When Cadillac Smith shouted, “You killed my brothers. I’m going to kill you,” Silverstein didn’t flinch. The two men were in a maximum-security prison. Smith was the leader of the DC Blacks, a giant, violent gangster who bragged that a knife had broken on his skin because he was too tough.
Silverstein was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. He had already killed two men in prison. Smith had come for revenge, but he was about to make the worst decision of his life. The murder of Robert Chappelle was supposed to be simple.
Chappelle, a Black inmate in the control unit at Marion, was marked for death. He had provoked the Mexican Mafia, and they couldn’t get to him. The Aryan Brotherhood had an understanding with them: you kill one of my enemies, and I’ll kill one of yours. Thomas Silverstein agreed to do it.
On a quiet Sunday afternoon, Silverstein and an accomplice came down the tier with a strand of metal wire. Chappelle had propped his head against the bars of his cell. They wrapped the wire around his neck, pressed their legs against the bars, and strangled him to death. Robert Chappelle’s cousin, Cadillac Smith, swore he would make Silverstein pay.
He should have known better. Thomas Silverstein was called Terrible Tommy for a reason. Silverstein was born in Long Beach, California, in 1952. His biological father, Thomas Conway, was an Oklahoma bank robber.
He was jailed when Silverstein was four years old. His mother, Virginia, remarried a man named Sid Silverstein, who adopted the boy. But the violence at home only got worse. His mother beat him constantly.
When he wet the bed at age five, she forced him to drink his own urine. She humiliated him, shamed him, made him feel small for things beyond his control. When a bully beat him in third grade, his mother drove to the school and grabbed the bully. She told Tom to hit him.
When he refused, she threatened, “You hit him in the face or I’m going to hit you. ” So Tom beat the bully while his mother watched. He learned that dominance was the only way to survive. He grew up fighting his stepfather.
His mother hit him with a shovel in the head. He rambled to escape. He idolized the father he never knew. When he was a teenager, he decorated his cell with a picture of his dad in Oklahoma State Prison and dreamed his father would come back and save him from the beatings.
At seventeen, Silverstein got high and robbed a restaurant. He was sent to a juvenile prison. On his first night, he heard another inmate raping a prisoner, then beating the victim. He decided that to avoid rape, he had to fight.
He was attacked by Black inmates who hated whites. He developed a deep hatred for them and tattooed lightning bolts on his neck, a Nazi symbol. It was the brand of the Aryan Brotherhood. After six months, he was released.
He married his childhood sweetheart, Judy, who was pregnant. He got a construction job. For a moment, he almost went straight. But he started using heroin.
He got fired. He began robbing stores. He became abusive to his wife, later saying, “I had no trouble hitting a woman because my mother had beaten me. ” His wife left, taking their daughter.
Around that time, his father was released from prison. The man Silverstein had worshipped from afar reconnected with him. They decided to rob banks together. Father and son wore disguises—Silverstein painted his face black and wore an afro wig—and held employees at gunpoint.
The FBI had a picture of the robbers. They took it to his mother. Virginia asked, “Is there a reward? ” She turned in her own son for money.
Silverstein was twenty-three. He was never a free man again. He got eighteen years for the bank robbery. He was sent to San Quentin in 1975, one of the most violent prisons in America.
Because of the lightning bolts tattoo, he wasn’t given many choices. He became affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood. His hatred of Black inmates fit neatly into their ideology. In 1977, he was transferred to Leavenworth Federal Prison.
He was given a cellmate and connected with the California crew of the Aryan Brotherhood, who were building their power by controlling the drug trade. Their competition was a Black gang called the DC Blacks. Silverstein’s neighbor was a man named Danny Atwell, a quiet guy who’d never been in prison before. He had a drug charge and only ten years.
The DC Blacks forced him to bring drugs in for them. The Aryan Brotherhood demanded he do the same. He refused. One day, alone in his cell, an inmate distracted the guards.
They went in and stabbed Atwell over and over again. He was sitting on the toilet. He couldn’t get away. As he was dying, he gasped to the guards, “Tommy, California crew.
” Two snitches came forward and testified that Silverstein had told them Atwell would be murdered. Silverstein got a life sentence for the murder of Danny Atwell. He was transferred to Marion, Illinois, the highest security prison in America. It was built in 1963 to replace Alcatraz, and it held only 380 of the most dangerous inmates in the country.
Mike Marino was already there. “The control unit is a very small cell block isolated from the rest,” he recalled. “Nobody’s in a two-man cell. They let you out for an hour a day to take a shower, then you go back in for 23 hours.
”
Silverstein walked in, strong and physical, a hardcore convict who liked to box. All the stories about him killing Atwell had followed him. He had built a reputation, and in gang culture, reputation is everything. But reputation brings challenges.
Cadillac Smith was Silverstein’s challenge. On May 11, 1982, Silverstein was sitting on his bunk when he heard a loud voice: “I’m going to kill you, Silverstein. ” He turned around. He didn’t recognize the man.
“You killed my brothers. I’m going to kill you. ”
Raymond Lee “Cadillac” Smith was a cold-blooded killer out of Washington DC. He was a giant, violent, racist predator.
