America's Most Dangerous Prisoner

Tommy Silverstein - one of the leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang in the United States - killed three men behind bars in the space of two years, one of whom was a prison guard. The federal Bureau of Prisons reacted by locking him up in solitary for decades. 20 years ago I wrote to Silverstein in a supermax prison. Find out what happened next in this episode, in which I tell the full story of "Terrible Tommy" Silverstein and the Aryan Brotherhood.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello and welcome back to the Total Crime Podcast. This is episode seven. And today it's all about prisons in the United States. And in particular a man who was known as America's most dangerous prisoner right up until his death in twenty nineteen. His name was Tommy Silverstein, and in 2001, when I was uh working for the BBC, I wrote an article about him and spoke to several people who knew him. And five years later I wrote a letter to him. But I'm gonna go into that in a bit more detail later. Firstly, let's give you a bit of context about prisons in the US and how they differ, especially from British jails. So most US prisons are strictly segregated, not by any uh Jim Crow laws, of course, but by an invisible system of racial separation which is condoned and even encouraged by the authorities, probably because it allows them to operate without daily violence. Um African American, Latino and white inmates will generally keep to their own and will defer to the most powerful gangs in whichever prison they are in. I mean it's difficult to imagine, you know, if you're like me, uh, you know, a white guy with n without a racist bone in his body to be sent to prison and told, you know, you have to stick with the white guys, you can't uh fraternize with any other race and um you know, ha you have to hang out with people who've got, you know, swastika tattoos all over them. It's difficult to imagine, but you know. So who are these gangs? Well, they're not the same gangs as you get on the streets of American cities, so there's no bloods and crips. One of the most uh powerful African American gangs in the prison system is probably the DC blacks, who, as their name suggests, originated in Washington DC, but now have members from all over the country. Then there are the black gangster disciples who are originally from Chicago and the black guerrilla family. The biggest Latino gang is the Mexican Mafia or La M, which is uh simply Spanish for the M, but there are many others including La Nuestra Familia, Barrio Azteca, the Texas Syndicate and forgive me cannibalizing Spanish, but Los Hermanos de Pistoleros Latinos, which translates as the Brotherhood of Latino gunmen. The biggest white prison gang is the Aryan Brotherhood, or AB. And before I go on, I want to say the obvious I'm not a racist or a white supremacist, and in this podcast I am definitely not trying to glamorize the Aryan Brotherhood or Tommy Silverstein, who was one of their leaders. There are other white gangs, the Nazi low riders, the dirty white boys, Dead Man Incorporated, and the two one one crew who are mainly based in Colorado, but the Aryan Brotherhood and their various affiliates have long been the most dominant. Members of the AB will often wear a shamrock tattoo, sometimes along with swastikas or other neo Nazi paraphernalia. And yes, the AB leadership really does believe in the supremacy of the white race and will have no truck with inmates who fraternize with blacks or Latinos. Later on in this podcast I'm gonna come back to the A B. Um but for now I want to focus on Tommy Silverstein, who was one of the A B's leaders in the nineteen seventies and eighties. In the summer of two thousand one I became interested in Silverstein after reading a fantastic book by Pete Early. Early is a great nonfiction writer, um, and I'd also recommend his books Super Casino, which is about how corporations eased out the mafia and took over Las Vegas, and Witseck, which is about the witness protection program in America. Uh but the book which features Silverstein is called The Hot House and it actually focuses on Leavenworth, a federal pedrit penitentiary in Kansas. Now Silverstein uh spent a a a period there in the uh in the seventies and then after various events which I'm gonna come to, he was uh moved back there and housed in a specially designed c cage in the basement with the lights on twenty four hours a day, a bit like Hannibal Lecter in in Silence of the Lambs. Um but what had Silverstone done to deserve such treatment? Well, he was born and brought up in a middle class neighborhood of Long Beach, California, but drifted into a life of crime in the mid seventies and spent a short spell inside the notorious San Quentin prison for arm robbery. Now I visited uh San Quentin in two thousand three, but now is not the time to go into that story. Uh and at this point I want to recommend another podcaster who did a two parter about Silverstein earlier this year. Bloody Angola is the name of it, and it's produced by Jim Chapman, who comes from Louisiana and has a delicious uh southern accent which I could listen to all day. Uh now the name of the podcast is nothing to do with the African country, it's actually about the history of the Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, which is a huge prison farm which replaced a uh slavery era plantation or was was uh sort of took over that um many years ago. But uh Jim Chapman has branched out and he recently did an episode about Silverstein. And I'm gonna play you a little clip here where he talks about Tommy's final run of crimes on the outside, which would turn out to be his last taste of freedom.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

