TOP 7 NOTORIOUS INMATES OF FLORENCE ADX: THE ALCATRAZ OF THE ROCKIES

I was wondering the other day who are the most notorious criminals serving life inside the Super Max Prison known as the ADX in Florence Colorado. There are 4 prisons located in that complex with over 3,000 total prisoners. However, only 382 are assigned to the ADX. The inmate's life inside the ADX is a whole lot like living in an average bathroom. They do get a small tv with very limited channels.

Just a two-hour drive from Denver, 376 of the United States’ most notorious criminals are held at the country’s only federal supermax prison, the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility—otherwise known as the ADX.

As of mid-July, Colorado gained yet another infamous resident, when Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, was relocated here after being sentenced to life plus 30 years on international drug trafficking charges earlier in the month.

The 37-acre compound, located on the outskirts of the old mining town of Florence in Fremont County, was opened in November 1994 and houses many of the country’s most high-profile inmates, including those convicted of federal high crimes and deemed too violent to live among a general prison population.

Prisoners at the ADX—we’re talking bombers, serial killers, terrorists, mobsters, cult leaders, and drug kingpins—live in near-continuous solitary confinement, spending 23 or more hours a day isolated in soundproof, one-man cells that are only 7-by-12 feet, with a small, four-inch slit for a window. Aka Hi-Tek Hell. Read More

7 Most Notorious Inmates:

Eric R. Rudolph: Olympic Park bomber, serving two life sentences

Eric Robert Rudolph (born September 19, 1966), also known as the Olympic Park Bomber, is an American Christian Terrorist convicted for a series of anti-abortion and anti-gay-motivated bombings across the southern United States between 1996 and 1998, which killed three people and injured 150 others.

Theodore "Ted" John Kaczynski: Domestic terrorist, aka the “Unabomber,” serving eight life sentences is an American domestic terrorist, anarchist, and former mathematics professor.[2][3][4] He was a mathematics prodigy, but he abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a more primitive lifestyle. Between 1978 and 1995, he killed three people and injured 23 others in an attempt to start a revolution by conducting a nationwide bombing campaign targeting people involved with modern technology.

Robert P. Hanssen: Double agent/spy, serving 15 consecutive life sentences. On February 18, 2001, Robert Philip Hanssen was arrested and charged with committing espionage on behalf of the intelligence services of the former Soviet Union and its successors. He pled guilty to 15 counts of espionage on July 6, 2001, and was sentenced to prison without the possibility of parole.

Terry L. Nichols: Oklahoma City bomber/domestic terrorist, serving 161 consecutive life sentences is an American domestic terrorist who was convicted of being an accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Ramzi Yousef & Mohammed Salameh: Two of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers; serving life sentences are Kuwaiti convicted terrorists of Pakistani origin who were the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434, and was a co-conspirator in the Bojinka plot.

Evil Dr Michael Swango: the poisoning guy Serial killer, serving three consecutive life terms. Joseph Michael Swango (born October 21, 1954) is an American serial killer and a former physician. It is estimated that Swango has been involved in as many as 60 fatal poisonings of patients and colleagues, though he only admitted to causing four deaths. He was sentenced in 2000 to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole

Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev: Death Row Terrorist, aka the Boston bomber, sentenced to death born July 22, 1993 is a Kyrgyz-American terrorist of Chechen descent who was convicted of planting pressure cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, along with his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The bombings killed three people and injured approximately 280 others.

ALCATRAZ PRISON CLOSED ON MARCH 21 1963

March 21, 1963 Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay closed down and transferred it's last prisoners. At it’s peak period of use in 1950s, “The Rock, or “”America’s Devil Island” housed over 200 inmates at the maximum-security facility. Alcatraz remains an icon of American prisons for its harsh conditions and record for being inescapable.

Fernando Moledero Photography

The twelve-acre rocky island, one and a half miles from San Francisco, featured the most advanced security of the time. Some of the first metal detectors were used at Alcatraz. Strict rules were enforced against the unfortunate inmates who had to do time at Alcatraz. Nearly complete silence was mandated at all times.

Alcatraz was first explored by Juan Manuel de Ayala in 1775, who called it Isla de los Alcatraces (Pelicans) because of all the birds that lived there. It was sold in 1849 to the U.S. government. The first lighthouse in California was on Alcatraz. It became a Civil War fort and then a military prison in 1907.

JOHN GOTTI THE TEFLON DON SENTENCED TO LIFE JUNE 23 1992

In 1992, Gotti was convicted of five murders, conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, obstruction of justice, illegal gambling, extortion, tax evasion, and loansharking. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole and was transferred to United States Penitentiary, Marion.

