Locked On

6

One hundred miles south of Denver, Colorado, on Highway 67, a 640-acre complex of buildings, towers, and fences sprawls across the flatlands in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains.

Its official name is the Florence Federal Correctional Complex, and its designation in the nomenclature of the Bureau of Prisons is United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, ADX Florence.

The Bureau of Prisons classifies its 114 prisons into five levels of security, and ADX Florence is alone at the top of this list. It is also in the Guinness World Records as the most secure prison in the world. It is America’s tightest “supermax” prison, where the most dangerous, the most deadly, and the hardest-to-hold prisoners are locked away.

Among the security measures are laser trip wires, motion detectors, night-vision-capable cameras, automatic doors and fences, guard dogs, and armed guards. No one has ever escaped from ADX Florence. It is unlikely anyone has even escaped a cell at ADX Florence.

But as difficult as it is to get out of “the Alcatraz of the Rockies,” it is perhaps equally hard to get in. There are fewer than 500 inmates at Florence, out of a total U.S. federal prison population of more than 210,000. Most regular federal prisoners could more easily find acceptance to Harvard than Florence.

Ninety percent of ADX Florence’s convicts are men who have been taken out of the population of other prisons because they pose a danger to others. The other ten percent are high-profile or special-risk inmates. They are housed, predominately, in general-population units that keep the inmates in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day but allow a level of nonphysical contact among the inmates and — via visits, mail, and phone calls — the outside world.

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, is in the general-population D Unit, along with Oklahoma City conspirator Terry Nichols, and Olympic bomber Eric Robert Rudolph.

Mexican drug lord Francisco “El Titi” Arellano is housed at Florence in the general population as well, as is Lucchese mob family underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, and Robert Philip Hanssen, the FBI traitor who sold American secrets to the Soviet Union and then Russia for two decades.

The H Unit is more restrictive, more solitary, and here inmates face SAMs, Special Administrative Measures — Bureau of Prisons parlance for the rules for housing the especially difficult cases. In all of the federal prison system, there are fewer than sixty inmates under SAMs, and more than forty of them are terrorists. Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber, spent many years in H until moving into D after good behavior and high-profile lawsuits. Omar Abdel-Rahman, “the Blind Sheikh,” is in H Unit, as is Zacarias Moussaoui, “the twentieth hijacker.” Ramzi Yousef, the leader of the cell that detonated the bomb in the World Trade Center in 1993, splits his time between H and even more restrictive quarters, depending on his shifting moods and behavior.

The men here are allowed just a one-hour visit to a one-man concrete recreation yard that looks like an empty swimming pool, and then only after undergoing a strip search and a walk in cuffs and leg irons while escorted by two guards.

One to hold the chains, the other to hold a baton.

Still, H Unit is not the highest-security wing. That is Z Unit, the “ultramax” disciplinary unit, where the bad boys go to think about their transgressions, should they violate any of their SAMs. Here there is no recreation and no visitors, and minimal contact with even the guards.

Remarkably, even Z Unit has a special section, where only the worst of the worst are sent. It is called Range 13, and at this moment only three prisoners are housed there.

Ramzi Yousef was put here for violations of his SAMs while in Z Unit, where he was staying due to violations of his SAMs in H Unit.

Tommy Silverstein, a sixty-year-old career inmate who was convicted of armed robbery in 1977, was put here long ago for killing two inmates and a prison guard at another maximum-security prison.

And a third prisoner, a male inmate who was brought here by masked FBI agents some months prior only after an existing Range 13 cell was specially sealed off from the rest of the ultramax subunit, making it even more restrictive. The new cell is known only to Range 13 personnel, and only two have seen the new resident’s face. He is guarded not by BOP officers but by a special ad hoc unit from the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, fully armed and armored paramilitary officers who observe their one prisoner through a glass partition twenty-four hours a day.

The HRT men know the inmate’s true identity, but they do not speak it. They, and the few Range 13 personnel who are aware of this odd arrangement at all, refer to the man behind the glass only as Register Number 09341-000.

Prisoner 09341-000 does not have the twelve-inch black-and-white television allowed most other inmates. He is not allowed out of the room to go to the concrete rec yard.

Ever.

Most inmates are allowed one fifteen-minute phone call a week, provided they pay for it out of their own trust fund account, a prison banking system.

Prisoner 09341-000 has neither telephone privileges nor a trust fund account.

He has neither visitor nor mail privileges, either, nor access to the psychological or educational services afforded the other prisoners.

His room, his entire world, is eighty-four square feet, seven feet by twelve feet. The bed, the desk, and the immovable stool in front of the desk are poured concrete, and other than the toilet-sink combo designed to shut off automatically if intentionally plugged, there are no other furnishings in the cell.

A four-inch-wide window on the back wall of the cell has been bricked over so that the inmate inside has neither a view to the outside nor any natural light.

Prisoner 09341-000 is the most solitary prisoner in America, perhaps the world.

He is Saif Rahman Yasin, the Emir. The leader of the Umayyad Revolutionary Council, and the terrorist mastermind responsible for the deaths of hundreds in a series of attacks on America and other Western nations, and also the perpetrator of an attack on the West that easily could have killed one hundred times that number.

The Emir climbed up from his prayer rug after his morning salat and sat back on the thin mattress on his concrete bed. He checked the plain white calendar on his desk by his left elbow, and saw that today was Tuesday. The calendar had been given to him so that he could hand his laundry out through the electric-operated steel hatch for cleaning at the proper times. Tuesday, Yasin knew, was the day his wool blanket needed to go through the hatch to be cleaned. Dutifully he rolled it into a tight ball, walked past his steel one-piece toilet-and-sink unit, took another step that moved him past a shower that worked on a timer so that he would not be able to cover the drain and flood his cell.

One more step brought him to the window with the hatch. There, two men in black uniforms, black body armor, and black ski masks stared blankly through the Plexiglas back at him. On their chests, MP5 sub-guns hung at the ready.

They wore no badges or insignia at all.

Only their eyes were visible.

The Emir held their gazes, one after the other, for a long moment, his face not more than two feet from theirs, though both men were several inches taller. All three sets of eyes broadcast hatred and malevolence. One of the masked men must have said something on the other side of the soundproof glass, because two other masked and armed men sitting at a desk in the back of the viewing room turned their heads toward their prisoner, and one flipped a switch on a console. A loud beep rang out in the Emir’s cell, and then the small access hatch opened below the window. The Emir ignored it, continued the staring contest with his guards. After a few seconds he heard another beep, and then the amplified voice of the man at the desk came from a speaker recessed in the ceiling above the Emir’s bed.

The masked guard spoke English. “Put your blanket in the hatch.”

The Emir did not move.

Again, “Put your blanket in the hatch.”

Nothing from the prisoner.

“Last chance.”

Now Yasin complied. He had made a small show of resistance, and here that was a victory. The men that had held him in those first weeks after his capture were long gone, and Yasin had been testing the fervency and resolve of his captors ever since. He nodded slowly, dropped his blanket into the hatch, and then the hatch shut. On the other side, one of the two guards close to the window retrieved it, opened it up and looked it over, and then walked toward the laundry basket. He walked past the basket and tossed the wool blanket into a plastic garbage can.

The man at the desk spoke into the microphone again: “You just lost your blanket, 09341. Keep testing us, asshole. We love this game, and we can play it each and every fuckin’ day.” The microphone switched off with a loud click, and the big guard returned to the glass to shoulder up next to his partner. Together they stood as still as stones, staring through the eyeholes in their masks at the man on the other side of the window.

The Emir turned away and returned to his concrete bed.

He would miss that blanket.