The Big House Read online

  Finally you enter the Segregation Unit itself. Its fifty-two cells house inmates serving sentences ranging from a few days to many years. The offenses that have landed them in isolation run from a rule violation, such as disrespecting staff, to an extreme offense, such as the murder of another inmate. The inmates here are confined to their cells twenty-three hours a day, with one hour of recreation in an outdoor enclosed cage, where they exercise alone. They are escorted between cell and recreation yard in restraints and under heavy guard. These security measures make Segregation by far the most controlled area of the prison. For short-term residents, this restricted environment is a temporary punishment. For Segregation’s long-term inmates, it is the only way to control them.

  Some inmates view the intense security as a challenge to overcome, making Segregation a frequent stage for outrageous behavior. One prisoner, using smuggled matches and toilet paper, managed to set his mattress on fire. When staff rushed to open his cell door, they found he had jammed the lock. By the time they were able to open the door, the inmate was barely breathing and covered in ashes and soot. The officers dragged him out of the smoke-filled room. The inmate regained consciousness on the cold cement floor outside his cell, looked up at the officers who had just saved his life, and said, “That will teach you people to quit fucking with my canteen order.”

  Another unstable Segregation inmate was Alan Eddington, a downright bestial man who possessed a strong will to hurt people. He was well-conditioned and powerful from untold hours pumping iron until his skin bulged with muscles. Eddington was also dangerous and unpredictable. I tried to speak to him several times, but he rarely communicated with staff. Eddington seemed ready to attack guards at any moment, and we had to watch his every step. In one incident, he appeared peaceful, then unexpectedly spun around and drove his fist into an officer’s windpipe. This earned him an attempted murder conviction to add to his resumé of sentences.

  Another inmate prosecuted in outside courts for assaulting staff was William Jacks. Short and stocky yet supremely athletic, Jacks was like a bomb just waiting to explode. He was doing time for several barbaric assaults, and prison had not been able to scrub this violence out of him. He lived in Segregation for several years where guards used considerable precaution every time they came into contact with him–yet he still managed to assault twelve correctional officers in eighteen months. One day, as several staff members escorted him from the recreation yard to his cell, Jacks suddenly turned and head-butted an officer in the face. Even the restraints and number of officers didn’t stop him. He still found a way to hurt someone.

  Eddington and Jacks were among the worst predators. Some years ago, we transferred them to the Federal Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. The warden was a friend of mine and agreed on the transfers. It wasn’t that we couldn’t control Eddington and Jacks; it was more that we needed a break from them. Those two didn’t look so bad once they were gone, however; we knew there would be others to take their place, cons like Herbert Cummings and Manfred Locks.

  Cummings I already knew from my years at a county facility where he had been a regular. He had a sour attitude along with numerous physical and mental problems. He never got along with anyone–inmates or staff–and spent his time destroying his living space. He often broke glass and desecrated walls and windows. As difficult as it was to deal with him, I always pitied Cummings. He had no friends and always believed someone had wronged him. He was probably the most disagreeable person I have ever met, but I cannot recall him ever physically injuring anyone.

  During Cummings’s last stay at Oak Park Heights, he served his entire sentence in the Segregation Unit. On the day of his release, he carved up the windows, tore apart his bedding, and flooded his cell. When he was brought upstairs to the holding cell, he began to destroy this cell as well. I found Cummings banging his fists against the walls, spit trickling down the windows. I told Cummings that if he did one more damaging thing, we would call the local sheriff and have him arrested for destruction of state property. Instead of leaving a free man, he would be arrested and taken to the local jail. He calmed down and left quietly, but I don’t think the outside world was ready for him.

  Cummings died a short time later. He was a street person, and I can only imagine the suffering he must have gone through. We never heard how he died, but it probably wasn’t under the best circumstances. His obituary bore the touching statement, “This poor lost soul has finally found his way home.”

  Unlike Cummings, Manfred Locks was a dangerous man with a violent agenda. He was serving time for a burglary in Wisconsin and had been transferred to Oak Park Heights in an attempt to control his savage behavior. In one incident, Locks managed to deceive guards into thinking he was safely locked in his cell after taking a shower, but he was actually hiding in a shower stall, waiting to attack the first staff person who appeared. When an officer entered, Locks assaulted him with a towel rack. Locks inflicted serious lacerations all over the head of the officer, who managed to escape more of Locks’s wrath. Locks didn’t know who he was going to attack and likely didn’t care. He simply wanted to hurt someone–even though he was serving the last six months of his incarceration. Fulfilling his addiction to violence was more important than his impending freedom.

  Alan Eddington, William Jacks, Herbert Cummings, and Manfred Locks were all troublesome inmates, but none of them came close to Richard Samuels. What made Samuels different was his remarkable ability to sustain violent and aggressive activity over a prolonged period of time. He was a one-man wrecking crew with an incredible ability to demolish jails and prisons.

