Speaker A
Ninety miles south of Denver, off Colorado Highway 67, there is a building that was designed to be forgotten.
A detailed look inside ADX Florence, the federal supermax prison housing the most dangerous inmates, through stories of seven prisoners.
Key Takeaways
- ADX Florence is reserved for inmates deemed uncontrollable in other federal prisons.
- The prison's design enforces near-total isolation and sensory deprivation.
- Only a few inmates have ever been released after long stays at ADX.
- The psychological toll on inmates is severe, often leading to self-mutilation and mental health crises.
- The facility prioritizes control and security over rehabilitation.
What the video covers
- ADX Florence is a federal supermax prison in Colorado designed to hold the most dangerous inmates who cannot be managed elsewhere.
- The prison's cells are small, concrete, and highly restrictive, with 23 hours of solitary confinement and minimal human contact.
- Travis Dusenbury, a career inmate who assaulted a correctional officer, is the only one on the list who was released and shared his experience.
- The prison houses terrorists, spies, cartel bosses, gang leaders, serial killers, and violent repeat offenders.
- Inmates experience extreme isolation, sensory deprivation, and psychological effects such as claustrophobia and self-harm.
- Jimmy Sabatino, a con man connected to the Gambino crime family, voluntarily requested transfer to ADX.
- The facility uses a step-down program to gradually increase privileges for inmates who comply with rules.
- The prison environment is described as a 'clean version of hell' and is not designed for rehabilitation.
- The video highlights the brutal realities of life inside ADX through detailed inmate stories and conditions.
- ADX Florence holds about 400 men under extreme security measures including multiple fences, gun towers, razor wire, and attack dogs.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to ADX Florence and its design
- 02:05Types of inmates held at ADX Florence
- 04:19Life inside the cells and daily schedule
- 06:43Travis Dusenbury’s story and release
- 09:07Jimmy Sabatino’s background and request to transfer
- 11:59Inmate conditions and psychological impact
- 20:08Notable inmate stories and prison violence
- 25:08Conclusion: The reality of ADX Florence today
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
[clears throat] It sits low against the foothills, the color of the dirt around it.
Speaker A
From the road, you would not know what it is. There is no sign that says Supermax.
Speaker A
There is a fence, then another fence, then 12 gun towers, then a stretch of razor wire and pressure sensors and attack dogs. And then, a set of concrete buildings that the Federal Bureau of Prisons refers to in its paperwork as
Speaker A
the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility. Everyone else calls it ADX Florence, or just the ADX, or if they're being dramatic, the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
Speaker A
It opened in November of 1994. It holds somewhere around 400 men. Every one of them has already been through the rest of the federal system, and the rest of the federal system has decided it cannot hold them.
Speaker A
That is the only entrance requirement. You don't get sent to ADX for what you did on the outside. You get sent to ADX for what you did inside another prison, or for what the government believes you would do given a cellmate, a yard, a
Speaker A
cafeteria, a phone. The cells are 7 ft by 12. Everything in them is poured concrete. The bed, the desk, the stool, the sink.
Speaker A
There is a window 4 in wide, angled so that the man inside can see a sliver of sky, but never the ground. Never a fence line, never a landmark that would tell him where in the complex he is.
Speaker A
There are 1,400 remote-controlled steel doors. There is no mess hall. Meals come through a slot.
Speaker A
Recreation is 1 hour in a concrete pit or a wire cage, alone. Twenty-three hours a day, the door stays shut.
Speaker A
A former warden, Robert Hood, once described it in a single sentence. He said it was not built for rehabilitation. He said it was a clean version of hell.
Speaker A
The men inside are terrorists, spies, cartel bosses, gang founders, serial killers, and a small number of ordinary prisoners who simply would not stop hurting people.
Speaker A
Some of them will die there. A few, a very few, will walk out. These are seven of them.
Speaker A
Not the seven most famous, the seven whose stories tell you what this place actually is.
Speaker A
Number seven, Travis Dusenbury. We start with the one who got out because you need to understand the building before you can understand the men. And Travis Dusenbury is the only one on this list who came back to describe it. Dusenbury
Speaker A
is from Lexington, North Carolina, a furniture town in the middle of the state. The kind of place that had good jobs once and fewer of them every year after. He was not a kingpin, he was not a killer, he was a career federal
Speaker A
inmate. The sort of man who cycles through medium and high security penitentiaries on a string of sentences that individually mean very little and collectively mean a life. In 2005, at a federal prison in Florida, Dusenbury assaulted a correctional officer. That
Speaker A
is the entire crime. The Bureau of Prisons does not publish the details and Dusenbury has never dressed it up. There was an officer, there was an assault, and there was a decision made somewhere in an office in Washington that Travis
Speaker A
Dusenbury was no longer a general population problem. He was a control problem. He was transferred to Florence.
Speaker A
He was in his early 30s. Here is what he described years later to the Marshall Project and to Vice. The transport.
