

Let That Punk Die! or Predators, Legends, and Ghosts!

Line of Duty I, May 6, 1993!

Johnny Estrada, Flaco from Canoga Park

Mack, Vanessa, and the Walking Dude! December 23, 1987

Von Gilmore, July 29, 1988

A Fall from Grace, or the Aryan Brotherhood Retirement Program!

Gregory Monster Barnett, March 13, 1990

The White Order of Thule, or Bloodbath in A-block!

Hit ’Em Again, Pico!

Special Housing Unit Horror Shows, or Batshit Crazies and Bloodthirsty Savages!

Line of Duty II, April 3, 1997

The Summer of Blood, or Anatomy of a Cellblock Killing!

Cold Case Assist or The Right Thing Doctrine

For Owen II and Larry II, RIP!

Introduction

My name is Joe Fitzmaurice (Lieutenant Fitz), and I was a correctional officer and lieutenant at the United States Penitentiary, Lompoc, California, Federal Bureau of Prisons, for twenty-seven years. I investigated hundreds of felony assaults, fights, riots, gang conflicts, sexual assaults, narcotics trafficking, suicides, murders, and staff corruption cases. For many years, I considered writing a book about my experiences on the Old Yard. I’d be at a family gathering or anywhere else with a lot of civilians, and as soon as I started telling a prison story, the room would get quiet; everyone in the vicinity was all ears!

When I met her for the first time on August 16, 1987, it was love at first sight! I loved the old cellblocks branching into the main corridor packed with some of the most violent and dangerous convicts in the country. I loved the auditorium, the chapel, the archives room, and the recreation yard. I especially loved the camaraderie, the adventure, and the jolts of adrenaline! I loved her mother too, and the Bureau of Prisons didn’t always love me back, but I’d have given my life for her on any given day!

A murder cast a pall over the penitentiary, and the quiet tension could be felt as soon as you walked through the gate. The officers, staff, and convict nation all felt it, and it was disturbing!

Chapter One

The Old Yard

The United States Penitentiary (USP) Lompoc was constructed in 1939 to house MAX-custody military prisoners. The bed space was needed to take some of the pressure off the Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In 1959, USP Lompoc was purchased by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), and its mission was changed to house offenders convicted of federal crimes like bank robbery, kidnapping, mail fraud, murder, and all manner of narcotics smuggling and trafficking. In 1963, a reorganization occurred, which included the closing of USP Alcatraz and the activation of the new control unit in Marion, Illinois.

The word supermax had not yet been coined back in 1963, but the Bureau of Prisons had for years recognized the necessity of segregating its most violent, escape-prone convicts. Alcatraz received its population from the other United States Penitentiaries, Lewisburg, Leavenworth, Atlanta, Terre Haute, and McNeil Island, following an escape attempt, murder of another inmate, murder of a correctional officer, or other notorious behavior. The escape of Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, Clarence and John, on June 11, 1962, may have accelerated plans to phase out USP Alcatraz. Island prisons are very expensive to operate, and the salty ocean air has a corrosive effect on metal bars and concrete. These conditions made it possible for Morris and the Anglin brothers to excavate a hole from the back of their cells near the toilet, through which they gained access into the pipe chase. This space between the rows of cells contained all the water and sewer lines for three tiers of cells, with a walkway down the center. Once inside the pipe chase, the convicts had access to the roof through a ventilation duct. They covered up the holes in their cell walls with cardboard and paint. Morris and the Anglin brothers were able to conceal their activities inside the pipe chase as they hoarded the raincoats they used to construct a very sturdy raft and lifejackets. They also fashioned paddles from boards they were able to steal from the shops building, and all this extremely hazardous contraband was concealed in the pipe chase, where they sewed their raft together.

Security at Alcatraz was the tightest in the Bureau of Prisons. The cell house walls were concrete, reinforced with rebar and hardened steel bars on all the cells and windows. The cell house perimeter was surrounded by rifle towers with walkways to most areas of the roof, and all movement outside the cell was tightly controlled. Cell and pat searches were constant. The housing-unit officers counted the inmates at midnight, 3:00 a.m., and 5:00 a.m., so Morris and the Anglins created lifelike dummies, which they staged in their bunks to fool the officers on the graveyard shift. Counting a dummy in a bunk can cost an officer his job, and rightly so.

The trio finished the raft, and they were waiting for an accordion that Morris had ordered through a catalogue. The squeeze-box was needed to inflate the raft should they make it to the water’s edge.