Gotti, born and educated on the mean streets of New York City, became head of the powerful Gambino family after boss Paul Castellano was murdered outside a steakhouse in Manhattan in December 1985. The gang assassination, the first in three decades in New York, was organized by Gotti and his colleague Sammy “the Bull” Gravano.

The Gambino family was known for its illegal narcotics operations, gambling activities, and car theft. During the next five years, Gotti rapidly expanded his criminal empire, and his family grew into the nation’s most powerful Mafia family.

Despite wide publicity of his criminal activities, Gotti managed to avoid conviction several times, usually through witness intimidation. In 1990, however, he was indicted for conspiracy to commit murder in the death of Paul Castellano, and Gravano agreed to testify against him in a federal district court in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. While still imprisoned, Gotti died of throat cancer on June 10, 2002.

BETTY BRODERICK: TELLING ON MYSELF

 Betty Broderick

Guest Post by Author Kathleen Hewtson

I first heard of Betty Broderick in a People Magazine article in October 1991, written at the time of her first trial that resulted in a hung jury.

I was around twenty-six at the time – more or less Linda Broderick’s age – and almost a decade into a really bad marriage, and I had always been brought up with, and believed in, the concept of a no-fault divorce. For most of my childhood, I would lie in bed wishing that my own parents would get divorced and bring to an end my having to listen interminably to their vicious and repetitious arguments. “Please, Daddy, leave,” I would tell my dad. “You’ve got to get out of here, for everybody’s sake!”

For me, marriage was a contract that held for as long as it worked, and then, when it stopped working, you went off and did something else. When you bought a house, you didn’t buy it for life; you might choose to live in it forever, but you might equally find a better one you would want to live in. No-fault meant no-fault and any idea to the contrary threatened me personally – I, too, wanted a divorce one day, and I didn’t want to spend days in court picking over my and my husband’s misbehavior. Most people aren’t evil, we are just people, and we get things wrong, and sometimes we change what we want from life, so if your marriage doesn’t work anymore, close it down with the least fuss from everyone.

So why was this "fat hag" so intent on hassling Dan Broderick, who simply didn’t want to live with her anymore, and did want to live with somebody else, somebody fun-loving and cheerful like me?

And then there was the verdict of Betty’s first trial, a hung jury. What? A hung jury? How could what Betty did be anything other than premeditated? She bought a gun. She took shooting lessons. She stole the keys to Dan and Linda’s house weeks before the shooting. She took a forty-minute drive over to their house, broke in, climbed the stairs and let rip. Then, in a final, calculated act of premeditation, she pulled the telephone from its socket to prevent Dan phoning for the help that might have saved his life.

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From reactions to the Betty Broderick trials and the off-the-chart ratings for Oprah Winfrey’s interviews with her, I learned something else: there must be a lot of people out there just as angry as Betty. What were they on about? Marriage isn’t a master-slave relationship; it isn’t, “Come, Kunta, I’ve bought you and I am taking you home now.”

Except for the verdict of the 2010 Parole Board which gave Betty the max – parole denied and no further hearing for fifteen years – that was it for me with Betty until twenty years later, when I married my second husband who had an ex-wife who was just like Betty. She was even issuing us with death threats on a monthly basis and I had a restraining order, based on those death threats, even though she was (hopefully still) 5,000 miles away.

I thought my husband might be interested in ‘Until the Twelfth of Never.’ Not only is it one of the best true crime books I had ever read, on a subject that I still felt passionately about, but my husband also had some psychological trauma to work through. He needed to be put back together, and I thought reading ‘Until the Twelfth of Never’ might help. At least he wasn’t dead … yet.

So I decided to read him ‘Until the Twelfth of Never’ (UTON) before we went to sleep, and reliably, about every half-page, he would exclaim, “Wow, that is just like …” and later, “There must be a secret handbook these people are all working from.”

In getting hold of a copy of UTON, I discovered that it was out of print and had been for many years. That is also an interesting story. Janet Regan was the Commissioning Editor who persuaded an LA Times journalist, Bella Stumbo, to write UTON. Then, Janet Regan was forced to leave the book’s original publisher because of a problem over O.J. Simpson’s ‘If I Did It’ that she had also commissioned. After she left, the publisher pulled all Janet Regan’s books, including UTON.

Bella Stumbo had died ten years before I started making my investigations into the copyright situation with her book, but I did manage to track down her sister, who told me that the rights were now owned by her own daughter (Bella’s niece). She put us into contact with her daughter who said she would be happy to have us republish the book. The publisher had not issued any royalties for nearly a decade, since it was withdrawn from publication. We also contacted the publisher to make sure that all rights had reverted to Bella Stumbo’s niece.

