The Set-Up

by Paul Jorgenson

To: Mr. Don Ingwersen, Private Investigator, 1979 Seven Hills Dr., Hemet, CA 92545

Mr. Ingwersen:

I received your letter on October 20, 2003, and will do my best to describe the peculiar incident I witnessed here at the Federal Super Max, commonly called ADX, in Florence, Colorado, on November 16, 1998.

* * *

I'd like to begin about a week prior to the incident of your interest with another incident which lead to my unique view of the latter incident.

I had just happened to be gazing out my second story F-Block window into the little cement triangle yard below when a big black guy hit and knocked out Ronnie, a white guy. He hit Ronnie on the side of his head while Ronnie was looking elsewhere. Thus began the biggest fight I had ever seen in ADX.

The big man moved away at first, but when Ronnie just laid there inert he came back and was raising his foot to stomp the unconscious Ronnie when a big white guy named Scotty pushed him away. Those two then began fistfighting.

Another black guy moved toward the prone Ronnie and he too was intercepted by a white guy. Then another black guy did the same and the last white guy got into the fight with him. A fourth black guy got into it fighting the three standing white guys and Ronnie lay on the cement untouched after that first knockout blow.

The seven men fought on and on without interference from guards for about 15 minutes. This is very unusual for this joint and I think the screw assigned to watching the video surveillance system was goofing off. I could hear the cell block screws serving chow on the other side of the block so the one in the control center would have had his back to the fight while watching his comrades and pushing buttons for the opening and closing of electronic doors. Hearing an outside fight is impossible and I have missed several because I just wasn't looking out the window when they occurred.

Most fights are fast and furious in these max joints as the combatants assume that "a goon squad" of screws will be rushing them soon so they try to inflict maximum damage on their opponents before the inevitable interruption.

The goon squad here consists of all the non-essential staff from every department at the time of the incident. This includes education and medical departments and they number around 25. They come with stun guns, stun grenades, a big bore (maybe 8 gauge) shotgun that shoots a leather bag of lead shot and all the rest carry foot long clubs tipped with steel balls. There is one at the back of the squad with a video camera.

Back to the big fight I watched. They fought so long that they all wore themselves out and were walking around the blood-splattered area huffing and puffing and from the reading of lips and finger gesticulations I could tell they were cursing each other.

Meanwhile, Ronnie woke up. He sat up and wavered around then lay back down only this time he put himself in the International Red Cross rescue position. I figure Ronnie knew about that being the position a first aid person is supposed to place the wounded in, so he did it for himself.

The fighters, after a minute rest, went back at each other. There was an old guy trying to hold a young guy who was punching him. They all wound down again with sporadic punches. Then I heard someone knocking on a window from my range. That's a sound that travels well here and I saw a black guy who was taking a break from the combat look up to Leroy Elmore's window, as it was he who knocked. He gave Elmore a solidarity sign and resumed the fight.

A black guy who was sometimes mentally unstable, Elmore was upstairs on the same range as I was. I know this because he told me that he gets intense short periods of extreme paranoia from time to time. Also, he once accused me of smiling at him in a threatening manner. T.D. was there and helped me calm Elmore down with talk.

After about 15 minutes the cell block screws serving lunch saw the fight and pushed the panic button. Literally, they have panic buttons. Twenty-five screws flooded into the rec area with their weapons, cuffed and shackled everybody, even Ronnie, and began removing them, Ronnie on a stretcher.

The big guy who started this fight made a show of resistance after he was back-cuffed and ankle-shackled. He shouldered and head butted a screw, which brought over more screws and they beat him with their clubs. I figure the big guy did that to show the guards that he was the instigator of this. It's a form of ratting on oneself so as to be sure that there is always a separation order in his file and he will not find himself ever having to face Ronnie or the big white guy who is a bit more of a boxer than he.

F-Block was locked down for a few days after that rumble and during the lockdown the new warden, Michael V. Pugh, issued a memo to every prisoner in F-Block, about 60 of us. Unusual, because memos are normally posted on the electronic tv bulletin board, a closed circuit channel. But this one was a sheet of paper on which Pugh threatened that if there were any more fights he would lock down the entire prison for 30 days.

Now this is where I enter the picture. Instead of kicking back, minding my own business, I have this propensity to make jokes and that is how I got into this.