On the night of June 11, 1962, they made their attempt, leaving the dummies in their bunks, the convicts made their way to the roof, where they removed the cover over the vent and crawled through. They crossed the roof unseen. This was the riskiest part of the plan. Had even one of the tower officers seen them, it would have ended the attempt, but the convicts climbed down a water-drainage pipe and made it to the bay, where they inflated their raft with the accordion / air pump.

There had been an outside group of volunteers visiting Alcatraz that very evening, and it was considered a possibility that the three escapees tied their raft to the ferry boat and were unwittingly towed to freedom by that transport ferry. This theory has not been ruled out. The other possibility is that they paddled away from Alcatraz Island into the San Francisco Bay, which is cold, dark, and dangerous, with a strong current flowing under the Golden Gate bridge out to the Pacific Ocean. The shores of the bay are teaming with harbor seals, which are fed on by white sharks. Perhaps that is how nearby Tiburon Point got its name. It took great daring to embark into the bay at night on a homemade raft.

Did these guys get away? It has not been conclusively proven one way or the other. A prison-made life jacket and a plywood paddle were later found in the bay, and a body dressed in convict-styled clothing was reported floating in the Pacific Ocean, some eleven miles from shore. It was primarily this reported floater, which lead to the Bureau of Prison’s official position, that Frank Morris and Clarence and John Anglin all drowned during the escape attempt. The BOP would have seized any bit of information supporting a conclusion that the escape attempt failed, but no bodies were found, and that is highly unlikely. There are other facts indicating the escape was successful. There were reports and photos of the raft found on Angel Island, two miles from Alcatraz, with footprints leading away from the shore. There was another report of a carjacking by three men in a nearby neighborhood on the morning of June 12, 1962. Family members of the Anglins reported receiving letters from the convicts after the 1962 escape. The case remains open with the US Marshals Service and will remain so until the hundredth birthday of each of the infamous three.

The 1962 escape attempt was the first and only one that may have succeeded. All previous attempted escapes, a total of thirty-six, ended with the convicts being recaptured, shot, or drowned in San Francisco Bay. It is crystal clear that these guys needed the highest security available, and even that could not hold them.

The final escape attempt from USP Alcatraz occurred later in 1962 and was quite a surprise to the officers on duty, I’m sure. On December 17, hardened convicts John Paul Scott and Darl Lee Parker came up missing at the 4:00 p.m. count. It was later determined they had breached a window in the kitchen, made it to the Alcatraz shoreline, and dove into the bay. Parker made it only a hundred yards to the rock outcropping called Little Alcatraz, where he surrendered. Incredibly, Scott swam all the way to Fort Point at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, where he was found semiconscious and suffering from severe hypothermia. Scott was hospitalized and later returned to Alcatraz. He was the first convict to ever swim the San Francisco Bay, though his escape attempt still failed. USP Alcatraz was phased out soon after, and the newly constructed penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, became the new home for the BOP’s most dangerous offenders.

Until the late 1970s, USP Lompoc functioned as a MEDIUM-security-level prison, while the penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington, housed the MAX-custody prisoners for the far Western United States and Hawaii. McNeil Island had a reputation for violence, housing most of the hard-core prison gang members on the West coast. Like Alcatraz, USP McNeil Island was tremendously expensive to operate because of the island location, which meant that personnel, inmates, water, and all other supplies had to be ferried out to the island. Although island prisons are more secure because of their isolation and being surrounded by ocean, the costs are staggering. In 1978, the USP McNeil Island penitentiary was phased out, and the infamous inmate population was transferred to USP Lompoc, which had been hardened with security upgrades to comply with the MAX-custody inmates.