Speaker A
Shackled at the wrists, the waist, and the ankles. A bus, then a van, then a set of doors that opened electronically, one at a time, so that at no point was any door in front of him open at the
Speaker A
same time as the door behind him. The cell. All concrete. The walls, the floor, the desk, the sink, the bed. A thin mattress on a slab. A steel toilet.
Speaker A
A shower on a timer so that a man could not flood the unit. And the window. Four inches wide, set deep into the wall at an angle. He said you could not see anything. Not a highway in the distance.
Speaker A
Not the sky. You knew from the minute you arrived that you would not see any of that for years. The schedule. Twenty-three hours in the cell. One hour, sometimes two, in an outdoor recreation cage. A fenced pen inside a concrete yard. With
Speaker A
other cages around it. Other men in those cages. And fencing between them so tight that the most physical contact possible was what Dusenbury called a finger handshake. Two fingertips pressed through the mesh. The silence. Each cell has two doors. A barred inner door and a
Speaker A
solid steel outer door. When both are closed, the cell is effectively soundproof. Dusenbury said he'd been locked up in some isolated rural places.
Speaker A
But at those places at least, he could always see something living. At ADX, he said, there was nothing living. Not so much as a blade of grass.
Speaker A
He said the claustrophobia built slowly. And then, it was all there was. He said it got to the point where anything that changed, anything at all, a snowflake drifting past the 4-in slit, became the event of the week.
Speaker A
There is a name for what that does to people. The Bureau of Prisons does not use it.
Speaker A
But in 2012, 11 ADX inmates sued the Bureau. And the lawsuit put into the public record what the building had been doing for 18 years.
Speaker A
Men who had cut off their own earlobes. Men who had chewed through their own fingers.
Speaker A
One inmate, Jack Powers, sent to ADX after an escape, who mutilated himself so many times and so severely that the details are difficult to read in a court filing, let alone say aloud. Dusenbury watched that happen to other men. He did
Speaker A
not let it happen to him. He did his 10 years, most of it in the so-called general population units, which at ADX means the least restrictive tier of the most restrictive prison in America. And he worked his way down through the
Speaker A
step-down program, the phase system that lets a man earn slightly more contact, slightly more time out of the cell, slightly more of the things that the rest of us don't think of as privileges.
Speaker A
And then, after 10 years, he was transferred out. And then, he was released. He went back to North Carolina. In 2019, he sat down with a reporter and told the story you just heard. He was 46 years old. He is, as far as anyone can tell,
Speaker A
one of a small handful of men in the prison's history who has spent a full decade there and then walked back into the world to talk about it.
Speaker A
Travis Dusenbury is not dangerous in the way the rest of this list is dangerous. He is here because he is the control group. He is what the building does to an ordinary man who made one violent mistake in a Florida prison.
Speaker A
Every other man on this list did far worse. Keep his 4-in window in mind. Everyone that follows is looking through it.
Speaker A
Number six, Jimmy Sabatino. Every other man on this list was sent to ADX Florence against his will. Jimmy Sabatino asked to go.
Speaker A
James Sabatino was born in the mid-1970s and raised in the orbit of the Gambino crime family. Brooklyn by blood, Miami by choice, and a con man by every account, including his own.
Speaker A
His father was connected. Jimmy was not a made man and never would be. He didn't have the temperament for it. What he had was a voice that could sound like anyone on the phone and a total, apparently physiological inability to stop using
Speaker A
it. His first federal case came before he was 20. In the mid-1990s, as a teenager, he talked his way into hundreds of Super Bowl tickets by pretending to be a corporate executive and resold them. He went to prison. He
Speaker A
got out. He checked into a Miami Hilton under a fake corporate account and ran up a bill of $174,000 before anyone asked for a card. He went to prison. He got out. He did the same thing at the Waldorf Astoria in New
Speaker A
York, $16,000. He went to prison. He got out. He did it at the Ritz-Carlton in Los Angeles, another $16,000. He would later tell a judge, in more or less these words, that he could not help it, that when he was
Speaker A
free, he conned people, and that the conning was not a means to an end, it was the end.
Speaker A
By 2014, Sabatino was in federal custody again and housed at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami, a high-rise jail, not a penitentiary, where pre-trial inm
Speaker A
Here is where the story turns. Picture a cell on an upper floor of a federal jail in Miami. Picture a man on a bunk with a smuggled cell phone. Not one phone, several, over the years delivered by a
Speaker A
correctional officer named Carlos Mazar, who was taking money to bring them in. Sabatino makes a call. He is not Jimmy Sabatino on that call. He is an executive at Sony Music. He is a vice president at Roc Nation. He is producing
Speaker A
a music video for Jennifer Lopez, for Beyoncé, for whoever the boutique on the other end of the line would most like to dress, and he needs jewelry for the shoot. He needs watches. He needs handbags and shoes. He needs it shipped
Speaker A
today to an address in Miami, and the invoice can go to the label. Van Cleef & Arpels ships, Audemars Piguet ships, Jimmy Choo ships, boutique after boutique. The kind of stores that have a private room in the back for clients who
Speaker A
don't ask prices. Box up their inventory and send it to a man who is at that moment sitting in a federal jail cell in a khaki jumpsuit. The goods land with associates outside. The associates sell them. The money goes wherever the money
Speaker A
goes. Sabatino makes another call. October 2014 to April 2017. Two and a half years. More than $10 million in merchandise by the government's count extracted from some of the most exclusive luxury houses in the world by a man who never left his
Speaker A
cell. When it collapsed, it collapsed the way these things always do. Not because the con was found out, but because the phone was.