I wrote a letter to the unit manager, a Mr. Sosa, stating that the warden declared in his memo that we, the majority of prisoners, were going to be punished if any two prisoners fought, thereby implying that we should prevent any upcoming fights. So he must want me to organize the prisoners to not fight. If you will ok it, just initial this letter and send it back — I will begin organizing the prisoners Monday morning.

A little background info here: it is against the Bureau of Prisons rules for a prisoner to organize other prisoners for any purpose at all. So the joke is that Mr. Sosa cannot authorize me to persuade other prisoners not to fight, therefore, what's the sense of this memo threatening all of us with punishment?

There most assuredly will be another fight. I had written jokes like this to Mr. Sosa in the past — it is my attempt to humanize this government machine. All I expected was for him to stop by next time he was walking the ranges, give me back my letter and say something about irony and government rules.

He never got the letter. It was intercepted by a new counselor named R. Madison, who was nervous because of a talk he had recently heard from Warden Pugh. He was so nervous that he couldn't focus or understand what I had written. Two words stuck in his head, fight and organize. He showed the letter to a lieutenant who was just as hyped up as he was and not even as smart. The lieutenant saw the same two words and told Madison to write a shot (i.e., write an incident report which begins with moving a prisoner to the hole).

I didn't know that my letter had been intercepted and it was the morning of the day that this short lockdown was to end — November 16, 1998.

There are two outside rec yards, and I heard them taking a range of guys out to the one on the other side of this little cell block. Then I waited for them to take another range of guys out to the rec area I could plainly see. I knew it was not my range going out this morning because there is a schedule and we are not supposed to go until this afternoon. We all know the schedule. After the other rec yard had been occupied for 40 minutes, I realized that something was delaying the movement of men to this rec yard. Then two escort guards showed up at my door and informed me that they were here to take me to the hole. They didn't know why — I didn't know why. So they back-cuffed me and opened the door. They took me around the control center, through several doors that opened for us, up a corridor to the front door of the cell block. On the other side of this door are more corridors connecting the other cell blocks, chow hall, factory, admin offices, etc. Everything is connected inside. (Only K-block prisoners go to the chow hall and factory.)

When the solid steel front door was electronically opened, I saw 25 "goon squad" guards all suited up, i.e., they were dressed in complete hockey suits and motorcycle helmets with face shields. They all carried their weapons and were in a line leaning against the wall. As I came out with the two escort screws, the guard at the front of the line asked, "What's going on in there, Jorgenson?" I replied, "Nothing. Nothing's happening." This was mighty peculiar indeed to have 25 guards sweating in all this gear lined up in the hall outside of F-Block at 7:45am and nothing was happening.

Well, the warden had a plan and there would soon be something happening.

A half hour afterward I was pacing a cell floor in the hole, and in came T.D. Bingham, a guy called Little Man, and Leroy Elmore. They had brought those three guys from the range I was onto from the outside rec yard at a time when it was not their scheduled turn. Bingham is white, Little Man a Mexican and Elmore is the paranoid black man I mentioned earlier. These guys did not live one, two, three next to each other either. If they were doing a normal outside rec movement they would have begun at one end of the range and worked on down the line in order. Anyway, they put the three of them outside together and Elmore immediately punched Little Man. Bingham moved to get Elmore away from Little Man and then all three were mobbed by the 25-member goon squad that had been literally waiting in the wings. So there it is, they were set up.

I found out about that last part when I got back to the block about a week later. They didn't even tell anybody else to get ready to go to the yard, just picked out those three guys.

The counselor realized he had erred in writing a shot on me and asked that it be expunged from my record. In spite of that they still found me guilty of writing a "bad" joke and fired me from my orderly job and sentenced me to another year in ADX.

We were all locked down then for about two and a half months, except for individuals inside recreation. They moved some gang members to the A-range side of all the blocks where they only rec with their own and told them they were never going anywhere else.

Months later Leroy Elmore, who was on one of the A-ranges, was beat up bad enough by other black guys to be sent to the Bureau of Prisons hospital in Springfield, Missouri.

Occasional fistfights continue throughout the joint. New gangs replace the old.

We have a new warden now. He's better than Pugh.

More women are working here now, probably because the male guards who were in the national guard have been called up. Women are mostly a calming influence.

I no longer write jokes to prison staff.