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Season Six: Holiday Episode Three (2026)
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Transcript
Introduction & Hostage Themes in Films
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:50
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
00:01:01
Speaker
You know, these stories where they have hostage takings, I think in the 90s, if I recall correctly, there are a couple of movies where it was sort of a comedic holiday take for people to be held hostage.
00:01:19
Speaker
I'm thinking of, i think The Ref is a holiday movie with a hostage theme. And then there's one that has k Christina Applegate and Ben Affleck, where it starts off, he's like paying her family to pretend to be his family.
00:01:35
Speaker
no she's paying a family to pretend to be his family. Do remember these movies? I can't remember the name of that one. I don't remember the first one, but the second one sounds a little familiar, but not...
00:01:47
Speaker
a lot Yeah, I realized maybe that was what... like I watch a lot of Christmas movies this time of year, but I don't... like It's difficult for me to get into the Hallmark movies, so I'll go back through sometimes and pick like really strange movies. like There's this some movie called Just Friends that like under any other circumstances would not really be a holiday movie.
00:02:11
Speaker
And like it's Ryan Reynolds in a fat suit. with Amy Smart. And Amy Smart is in like three of my favorite holiday movies. ah One of them is called The Twelve Dates of Christmas. i don't
Real-Life Hostage Situations: Atlanta Prison Riots
00:02:24
Speaker
know if you've ever seen that. It's a short movie that used to be on ABC Family. I think I own it at this point.
00:02:30
Speaker
um Anyways, I say all of that to say that like it's interesting that we end up telling these hostage stories this year because some of these stories I knew bits and pieces of, but I'd never really thought of them all that much. Sure, right.
00:02:46
Speaker
And it's actually like disturbing. And I thought they might get less disturbing as we went along. um And I put together so many different ones.
00:02:57
Speaker
i This one... is like kind of apropos of what's happening around the country this year. Had you ever heard of the Atlanta prison riots?
00:03:10
Speaker
I had heard of it. Okay. So this is kind of two stories in one. In order for us to tell you...
The Mariel Boatlift and Its Consequences
00:03:18
Speaker
The main story, we have to tell you about the Atlanta prison. Right. One of the things that was going on in the early nineteen eighty s it might have actually been 1980, was this incident called the Mariel Boatlift.
00:03:34
Speaker
Have you ever heard of this? Yes, I have. So it's a mass emigration of Cubans. That's emigration with an E. They're traveling from... Mariel Harbor into the United States, mainly between April 15th and October 31st, 1980.
00:03:52
Speaker
nineteen eight This is a very specific kind of exodus. And after 10,000 Cubans had come to try and gain asylum by taking refuge in a Peruvian embassy, the Cuban government kind of throws its hands up and says, whoever wants to go can go.
00:04:17
Speaker
So all of a sudden they've realized that that's about to backfire. And roughly 125,000 Cubans are
00:04:32
Speaker
documented as leaving Cuba for the United States. So the flood of arrivals created political problems for Jimmy Carter back in the day.
00:04:44
Speaker
And he ends up like sort of negotiating at the end of 1980 and all of this. But it's going to take a while to sort all of this out. We end up with 25,000 Haitian immigrants in the middle of all this and around 125,000 immigrants.
Cuban Prisoners and 1987 Riots
00:05:02
Speaker
Um, we sort of knew this was potentially happening because of the way the the couple of years leading up to this had gone in terms of immigration with an eye and immigration with an E. This is going to lead to United States and also Cuban policy changes.
00:05:23
Speaker
um but this is called, ah the boat lift. Um, This time period, when this boat lift occurs, it leads to a series of riots in Miami.
00:05:36
Speaker
um These riots were known as the McDuffie riots, and they may come up again, but they're the 1980 Miami riots. um An all-white male jury... aquits five white Dade County ah police officers and public safety officers in the death of Arthur McDuffie, who was a black insurance sales.
00:05:58
Speaker
We have this massive influx of people in roughly the same area at roughly the same time. And they try to detain all these people. So by 1987, have at least 4,000 they have at least four thousand Cubans who are part of this mass immigration.
00:06:19
Speaker
They're incarcerated for a lack of documentation and for committing sort of various types of crimes. On November 10th of 1987, the United States State Department announced that Cuba had agreed to reinstate a 1984 accord that would permit the repatriation of up to 2,500 nationals.