Speaker A
Mazar was arrested. He was convicted of smuggling the devices in. Sabatino pleaded guilty in 2017 to racketeering conspiracy.
Speaker A
And then he did something no one expected. He asked for ADX. His reasoning, laid out for the court, was simple. He could not be trusted with a phone. He could not be trusted with a pen, a stamp, an envelope, a visitor, a
Speaker A
mail order catalog. If they put him in a regular prison, he would find a way to reach the outside world and he would lie to it. The only place in the federal system where that was physically impossible was Florence. So that is
Speaker A
where he wanted to go. He got 20 years. He arrived at ADX in 2018. And here's the detail that puts Jimmy Sabatino, a man who has never physically hurt anyone, on a list with spies and murderers.
Speaker A
At ADX, there is a wing called H unit. H unit is where the government keeps men whose communications are restricted under what are called special administrative measures. Terrorists, mostly, whose letters and calls are screened by the FBI. And behind H unit,
Speaker A
there was a smaller wing, four cells. The staff call it the suites. Jimmy Sabatino lives in the suites. His cell has infrared cameras that can see him in the dark. It has audio and video surveillance running 24 hours a day. His
Speaker A
list of approved contacts, people he is allowed to write to or call, is shorter than his neighbors. His neighbor is Joaquin Guzman, El Chapo, the most notorious drug trafficker alive. The head of the Sinaloa Cartel has more approved contacts than the con man in
Speaker A
the next cell. Because the government has decided that Guzman is dangerous with an army, but Sabatino is dangerous with a sentence.
Speaker A
His projected release is around 2035. As of this recording, he is still in the suites. Still, presumably, the only inmate in Florence who is there because he told the judge he needed to be.
Speaker A
Number five, Robert Hansen. Most men arrive at ADX Florence because the system failed to contain them. Robert Hansen arrived because he was the system. Robert Philip Hansen was born April 18th, 1944 in Chicago. His father, Howard, was a Chicago police officer,
Speaker A
and by every account that has come out since, Hansen's own, his wife's, the FBI's, Howard Hansen was a bully who spent his son's childhood telling him he was worthless. There is a story, repeated in later accounts, of the
Speaker A
father wrapping the boy in blankets and spinning him until he vomited. The point was to toughen him.
Speaker A
What it produced was a quiet, awkward, deeply intelligent young man who wanted, above all things, to be smarter than everyone in the room and to make sure no one knew it.
Speaker A
He studied chemistry. He tried dental school and dropped it. He got an MBA. He joined the Chicago Police Department and worked briefly in Internal Affairs, investigating other cops.
Speaker A
In 1976, he joined the FBI. He converted to Catholicism for his wife, Bonnie, and joined Opus Dei, the conservative lay order. He went to mass daily. He had six children. He wore dark suits and was known in the Bureau, without affection,
Speaker A
as the mortician. And in 1979, 3 years into his FBI career, he walked into the offices of a Soviet trade organization in New York and offered to sell them everything.
Speaker A
It was not ideological. Hansen despised communism. It was not, at first, even really about the money, though the money would eventually total more than 1.4 million dollars in cash and diamonds, most of which he never spent.
Speaker A
[music] It was about the room. It was about being the one man in the building who knew what no one else knew.
Speaker A
[music] His first run lasted about 2 years. He gave the Soviets the name of a general in Soviet military intelligence, Dmitri Polyakov, who had been working for the Americans since the 1960s.
Speaker A
Then, his wife caught him in the basement with the paperwork, and he confessed to her and to a priest. He told her he'd only given the Russians junk. He stopped.
Speaker A
In 1985, he started again. This time, he did it by mail, anonymously, to a KGB officer in Washington under the name Ramon Garcia. He never met a handler. He never let them know his real name, his agency, his position. He set the rules.
Speaker A
He picked the dead drops, a footbridge in a park in northern Virginia, and he told them when to check. What he gave them over the next 16 years is difficult to summarize because the full list is still classified. The declassified
Speaker A
portion includes the names of at least three KGB officers secretly working for the United States. Two of them, Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin, were recalled to Moscow and executed. Hansen had signed their death warrants with a typewriter. The existence of a
Speaker A
multi-million dollar tunnel that the FBI and NSA had dug beneath the Soviet Embassy in Washington to intercept communications. The continuity of government plan. The actual procedures for how the United States would keep functioning after a nuclear strike.