In nineteen seventy-five, his father, Thomas Conway and his cousin, along with Silverstein, they lost three armed robberies. And they made about eleven thousand dollars in these robberies combined. That's about eighty-five thousand dollars in today's combination. This is nineteen seventy seven, fifteen years.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

So in nineteen seventy-seven uh Silverstein was jailed on a federal charge of armed robbery and sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. And he soon joined the Aryan Brotherhood, who were very powerful there. Uh he would later be transferred to Marion, a high security federal penitentiary in Illinois, where Mafiadon John Gotti would later serve much of his sentence. And by the early nineteen eighties, Silverstein was one of the AB's leaders in Marion, and on the twenty second of november nineteen eighty-one, he killed Robert Chappell, uh, an African American inmate who belonged to the DC Blacks. The following year, the leader of the DC Blacks, Raymond Cadillac Smith, was transferred to Marion and was soon bragging that he was gonna kill Silverstein. Uh I'm gonna quote you what Silverstein told Pete Early about what happened next. Silverstein's Silverstein said, I tried to tell Cadillac that I didn't kill Chappelle, but he didn't believe me and he bragged that he was gonna kill me. 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. On the sixth of September nineteen eighty two, Smith tried to stab Silverstein Silverstein through the bars of his cell. When prison guards intervened, the shank disappeared and both denied anything had happened and claimed they'd been shooting the breeze about an F NFL game. Silverstein said I hated Smith, but I'm no rat, and I wasn't gonna tell on him. I was gonna take care of it myself. But n but before he could, Cadillac came at him again. This time Cadillac had made a zip gun using a piece of pipe crammed with sulphur match heads, but his attempt to shoot Silverstein with it failed, and he was taken to an isolation cell for a few days as punishment. But he was soon back into the general prison population, and on the twenty seventh of September nineteen eighty two, it was Silverstein's turn. Pete Early again describes what happens. At seven thirty PM he put his plan into action by asking the guards for permission to exercise with his buddy Clayton Fountain. Both men were let out of their cells and placed inside a screened recreation cage that ran along the tier. Ten minutes later, guards opened the door in Cadillac Smith's cell because it was his turn to walk down the tier and take a shower. When Smith was showering, Fountain and Silverstein used a piece of hacksaw blade to cut through the wire screen on the exercise cage. And as Smith stepped out of the shower, Fountain slipped through the hole in the screen, ran down the tier and with his shank in hand. Silverstein claimed Cadillac had his own knife hidden under a towel, and as Fountain approached him, he pulled it out and lunged forward, stabbing Fountain in the chest. Silverstein then tackled Cadillac, and the pair began wrestling for possession of the blade. Fountain, who was only slightly wounded, then joined in, and they both out overpowered Cadillac. Silverstein and Fountain then began stabbing Cadillac and did not let up until he was dead. An autopsy later found he had been knifed sixty-seven times. But what happens next is even more horrific. Early writes When Silverstein and Fountain finished, they grabbed his arms and dragged him up and down the tier, so that the un other inmates, still locked in their cells, could see the bloody corpse. A few white inmates cheered and yelled racial slurs. Then the two killers surrendered. Now, after his murder, Silverstein was placed in a control unit at Marion, and there he came under the authority of the chief guard, a man called Merle Klutz. It appeared Klutz tried to break Silverstein, or maybe he was trying to humiliate him, as he would continually have his cell searched and report him for numerous infractions of the prison rules. Silverstein would later claim that Klutz would also vandalize his artwork. Now, Tommy Silverstein was a very talented artist, and you can find some of his pencil drawings on Pete Early's website or just by Googling Tommy Silverstein art. Klutz would scribble on them and joke, I did a bit of work on your painting. John Greshner, a convicted killer and fellow A B member, told Early I remember hearing Klutz telling Tommy, Hey, I'm running this shit. You ain't running it. You're a fucking prisoner. I'm the cop. Who the fuck do you think you are? On the twenty second of October nineteen eighty three, Silverstein answered that question in brutal, bloodthirsty fashion. It was all pre-planned. As he was being led back to his cell from an exercise cage, Silverstein stopped briefly by the cell of another A B member, Randy Gometz. Suddenly, Gometz produced a key he had somehow obtained, leaned through the bars of his cell, and unlocked Silverstein's handcuffs. Then rapidly, Sil Silverstein reached through the bars, pulled out a shank, which Gometz had tucked into his waistband. Wheeling around, Silverstein ran down the landing towards Klutz, who raised his arms instinctively, leaving his stomach exposed. Silverstein stabbed the shank into his guts. Then as as