00:06:43
Speaker
so The idea was that 2,500 of the Cubans who had been incarcerated after Marial boat left had occurred, so people who have been incarcerated over the last seven years, they're all going to be deported at one time.
Hostage Crisis at Atlanta Penitentiary
00:07:01
Speaker
But turns out that a lot of these people, even the ones that are behind bars for various crimes and for detention on immigration issues, prefer life in the United States over life in Cuba.
00:07:15
Speaker
So they decide they want to collectively express their anger over the potential of them facing deportation. And they riot.
00:07:28
Speaker
And they take hostages to try and negotiate a different fate. Now, this is all taking place at the U.S. Penitentiary and Atlanta, Georgia. And there's coinciding riot at the Federal Detention Center in Oakdale, Louisiana.
00:07:46
Speaker
Three days after it's announced that Cuba's taking back 2,500 people, the detainees seize control of the USP Atlanta. Their principal demand is, please don't send us home.
00:08:01
Speaker
So to me, that is sort of an interesting way to not be sent home to start a riot and take hostages. Right, but what kind of behavior does that encourage, right? Right.
00:08:15
Speaker
Well, it's it's essentially the same thing as negotiating with terrorists. Like, if we're going to do this for them, then this type of violence is acceptable.
00:08:26
Speaker
And in the future, you'll see more of that kind of violence. Right. And which is exactly what you don't want. Right. Right. and And in the prison system, right in theory, like they are guilty of what they've been charged with, right? Now, I don't know, but that's the theory. yeah And you know they don't get to make choices, right?
00:08:50
Speaker
Right. These riots that start on November 13th, 1987, are going to last 11 days. And they're going to last right up until November of 1987.
Thomas Silverstein and Prison Violence
00:09:05
Speaker
And I'm just going to throw this out there um that one of the things that struck me about this case and one of the reasons it ended up on this list is because if you look at it on a calendar and you sort of look
00:09:28
Speaker
could make this more apropos. I don't know how you would do it. But essentially, this riot is going to end three days before Thanksgiving, 1987. nineteen eighty seven And that's sort of the ultimate time that we are kind of led to believe how immigration into the United States should work.
00:09:48
Speaker
And that is people get together, they bring food, they all sit down, and they're thankful for the things that they have. Oh yeah, you're right. that That's some iron irony. Yeah.
00:10:00
Speaker
So we end up with a very interesting situation here. During the riots, 32-year-old Cuban inmate named Jose Pena Perez, he gets killed by a correctional officer.
00:10:16
Speaker
Now, according to Joseph Petrovsky, who was the prison warden when this was happening, that officer shot the inmate in order to protect a fellow officer. This prison is not prepared for what's happening at all.
00:10:30
Speaker
So the Atlanta FBI, led by a guy who at the time was a special agent in charge down there, I believe. um He's going to become pretty famous for some other stuff later.
00:10:41
Speaker
His name is Weldon Kennedy. He's called in originally to handle negotiations and to gather intelligence. After they realized how many hostages were taken, they start bringing in special operations soldiers from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which has renamed itself a couple of times in the last few years, to advise local law enforcement and federal authorities.
00:11:08
Speaker
um I believe those were members of the unit, which is operational ah detachment. I don't know that for sure. But following the negotiations, the majority of the inmates voted to a surrender agreement.
00:11:24
Speaker
um That surrender agreement comes December the 4th, and by that point in time, all of the hostages are released. The reason that this is so interesting to me, other than the timing of it all, is they have a particular hostage in the mix that I found to be fascinating.
00:11:45
Speaker
Now, this guy's name is Thomas Edward Conway when he's born. Have you ever heard of him? Not until we started researching this case. So he is born in Long Beach, California to a woman named Virginia Conway.
00:12:02
Speaker
She had gotten divorced in 1952 from her first husband, and she had married a man named Thomas Conway. So on February 1952,
00:12:13
Speaker
Everybody claims that this is their biological family. Now, four years later, in 1956, Virginia Conway is going to divorce Thomas Conway, and she's going to marry a man named Sid Silverstein.
00:12:28
Speaker
Sid Silverstein is legally going to adopt the stepson. And Thomas Silverstein is described as timid, awkward, shy, and the target of bullies as a child in this middle-class neighborhood where they live.
00:12:47
Speaker
It's believed that part of one of the reasons he gets bullied is his peers think, because of his last name, that Thomas is Jewish.