He was Chappelle’s cousin, and he wasn’t going to let the murder go. After Chappelle’s death, stricter rules were put in place. Inmates exercised in pairs, locked in a special cage on the prison floor outside the cells. Silverstein and his accomplice Clay Fountain were in that cage with a smuggled piece of hacksaw blade.
They slowly cut through the wire mesh, working a little at a time. When they were done, they’d apply a paste to stick the mesh back together so it looked intact. They waited for Cadillac to come out of his cell. Their moment arrived when he was let out for a shower at the same time they were exercising in the cage.
Silverstein didn’t have a shank—his weapon had been discovered. But Fountain had one. Cadillac came out with a towel over his arm. He saw them coming.
He threw off the towel and revealed a shank he’d made from a towel rod. Fountain ran forward. Cadillac stabbed him in the chest. Fountain fell backward.
Silverstein slammed into Cadillac, took the shank away, and started stabbing. He stabbed him more than forty times. He stabbed him so hard the blade went all the way through and hit the concrete. The guards stayed back for their own safety.
Silverstein and the wounded Fountain dragged Cadillac’s body down the tier in front of the DC Blacks’ cells, shouting, “You’re next. You’re next. ”
The autopsy revealed Cadillac Smith was stabbed 67 times. The message was clear: if you disrespect us, not only will you be murdered, you’ll be put on display.
Silverstein got another life sentence and more time in solitary. But his influence soared. The head of the Bureau of Prisons later said the Aryan Brotherhood was running Marion. Silverstein was the shot caller.
He could give an order and someone would die. He sent a letter to Barry Mills ordering him to kill a guy in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Barry did it and got convicted for murder. His next target was closer to home.
Merl Klutz was a veteran guard at Marion, a cowboy who liked horses and had a wife and kids. He ran the C tier, where Silverstein was housed. They clashed constantly. Klutz was a tough guy who believed he would control the control unit.
Silverstein was a major troublemaker who felt no one would control him. Every time Klutz shook down his cell, Silverstein felt disrespected. Klutz threw his pictures around, messed with his personal photographs and legal papers. Their relationship turned toxic.
Silverstein said that the moment he heard Klutz’s voice on the tier, his whole day was ruined. He pacing back and forth in his cell like a wild animal. “You got something coming,” Silverstein warned. “Keep messing with me.
”
His gang members warned him too. “Don’t do it, Tommy. If you murder an officer, you will never be released from solitary confinement. ”
Silverstein didn’t listen.
He told Pete Early, a journalist who interviewed him, that killing an officer was the ultimate act of showing the system that he didn’t care about it. On October 22, 1983, Silverstein was escorted out of his cell for a shower. He was handcuffed and searched. They found no weapons.
On the way back, Klutz was behind him with officers on each side. Another inmate distracted Klutz. Silverstein used the moment to stop at a neighboring cell with a member of the Mexican Mafia. The man had smuggled a key.
He unlocked Silverstein’s handcuffs. Silverstein lifted his shirt and exposed a ten-inch weapon. He spun around. The two officers yelled, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.
He’s got a knife. ” They ran to safety to get billy clubs. Silverstein was left with Klutz, who was unarmed. Klutz froze.
“He’s just standing there looking at me,” Silverstein later recalled. “And I just go all the way off. I start stabbing. We’re fighting.
He hits me, but I just keep stabbing. ”
Klutz somehow managed to escape and run down the tier. Silverstein chased him. Klutz passed through a door and slammed it shut.
He got away, but his wounds were fatal. He died. Silverstein said, “It was like a big weight lifted off me. I was over.
”
Officer Merl Klutz’s death marked a turning point. Silverstein was sent to the US Penitentiary in Atlanta because they couldn’t keep him in Marion—the officers there wanted him dead. The director of the Bureau of Prisons, Norm Carlson, devised a new extreme form of solitary confinement specifically for him. It was called “no human contact.
”
Silverstein was locked alone in a cell with no communication. No radio, no TV, no letters. Only food came through a slot in the steel door. They were hoping he would end his own life.
Instead, it made him even more determined. They were not going to break him. Three years passed. On November 23, 1987, Cuban inmates rioted in Atlanta prison and freed Silverstein from his cell.
The Bureau of Prisons was so worried that they issued a memo: “If you see Thomas Silverstein, shoot him on sight. ” They feared he might murder a guard or other prisoners. The rioting inmates realized who they were dealing with and feared for their own safety. They overpowered him, handcuffed him, and handed him over to prison officials.
He was sent back to Leavenworth, placed in a special isolated unit built just for him, nicknamed the Silverstein Suite. He spent the next fifteen years alone in a limited space of three rooms. He drew cartoons to express his frustration. The murders in 1983 led to the building of the first Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
In 2005, Silverstein was transferred there to live out the rest of his days in another dungeon-like cell, isolated from everyone. The Bureau of Prisons refused to lift any punishment. “He is such a monster,” they said. They never wanted him to have contact with anyone ever again.
Silverstein spent thirty-six years in isolation. He was sixty-seven when he contracted pneumonia and suffered a heart attack. He died in February 2019 at a hospital in Colorado. When the Bureau of Prisons announced his death to the staff at the Supermax, they broke out in thunderous applause and cheering.
They were finally rid of Thomas Silverstein.