USP Lompoc was quickly populated with some of the most hard-core and dangerous inmates in the Bureau of Prisons. At the time, the most powerful prison gangs in the BOP were the Mexican Mafia (EME), Aryan Brotherhood (AB), Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), Texas Syndicate (TS), and the Nuestra Familia (NF). Each of these gangs had their origins in the California Department of Corrections. They competed for control of the prison rackets, extortion, gambling, and narcotics dealing, while they exercised control over the inmate population through the threat of extreme violence and murder. Virtually all the old-school, blood-in-blood-out gang members had a prior murder or attempted murder; it was a requirement for membership. At USP Lompoc, the victim’s survival sometimes depended upon what shift the assault occurred on. The day shift was staffed with two physician’s assistants (PAs), a registered nurse, and Clinical Director Dr. Sterling Pollock, RIP! Many a stabbing victim’s life was preserved by the medical staff on the day watch. The other two shifts had one PA who was overworked with pill-line duty and covering the Federal Prison Camp as well, which is to say that if someone is bleeding to death, it’s better that they do it on day watch. The duty PAs on all three shifts and Dr. Sterling Pollock, for over twenty years, were the unsung heroes of the place. In the spring of 2000, I watched as Dr. Pollock saved the life of a young Crip gangster named Michael Smith, who was bleeding to death. Smith had been foolishly trading insults on the tier of the Special Housing Unit (Warehouse H) with an old-school District of Columbia convict named Donzell Biggs. They called each other out and met in the H-unit rec yard the next morning, and as soon as Biggs’s cuffs were removed, he pulled a shank and swung a roundhouse, which caught Smith deep inside his left ear, severing an artery.

OFFICER NEEDS ASSISTANCE IN H-UNIT! Officer Eric Meyer and I were right next door in I-unit, and we arrived in seconds to find Biggs already cuffed up by the SEG Dogs (H-unit crew). Smith was spurting a stream of blood out of his left ear, and I watched as it splattered the concrete wall six feet away. Meyer grabbed a towel and slapped it over the wound, and I started questioning Smith, who looked really scared.

Smith, why’d he hit you!

It was stupid, Fitz. We was talking shit to each other, and I called him out! We put Smith on a gurney and rushed to the urgent care room, where Dr. Pollock took over. He opened Smith’s ear wide with some kind of clamp, reached inside with a pair of forceps, and found the artery. He was wearing a headlamp as he sutured the artery, while the nurse and PAs got an IV line in and saline began flowing into Smith’s arm. All this went down in less than five minutes. Smith was stabilized before the ambulance crew, American Medical Response, even arrived. Sterling Pollock was in his late seventies, but he was still the man!

When McNeil Island was phased out, USP Lompoc became the home yard for the AB, EME, and BGF. Nuestra Familia members could not be housed with the Mexican Mafia; the two gangs had been in a kill on site war since 1968 at San Quentin, when an early-twenties Robert Salas Robot Bobby from Big Hazard, RIP, stabbed a La Familia gang member named Hector Padilla in the neck, a near-fatal attack, but Padilla survived.

It’s important to note that Nuestra Familia had not been named yet; that would come later in 1970 or 1971, and virtually all the original members of both gangs were from Southern California varrios. The regional North-versus-South rivalry took hold in the midseventies, but at the beginning, both EME and La Familia were primarily from South Cali. Padilla had a beef with a Sureno, Carlos Pie-face Ortega from Geraghty Loma Sur, whom Padilla accused of stealing his visiting shoes and giving them to Robot. When Padilla confronted Robot about Ortega’s alleged theft—or worse yet, accused Robot of stealing the shoes—he must have been disrespectful, and when dealing with any Emero, that alone can get one killed. It should also be noted that EME had recently murdered two other Familianos, Phillip Neri and Sonny Pena, so the Padilla assault was the third EME move against La Familia on the main yard at San Quentin in 1968. The very next day, La Familia answered back in section 2A of the South yard, killing Emero Archie Gallegos and stabbing several others. The war was on, and from that day forward, it was tit for tat between EME/SUR and La Familia, who renamed themselves Nuestra Familia in 1971.

USP Lompoc had traditionally been a Mexican Mafia stronghold, having their Northern California rivals outnumbered ten to one or better. The two prison gangs had been separated since the midseventies. The NF recruited heavily from Norteno Street gangs in Stockton, Sacramento, Fresno, Salinas, and many other Northern California cities. These Norteno street gang members are all potential soldiers for the Nuestra Familia, and the cities from where they hailed are known as regiments, with an NF carnal in charge of a crew defending the varrio, selling heroin, and making war on rivals. Each Norteno crew had to kick up a percentage of narcotics sales, tar heroin, and methamphetamine mostly, to the NF leadership still incarcerated.

The Texas Syndicate (TS) first formed up at old Folsom prison in the early seventies and was comprised of inmates from Texas serving time in the vast California DOC. The Texas inmates stuck together for common protection. They recruited younger prospects and expanded throughout the Texas prisons, both state and federal. Over time, they became the most feared gang in the Texas Department of Corrections. The TS also had a few dozen members scattered throughout the BOP. USP Lompoc had a crew of around five or six stone-cold Texas Syndicate members up until June of 1993, when another war at USP Leavenworth, Kansas, broke out between the Texas Syndicate and Mexican Mafia. After that, the two gangs were separated across the entire Bureau of Prisons, same as with EME and the NF.