Speaker A
Details of how the FBI investigated suspected spies, which meant for years that the FBI's own counterintelligence division was being fed its playbook by one of its senior analysts. He was, in the words of the Justice Department, possibly the most damaging spy in
Speaker A
American history. And he was caught, not by brilliance, but by money. In 2000, the FBI paid a former KGB officer $7 million for a file. The file included a plastic bag Hansen had used at a drop. It had his fingerprints on
Speaker A
it. It included a recording of a phone call. Colleagues recognized the voice. On the evening of February 18th, 2001, a Sunday, Hansen drove to Foxstone Park in Vienna, Virginia. He walked to the footbridge. He taped a package underneath it. When he turned around,
Speaker A
there were agents in the trees. He said one thing to them. He said, "What took you so long?" He pleaded guilty in July 2001 to 15 counts of espionage. In exchange, the government took the death penalty off the table and agreed to let
Speaker A
his wife keep part of his pension. On May 10th, 2002, he was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. He was sent to Florence. He was 58 when he arrived. He would spend the next 21 years in a cell
Speaker A
the size of a parking space under the same roof as the terrorists and traitors he had spent his career supposedly hunting. There was, at first, an irony in that.
Speaker A
Over two decades, the irony wore off, and what was left was an old man in a concrete room. There were no prison events. That's the point. The ADX chapter of Robert Hanssen's life is empty because the building is designed
Speaker A
to make it empty. He read. He grew old. At approximately 6:55 in the morning on June 5th, 2023, a correctional officer doing rounds found Hanssen unresponsive in his cell. Staff attempted to revive him. He was pronounced dead. He was 79 years old. A
Speaker A
lot of quick summaries will tell you it was a heart attack. It was not. The Bureau of Prisons and subsequent reporting confirmed the cause, colon cancer.
Speaker A
The most damaging spy in American history died of the same thing that kills ordinary men, alone in a room with a 4-in window. If you want the dramatized version, the 2007 film Breach with Chris Cooper as Hanssen is close to
Speaker A
the record. The real version has no soundtrack. It has a footbridge, a plastic bag, and a question that took 22 years to ask.
Speaker A
Number four, Larry Hoover. The government has a phrase for men like Larry Hoover. It calls them continuing criminal enterprises.
Speaker A
The word that matters is continuing. Because the thing about Larry Hoover is not what he built. It is that he kept running it for more than 20 years from a prison cell. And that the only way the federal government could finally stop
Speaker A
him was to send him to a prison where a man cannot talk. Larry Hoover was born November 30th, 1950 in Jackson, Mississippi. His family moved to Chicago's South Side when he was four, part of the last great wave of
Speaker A
the Great Migration. By 12, he was running with a street crew. By 19, in 1969, he had merged his own gang with a rivals, a man named David Barksdale, to form what became the Black Gangster Disciple Nation.
Speaker A
When Barksdale died in 1974, Hoover took it all. What set Hoover apart from every other Chicago gang leader of his generation was that he thought like a chairman. The Gangster Disciples had a written constitution. They had a board of
Speaker A
directors. They had governors over territories and regions under the governors and a system of taxes that flowed up the chain.
Speaker A
Later, in the 1990s, Hoover would rebrand the whole thing as growth and development with a political action committee and voter registration drives and a line of clothing. And enough South Side politicians would take the rebrand seriously that Hoover came within a
Speaker A
hearing of being paroled. But before any of that, there was the murder. In 1973, a 19-year-old drug dealer named William Young, known as Pooky, was accused of stealing from the gang. On Hoover's orders, he was picked up, driven to a location on the South Side,
Speaker A
and shot to death. Hoover was arrested on September 21st, 1973. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 150 to 200 years in the Illinois state prison system. He was 22.
Speaker A
And by any normal understanding of the word, that should have been the end of the Larry Hoover story.
Speaker A
It was the beginning. From inside the Illinois prison system, at Stateville and later at Dixon and Vienna, Hoover ran the Gangster Disciples for the next two decades through visitors, through letters, through coded messages, through a leadership structure that was designed
Speaker A
from the start to survive his absence. The organization grew. By the mid-1990s, federal prosecutors would estimate it at roughly 30,000 members across 28 states, moving more than a hundred million dollars in drugs a year in Illinois alone. The federal investigation that
Speaker A
finally reached him was called Operation Headache. It ran six years. Its centerpiece was almost insultingly simple. Agents put a listening device inside the visitors badge that Hoover's people wore when they came to see him at the Vienna Correctional Center.
Speaker A
On the recordings, in his own voice, Hoover discussed drug prices, discipline, and who was to be dealt with. In August 1995, 39 Gangster Disciples leaders were indicted. In 1997, after a trial in Chicago, Hoover was convicted on 40 counts: conspiracy,
Speaker A
extortion, money laundering, and running a continuing criminal enterprise, and sentenced to six life terms in federal prison.
Speaker A
The lead prosecutor, Ron Safer, would later summarize the case in one line. He said that if Larry Hoover said there was going to be a killing, there was a killing. He was sent to ADX Florence, 23 hours a day in a 7 by 12 concrete cell.
Speaker A
The man whose entire criminal career was built on communication was placed in the one building in America designed to prevent it. And it worked. The Gangster Disciples fractured. The board of directors went to prison. The organization that had answered to one
Speaker A
man's word became a loose federation of neighborhood sets fighting each other. And then something strange happened.