00:12:59
Speaker
So Virginia Silverstein
00:13:04
Speaker
demands that her son fight back. And she tells Thomas that if he ever comes home again crying because he's been beaten up by a bully, that she would be waiting to give him another beating.
00:13:18
Speaker
According to later interviews, Silverstein states, that's just how my mom was. She stood her ground that if someone came at you with a bat, you get your bat and both of you go at it.
00:13:31
Speaker
By the age of 14, Thomas Silverstein is starting to be sentenced to crimes in California that land him in the California Youth Authority Reformatory.
00:13:43
Speaker
He says that his time there reinforces his attitude about violence. and that attitude that he would later describe is that anyone not willing to fight had been abused.
00:13:58
Speaker
In 1971, at age 19, at age nineteen he finds himself in San Quentin Prison in California for armed robbery. Four years later, he's paroled, but soon after that, he's arrested along with his father, sort of, the original father, as far as he knew, Thomas Conway, and his cousin, Gerald Hoff.
00:14:23
Speaker
They had committed three armed robberies. Their take was less than $11,000.
00:14:32
Speaker
So in 1977, he sentenced to 15 years for armed robbery. And that 15 years is gonna be served at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. he figures out really quickly, because he is still very young, he's in his mid-20s, that he is gonna have to have someone help him protect himself in prison.
00:15:02
Speaker
So while he's at Leavenworth, he develops ties with the Aryan brother it. And in 1980, Thomas Silverstein is convicted of the murder of another inmate named Danny Atwell.
00:15:21
Speaker
The motive for him being murdered is that he had reportedly refused to serve as a mule for heroin being moved through the prison.
00:15:32
Speaker
At this point in time, Thomas Silverstein is sentenced to life, and he's transferred to the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, which is also known as USP Marion.
00:15:45
Speaker
At the time he's transferred, USP Marion, which is today a quote, medium security um prison, it was a high security, close custody facility.
00:16:01
Speaker
In 1985, his conviction for the murder of Danny Atwell is overturned. And the main reason that it's overturned is that it's brought about that the jailhouse informant who had testified at his trial had all lied on the stand.
00:16:20
Speaker
So at USP Marion, Thomas Silverstein had been housed in what was known as the control unit. The control unit was reserved for extreme, quote, management problems.
00:16:30
Speaker
And that was prisoners who either prone to assaultive or disruptive behavior or who were thought to be involved in heavy organized crime. So this is basically solitary confinement for Thomas.
00:16:43
Speaker
He is... spending his time in a solitary cell that has a constant light. He has uninterrupted camera surveillance on him. He's only allowed two phone calls per month, and he is only allowed to receive his meals through a slot in the door.
00:17:03
Speaker
I don't know about you, but that's absolutely terrible. It is. It's really bad. In spite of all this,
00:17:13
Speaker
In 1981, Thomas Silverstein is accused of murdering a man named Robert Chappelle. Robert Chappelle is a member of the D.C. Blacks prison gang, and he was serving a life sentence for the 1964 murder of Connecticut police officer Henry Jennings.
00:17:33
Speaker
According to the story, Thomas commits this murder with a fellow Aryan Brotherhood member named Clayton Fountain. They're both convicted, and Silverstein receives an additional life sentence.
00:17:47
Speaker
Throughout all of this, Thomas maintains that he was innocent. So while he's on trial for Chappelle's murder, the Bureau of Prisons, or the BOP, they transfer a man named Raymond Lee Cadillac, is his nickname, Smith, from another prison into the control unit at Marion.
00:18:08
Speaker
What's interesting about Cadillac Smith is he is the national leader of the D.C. Blacks' prison gang.
00:18:17
Speaker
From the moment that Smith is transferred into the Marion Control Unit, guess what he does? He tries to kill Thomas Silverstein. That would have been my guess, and they couldn't have planned it better if they tried, huh? Right?
00:18:29
Speaker
Right. So according to Thomas Silverstein, he recalls, I tried to tell Cadillac that it wasn't me that killed Chappelle. He didn't believe me, and he bragged that he was going to kill me.
00:18:42
Speaker
Everyone knew what was going on, and no one did anything to keep us apart. The guards wanted one of us to kill the other.
00:18:54
Speaker
So Silverstein and Clayton Fountain allegedly killed Smith. with an improvised weapon, stabbing him 67 times.
00:19:06
Speaker
After he was dead, they dragged his body up and down the catwalk in front of the other cells, displaying it to other prisoners. So Thomas Silverstein ends up convicted of first-degree murder for killing Smith, and he gets yet another life sentence.