  Samuels’s reputation preceded him. Transfers are usually routine affairs that generate little concern beyond the normal precautions accompanying all new admissions. We knew, however, that Samuels was being transferred to Oak Park Heights because few facilities in the country could control him. We were told he had literally dismantled a small jail piece by piece. He was described as a human destruction machine with a motor stuck in high gear.

  Samuels’s reputation was right on target. When he arrived, his entire person seemed to exude hostility and hatred to other human beings–especially if they wore a uniform. Right away, he informed us we were in for a hard time. “You’ve never faced the likes of me,” he told us. And he was right. The brand-new prison was like Disneyland to Samuels. He awoke every day looking forward to taking on new destructive challenges, whether people or property. He had all these shiny, unused things to break, tear, rip, smash, wreck, and destroy. That was Richard Samuels, a monster in human form.

  I came into contact with Samuels when I was the prison’s Internal Affairs Investigator during those early years. My responsibilities included investigating disturbances, major staff or inmate misconduct, or out-of-the-ordinary occurrences–and when Samuel lived here, every day was out of the ordinary. His drive and determination amazed me. He possessed an incredible desire to accomplish what he set out to do. In a different lifetime, that determination could have been harnessed to a positive end. As it was, it seemed like such a waste to focus all this persistence toward such negative results.

  One of Samuels’s many skills was obtaining unauthorized items and converting them into weapons or tools. Once, staff executed a thorough search of him, his cell, and the area around his cell, but within a few hours, while isolated in his cell, he had accumulated more weapons, tools, and other objects than I could have gathered from a hardware store. It was incredible. He had wire, screws, bolts, metal, and paper–from where, we didn’t know. Either he retrieved them from hiding places so cunning we probably never will discover them, or he convinced other inmates to pass items to him.

  Samuels’s innate ability to recruit inmates in support of his mission was another feature that made him stand out. He was like the captain of a team with everyone waiting to respond to his leadership and direction. This tremendous power made him even more dangerous.

  The solitary confinement section comprises just seven cells o
n the lower tier and represents the highest level of security within Oak Park Heights. It is at the far end of the Segregation Unit, across the main floor from the sally port. To reach this section, you pass the other living areas and descend several steps to a steel door. As you enter the cell area, the door closes behind you, trapping you inside a small area adjacent to the seven cells. It’s a tight space with only enough room for a steel table, which is bolted to the floor so it can’t serve as a weapon. This area is where the section inmates take their daily hour of exercise. Samuels spent all of his stay in the Segregation Unit under solitary confinement. He was allowed nothing in his cell but his clothing. Anything else he would destroy or use as a weapon.

  Samuels didn’t work alone. His disruptive behavior won attention and respect from other inmates, and this soon thrust him into a leadership role. Before long, he had five hostile, aggressive cons in solitary following his lead. Samuels excelled at picking a most offensive team. They were all devious, committed followers with several murders on their resumés, and they looked up to Samuels like a charismatic leader of a cult of violence.

  Samuels and his followers were originally housed in neighboring solitary confinement cells. The cells were largely soundproof, so Samuels passed on his “teachings” by screaming loud enough for the others to hear him. He instructed them on what to do, and soon we had chaos. They broke up sinks and toilets, tore electrical plates from walls, smashed mirrors and windows, ruined hinges, doors, light fixtures, wall vents, and anything else in their way. The damage was extensive, the repairs costly and time-consuming. Every day they were charged with prison rule violations that only extended their stays in the Segregation Unit.

  The summer that Samuels came to Oak Park Heights was the only time in my career that my job responsibilities created a knot in my stomach every day. As I walked into the unit each morning, I knew there was an unpleasant experience ahead. I can only imagine how the officers who had to work near Samuels eight hours a day felt. He kept staff on guard every minute. On one occasion, he was able to free himself from handcuffs and waist chains and punch a correctional officer in the face. The other inmates idolized him, and he worked hard to keep his image intact. The five inmates led by him were relentless in their efforts to keep from being controlled. One morning, I entered the unit to find three of Samuels’s accomplices sitting on their cell floor chained around the sink post. The staff simply had no other way to control them. The inmates had been breaking up their cells and, after being moved to different cells, started to destroy their new locations. Chaining them to the sink was the only way to restrain them.

  Oak Park Heights was under no obligation to keep this human destructor. The Vermont prison system had transferred Samuels to Minnesota as part of the Interstate Compact, an arrangement administered by most state corrections departments. The Interstate Compact is based on mutual agreement, and we could have shipped Samuels back to Vermont any time we wished. But Warden Frank Wood had a different idea. He reasoned that if Samuels was one of the most violent and destructive inmates in the country, why not use some of his negative expertise to our advantage? We would keep him as an unpaid consultant to assist us in learning how to reconstruct our cells.

  Samuels continued his resistive and damaging behavior, and we repaired his destruction but always in a manner that created a sturdier cell. Sinks were remade and reinforced; they could no longer be pulled out of the wall, broken up, or destroyed. Electrical plates were removed from the walls, and toilets were rebuilt and reconfigured so they could no longer be smashed. We installed shut-off valves that stopped the water supply after a toilet is flushed a second time. We replaced lights and windows with unbreakable materials. We cut a slot in the steel door to restrain the inmate at the door when staff needed to enter the cell. Door hinges were enlarged and carefully secured. Special steel flaps were installed over the cell door windows, and steel grates were installed to provide additional barriers between inmates and staff.