Speaker A
Hoover became a cause. His son, Larry Hoover Jr., spent years arguing that his father had renounced the gang, that he had been in solitary confinement longer than any reasonable sentence could justify, that he was an old man being
Speaker A
punished for a legend. In December 2021, Kanye West and Drake headlined a benefit concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. It was called Free Larry Hoover. Millions of people watched it stream. Most of them had never heard of
Speaker A
William Young. On May 28th, 2025, President Donald Trump commuted all six of Larry Hoover's federal life sentences. He did not walk out. He [music] couldn't. The President of the United States can commute a federal sentence. He cannot touch a
Speaker A
state one. And the state of Illinois still had 150 to 200 years on the books for a murder in 1973.
Speaker A
So, Larry Hoover, 74 years old, was transferred out of ADX Florence after 27 years there and into the Colorado State Penitentiary, held on Illinois' behalf.
Speaker A
According to his attorneys, he was assigned prison labor. According to those same attorneys in a 39-page clemency petition filed with the Illinois Prisoner Review Board in October 2025, he suffered three heart attacks during that labor. The most recent, that
Speaker A
September. They called his continued confinement a slow, state-sanctioned death sentence. His wife wrote to the governor's wife.
Speaker A
She pointed out that the co-defendant in the Young murder, the man who admitted to being the shooter, served 20 years and was paroled. Ron Safer, the prosecutor, said he believed in redemption and mercy and that some crimes are not deserving of it.
Speaker A
As of this recording, Larry Hoover remains in state custody and his fate rests with the state of Illinois. The Gangster Disciples still exist. They are no longer one organization. Whatever else you say about ADX Florence, it did the one thing the state of Illinois
Speaker A
could not do in 22 years. It took the phone away. Number three. Ishmael Petty.
Speaker A
There is a question people ask about ADX Florence, usually as a joke. If it's really the most secure prison in America, if every inmate is alone 23 hours a day behind two doors with a guard controlling the locks from a
Speaker A
booth, then what could anyone possibly do in there? Ismael Petty is the answer. He is what the building was built to prevent, and he did it anyway.
Speaker A
Twice. Petty was born around 1969. The Bureau of Prisons has never published much about his early life, and he has never given interviews. So, the record begins where the government's does.
Speaker A
In 1998 in Mississippi, he robbed a bank while impersonating a police officer. It was an armed robbery. He was convicted in federal court and eventually sent to the United States Penitentiary at Pollock Louisiana.
Speaker A
A high security prison, but a normal one. Cellmates, a yard, a dining hall. His cellmate at Pollock was 71 years old.
Speaker A
Petty killed him. The details of how were never widely reported. What the court record preserves is that a man of 71 was murdered in a locked cell by the one other person in it, and that the person was Ismael Petty, and that in 2002, a
Speaker A
federal judge gave him life. Life in the federal system means life. There is no parole. And a man with a life sentence for killing his cellmate is not a man any warden wants in general population. So, Petty was sent to
Speaker A
Florence, and for years, that should have been the end of it. September 11th, 2013, a Wednesday.
Speaker A
Understand the geometry of an ADX cell. There is the cell itself, concrete, 7 by 12. Then, there is a barred inner door.
Speaker A
Beyond that is a small vestibule, a few feet of floor. Beyond that is a solid steel outer door.
Speaker A
When staff need to hand something to an inmate, they open the outer door, step into the vestibule, and pass it through the bars of the inner door. The inmate stays behind the bars. That is the whole system. That is what keeps the guards
Speaker A
alive. Three staff members come down the tier. Two of them are prison librarians. They are delivering books. The ADX has a book cart, and the cart is one of the few things that moves through the building that isn't food or mail. The third is a
Speaker A
case manager. They open the outer door. Petty is not in his cell. He is in the vestibule. He has been in the vestibule waiting for however long it took the cart to reach him. How he got through the inner door was never fully explained
Speaker A
in public. He is wearing armor. He has made it himself out of cardboard layered and taped over his chest. He has a shank. The first librarian gets a faceful of hot sauce. It's the only thing he's been given that burns. She
Speaker A
goes down blinded. on the second librarian and begins stabbing. The case manager comes in behind them, gets between Petty and the librarian, and calls for help. Someone gets a baton up.
Speaker A
Petty keeps coming. By the time the response team drags him off, three federal employees are injured, and the fact that none of them are dead is credited to the case manager and to luck. [music] He was indicted on January 27th, 2015.