00:19:22
Speaker
On October twenty second of 1983,
00:19:26
Speaker
Thomas Silverstein kills a corrections officer named Merle Klutz. He's let out of his cell to go to the showers, and Thomas uses a ruse to get Merle Klutz to walk ahead of him, and he positions himself between Klutz and the other officers.
00:19:43
Speaker
He stops outside the cell of another inmate named Randy Gomez. Gomez passes a homemade prison knife to Thomas Silverstein. He unlocks Silverstein's cuffs with a homemade key.
00:19:57
Speaker
And then Thomas attacks Merle, stabbing him multiple times. Silverstein later claims that he murdered Klutz in retaliation for Merle Klutz deliberately harassing him.
00:20:11
Speaker
Among other things, Merle was accused of destroying paintings by Silverstein. And according to the policy of the time, BOP's policy was to confiscate artwork by inmates if it depicted murder.
00:20:28
Speaker
A few hours after Silverstein killed Merle Klutz, Clayton Fountain uses the same strategy to kill corrections officer Robert Hoffman. The murders of Hoffman and Klutz enrages U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, who urges Congress at the time to reinstate the federal death penalty.
00:20:52
Speaker
He said it had gotten to a point here in the 1980s where the inmates are killing for sport with effective impunity since they were already serving the maximum sentence allowed under federal law.
00:21:06
Speaker
He said these inmates were already serving life sentences in disciplinary sections of the most maximum security prisons in the country. They knew that there was nothing else the federal prison system could do to them.
00:21:18
Speaker
They knew they had absolutely nothing to lose.
The Isolation of Silverstein & Supermax Prisons
00:21:21
Speaker
That would be a very dangerous situation. Absolutely. So, USP Marion ends up being placed on lockdown.
00:21:31
Speaker
Guess how long the lockdown lasts? 23 years. What? Yeah. Following the murder of Klutz, Silverstein is actually transferred out of USP Marion, which will remain on lockdown well into two Wow. So...
00:21:50
Speaker
so When he's transferred down to the USP Atlanta, he's placed in solitary confinement and he gets a new status. This new status is recorded as no human contact allowed.
00:22:05
Speaker
So the events surrounding his exit from USP Marion, which is the murders of the two corrections officers, this inspires the federal prison system to design what's known as a supermax.
00:22:21
Speaker
And that is how we get the ADMAX out of the United States Penitentiary in Florence, which is in Fremont County, Colorado. It's going to open in 1994, but it is built to house the most dangerous inmates.
00:22:39
Speaker
Now, how does this all come back to the riots? During 1987 Atlanta prison riots, Cuban detainees ignored the no human contact sign and let Thomas Silverstein out of his cell.
00:23:00
Speaker
That becomes a focus of what are what is going on on the inside of this hostage situation. You've got Thomas Silverstein roaming freely around the prison,
00:23:17
Speaker
And there's a prison guard there. He's being held hostage by these Cubans. He has a history of being polite and considerate to Thomas Silverstein.
00:23:30
Speaker
Like Silverstein remembers this guy saying things to him like, are your handcuffs too tight? When situations arose where Thomas Silverstein had to be procedurally in cuffs.
00:23:44
Speaker
during the riot, this guard is confronted by Silverstein, who ultimately spares him. The BOP negotiators, who are being consulted by many different people that we were talking about, they're able to convince the Cuban riot leaders to hand over Thomas Silverstein as a gesture of good faith, which this is a relatively easy decision for them to make.
00:24:18
Speaker
And like, they're not here to, to have anything to do with Thomas Silverstein. I'm not even sure that the detainees who were rioting in Atlanta at the time would understand how dangerous a person that they're messing with.
00:24:36
Speaker
I doubt very seriously. They did, or like even trying to understand that they just wouldn't care. Right. So Silverstein, in the background of all of this, he has raised issues that the no human contact status is essentially a form of torture that's being reserved by the BOP for inmates who are killing correctional officers.
00:25:02
Speaker
And while he's not wrong, I think he's kind of missing the point. yeah allll he Yeah, exactly. He's missing the point. ah There's an author named Pete early He writes extensively over the years. I think he starts a journalist. He becomes an author. He writes extensively about some of these issues.
00:25:20
Speaker
And a Bureau of Prison Officials tells Pete early later, when an inmate kills a guard, he must be punished. And the quote that follows is, we can't execute Silverstein, so we have no choice but to make his life a living hell.