Before we published UTON ourselves, we decided we wanted to add some new material to make it more current, so we interviewed a couple of Dan Broderick’s lawyer friends and asked a top graphologist to analyze Betty’s handwriting because my husband knew the graphologist well and had some great stories about his work and its prescience, not least the one about the girl who had shown him her boyfriend’s handwriting. “Get away from him now,” the graphologist said. “Whoever he is, never see him again.” The girl didn’t take his advice, and a month later was stabbed to death by her boyfriend after twenty-seven blows from his knife.

As always with the Broderick case, questions still hung in the air: “Who was really abusing whom? Was Dan systematically abusing Betty in his legalistic way? Was Betty constantly taunting Dan in drip-drip-drip provocations? And why was $16,000 a month in alimony and an Oceanside property not enough for Betty?” The graphologist answered these questions one way, but still I wasn’t sure, so I decided to contact Betty to see if she had a book of her own. She did.

 Betty Broderick: Telling on myself

We communicated by letter for a while, then I went to see her in the California Institution for Women in Chino-Corona. During our first meeting, I not only got to meet Betty but also Joe Pesci who was there visiting his ex-wife, Claudia Haro, who had taken out a contract on her next husband, a movie stuntman who managed to avoid at least some of the bullets being fired in his direction, and lived. Betty also tried to introduce me to Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten of the Manson Family. Clearly there was a whole Killer Royalty thing going on there, and Betty had made it into the Royal Mob. I had interviewed Susan Atkins of the Manson Family at CIW several years earlier, and she was definitely treated like royalty in there; in fact, that is rather an under-statement – more like an icon.

Betty was charming during that first meeting and interested in having us publish her book. The prison was loud and smelly. Fellow inmates kept coming up to her to thank her for helping them learn English. I felt really sorry for her. She was very ladylike and has mesmerizingly beautiful eyes.

From that meeting, Betty continued to show interest in our publishing her book, which was on handwritten sheets of paper, but somewhat elusive about actually signing a contract. We talked by phone. We communicated by letter. Time passed.

I even considered writing a book about Betty myself – after all, I had met her and I had read every book about the case, and I knew San Diego well. Hell, I had even been bundled aggressively out of the presence of Sherriff Billy Gore there for asking impertinent questions about his handling of the Rebecca Zahau murder case on Coronado Island, off San Diego. However, at this point I had just started writing what was to become a five-volume series on Empress Alexandra Romanov of Russia, and already had my time accounted for several years into the future. Ironically, it turns out that Empress Alexandra was a lot like Betty.

As it happens, a close friend of mine is Anne Bremner, one of America’s top criminal lawyers and legal analysts – the one who got Amanda Knox out of prison in Italy. We had worked together on the Rebecca Zahau case – would she be interested in representing Betty in getting her a new parole hearing? Anne said she would. So, I went to see Betty again, this time accompanied by Anne Bremner. The meeting went well and Anne gained a good impression of Betty, although we were both exhausted when we came out. Betty has a lot of energy! I handed Betty our publishing contract, which she signed. Anne said she would send Betty a client agreement to enable her to represent her in parole proceedings, which Betty never did sign.

I also got to meet up with Betty’s trial lawyer, Jack Earley, with whom we had dinner twice, once at his house with his wife and friends. He’s a pretty laid back guy and seemed more amused by Betty than anything else, although he did warn me that Betty took some handling. I assured him that I had read UTON and I knew that. He gave me a kind of ‘If you say so’ look.

Betty sent us her handwritten manuscript with a mass of photos and we proceeded to edit what was to become ‘Betty Broderick: Telling on myself,’ with Betty’s choice of title. She wanted us to use one photo as the cover; we insisted on using another. There were about twelve areas of the book where we felt that Betty could have been more forthcoming and which would have made the book more interesting to readers, but Betty ignored our repeated requests over a six-month period. We also sent her a copy of her daughter, Kim’s, book which has appeared under a couple different titles (‘Betty Broderick, My Mum’ and ‘Betty Broderick, the Mother, the Murderer’), because we thought there were many allegations Kim had made that she should be addressing. Nothing.