The Aryan Brotherhood had its origins at San Quentin state prison in the early 1960s. White convicts joined the Aryan Brotherhood for the usual stated reasons, protection against other races and gangs. The AB soon evolved into an extortion and narcotics trafficking organization, capitalizing on the opportunities created by a few hundred heroin addicts as they smuggled tar heroin through the visiting room and other methods. They preyed upon unaffiliated white convicts, demanding protection money or forcing family members to mule narcotics. The AB had a decades-long alliance with the Mexican Mafia, which forced the BOP to separate assault victims and protective custody cases from both gangs, regardless of with whom the initial conflict was with, which is to say that the AB and EME assumed hits for each other. Beginning in the early seventies, the Aryan Brotherhood and Black Guerrilla Family had a smash on-site war raging in the California Department of Corrections. By way of their alliance, the Mexican Mafia backed up the Aryan Brotherhood in this war, and this was the factor that probably brought about the end of hostilities, because the BGF was suddenly overwhelmed. I interviewed a ranking BGF gang member who referred to them as la EM-A, the Endless Mexican Army. It is true that most gangs would go to great lengths to avoid provoking the Mexican Mafia; such was their numeric superiority and reputation for extreme violence. They were, and remain today, the most powerful and feared gang in California.

The Mexican Mafia had their origins in 1957 at Deuel Vocational Institute (DVI) in 1957, a California Youth Authority prison in Tracy, California. Most of the original gangsters hailed from Chicano street gangs in East Los Angeles and the Maravilla hoods. Luis Huero Buff Flores, Hawaiian Gardens; Richard Richie Jaramillo, Pomona Twelfth Street; Benjamin Topo Peters, Hoyo Soto; Joe JD Morgan; Abe Hernandez, Sacto; Mike Mulhern, Sacto; Manuel Rocky Luna; Gilberto Mongol Soto. Rudy Cheyenne Cadena, Bakersfield; and Peter Sana Ojeda, Orange County.

Cadena, Morgan, and Peters would all lead EME in different eras. Cheyenne Cadena was murdered in Palm Hall, Cali DOC Chino, by four Nuestra Familia members on December 17, 1972. Cadena was stabbed seventy times then thrown off the third tier of the cellblock to the concrete floor. There were eleven murders attributed to this war in 1972. Ten NF members were killed, and they retaliated by killing Cadena, who was an EME legend. Joe Morgan assumed EME leadership after Cadena’s murder and lead EME until his death from cancer in 1993. Joe Morgan had an artificial leg, but it didn’t seem to slow him down much. Morgan had a serious reputation for violence if someone crossed him up. He robbed a West Covina bank with a machine gun, and in his late teens, he killed the husband of his then thirty-two-year-old girlfriend. Morgan also looked out for and schooled the youngsters who found themselves locked up in Folsom or San Quentin. He was somewhat of a father figure to many. The Mexican Mafia had historically called the shots from the inside of CDC Folsom and San Quentin and, after 1989, from Pelican Bay, the California Department of Corrections’ supermax. This isn’t so much a matter of policy as it is a matter of who the leader is at any given time and whether that carnal is still incarcerated. The way things have worked out is that EME has always called the shots from inside the California and federal prisons, assigning neighborhoods to trusted Camaradas with a street clique to traffic heroin, collect debt, carry out hits, and defend the varrio. The carnal in charge of a neighborhood or several had to provide for EME members still incarcerated through their family members, usually. They have tens of thousands of soldiers at their disposal because every Sureno street-gang member, from Bakersfield and Salinas on the northern boundaries of EME territory, all the way to the Mexican border, are subject to orders from a carnal/emero, a made member of the Mexican Mafia. These young Sureno prospects smuggle drugs, manufacture and hide weapons, and of course, carry out hits ordered by EME. The EME reputation grew over the decades. Their assassinations were typically very gruesome and bloody affairs, which spread fear in other inmates and staff alike. The blood-in-blood-out policy also resulted in life sentences for numerous Mexican Mafia members convicted of murdering other inmates in the nineteen seventies and eighties.