00:25:37
Speaker
Otherwise, other inmates will kill guards too. There has to be some form of supreme punishment. Every convict knows what Silverstein is going through.
00:25:49
Speaker
We want them to realize that if they cross the same line that he has crossed, they will pay a heavy price. Now, according to and a man named Ted Sellers, he is a convict who meets Silverstein in prison because after the Atlanta prison riots, Silverstein is going to moved back to leave to Leavenworth. He's going to spend the next 18 years at Leavenworth.
00:26:13
Speaker
And... Ted Sellers says that Silverstein became like this ghost or a legend at Leavenworth. He would later tell BBC News online, he is not as bad as they portray him to be. He's dangerous if they push him to the wall, but there were some dirty, rotten guards at Marion. They would purposely screw you around, and you were already dealing with a person locked up 23 hours a day And of course, this person has a short fuse.
00:26:43
Speaker
um It's later alluded to that he just has the ability to deal with it when, like, the way that he thinks, he can figure out a way to confront the guards, and the guards didn't like that fact.
00:26:54
Speaker
He is committing murder, but I don't know what other options he necessarily would have had. I'm not justifying what he did either. In 2014, a federal court is going to finally reject Silverstein's claims that his treatment constituted cruel and unusual punishment.
00:27:11
Speaker
They rule that he is the extreme case where long-term solitary confinement is justified. ah Part of that ah ruling reads, Mr. Silverstein asks us to consider to consider the fact that he has been in such confinement for more than 30 years without interruption, which he contends violates his Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.
00:27:35
Speaker
Thirty years is indeed an extraordinary length of time to live in segregation under any conditions. But even if we decline to apply the six-year statute of limitations, as he suggests, on grounds of a continuing violation or equitable tolling, we cannot look at those 30 years alone without considering the reasons for both his confinement and the continuation of his confinement in such isolation.
00:27:59
Speaker
Up until 1988, Mr. Silverstein has committed at least three brutal murders, was implicated in two others, assaulted three staff members, threatened a staff member, made an escape attempt by posing as a United States Marshal, possessed weapons including hacksaw blades, handcuffed keys, and lockpicks.
00:28:19
Speaker
Indeed, with respect to at least one of his murders, the Seventh Circuit stated his appeal afforded a horrifying glimpse of the sordid and lethal world of modern prison gangs.
00:28:31
Speaker
Irrespective of the length of his confinement, Mr. Silverstein's history with regard to both his violent conduct and leadership in the Aryan Brotherhood makes him a deeply atypical case, and it is clear his segregated is segregated confinement is commiserate with ongoing prison security measures.
00:28:52
Speaker
And like this is interesting. This guy is really interesting to me. His earliest theoretical data release was going to be November 2nd, 2095, based on how he'd been sentenced. In 2005, USV Leavenworth is downgraded, like I mentioned earlier, to a medium security facility.
00:29:10
Speaker
And Silverstein is going to spend his final days at ADX Florence, which is that Supermax facility they built in Colorado. um It's not going to last a super long time. What do you think of like keeping somebody in solitary confinement that long?
00:29:25
Speaker
I mean, what else are they going to do with them? I
Silverstein's Upbringing and Its Impact
00:29:29
Speaker
don't know. i don't know what they're going to do with them. Now, as far as like the light being on and like anything, any little thing that would make it more torturous, right? Yeah.
00:29:42
Speaker
I don't know about that. um But he had proven himself like... They didn't trust him because he killed guards, right? Yeah.
00:29:53
Speaker
And so nobody wants to deal with that. Nobody that works at a prison wants to deal with that, right? Yeah. It would be absolutely ridiculous, you know, if you were killed while you're at work.
00:30:07
Speaker
And they have to face the thought of the fear anyway. But see, he brought it to life in a whole new way, right? And I see where... it could be an issue. Now, the biggest thing I take away from this whole situation that we've talked about is his mother saying that if somebody has a baseball bat, you go get your baseball bat and you guys just beat the crap out of each other.
00:30:34
Speaker
I feel like that might've ignited a flame in him. Yeah. And may not be the best advice for children or instruction for children.
00:30:46
Speaker
Yeah, I tend to agree with you there. i so I have some more questions about this, but I want to tell like a little another piece of the story, and then I'm to come back to him, and then I'm going to come back to the riots.