Speaker A
Three counts of assault, resisting and impeding a federal employee with a dangerous weapon resulting in bodily injury. The trial began July 13th, 2015 before United States District Judge Philip Brimmer in Denver. It lasted two days. The jury deliberated for 1 hour
Speaker A
and 20 minutes. Guilty on all three. That October, Brimmer added 60 years to a sentence that was already life. Which raises the obvious question, what does 60 years mean to a man who was never leaving? Nothing, legally. Everything
Speaker A
institutionally. It meant Petty was moved to a more restrictive tier of the most restrictive prison in the country, that the two-door protocol around him was tightened, that the book cart did not stop at his cell. And then, 5 years
Speaker A
later, it happened again. September 19th, 2020. According to the federal indictment, and the indictment is all there is, the government released no narrative, Ishmael Petty murdered another inmate in his unit. The victim is identified in the court documents
Speaker A
only by initials, L.H. How they came to be in the same space in a prison designed so that no two inmates are ever in the same space has not been made public. It may never be. What we know is
Speaker A
that for nearly 5 years, nothing happened. [music] The Bureau of Prisons investigated. A man was dead inside the most secure building in the American penal system, and the government took its time.
Speaker A
Then, in April 2025, a federal grand jury in Denver returned a two-count indictment, first-degree murder and murder by a federal prisoner serving a life sentence. That second charge exists for a reason. It is one of the very few
Speaker A
federal crimes for which the only two possible sentences are life, which Petty already has, twice over, or death. On April 10th, 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi authorized the U.S. Attorney's Office in Colorado to seek the death penalty. Prosecutors filed their notice
Speaker A
of intent with the court. Bondi had lifted the federal execution moratorium on her first day in office, and had said she would pursue capital punishment whenever possible. Ishmael Petty, a bank robber from Mississippi with no famous victims and no name recognition, became
Speaker A
one of the first men in the second Trump administration to face a federal death sentence. He was 56.
Speaker A
As of this recording, the case is pending. If it goes to trial, and if a jury sentences him to death, he will be transferred to the federal death row at Terre Haute, Indiana. If it doesn't, he stays where he is. Either way, the count
Speaker A
stands. One cellmate at Pollock, three staff at Florence, one inmate at Florence. Two of those attacks happened inside a prison where, by design, nothing can happen. Petty is not the most famous man in this building. He may be the most important because he is the
Speaker A
proof ADX Florence is not escape-proof or violence-proof or death-proof. It is just the closest anyone has come.
Speaker A
Number two, Thomas Silverstein. Every prison has a founding story. Alcatraz has Al Capone. San Quentin has the gallows. ADX Florence has a morning in October 1983 and two men.
Speaker A
This entry is the first of them. The last entry is the second and you cannot understand either without the other because they did the same thing on the same day in the same prison and then spent the rest of their lives becoming
Speaker A
opposites. Thomas Edward Silverstein was born February 4th, 1952 in Long Beach, California. His biological father was gone before he could remember him. His stepfather, Sid Silverstein, gave him the name and, by Tommy's later account, very little else.
Speaker A
He was a small, hard-eyed kid who fell into robbery in his teens and armed robbery by his early 20s. In 1977, he was sentenced to 15 years for a string of armed robberies committed with his stepfather and a cousin, a family
Speaker A
business of a kind. He went to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth. There, he joined the Aryan Brotherhood.
Speaker A
The Aryan Brotherhood in the late 1970s was small, a few hundred members nationwide and almost unbelievably violent. Membership required a killing.
Speaker A
Leaving was not possible. The Brotherhood's rule was blood in, blood out. And Silverstein, who was gifted with a knife and had nothing to lose, became one of its most reliable instruments. In 1980, an inmate named Danny Atwell was stabbed to death at
Speaker A
Leavenworth. Silverstein was convicted. The conviction was later overturned on appeal. The evidence was an informant's word, but by then, it no longer mattered. He had been transferred, along with the rest of the federal system's worst, to the United States Penitentiary
Speaker A
at Marion, Illinois. Marion was, in 1981, what ADX would later become, the end of the line. It had replaced Alcatraz in 1963.
Speaker A
It held the men no other federal prison wanted. And in its control unit, H unit, it held the worst of those. In 1981, in that unit, Silverstein and another Brotherhood member killed an inmate named Robert Chappell.
Speaker A
Chappell was a member of the DC Blacks, a rival prison gang. He was strangled through the bars of his cell.
Speaker A
The DC Blacks sent a man to Marion to answer for it. His name was Raymond Smith, and his prison name was Cadillac.
Speaker A
Everyone in the unit knew why he was there. Silverstein knew. On September 27th, 1982, Silverstein and Clayton Fountain, remember that name, got out of their cells during a move, got into Cadillac Smith's cell, and stabbed him 67 times. Then, they dragged his body
Speaker A
down the tier so every man on the range could see it. That was two murders in the most secure unit in the federal system.
Speaker A
Silverstein was now spending his time in a cell with a solid door, moved only under escort by three officers in handcuffs and chains.
Speaker A
One of the officers who regularly drew that duty was a man named Merle Clutts.
Speaker A
Clutts was a career Bureau of Prisons man, and by every account, a hard one.
Speaker A
Silverstein believed Clutts had a personal campaign against him, that Clutts tampered with his mail, destroyed his artwork, provoked him.
Speaker A
Whether that was true or the paranoia of a man in a box is not something anyone can settle now.