The Frank Trejo murder was just one of these bloodbath events. On November 11, 1978, Trejo’s body was found stuffed under the lower bunk in a cell in H-unit, which at that time was a general population cellblock. Trejo had been stabbed forty-five times, and the cell was saturated in blood. The typical EME method was a four-man hit squad, two to hold the victim down, another to watch for the correctional officer, and the actual assailant, who filled Trejo’s chest with stab wounds. His upper body looked like one of our 9-mm pistol targets from Annual Refresher Training, which is to say that the knife was aimed center of mass. Adolpho Champ Reynoso, Big Hazard; William Willie Bobo Gouveia; Phil Blackie Segura, East Side Clovers; and Robert Black Bobby Ramirez were convicted of the Trejo murder. They received life plus ninety-nine years. At some point during the early eighties, Champ Reynoso, RIP, became the leader of the Mexican Mafia in the Bureau of Prisons. When I say leader, I mean that EME is not a dictatorship. By their own reglas, each carnal has equal authority over Sureno street-gang members, but a carnal can only be taken out by another carnal. If a Sureno were to kill a made member, no matter the reason, he himself would be subject to murder. Guys like Segura, Ramirez, Reynoso, and Gouveia were revered because of the sacrifice they made to eliminate a target for the organization. They didn’t give a fuck about more prison time!

The Black Guerilla Family (BGF) began in the late 1960s at the Soledad state prison. Many of their members had previously been affiliated with the Black Panthers. The BGF recruited heavily among the black convicts from San Francisco and Oakland. The BGF was also involved in narcotics dealing, and they had a revolutionary political view, with a quasimilitary structure and a Zulu-warrior mentality. Of the five major prison gangs, the BGF had the most antagonistic attitude toward correctional officers, but that attitude had its origins in the Adjustment Center, at Cali DOC Soledad. According to redeemed EME carnal Ramon Mundo Mendoza, creator of the Mundo Chronicles, YouTube, Perplex News, 2018 (thanks, Mundo), the hostility began on January 13, 1970, when Cali DOC Seargent R. A. Mad Dog Maddox and Correctional Officer Opie Miller spilled a dozen AB and BGF members into the exercise yard, knowing the two gangs were at war. As the AB and BGF squared off, shots rang out from the gun gallery manned by Officer Miller. BGF members Alvin Miller, Cleveland Edwards, and W. L. Nolen were shot and killed, uh-oh! Extreme retaliation followed three days later when Officer John Mills was beaten to death and thrown from the third tier, allegedly by BGF Warriors Fleta Drumgo, George Jackson, and John Clouchette. Over the next nineteen months, eleven more officers were murdered at Cali DOC Soledad and San Quentin, culminating with the takeover of the San Quentin Adjustment Center on August 21, 1971, when George Jackson smuggled a pistol back to the cellblock following a legal visit. A takeover of the cellblock followed, and five correctional officers were stabbed or had their throats slashed and were then piled inside a cell by the BGF. Two of these officers survived though they were critically wounded. George Jackson and two other BGF members were shot to death as the cellblock was stormed by correctional officers. This day went down in history as Black August! Every year on August 21, 1971, the BGF held a solemn remembrance for George Jackson and the other two BGF members killed that day. They kept it very low-key, and you had to have knowledge of the history to even be aware of it. We did not interfere!

The Bureau of Prisons classified these five prison gangs as disruptive groups. Validated disruptive group members were subject to additional security regulations, and it was mandated that these gang members be housed in HIGH/MAX custody. They were also subjected to monthly drug testing. The notorious reputation of these inmates was well deserved and came down to a willingness to kill their enemies, like the Nuestra Familia or the Texas Syndicate, or anyone who crossed them up, informed against them, etc. The main difference between street and prison gangs was their base of operations. For most of the last thirty years, the Mexican Mafia and Federal Aryan Brotherhood leaders were incarcerated at USP Marion, ADX Florence, and CDC Pelican Bay. Champ Reynoso, RIP, was housed at Marion and later transferred to ADX Florence until his death in November 2018. He spent the rest of his life, nearly forty years, in supermax status. He never saw the general population again following the Trejo murder.

USP Lompoc traditionally incarcerated a large representation of Crips, Bloods, Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, and other California-based white gangs like the Dirty White Boys and Nazi Low Riders. There were two white gangs from the Utah Department of Corrections that had become a very disruptive influence in the state yards, the Silent Aryan Warriors (SAW) and the Soldiers of Aryan Culture (SAC). As a result, the BOP began receiving increasing numbers and influential members of these gangs. Of course, the Arizona and Texas DOCs have their own version of the Aryan Brotherhood, and some hard-core Brand members came to the BOP from the state prison in Walpole, Massachusetts. Of all these state boarders though, the most sophisticated and extreme prison gang had to be the Aryan Family from the Washington DOC. Veterans of Walla Walla and the Monroe State reformatory, these guys were violent, intelligent, and hardheaded. They were never to be underestimated despite their low numbers, as some of their exploits at Lompoc will illustrate.