00:30:57
Speaker
So Clayton Fountain, that's the guy, he's a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, who kills the other guard when they're in Marion. He had been born September 12, 1955, at a U.S. Army hospital down in Fort Benning, Georgia.
00:31:11
Speaker
He's the oldest of six kids. He has a brother and four sisters. He is named after his father, Clayton Fountain. The family was a ah military family.
Clayton Fountain's Background & Prison Life
00:31:20
Speaker
His father served combat tours in Korea and Vietnam. His mother was always working. Clayton ends up being in charge of all these kids.
00:31:29
Speaker
He remembers and recalls in some interviews with him much later, cooking, ironing, serving, cleaning, caring for five younger siblings. He ends up going into the United States Marine Corps.
00:31:42
Speaker
So when he becomes a Marine, he's Got some issues. He's only 19 years old. He gets stationed down in the Philippines in 1974.
00:31:55
Speaker
He steals and disassembles a pistol from the ship that he's on, from the armory. And he brings it ashore. He puts it back together.
00:32:07
Speaker
And he robs a Filipino security guard of his shotgun. He then uses his shotgun to murder his staff sergeant. They don't talk at all.
00:32:18
Speaker
Fountain shoots him once in the chest, and then he goes on a walk where he takes five hostages. So the way he gets into this situation is a staff sergeant who is a Marine named Wrin, W-R-I-N.
00:32:33
Speaker
He had reprimanded Fountain recently because Fountain showed up on the mess deck, like where they would eat in the mess hall, and He shows up in PT gear, suit shorts and a shirt, tennis shoes.
00:32:46
Speaker
For all of this, he ends up being sentenced to life in prison. He gets two years added to his sentence for aggravated assault for attempted to escape. That's how he comes to be in USP Marion, as opposed to the robberies that land Silverstein there.
00:33:05
Speaker
It's fascinating. Like how the switch just gets flipped or something? yeah Yeah, like something happens. And I just thought this was interesting from the perspective of like that's how like he lands there. But one of the weird things that I found is with Clayton Fountain, over the course of time, he's accused of multiple murders.
00:33:27
Speaker
He has... From what I can tell, five murders. So Staff Sergeant Wren, that's 1974 in the Philippines. He's accused of ah Charles Stewart's murder in 1979.
00:33:40
Speaker
That's while he's in prison, obviously. Same thing with Robert Chappelle, which we talked about. Raymond Smith in 1982, which we talked about. And Robert Hoffman in 1983. So Chappelle and Smith, he commits with Thomas Silverstein. He ends up, for Stewart's murder, he's convicted for manslaughter in that one. But he gets life in prison and all in the other ones.
00:34:05
Speaker
He's tagged as a serial killer. And then I noticed that Thomas a Silverstein is tagged as a serial killer.
00:34:17
Speaker
What you think of that? I mean, they I guess they meet the definition of, like, the FBI's definition, but I don't think that. I think that if they weren't... Incarcerated, there'd be no murders?
00:34:31
Speaker
I don't think that they set out to commit murder to begin with. I think it was a snapped and... like a lot of not dealing with emotions that exploded. Yeah. i And to me that gives them a completely different mindset than a serial killer.
00:34:50
Speaker
Yeah. I kind of think that way too. um So for him, Clayton Fountain, he has a heart attack and dies at age 48 at um federal penitentiary in Springfield, Missouri.
00:35:03
Speaker
That's July 12th of 2004. Yeah.
00:35:06
Speaker
Thomas Silverstein is going to live until May 11, 2019. He's going to be 67 years old when he dies at St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado. This is after being released for the first time, 36 years he spends in solitary confinement, and it ends at Admax and Florence.
Ethical Implications of Solitary Confinement
00:35:27
Speaker
So he dies due to complications from a heart surgery. And there's an email from Norman Carlson, who was the federal prison director of the BOP at the time. He had issued the total lockdown order ah on him.
00:35:43
Speaker
And he conceded that the treatment had been cruel. But without the death penalty having been an option at the time, he said that there was no viable alternative to dealing with Silverstein. And the the quote was, i don't know what else could have been done to prevent further violence by a man who had nothing to lose.
00:36:03
Speaker
Right. But you you said he got out, though. I got out. What you Was he out when he died? He is. he is. released no he's released to a hospital.
00:36:16
Speaker
okay. Just getting medical care. Yeah, he's getting medical care. Yeah. You know, I i thought about, I was like, that was a turnabout face, huh? But i I was thinking about it.