Speaker A
October 22nd, 1983, a Saturday morning. Silverstein is walked out of the shower. Three officers, handcuffs. Clutts is one of the three.
Speaker A
They walk him down the tier past the other cells. In one of those cells is an Aryan Brotherhood member named Randy Gomez. Silverstein stops at Gomez's cell. A step, a pause, nothing an officer would think twice about. Gomez
Speaker A
has a handcuff key. He has a knife. He passes both through the bars. Silverstein's hands are free before the officers know the cuffs are off. He goes straight at Clutts. The other two officers run for help. Silverstein backs
Speaker A
Clutts into a corner of the tier and stabs him. He does not stop. When it is over, and the number in the records is around 40 wounds, Merl Clutts is dead on the floor of the control unit, and
Speaker A
Thomas Silverstein is standing over him. And the first thing he says to the officers who come back is that this was between him and Clutts. Nobody else needs to get hurt.
Speaker A
Silverstein was convicted of Clutts's murder and given another life sentence. But the sentence was never the point.
Speaker A
The point was what the Bureau of Prisons did next. Director Norman Carlson ordered Silverstein placed on what the Bureau called no human contact status.
Speaker A
It was not a policy that existed before that morning. It was invented for him.
Speaker A
He was moved to Atlanta, then to a specially constructed basement cell at Leavenworth, a cell the inmates called the Silverstein Suite, where the light stayed on 24 hours a day, where the only visible human beings were the officers
Speaker A
who slid meals through a slot, where he was allowed a pencil and paper, and eventually paints, and nothing else.
Speaker A
He was in that cell, or one like it, for more than 20 years. When ADX Florence opened, he was one of the reasons it existed. In 2005, he was moved there, into the most restricted range of the most restricted unit, where he would
Speaker A
stay for 14 more years. He painted. He wrote. He learned to be quiet in a way that unsettled the people who met him. A low, careful voice. A man who had spent so long without conversation that he rationed his words.
Speaker A
He sued the Bureau of Prisons, arguing that three decades of isolation was cruel and unusual.
Speaker A
He lost. A federal appeals court found that the conditions, while severe, were justified by what he had done.
Speaker A
He spent 36 years in solitary confinement. It is the longest such term in the history of the federal system.
Speaker A
On May 11th, 2019, Thomas Silverstein died at a hospital in Lakewood, Colorado, of complications following heart surgery. He was 67.
Speaker A
The Bureau of Prisons confirmed the death in a two-sentence statement. The rule he lived under, no human contact, is not on the books as a rule. It was never written into policy. It was simply the way one man was handled for the rest
Speaker A
of his life, and then it became the way a building was designed. Merle Clutts had given the Bureau of Prisons more than two decades. He is listed on the Officer Down Memorial page with the date October 22nd, 1983.
Speaker A
Number one, Clayton Fountain. Eight hours after Merle Clutts died on the floor of H unit, the same thing happened again.
Speaker A
This is the second man. Clayton Anthony Fountain was born September 12th, 1955, and grew up in a Marine Corps family. A childhood of base housing, transfers, and a father whose expectations he did not meet. He enlisted at 18. He was, by
Speaker A
the accounts of people who served with him, an excellent Marine in every respect except one. He could not tolerate being humiliated. In 1974, at 19, Fountain was written up by his staff sergeant for wearing physical training gear in the mess hall. A minor
Speaker A
infraction, a paperwork matter. Fountain went and got a shotgun, found the sergeant, and killed him with a single blast to the chest. He was court-martialed and sentenced to life.
Speaker A
He went into the federal system, and the federal system sent him, inevitably, to Marion. He was there when Silverstein arrived. He was there for Robert Chappelle. He was there for Cadillac Smith. He was one of the two men who
Speaker A
stabbed Smith 67 times and dragged him down the range. By 1983, he had one murder on the outside and was tied to three more inside. He was 28 years old.
Speaker A
October 22nd, 1983, afternoon. Same unit, same tier. Silverstein is already in a holding cell, hands and feet chained, an officer dead. The unit is on lockdown. Every man in H unit knows what happened that morning. Fountain is being
Speaker A
moved anyway, a scheduled move. Three officers, handcuffs, the same protocol that failed 8 hours earlier. They walk in past a cell, and the exact thing happens. A key, a knife, a pause at the bars that no one catches until the cuffs
Speaker A
are already off. He turns on all three officers. Two are wounded and survive. The third is Robert Hoffman, a senior officer at Marion. Hoffman is stabbed repeatedly. He is carried off the tier.
Speaker A
Robert Hoffman's son was a correctional officer at the same prison. By the accounts of the day, he was on duty and his father died in his arms. Two officers murdered in a single day in the highest security unit in the federal
Speaker A
system by two inmates using the same trick. The Bureau of Prisons locked down Marion within the week and did not lift the lockdown for 23 years. Every inmate in the prison, in his cell, 23 hours a day, indefinitely. That lockdown was the
Speaker A
experiment. Norman Carlson watched it work and then he proposed a prison that would be built that way from the ground up, where the lockdown was not an emergency measure, but the architecture.