  Throughout this process, we meticulously documented Samuel’s wreckage. One morning, shortly after he broke the window out of his cell door, I arrived with a camera. I snapped photographs of the damage as Samuels hollered and growled profanities. In the few months I knew him, he never spoke a civil word to me. One of the pictures I took shows Samuels giving me the finger. It was the only clear communication he ever managed.

  Later, when inmates filed a civil lawsuit claiming the prison was using unlawful practices to restrain them, the records and photographs of Samuels’s destruction became key evidence in our defense. Based partly on these materials, the federal court found their claims lacking in merit, and the case was dismissed. This was just part of the positive legacy left by Samuels’s horrifying behavior.

  Eventually, Samuels completed his consulting work. We placed him in cell number 101, where he was fully controlled and contained. There was nothing he could destroy, and for the first time since his arrival, he was totally frustrated. We built twelve more cells like 101. We called them our modified cells.

  With nothing else to do, Samuels resorted to smearing his own excrement on the walls and throwing it around his cell. In his way of thinking, it was the only way to get back some of his perceived power.

  Shortly after Samuels was controlled in cell 101, I escorted his attorney to the Segregation Unit for a visit with his client. They spoke through the rectangular food-pass cut in the cement wall, slightly below eye level. Suddenly, the attorney dropped his eyes and backed away from the cell. Samuels had placed a pile of human feces on the shelf. I don’t know what his message was, but it wasn’t a pleasant one.

  On another occasion, the unit supervisor and I were in the area near Samuels’s cell, and he was still trying to convince us that he was in charge. It was tough to convince him he wasn’t. Here he was locked in the newly built cell, totally confined, without anything to smash or break so throwing excrement was all he had left. Yet still he shouted, “Why don’t you go upstairs and tell Wood who is running this prison?” His only relief would come from good behavior, and he was not about to lower himself to that standard.

  Once we had learned all we could about building indestructible cells from Samuels, Frank Wood arranged for his return transfer. Vermont officials, unable to place Samuels in any other state in the nation, came to pick him up. They shackled Samuels in full restraints, then loaded him into the backseat of a four-wheel-drive Chevrolet Suburban. Oak Park Heights’s captain of security and I watched as they headed down the driveway. I stood there thinking, Samuels will have that Suburban dismantled by the time they hit the Wisconsin border, just a few miles away.

  Many years later, I heard of an unprecedented interstate transfer–five inmates in exchange for a single prisoner. It was like a sporting world trade, five utility players for one star. But in this trade, Tennessee was trading five of its most aggressive murderers for one convict from Vermont. I also heard that Allan Greeley, the Tennessee transfer coordinator, was seen as a hero in his department for executing this wonderful deal.

  When our state transfer coordinator asked the name of this one person, Greeley checked and called back. The inmate’s name was Richard Samuels.

  Within sixty days, Greeley called Vermont and asked for his five murderers back. “Come as quickly as possible,” he told them, “and get this rotten son of a bitch out of here.”

  Fatal Attractions

  The letter was a plea, heartfelt and loving. Over several handwritten pages, the author, an Ohio woman, asked us to please release prisoner Gerald Anders. She detailed her caring relationship with him and the supportive home she was prepared to set up for the two of them. She described how she had come to know and deeply understand this man, mentioning their unusual connection and growing dependence upon each other. She wrote of the special love that had developed between them, and her confidence that this bond would guide them to a fulfilling life together. A transfer of supervision to Ohio, she argued, would be in his best interests, and she could provide
a strong support system for him there.

  I was impressed by the sincere tone of the letter. Her words were saturated with an emotional intensity unusual to letters concerning offenders. There was little doubt she was honest about her desire for a life with Anders and felt genuine devotion to him.

  Her final remarks, however, were what set this correspondence apart from any other. As she brought her plea to an end, she wrote, “and the reason our love is so special is that we have never met.”

  I set the letter down and thought of her compassion–and her naïveté. She was obviously a woman with hopes and dreams, but also with a frightening lack of insight into what her future would be like with a person such as Anders.

  Gerald Anders was a violent sex offender with a serious criminal history, including convictions for assault, burglary, kidnapping, and rape with the use of a weapon. With this kind of past, he had a precarious future. He had recently been granted parole, but almost immediately violated the parole requirements. When Oregon police apprehended him, they took him from a vehicle with its interior splattered in blood. Police found human hair and signs of a struggle, but they never found a victim. Without solid evidence of a criminal act, Anders faced no more than the technical violation of his parole. Only Anders would ever know what grisly events took place in that car.

  He was returned to Minnesota to face parole revocation proceedings, and it was then that I received the earnest plea from his girlfriend in Ohio. She apparently had learned nothing of the brutal heartlessness of his past during their correspondence and phone calls. She thought she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.