00:36:28
Speaker
I feel like it would be, especially given the duration, i feel like it would be beneficial to at least try and talk with them. Yeah. To get them to a point.
00:36:39
Speaker
Of course, Granted, you know, the person that's talking with them would constantly be at risk, right? Right, yeah. and But I feel like a realization that it's dumb to kill people, or, you know, i mean, I don't mean to make light of it, but you know what I mean? Like, just trying to reason with him.
00:37:06
Speaker
I feel like that might have helped, especially after feeling ah the solitary confinement for a little while. Yeah, I don't know how you, though. i don't know how you restore the humanity. You say, i know that you want to kill everybody right now because you've been sitting there enduring this.
00:37:27
Speaker
I want to help you get out of solitary confinement and restore your faith in the justice system, right?
Impact of Prison System on Inmate Behavior
00:37:36
Speaker
So let's do this. And like then you get a reaction, right? And it's probably not a great reaction at first.
00:37:42
Speaker
And then, see, a lot of times, the difference between somebody's reaction ah versus a an overt action is just how you're treating them, right? yeah oh and And in this case, I would say like just from the jump, like It started from the very beginning how they were treated, right?
00:38:07
Speaker
They reacted to things as opposed to thinking it through and saying, well, that would be really stupid for me to overreact to this, right? Yeah. And so they don't do it. And so I feel like...
00:38:20
Speaker
It would take some like modification, but you could get there, right? and then But then again, you know well, what's the point? Well, you know clearly nobody thought it was worthwhile because they were all like, let's just put him in solitary forever.
00:38:37
Speaker
And you know is is he a lost cause? Well, I mean, I guess it's possible that they're a lost cause, but- you know there has to be some sort of middle ground somewhere. Were they willing to do it at the time? No, I can't blame them because I'm not in the position of having to decide those types of things, right? Right.
00:39:02
Speaker
So I don't know. It's really easy for me to say that from where I'm sitting. I just would say like no human is a like a lost cause, but I feel like the key in those cases would have been to have them make...
00:39:17
Speaker
mindful like decisions before they act as opposed to just rage reacting. Yeah, I don't disagree with you at all. That's an interesting... That would be a much better approach. It would at least have been worth a shot.
00:39:33
Speaker
I feel like he was made an example out of. Yeah. And, you know, sort of rightfully so. I feel like prison guards should... not be killed any more than anybody else, right? I mean, you just shouldn't kill people.
00:39:48
Speaker
And it's really difficult when you're forced into that sort of balance, right? Because they couldn't, there was no death penalty and they had somebody who was willing to challenge everything at all times. But at at some point though, they had to have realized they broke him.
00:40:13
Speaker
I don't know that they ever did actually break him. Wow. I'm not saying he's unbreakable. I'm just saying, like, i think I think he had so little to lose because he lost it all behind the bars.
00:40:28
Speaker
Like, he didn't have anything in the world to anchor him in the first place. And he really wasn't there for anything more than the armed robberies to begin with. So his story is kind of tragic in that regard, too. Well, sure, but I guarantee you he wasn't the person he could have been otherwise. Oh, yeah, 100% agree with that. I mean, he's clearly a smart person, too.
00:40:51
Speaker
Correct. I agree. but And then I go back to like him talking about his mother saying... You know don't come home. um If you come home crying, I'm going to beat you again or whatever. Yeah.
00:41:05
Speaker
I mean, come on. That's terrible, right? Yeah. Well, I did want to say that like if you want to go down a rabbit hole this holiday season and you're looking for things to read, Clayton Fountain has a book about him. i can't recall the name of it right this second.
00:41:21
Speaker
But i remember that it has... um ah The Dead Men Walking, Sister Helen Prisian wrote the foreword for it. But it's like he becomes a monk along the way. He actually gets a degree in theology.
00:41:35
Speaker
um There are a lot of papers you can read about Thomas Silverstein. And I think there's a pretty good article called The Caged Life that mentions him quite a bit. i haven't read it in a minute, so I don't know the exact contents, but that was a good one. Pete Early, that i I mentioned him earlier on, he has The Hot House, and that is a book that's out. It talks about life inside Leavenworth Prison. It has some stories about Thomas Silverstein in it.
00:42:03
Speaker
um There's an NCJRS page on different riots that have occurred that you can kind of go down.
