Brought in to reform Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge after political appointees had mismanaged their way into a riot in 1957 and a sit-down strike in 1958, able Warden Floyd E. Powell, 46, gave convicts a break. He put salt, pepper, mustard and catchup on the mess-hall tables, instituted TV-watching hours, worked hard to shape up the grim, turreted brick buildings built in 1912.
But Powell's reforms had little charm for Jerry Myles, 44, six-time loser (burglary), sometime poem scribbler, and the prison yard's most flagrant homosexual. Nor did they change the attitude of Myles's closest friend, willowy, 19-year-old Lee Smart, who at 16 got 30 years for clubbing a man to death. Last week the pair conspired to set off one of the most harrowing riots in the recent years of trouble in the nation's prisons.
Hostages to Burn. At guard-change time one afternoon last week, Myles and Smart directed half a dozen other hard cons in a fast grab of two guards, armed with .30-cal. rifles. Young Smart coldly shot Deputy Warden Theodore Rothe dead. Other ringleaders captured Warden Powell, used the telephone to lure in other staffmen, slashed one guard who resisted, locked up five stoolpigeon convicts, whipped up some 30 other inmates (total: 435) and armed them with knives and meat axes. At nightfall the warden talked one convict into helping him escape, quickly called for an attack by National Guardsmen.
Hearing about the Guard call on prison radios, Myles and Smart herded their 18 handcuffed hostages, including Prison Sociologist Walter Jones, into a pair of cell cages in the third tier. On the bars above and around the sides, the ringleaders stationed convicts with jugs of naphtha from the laundry. Their orders: at the first noise of an attack from outside, pour the naphtha on the hostages, light it. "We'll burn 'em," shrieked a convict from the wall, and Warden Powell got word from inside that they meant it.
Under the Jug. For two nights and a day the hostages huddled under the naphtha jugs. Around them, convicts hopped up on dispensary narcotics and kitchen-made "pruno" alcohol brandished their meat axes and jittered wildly. Rawboned Sociologist Jones, 24, was twice sent out to tell Powell that any move would mean death to the hostages, and to report convict grievances (bucket toilets, young prisoners mixed with older men, a hated state parole commissioner). "It's tighter than hell," he said. "They're shook." Once he went back, as he had promised, to sit under the jugs; on the second trip Warden Powell refused his pleas to return.
Late the second night Warden Powell heard over his ever-working prison grapevine that Myles had decided to burn the hostages. He acted quickly, led a 50-guardsmen bazooka, machine-gun and rifle attack. The first bazooka "V-O-O-R-O-O-M" so shook the cons that they got only one naphtha jug poured, never got it lit before machine guns scared them away. Wept one guard: "It was like getting your life back again."