Carla Conti is a true crime journalist, storyteller, and prison reform advocate who previously covered the police beat and criminal courts as a newspaper reporter in the Midwest and Northeast. In 2012, she was asked to write about federal inmate Kevin Sanders, who was incarcerated inside the brutal, torturous conditions of Pennsylvania’s Lewisburg Prison. Carla then became part of the legal team that defended Kevin against unjust assault charges and remained his advocate and friend on the outside ever since.
Because of her exclusive access to Kevin’s first-person accounts, she knows the stories that led to the 2018 shutdown of USP Lewisburg’s Special Management Unit, one of the bloodiest experimental prison programs in the country. For a decade, Carla followed Kevin’s journey inside various federal prisons to write an exposé on the world of prison abuse, corruption, and violent prison gangs he experienced. However, she became imperiled by association after two separate prison gangs tried to kill Kevin and learned she was writing a tell-all book about his case.
For the protection of certain individuals, Carla is writing her true crime memoir Chained Birds: A Crimemoir under a pseudonym. Accordingly, most names and some places have been changed, but otherwise, the story is true — including the friendship that developed between Kevin and famed Boston mobster Whitey Bulger. Kevin and Whitey met on a tarmac in Florida in 2014 as they were heading to the same prison, and Chained Birds reveals stories about the last four years of Whitey’s life before the gangster was bludgeoned to death with a padlock-in-a-sock behind bars.