14 Feb. 7th–Feb. 13th, 2019 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | mUsIC | CAFe | FILm | CULtURe | nIght+DAy | FEATURE | neWs | oPInIon | FeeDBACK | Contents | yet — what did he owe these backstabbers, anyway? Leonard, in his view, had screwed up the robbery by not sticking to the plan. Leonard’s girlfriend had been the cause of the Crested Butte fiasco. And he was sup- posed to go away forever, just to protect these bastards? Alexa urged him to think about the unthinkable: naming his partners in order to reduce his own sentence. “These people are not your friends,” she told him. Over the next several weeks, Byerly had ample occasion to reflect on the absurdity of the convict code. He thought about all the heartache he’d caused his parents, his ex-wife, and anyone else who had cared about him. He thought about the years he’d lost inside and the ones he was going to lose if he took the brunt of the 16 charges he was facing over the Tucson robbery. He thought about waking up Christmas morning to the sounds of the guards rushing into the cell next door, where an inmate had tried to kill himself with a razor blade. Merry fucking Christmas. And he thought about what was waiting for him, buried in the woods, the money he couldn’t touch now because he’d been so cocky, stupid, and loyal to the wrong people. Every day he dug it up in his mind, won- dering if he’d ever see it again. “Something in me just snapped,” he says now. “I called my lawyer and said, ‘Tell the FBI I want to set up a free talk.’” A “free talk” is an explor- atory bit of snitching, an op- portunity for a suspect to coax a possible deal from prosecutors by revealing information about crimes, on the condition that the in- formation won’t be used to prosecute the source. Byerly had a lot to tell, and told it all — everything except the robbery of the dia- mond broker. The feds arranged to record a phone call he had with Leonard. Assuring his ex-part- ner that he was on a secure “lawyer phone,” he proceeded to lure Leonard into a conversation about his narrow escape from the getaway car. Coming clean also meant giving up Steve Boyce, who hadn’t been part of the Tucson robbery. Their relationship had frayed over the years; still, Byerly says he’d made up his mind not to testify against Boyce. He recorded a call with him, too, but the two have different memories of that conversation. Byerly says he went out of his way to ask “obvious” incriminating questions, to alert his old buddy to what he was doing. Boyce remembers being appalled that his friend would turn on him. “I told him, ‘You can tell the FBI agents standing next to you that I’m not going nowhere,’” he says. “‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Shame on you. Shame on you’ — and I hung up.” As the investigation turned into indict- ments, Byerly was shifted from jail to jail, from Tucson to Phoenix and places in be- tween, in an effort to house him apart from his co-defendants. The effort failed miser- ably. He and Leonard were stuck in the same holding cell at one point. During that awkward encounter, Byerly assured his ex- partner that they were still on the same side — a fiction that would last only until Leonard’s attorneys got the discovery in the case. On another occasion, Byerly was taken to court on the same bus with Boyce and even sat shackled to him in a federal courtroom while the judge quizzed him on his intent to cooperate. Byerly knew that news of his snitching would soon be spreading throughout the jail system. He hoped to be placed in the witness-security program down the line. He was still waiting to hear about Witsec placement when another inmate who was facing armed-robbery charges began ask- ing him for advice. Julius Dixon had com- mitted six bank robberies in the Phoenix area in a matter of months, wrapping his head in bandages to hide a distinctive face tattoo. His yield had been meager; in all but one of them, he came away with less than $3,000. Dixon was impressed with Byerly’s six-figure hauls and discussed his own ex- ploits freely, looking for pointers. Hoping to improve his chances for Wit- sec, Byerly began snitching on Dixon, too. Dixon didn’t find out the snitch’s identity until Byerly had been moved elsewhere; he agreed to plead guilty to five counts of armed robbery rather than go to trial and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Byerly testified in court against Leonard, who got 20 years. Boyce’s case never went to trial; he ended up pleading to one count of armed robbery and served six years in prison. From surveillance video the FBI screened for him, Byerly identified Red Tigue as the culprit in another unsolved bank robbery, and Tigue ended up taking a plea, too. On January 3, 2000, Byerly was sen- tenced to 84 months in prison for his role in the Wells Fargo robberies. His snitching had saved him from what easily could have been a 30-year stretch. The problem now was how to survive the next seven years. Witsec turned him down because his crimes weren’t gang-related; the government’s po- sition was that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons could protect him from any reprisals. The BOP has low-key facilities that pri- marily house protected witnesses; the resi- dents are issued ID cards that list only an initial instead of a last name. But Byerly was on a different path. In its inscrutable wisdom, the BOP decided to house him in the worst place in the federal system for snitches: the U.S. Penitentiary Florence, which had eight inmate murders in its first six years of operation. Carmen Fischer, Byerly’s attorney, was shocked when she learned where he’d been sent. “I worked like the dickens to get him into witness protection,” she recalls. “Instead they sent him to this really dan- gerous prison, where so many people were doing multiple life sentences. The lesson here is that you work with the government at your own peril. They can be pretty inept. When they want you, they’re good to you, but when it’s over, it’s over.” THE WORST PLACE O pened in 1994, the Federal Correc- tional Complex in Florence, Colo- rado, consists of four facilities, housing four distinct inmate populations: a work camp, a medium-security prison, a high-security penitentiary, and the federal supermax. When Byerly heard that he was being sent to Florence, he assumed he would be celled at FCI Florence, the me- dium-security prison, where he’d done time before. Nobody called his name when the bus stopped at the FCI. Or the supermax. The bus riders dwindled to a handful, the high- security pen loomed as the last stop, and Byerly knew he was screwed. Although the supermax next door has more infamous residents — the Unabomber, mob bosses, and so on — those bad boys are locked in their solitary cells for up to 23 hours a day and live in relative safety. The inhabitants of USP Florence tend to be serv- ing long sentences for violent crimes and es- capes, but there are fewer restrictions on their movements and more opportunities for extor- tion, rape, gang wars, and other predations. At the time Byerly got there, the penitentiary had nearly twice as many inmates as it was designed to hold. Thanks in part to the overwhelming gang presence — more than 40 distinct “security threat groups,” from the Aryan Brotherhood, the Bloods, and the Mexican Mafia to the Latin Kings, DC Blacks, and more obscure groups, some working in concert and others bat- tling each other — the as- sault rate was through the roof. In one 17-month pe- riod, USP Florence logged 94 inmate stabbings or beatings, roughly one for every 10 inmates. Since most inmate-on-inmate assaults are never reported, the actual figure was probably much higher. Violence erupted in other ways, too. Persistent rumors about staff corruption had triggered a Justice Department inves- tigation of a group of rogue corrections of- ficers who called themselves the Cowboys. According to the 55-count federal indict- ment, the Cowboys administered their own brand of vigilante justice, typically by beating and torturing inmates and then fabricating evidence, making it look like the inmates attacked them. Their motto: “Lie until you die.” But what truly set USP Florence apart from other high-security pens was the grisly fate of its snitches. In the months leading up to Byerly’s arrival, the killings had become more brazen, demonstrating that “high security” didn’t mean any kind of security for the people inside. In one instance, inmate Maynard Campbell refused to leave his cell when two other prisoners arrived to accuse his cellmate of ratting on a wine-making oper- ation in the prison bakery. Campbell was stabbed 27 times; his cellie was badly wounded but survived. A few days later, drug smuggler After years in the Witsec program, Wayne Byerly (left) reclaimed his name and moved his family to Idaho; Steve Boyce went on to a successful acting career, playing “tough biker” roles in movies, TV shows, and commercials. Way from p 13 >> p 17 Courtesty of Steve Boyce Alan Prendergast
