Chapter One

Supermax Prison: The Last Worst Place

 
They call themselves "Cowboys." They love to threaten us, or deny us the simplest of requests. Some of them wake you up every hour throughout the night by shining a flashlight in your face, or throw flaming papers into your cell as a pretext for spraying you down with a fire extinguisher. Then there are the meals served with feces and urine in the food trays. And faces smashed into concrete walls; handcuffs clamped so tight that wrists and ankles are left lacerated and bruised; leg shackles that cut flesh to the bone when men are forced to run; and when we fall to the ground, we are kicked, hit, and slammed some more.

 

You learn to stay out of their way, except for the ones who just want to torture us, no matter what, the ones who get their kicks that way. And of course you have to watch out for the inmates, because most of them are totally nuts, because they have been locked up here for years, and this place is designed to drive you crazy.

 

—Anonymous inmate in ADMAX, Florence, Colorado

 

Welcome to the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum (ADMAX) facility in Florence, Colorado. The most secure federal prison in the country, Florence is specifically designed, and uniquely qualified, to keep every occupant in nearly total solitary confinement for his entire sentence. Gregory Scarpa Jr., fifty-eight, convicted of racketeering, will call this prison home until at least 2033, when he will be eighty-four years old.

 

Gregory has been a resident of ADMAX since l998. He lives alone in a steel-and-concrete box approximately the size of your bathroom. For twenty-three hours a day, day in and day out, year after year, Gregory is confined to this space. His meticulously soundproofed seven-by-nine-foot cell includes a concrete slab and a thin mattress for a bed; a shower with a timer (to conserve water and prevent flooding); a sink with no taps ( just buttons); a toilet with a valve that shuts off the water automatically; a light fixture; an immovable concrete desk and stool; a polished steel mirror riveted to the concrete wall; and a thirteen-inch black-and-white television encased in Plexiglas (to prevent tampering). The lights are controlled by the guards: Frequently they are left on throughout the night, leaving the prisoner disoriented and sleep-deprived, and thus keenly aware that he has forfeited his freedom, and that he is, in many respects, nothing more than an animal.

 

Motion detectors and cameras track his every move; fourteen hundred remote-controlled steel doors modulate his infrequent journeys throughout the facility; twelve-foot-high fences rimmed with concertina wire help ensure that he’ll never take an unapproved vacation. Three times a day, like clockwork, small, tasteless meals are slid into his cell through a slot in the wall.

 

"You eat because you need to keep up your strength, but at night you dream about a thick steak, or a plate of spaghetti, or even a box of cookies," says Gregory. "I remember when I got a picture someone took of my mother in front of a tray of cookies, and all I could think about were the cookies. You see pictures of food on the TV and you begin to drool. You see beautiful women or happy families on TV and you try not to cry, because although you fear you will never be able to hold a woman or child in your arms ever again in your life, you have to be tough to survive."

 

Inmates have almost no physical contact with anyone: Corrections officers, for example, approach inmates’ cells through a vestibule; bars separate the vestibule from the solid steel doors of the cell, providing a second barrier and allowing the COs to handcuff inmates safely before removing them from their cells for transport or exercise. As with food, mail and laundry are delivered through a slot in the steel bars. Meals are either typical American diner fare—casseroles, hamburgers, and blue-plate specials—or foods conforming to almost all religious restrictions: no pork; an abundance of beans and vegetables. During the month of Ramadan, Muslims are afforded certain courtesies, such as taking their meals in the evening hours. But these are the rare exceptions.

 

From the prison nerve center, officers and other staff maintain control through the use of a wide array of sophisticated electronic and surveillance equipment. Doors are opened and closed by remote control, and almost always from a safe distance. Corridors are lined with cameras and microphones, making it almost impossible for an inmate to escape the watchful eye of prison administrators. The goal here is not rehabilitation; the goal is confinement—punishment. The safety of staff and officers is paramount at all times.

 

Gregory Scarpa Jr. is five-feet-six-inches tall, with a thick, muscular build, gray beard, and an assortment of tattoos. Though short in stature, he is a physically impressive man (prematurely bald, he no longer sports the rather conspicuous and obvious toupee he wore in his youth); and yet, there is an undeniable sadness in his eyes, something in his demeanor that suggests nothing so much as regret. He passes the endless hours exercising in his cell, watching TV, and writing long letters to his four children: Kori, Diane, Gregory III, and Maria (the last, at twenty, his youngest). He says that he attempts to be a father to them through daily letters; to date, however, he has rebuffed their overtures to visit. He says he would love to hold his children, to feel their touch and to hear their voices, to feel their breath against his cheek. But even if they were permitted to visit, there is no assurance they would be allowed any sort of intimacy, and the longing he feels—the sadness that comes with isolation—is offset by the pain he imagines they would feel if they saw him in this cell, chained and shackled, their encounter mitigated by a Plexiglas barrier.