Klutz's arms came down to protect his torso, Silverstein stabbed him over and over again. Here is Silverstein talking to Pete Early about the killing of Merle Klutz. Now the sound is not great, so I'll uh let you listen a bit, and then I will clarify some of what Silverstein says in case you can't hear it. All I can see is his hands moving and me stabbing him and everything else is a blank. He's basically, you know, describing going into a complete frenzy. Uh he then describes how two other prison guards came to the aid of Klutz and one of them smashed Silverstein over the head with a nightstick, or he calls it a club before they drag him into the office and handcuff him before the FBI arrived. And Silverstein also said I felt a huge weight had been lifted off me. Uh he's basically saying that he was happy that Klutz Klutz was finally dead. Um but he was to pay a very heavy price for the killing of Klutz, and it was definitely not worth that sickening sense of elation he felt after the brutal murder of a prison guard. And now Silverstone was in initially moved to an isolation cell in Atlanta, but after a prison riot by Cuban inmates there in nineteen eighty seven, he was moved back to Leavenworth. Leavenworth was built in the nineteen thirties to cope with the boom in robbery and other crimes which came hand in hand with the Great Depression. In nineteen thirty, Carl Pansram, a serial killer, was hanged in the prison yard of at uh Leavenworth for murdering a guard. When they put the noose around his neck, Panzram spat in the executioner's face and said, I wish mankind all had one neck so I could choke it. That was a nice guy. Um now in nineteen eighty seven Silverstein was moved to Lev Leavenworth and like I say, he was placed in this specially designed cell deep in the bowels of the prison with the lights on twenty four hours a day. In August two thousand one, when I wrote my first article about Silverstein, he had been in solitary component at uh Leavenworth for fourteen years. I interviewed Pete Early over the phone for that article, and he told me of his relationship with Silverstein. Sadly I don't have any audio of the interview, but I still have my notebooks where I took it all down in shorthand, so I'm gonna I'm gonna read from them. Pete Early told me we become friends. I'm not saying he's innocent, but he's smart, articulate, and has some interesting views. He said there's no reason for them to keep the lights on twenty four hours a day. That's just done out of spite. They say it's so the cameras will work. There's technology in place which makes a nonsense of that. Early told me there were two very different views of S Silverstein within the pol prison system. He said it has reached the point where the white inmates consider him a saint or a martyr on a par with Nelson Mandela, while the guards consider him to be the devil incarner. While researching my article that at the time, I I managed to get in touch with a guy called Ted Sellers, who was a black former inmate who lived in Detroit, but had met Silverstein during his time in jail and he told me he's not as bad as they portray. Sure he's dangerous if they push into the wall, but there were some dirty rotten guards at Marion. Sellers said they would purposely screw you around. You're dealing with a person locked up twenty-three hours a day. Of course he's got a short fuse. Catherine Morton, who had become Silverstein's pen pal, told me at the end of the day, he's a human being. He's a vi victim of a system which brutalizes people. Pete Early himself told me what the Brewer Prison should do is move him to a supermax such as the one in Florence, Colorado, and give him an incentive to behave. They need to make him less famous. Well, in two thousand and five that's exactly what they did, uh when Leavenworth was downgraded to a medium security prison, Silverstein was moved to Florence, uh to the Super Supermax, but his conditions didn't improve and his fame or infamy uh didn't go down either. The Supermax at Florence is the most secure prison in the United States and has been described as the Alcatraz of the Rockies. Among the inmates it's uh has housed or does house are the shoe bomber, Richard Reed, the Boston Marathon Bomber and until his death in twenty twenty three the Yuna bomber, Ted Kaczy. Now I wrote another article in two thousand two about the Aryan Brotherhood after a massive operation by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which led to them indicting dozens of A B members. In in July two thousand six, four senior A B members, um who included a guy called Barry the Baron Mills and Tyler the Hulk Bingham were found guilty of murder, conspiracy and racketeering. I was preparing another article about the A B and I decided to try and write to Silverstein. But I made quite a stupid mistake. I mean this was twenty years ago, but even so I'm quite embarrassed now at my naivety. As well as sending a letter to Silverstein, I included a draft of the article I proposed to write, which contained details about the crimes committed by the uh Aryan Brotherhood and people like Barry the Baron Mills, someone Silverstein would have known well. So with the wisdom of hindsight, it's not surprising that I got no reply from Silverstein, but instead I got the article returned to me, along with a letter from Ronnie Wiley, who was the warden at Florence Supermax. The warden, if you're not familiar with uh US prisons and prison movies, is the equivalent of the governor in a British jail. Uh Mr Wiley quoted Bureau of Prisons Programme