Conclusion: Riots' Historical Significance
00:42:09
Speaker
i don't think that we have that many more riots that are happening in terms of our – there might be one more in here somewhere.
00:42:16
Speaker
But I don't think we have many more riots in the holiday season, which is why I'm mentioning all of this. A New York Times article I pulled from December 87 by Robert Pair was called Behind the Prison Riots, Precautions Not Taken.
00:42:30
Speaker
And there was a really good write-up from Atlanta Journal-Constitution 2012. in two thousand and twelve I think it's the end of the year, 2012, by Mark Davis called 25 Years, Atlanta Prison Riots Live On in Captives' Memories.
00:42:46
Speaker
So there are different things to read about this story out there. um I find these two guys fascinating. I'm just going to throw this out there. They're not serial killers, unfortunately. i know that like there's like an argument about um like a technical definition. What they are is sort of enforcers for the Aryan Brotherhood.
00:43:06
Speaker
And that, in my opinion, and you correct me if you have a different thing going on here, that puts them more like in the category of hitmen or enforcers for me, so they can build up like a mass murder type thing, and I don't think of them as having the same motivations as serial killers.
00:43:25
Speaker
Yeah, I would have to agree with you. I i just i don't i i realize they meet the definition as far as... more than two people with a cooling off period in between. But I just, I don't see the mentality there. They're surviving as far as they're concerned. Yeah. but That's a key thing to remember is that this really is about survival.
00:43:44
Speaker
But the holiday season of 1987, having multiple prison riots going on, particularly involving these inmates that we're talking about was wild. And um apparently a lot of hostages were taken over the course of this period.
Final Thoughts & Listener Engagement
00:43:59
Speaker
They said there were 250 hostages taken at different times. They had a core group of 100 hostages, over 250 inmates. There was a death, and that was um Cuban inmate Jose Peña Perez. And at the end of this all, um they did make some changes in how they notified ah the Bureau of Prisons going forward of agreements like this that could affect this many people.
00:44:23
Speaker
But ultimately, it did not change anything for any of the Cubans who were to be deported in terms of how they were going to be deported. um There are a lot of good reads about that time period. It's interesting because I think parts of history are kind of repeating itself.
00:44:39
Speaker
um But I do think we've learned, maybe not for the better, how to deal with situations like this. And I do wonder, like, would a situation like this today be mainly, like, drone-oriented?
00:44:52
Speaker
Because I think about, like, them bringing in who I think are the, like, ODA guys out of Delta for this. But... the U S military is not allowed to get involved in things like this under posse comitatus. So that would not ever be allowed. You couldn't take military action. It has to be civilians, uh, solving the situation, so to speak.
00:45:15
Speaker
Don't you think it's interesting though that, um, so ultimately like when they ask, like, we need you to hand over, um Thomas Silverstein because he's just wandering around in there. Right. Yeah.
00:45:32
Speaker
And he's very dangerous. And, like, the Cubans drug him and hand him over. Yeah, that's what i read. I read that he had been drugged. And they were like, here you go.
00:45:43
Speaker
I mean, it seems to me like like there's no honor among thieves or whatever. I don't know what. Yeah, I mean, that of all the people that could have gotten their freedom, that would be a weird one to to read about.
00:45:59
Speaker
I will say the court documents on him too, by the way, if you want to read about like the details of this, there are tons of court documents available for Tom Silverstein. He's a very scary individual.
00:46:13
Speaker
i don't think I would have a problem handing him over. You're saying no honor among thieves, but I think that I think handing him over is probably a survival mechanism. Okay, maybe. Maybe they scared them into it. Yeah. You realize that you let this guy who has been ordered to have no human contact out?
00:46:35
Speaker
And then somebody had to get him. don't even see how they drugged him. Oh, there's no telling. He probably did it willingly thinking that like he would not be drugged enough that he couldn't attempt to escape.
00:46:47
Speaker
like like Just knowing like the that guy is like these guys are the ones who were pretending to be U.S. Marshals and stuff. Yeah. yeah there is a different That is a different time and a different type of prisoner.
00:47:03
Speaker
Oh, yeah, definitely. Well, that's all I got on this one for the holiday season. we will be back with more. yeah i don't think we're I don't think they're going to get any more lighthearted than as we go along, but I don't think there's going to be quite this much prison homicide in the next few.
00:47:24
Speaker
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00:47:35
Speaker
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00:49:40
Speaker
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00:49:58
Speaker
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