 

Five days a week, for one hour a day, Gregory is removed from his cell and transported to a small indoor steel-mesh cage about half the size of his cell. Inmates call it the "kennel" or "dog run," because that is precisely what it resembles. Leaving his cell for even this brief interlude involves an extraordinary ordeal for Gregory. Two guards enter his cell and order him to strip. After a cavity search, including a pointedly humiliating anal examination, he dresses again, and his hands are cuffed through a slot in the steel bars. Then the guards—with steel-tipped batons at the ready—accompany him down a long, narrow corridor. At all times, their movements are tracked by video monitors. Nothing is left to chance.

 

Exercise hour is exactly that—one hour. Afterward, the moving process begins again, including a second degrading cavity search. He then sits in his tiny cell for the next twenty-three hours, waiting for the next meal, for mail, for anything that will help interrupt the crushing monotony and sameness that typify his life. Gregory Scarpa has been incarcerated at several different federal penitentiaries over the course of the past seventeen years; he is no stranger to the boredom and indignity of prison life. Florence ADMAX, he readily acknowledges, is easily the worst. Guards wield authority and power to a degree not known at most prisons. It is a completely controlled environment, and nothing is allowed to put that control at risk. An inmate who is unhappy with his situation is well advised to keep his mouth closed. Corrections officers will meet force with force—tenfold—and as long as no one is killed or maimed, the muscular tactics are generally approved and encouraged. ADMAX is not supposed to be a warm and welcoming place. It is prison. In every sense of the word. And the inmates at ADMAX are never allowed to forget this fact. So long as an officer brings no unwelcome attention on the institution and its administration, his methodology is unlikely to be questioned.

 

The maximum security facility at Marion, Illinois, the model for Florence ADMAX, has been denounced by Amnesty International, a human rights organization, for violating the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. But few people care, because "supermax" facilities such as Marion and Florence ADMAX are considered little more than repositories for society’s scum. Garden-variety drug addicts and petty thieves do not find their way to Florence; one’s criminal oeuvre must be decidedly more violent, and persistently high profile. Florence ADMAX is the end of the line for drug kingpins, gang leaders, hit men, snipers, and, more recently, international terrorists (for example, Al-Qaeda shoe bomber Richard Reid and four men convicted of involvement in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies are all residents of ADMAX).

 

High-profile American terrorists have also called ADMAX home, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (who was executed in 2001) and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, as well as Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Together, for a time, this trio gave the prison’s highest-security section its nickname: Bombers Row.

 

Another notorious Florence ADMAX inmate is Ramzi Yousef, who is serving a life sentence with no chance for parole following a conviction in 1998 for his involvement in both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Bojinka bombing plot. In 1998, three years before 9/11, Gregory Scarpa Jr. risked his life to spy for the United States government, extracting from Yousef himself the incredible story of how Al-Qaeda was planning 9/11. Scarpa passed the information, in minute detail—including exact sketches of terrorist bombs— to then assistant U.S. attorney Valerie Caproni (now the FBI’s head counsel), and to then AUSA Patrick Fitzgerald (later a U.S. special prosecutor). In return, Scarpa had believed that his sentence would be reduced, or perhaps even commuted. Instead, he was called a liar, his intelligence was buried, and he was sentenced to forty years to life at Florence ADMAX, where he has been held essentially without any contact.

 

One might reasonably wonder why Gregory has been kept in this hellhole of a prison, unable to tell his story—unless, of course, the United States government has something to hide. Certainly he is no choirboy; he is, by his own admission, a killer. But is it possible that even a murderer can be both more and less than he appears?

 

"It is an absolute outrage that Gregory Scarpa Jr. should be doing four decades in the same jail as the man behind the trade center bombing and Bojinka," says Larry Silverman, Gregory’s former lawyer. "Especially when we only now have a full understanding of the quality of the intelligence he was furnishing to the feds."

 

Excerpted from Mafia Son by Sandra Harmon.
Copyright © 2009 by Sandra Harmon.
Published by St. Martin’s Press.

 

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