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United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum
Facility (ADX)
Florence, Colorado
1605 18 April 2007
J. William Leon, warden of the Florence ADMAX facility, was a large (six-three, 225 pounds) red-haired man known behind his back to his staff as “Willy the Lion” or sometimes simply as “the Lion.”
He was generally recognized within the federal prison community as the most senior of all prison wardens. In the United States there were 114 federal incarceration facilities, which the Federal Bureau of Prisons, part of the Department of Justice, called “institutions.”
Leon’s status as the most senior warden was de facto, if not de jure. He ran Florence ADMAX. That said it all.
He was de jure subordinate to a number of people in the Bureau of Prisons bureaucratic hierarchy but de facto answered only to Harold M. Waters, the director of the Bureau of Prisons. Howard Kennedy had begun his executive career working under Leon when Leon had been the assistant warden of Federal Correctional Institution, Allenwood, in Montgomery, Pennsylvania. He often said that everything valuable that he had learned about the incarceration business he had learned from Willy the Lion, and that Willy the Lion was the best warden in the bureau. Period.
Leon had joined the federal prison system as a trainee shortly after graduating from college, and the first time he had ever been inside a prison was the day he reported for work. He had needed a job, and his decision to join the incarceration profession had almost been as a lark—“What have I got to lose? It might be interesting.”
Ten years into his career—then a captain at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas—Leon had been offered a chance to move into the administrative side of the bureau—in other words, out of working with prisoners and into an office in Washington. A bright future was foreseen for him, and everybody thought he had made a mistake when he turned down the job offer.
He had decided—this time not impulsively—that he liked working with prisoners a good deal more than he would have liked working at a desk in the Bureau of Prisons headquarters in Washington.
What he meant by “working with prisoners” was the challenge he faced making them behave. The Lion had believed that the question of whether anyone belonged in prison or not had been decided in the courtroom and was none of a warden’s business. And he quickly decided that rehabilitation was mostly bullshit.
Willy the Lion had concluded that a warden’s business was confining a prisoner in decent conditions in such circumstances that he (or she) did not pose problems for the guards, fellow prisoners, or him- or herself. And the way to accomplish this was simple: Establish rules that were fair and made sense, and then see that they were obeyed.
His rise through the warden hierarchy was slow at first, but grew quickly as his superiors came to realize that he was not only good at running a prison, but even better at straightening out a prison in trouble. And trouble in prisons was not caused only by the inmates; the staff also contributed. Willy the Lion earned the reputation among them of being fair and reasonable, but not a man to cross.
No one was surprised when the Lion was first named assistant warden at Florence ADMAX facility, or a year later when he was named warden, after it had proved too much to handle for its first warden.
Once he took over, there had been no further problems. Period.
And shortly after that happened, he demonstrated that he had another skill, one that no one suspected, and one that surprised even him.
Willy the Lion could handle the press . . . from the handwringers convinced that the Bureau of Prisons spent most of its time figuring out ways to violate the civil rights of the prison population to the heavy hitters from the television news networks who had long known that covering bloody prison riots attracted as many millions of viewers as did the sexual escapades of movie stars and politicians.
Once Willy the Lion’s skill at handling the press became known to the upper brass of the Bureau of Prisons, whenever there was trouble—a riot or allegations of guard brutality or corruption—that was likely to draw the national press to the gates of a prison, when the Fourth Estate showed up they very often found that Willy the Lion,
the warden of the toughest prison in the world, had “coincidentally” been there when the trouble started.
Willy the Lion was a story by himself, so they dealt with him, and he was truthful with them, and they learned that he neither coddled the prison population nor made any effort at all to cover up malfeasance on the part of the warden or his guards.
With rare exceptions, the press left the site of the story convinced that the Federal Bureau of Prisons had one hell of a tough job to do, and most of the time did it well, and in those few instances where somebody fucked up, there were a large number of people—like Willy the Lion—standing ready to make things right.
Director of the Bureau of Prisons Harold M. Waters sometimes thought that Willy the Lion’s public relations role was almost as important as his proven skill at running Florence ADMAX.
No one—not even Director Waters—knew that for the past nine months Willy had a personal problem with one of the prisoners in Florence ADMAX, one Félix Abrego, register number 97593-655.
A federal court in Houston, Texas, had convicted Abrego on three counts of first-degree murder. The victims were all special agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration. And one of the three was Willy the Lion’s eldest sister’s youngest boy, Clarence, who had been twenty-two years old and on the job just over a year when Félix Abrego had stood over him and fired four shots into the groin area of his body, and then a fifth shot into his face.
Abrego had been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The sentencing investigation had turned up his record as a hit man for the Mexican drug cartels and that he had been sent to Florence ADMAX from the Federal Detention Center, Houston, immediately after his trial.
This caused Willy the Lion for the first time in his adult life to consciously violate the regulations—which of course have the force and effect of law—of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
For obvious reasons, a warden should not be in charge of the incarceration of a prisoner to whom he is related, or who has committed a crime against the warden, or a member of the warden’s family.
Ordinarily this poses no problem. Such a prisoner is assigned to a prison where the warden has never heard of him.
The problem here for Willy the Lion was that if ever anybody deserved to spend twenty-three hours of every day for the rest of his life in a cell furnished with a poured-concrete bed, a sink and toilet, a television screen providing educational and religious channels only, and windows that permitted a limited view of the sky, it was the miserable Mexican sonofabitch who had murdered Clarence.