We had promised to publish the book by April 2014, so I went to see Betty with Anne Bremner again in early January of that year to give her our edited version of her book, and for Anne to discuss with her once again the possibility of representing her. That was an awkward meeting. Betty really, really doesn’t like lawyers, even Anne, who is absolutely sweet. Anne spent most of the meeting sitting there stunned, and we both came out utterly exhausted. In fact, Anne remained in a state of shellshock the entire day. It was as well that we were staying at the Mission Inn Hotel in Riverside, the hotel that put the hotel in The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ (and, yes, it has what it claims to be the oldest dated church bell in the world, and seven Tiffany originals made by Louis Comfort Tiffany personally …).

We waited for Betty’s recommendations for corrections, amendments and additions to our editing of her book, but they never came. Anne had seen Betty a day after she had received the full edit, and Betty told her she liked what she had read so far. Two and a half months later, a day before the agreed latest publishing date, we put ‘Betty Broderick: Telling on myself’ up on Amazon, sending her the first paperback copy.

I haven’t had a lot of dealings with Betty since then. I know from people who correspond with Betty that she claims never to have read ‘Betty Broderick: Telling on myself;’ that she claims she never signed a contract with us; and that she claims she only sent us an outline, from which we worked up an entire book, but that’s just Betty, or as Oprah Winfrey said during an interview with her, “Betty, Betty, Betty!”

Kathleen McKenna Hewtson
 January 6, 2017.

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ALCATRAZ PRISON OPENED AUG 11, 1934

A view from the 1930's of the Alcatraz island and penitentiary, in San Francisco Bay. Opened on August 11, 1934, Alcatraz ("the Rock") was America's premier maximum-security prison, and for 29 years the final stop for the nation's most incorrigible inmates, including Al Capone. Alcatraz closed its doors 50 years ago, on March 21, 1963.

A group of federal prisoners classified as “most dangerous” arrives at Alcatraz Island, a 22-acre rocky outcrop situated 1.5 miles offshore in San Francisco Bay. The convicts–the first civilian prisoners to be housed in the new high-security penitentiary–joined a few dozen military prisoners left over from the island’s days as a U.S. military prison.

On the last day of Alcatraz, convicts were handcuffed, shackled and marched out of the prison.

Alcatraz was an uninhabited seabird haven when it was explored by Spanish Lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala in 1775. He named it Isla de los Alcatraces, or “Island of the Pelicans.” Fortified by the Spanish, Alcatraz was sold to the United States in 1849. In 1854, it had the distinction of housing the first lighthouse on the coast of California.

Beginning in 1859, a U.S. Army detachment was garrisoned there, and from 1868 Alcatraz was used to house military criminals. In addition to recalcitrant U.S. soldiers, prisoners included rebellious Indian scouts, American soldiers fighting in the Philippines who had deserted to the Filipino cause, and Chinese civilians who resisted the U.S. Army during the Boxer Rebellion. In 1907, Alcatraz was designated the Pacific Branch of the United States Military Prison.

 

In 1934, Alcatraz was fortified into a high-security federal penitentiary designed to hold the most dangerous prisoners in the U.S. penal system, especially those with a penchant for escape attempts. The first shipment of civilian prisoners arrived on August 11, 1934. Later that month, more shiploads arrived, featuring, among other convicts, infamous mobster Al Capone. In September, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, another luminary of organized crime, landed on Alcatraz. READ MORE

Watch this Alcatraz Documentary Here

GREEN RIVER KILLER TRANSFERRED TO COLORADO SUPER MAX PRISON

SEATTLE - Notorious serial killer Gary Ridgway has been transferred to a high-security prison in Colorado, Andrew Garber with the State Department of Corrections said.

Gary Leon Ridgway is the American serial killer known as the Green River Killer. He was initially convicted of 48 separate murders and later confessed to nearly twice that number

Ridgway, was transferred to the U.S. Penitentiary near Florence, Colorado on May 14, 2015, according to Garber.

"As part of standard correctional practice, the department constantly evaluates and reviews the overall safety and security of our operations, and makes decisions regarding the housing of offenders accordingly," Garber said Saturday.

It is unclear why Ridgway was transferred, as the Department of Corrections does not comment on offenders and their circumstances.

Ridgway, 66, pleaded guilty to killing 49 women in King County. He was spared the death penalty under a deal with King County prosecutors to cooperate in the search for bodies, and was serving a life sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary.

Supermax cells are fitted with immovable concrete furniture.

The ADX super-maximum-security prison in Colorado has a regime of solitary confinement for prisoners that are exceptionally dangerous. The prison is nicknamed the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," and also holds Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

At the ADX, life is much lonelier and more monotonous. Ridgway will join other notorious prisoners such as Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph; Zacarias Moussaoui, who helped plan the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001; shoe bomber Richard Reid; and Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center.