Speaker A
That proposal became ADX Florence. So, understand what you are looking at when you look at the building. Every steel door, every 4-in window, every vestibule, every finger handshake through a wire cage. It is the shape of October 22nd, 1983.
Speaker A
Fountain was convicted of Hoffman's murder and got another life sentence. And here his story and Silverstein's diverge. Not in what the government did, but in what each man did with it.
Speaker A
Fountain was not sent to Leavenworth's basement. He was sent to the United States Medical Center for federal prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, where the Bureau built him a cell of his own. A self-contained unit with its own recreation space, its own shower, its
Speaker A
own delivery hatch, designed so that no staff member would ever have to be in the same room with him again.
Speaker A
The Bureau called him the most dangerous prisoner in the federal system. That was not hyperbole. That was a classification.
Speaker A
He went into that cell in his late 20s. He came out of it more than 20 years later in a coffin.
Speaker A
What happened in between is the reason he is number one on this list. At some point in the years that followed, the exact year is not certain, Fountain began to read. Not for escape and not at first for religion. He simply had
Speaker A
nothing else. He requested correspondence courses and was cautiously allowed them. He earned a degree. Then another. He read philosophy. He read theology. He began, by his own later account, to write down what he had done and to try to look at
Speaker A
it. He started writing to a Trappist monastery in the Missouri Ozarks. The Trappists are a contemplative order.
Speaker A
Silence, manual labor, prayer, seven times a day. They live in cells, too. A monk named Father W. Paul Jones, a Methodist minister turned Catholic priest and hermit, wrote back. They corresponded for years. Jones visited when he could. Fountain converted to
Speaker A
Catholicism. He asked to be received into the Trappist order as a lay brother, a monk in all but the enclosure, living the rule of Saint Benedict inside a cell that the federal government had built to hold the most
Speaker A
dangerous man in America. The order took the request seriously. So did the Bureau of Prisons, which by all accounts was baffled by it and eventually accommodated it. Fountain kept the hours. He prayed the offices. He did his work, which was reading and writing and,
Speaker A
for a man who had killed five people, something harder than either. Jones later wrote that Fountain said to him, and this is [clears throat] the line that ended up on the cover of the book, that if he could be forgiven, then
Speaker A
no one was beyond God's forgiveness. Take that however you want. A prosecutor would tell you that it is what every lifer says, eventually, when there is no parole board left to say it to. Sister Helen Prejean, who has spent her life on
Speaker A
death rows and has heard every version of it, read the book and put her name on the cover. You can decide which of them is right.
Speaker A
On July 12th, 2004, Clayton Fountain had a heart attack in his cell at Springfield and died. He was 48 years old.
Speaker A
He had been in isolation for nearly 21 years. After his death, the Trappist community that had corresponded with him accepted him posthumously as a lay brother of the order.
Speaker A
He is, as far as anyone knows, the only man to hold that status having never once set foot in a monastery. Father Jones' account of it, A Different Kind of Cell, was published in 2011.
Speaker A
Robert Hoffman is listed on the Officer Down Memorial page with the date October 22nd, 1983 and the note that he was killed while escorting an inmate. So, here is the pair. Two men, same gang, same prison, same trick, the same day, 8
Speaker A
hours apart. The Bureau of Prisons put both of them in a box and threw away the key and it built ADX Florence so that it would never have to do it again.
Speaker A
One of them spent 36 years painting in the box and died fighting the box in court. The other spent 21 years in the box and died a monk.
Speaker A
The building doesn't care which. That's what makes it the building. There are roughly 400 men in ADX Florence tonight.
Speaker A
Most of them you will never hear about. The famous ones, Tsarnaev, Moussaoui, Guzman, the shoe bomber, the men from the 1993 World Trade Center attack, are the reason the prison gets written about. But they are not the reason it
Speaker A
exists. It exists because of a Saturday in October 1983. It is kept full by men like Ishmael Petty who prove every few years that no design is finished. It is kept honest by men like Travis Dusenbury who walk out
Speaker A
and say what it was. And it is occasionally asked for by a con man who knew that the only thing that could stop him was concrete. The Bureau of Prisons will tell you ADX is not a punishment.
Speaker A
It is a management tool. It houses men in a way that protect staff and other inmates and the public. And when a man has demonstrated that he can be managed elsewhere, he is moved elsewhere. That is true. It is also true that the men
Speaker A
inside are in a room the size of a parking space looking at 4 in of sky for 23 hours a day for years, and that some of them are still there when they die.
Speaker A
Both things are true. The building was designed so that you don't have to choose.
Speaker A
If this one held your attention, the full list of every prison we've covered is linked below, and the next one is already being researched. The seven men were the story. The building was the character. And as always, the details in
Speaker A
this video come from court records, Bureau of Prisons statements, and contemporary reporting. If you find something we got wrong, tell us because in this format, the specifics are the whole point.
Topics:ADX Florencesupermax prisonfederal penitentiarysolitary confinementprison conditionsdangerous inmatesprisoner storiesTravis DusenburyJimmy Sabatinoprison isolation