The gang mix at any MAX-custody prison is going to be volatile, and USP Lompoc was no exception. Enemy and ally status would occasionally fluctuate, and it was critical that investigators and supervisors keep abreast of all the gang politics on the yard. I remember investigating a string of violent assaults in the summer of 1998, and a visiting staff contingent from the regional office asked me, Lieutenant Fitzmaurice, what percentage of your violence is gang related?

It’s all gang related, virtually all of it, I replied, which was to say that rarely did we experience a violent incident involving two or more unaffiliated inmates.

Whether by motivation or participation, virtually all the violence we experienced was somehow related to gang activity. Our focus was identifying every gangster on the yard down to street gang, prison gang, and nickname, critical information. We also endeavored to keep these intake interviews relaxed and cordial. A good working rapport with the gang population and knowing their membership and tendencies are the best tools for managing violent penitentiaries. Once a convict’s affiliation was known, our intel officers would put his picture on our gang wall, a section of wall in our office upon which we had pasted photographs of the Surenos, Nortenos, Crips, Bloods, ABs etc., with a section for each gang represented at Lompoc. The sections grew, and before we were done, most of the wall space in our office was being utilized. The USP Lompoc population was running between 1,650 and 1,830, and we had some 1,200 gang members representing every region of the country.

Until the midnineties, the Bureau of Prisons operated six United States Penitentiaries at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; Atlanta, Georgia; Terre Haute, Indiana; Leavenworth, Kansas; Lompoc, California; and Marion, Illinois. From 1994 to 1997, three brand-new penitentiaries were activated at Florence, Colorado; Allenwood, Pennsylvania; and Beaumont, Texas. These new penitentiaries relieved crowding at the older facilities.

The Control Unit at USP Marion served as the BOP’s supermax since the closure of USP Alcatraz in 1963. The BOP housed its most dangerous or escape-prone offenders in the MAX-custody penitentiaries. If an inmate committed a murder, attempted an escape, stabbed a correctional officer, or some other serious offense, he would be transferred to the Control Unit at USP Marion. Also known to the inmates as the Swamp, Marion was the end of the line in the Bureau of Prisons. To the hard-core soldiers of the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia, a transfer to Marion was known as graduation and came as a result of earning gang membership by taking out an enemy. The old-school reglas tended to guarantee these gangs only extended membership to the most violent young prospects. The federal sentencing model and the pipeline to and from USP Marion were a revolving door. Inmates sentenced to twenty years served a third, were paroled, violated, and paroled again. It was constant. A convict sent to the control unit for any number of atrocities would typically be slammed for five years and returned to the general population at one of the six USPs until his next train wreck.

In the 1970s and ’80s, USP Marion was considered the most violent prison in America, and murders were common, even in the control unit. The watershed moment came on October 22, 1983, in H-unit, the BOP’S most secure housing unit, when two correctional officers were murdered that day. Senior Officer Specialist Merle Clutts, RIP, was stabbed to death by Aryan Brotherhood member Thomas Terrible Tom Silverstein, during the day watch. Later, on the evening watch, inmate Clay Fountain murdered Senior Officer Specialist Robert Hoffman, RIP, who had come to the aid of two other officers who were under attack. Both Clutts and Hoffman were old-school and highly experienced correctional officers, and they knew the caliber of the inmates they were dealing with, as both Silverstein and Fountain had murdered the leader of the District of Columbia black gangs (DC Blacks, or DC Car), Raymond Cadillac Smith, just months before. This was an especially brutal killing that occurred in Smith’s cell, with Fountain holding Smith down as Silverstein stabbed him a few dozen times.

All this violence occurred in Marion’s most secure cellblock. Inmates housed in H-unit were confined to their cells, with the exception of one hour a day of exercise and a shower every other day. Anytime inmates were moved for recreation or showers, they were supposed to be handcuffed and under escort by three officers carrying batons. On the morning of October 22, Officer Clutts and the H-unit crew were running recreation, and as they escorted Silverstein back up the range, he broke free from the officers escorting him and backed up to inmate Randy Gometz’s cell. Gometz had a handcuff key, which are fashioned out of ink-pen parts, among other things, and he used it to