Statement five two six six point one oh incoming publications, which says the warden may reject a publication if it is determined detrimental to the security, good order or discipline of the institution, or it may facilitate criminal activity. He went on to say the publication has been rejected because the reference page pages contain information on gang to activity. Due to the reason cited, the above named publication is not suited for introduction into a correctional facility. Basically, they didn't want Silverstein knowing anything about the A B or its activities uh in prison, even though he was being held in solitary confinement, had had real no way of stirring up the rest of the prison population. The letter went on to tell me of my rights to appeal, but I never bothered. Seven years later, in twenty thirteen, law students from the University of Colorado helped Silverstein file a lawsuit against the Bureau Bureau of Pris in a bid to end his solitary confinement. In the second part of Jim Chapman's Bloody Angola podcast, which I highly recommend. Recommend. He reads out in full the long and self pitying declaration which Terrible Tommy wrote in support of his claim against the Bureau of Prisons. I will just read out two of the best bits. Silverson wrote On the day I arrived at Leavenworth, Associate Warden Smith visited my cell. Smith had been correctional officer Klutz's friend. He was now in charge of my confinement. He told me that he was going to do all he could to prevent me from seeing the light of day and that I deserved everything I was getting. Later he talks about his conditions in the Supermax prison. My cell is approximately eighty seven feet eighty seven square feet and contains a concrete bed, concrete desk, shower, sink and toilet. My cell is separated from the hallway by two doors, one of which is solid steel. There is very little natural light in my cell. I'm usually confined to my cell for twenty two hours a day, five days a week, and twenty four hours a day, the other two days of the week. I take all of my meals alone in my cell. Well the court rejected Silverstein's arguments that he maintained no danger and should be moved out of solitary. And in their ruling in twenty fourteen there's an interesting line in which they say while Mr Silverstein claimed or perceived he is no longer a member of the gang, the Bureau of Prisons expert explained such a claim or perception is unrealistic because Aryan Brotherhood members are not allowed to leave the gang. That is indeed the case, uh blood in, blood out goes the A B motto. And indeed, five years later, Tommy Silverstein died aged sixty-seven. He had spent um a total of thirty six years in solitary. Norman Carlson, the former director of the Bureau of Prisons, later admitted that his treatment had been somewhat akin to torture, but he said I don't know what else could have been done to prevent further violence by a man who had nothing to lose. So what happened to the A B? Well, in twenty in 2002 there was that massive prosecution which accused the A B of crimes dating back decades. It included the murder in 1979 of John Marzloff in prison in Atlanta for allegedly cheating Silverstein in a drug deal. The indictment also stated that New York Mafia boss John Gotti had once offered to pay A B members a bounty for the murder of a guy called Walter Johnson, an inmate at the Marion Penitentiary. But anyway, Byron the Baron Mills and Tyler the Hulk Bingham got long prison sentences and another A B leader, Big Al Benton, became a prosecution witness, a snitch. Terry Reerich, an investigator who worked for Mills' defence team, who I interviewed in 2006, told me he believed the A B had ceased to be a power long before the 2002 raids. He said the A B was like a flashy, violent streak across the prison sky between 1981 and 1989. They were responsible for a number of spectacular murders, but the most murder most recent murder on the indictment was ten years ago, that is 1996. After Mills and Bingham were indicted, I interviewed a guy called Tom Rosek, a spokesman for the US Attorney's Office in Central California, who said we have cut the head off the snake, but the snake has a habit of growing a new head. And indeed the A B still exists in US prisons, but appears to be a lot weaker than it was in the eighties and nineties. The Aryan Brotherhood remains a powerful brand name though, both in and out of prison. In 2009, a member of the Arian Brotherhood of Mississippi, Michael Skip Hudson, was murdered by two other A B members, apparently because he owed money from a drug deal. In 2012, 34 members of the Arian Brotherhood of Texas were indicted by a grand jury in Houston, and then in 2021, the Universal Aryan Brotherhood, based in Oklahoma, was smashed by the feds. The most recent case involved the Aryan Brotherhood. The most recent case involving the Arian Brotherhood concluded in May 2025. Three members from California were convicted of a RECO conspiracy that included multiple murders, drug trafficking, fraud, and robbery. Matthew Galliotti, head of the Department of Justice's criminal division, said afterwards The convicted defendants led a notorious prison gang that committed ruthless murders, widespread methamphetamine trafficking, and perpetuated a culture of mayhem, fear and disorder within the prison system that bled into the outside world. So I think it's safe to say the Aryan Brotherhood is still a force in American prisons. Thanks for listening, and I'll hope you'll come back next week for the next episode of the Total Crime Podcast.