(This article has been updated with new details and images from its original September 2024 publication.)
My true crime memoir, Chained Birds, chronicles the ten-year journey of federal inmate Kevin Sanders as he fought to survive the blood-soaked Special Management Unit at Lewisburg Prison. While the book serves as an exposé of that now-shuttered experimental program, it also reveals an unexpected chapter in criminal history and a chance overlap with one of the most notorious gangsters of the modern era, Whitey Bulger.
Long before Lewisburg Prison started housing the “worst of the worst” federal prisoners in its SMU in 2009, the historic Lewisburg Penitentiary was renowned for its famous mobster inhabitants and nicknamed “Mafia Row,” which I recount in Chained Birds.
I also chronicle a later chance encounter between Kevin and Whitey, who eventually became Kevin’s mentor and confidant in a Florida prison. Ironically, Whitey had once walked the same halls of Lewisburg Prison decades earlier, while serving time as a young bank robber years before becoming a crime boss. Through their unlikely bond, the story connects the mid-century ‘Mafia Row’ of Jimmy Hoffa and Al Capone to the modern cycle of brutality that Kevin Sanders was desperate to escape.
(Keep reading past the history lesson for more on the friendship between Kevin Sanders and Whitey Bulger, including stories of this mob boss that are exclusive to Chained Birds.)
An Overview of Lewisburg Prison’s Famous Mafia Inmates from Chained Birds
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 5, “The Big House”:
The Big House, as it was known to locals, was a storied institution built in 1932 that, over the decades, housed a roster of notorious organized crime leaders and associates. The list included: Al Capone, a.k.a. Scarface (Chicago’s infamous Prohibition-era gangster), Whitey Bulger (at the time just a bank robber and years away from becoming Boston’s crime boss), Jimmy Hoffa (Teamsters Union president probably killed and disposed of by the mob after his release), John Gotti (head of the Gambino Crime Family, served three years there for airline hijacking), and Henry Hill (mobster-turned-informant whose story became a book and then the film Goodfellas). This unique profile earned the red-brick prison another moniker, “Mafia Row,” which harmonized with the imposing structure’s Italian Renaissance style.
CHAINED BIRDS: A CRIMEMOIR, Chapter 5 “The Big House”
NOT in the Book, But a Brief (Non-Inclusive) Mob History of Lewisburg Prison
Al Capone, a.k.a. Scarface, Briefly Stopped by Lewisburg Prison
Fun fact about Capone/Scarface—he spent less than 2 hours in Lewisburg prison, yet holds a place on the mobster prison roster for causing the biggest ruckus and media frenzy for his anticipated 1939 arrival from Terminal Island prison in Los Angeles. An estimated 50 reporters and photographers gathered at Lewisburg’s prison gates to glimpse the notorious Chicago crime boss, but Capone had been whisked inside and out of a back entrance in less than two hours. No photos or interviews were captured of Capone, according to a fascinating in-depth article from the Daily Item newspaper about the history of the famously incarcerated at Lewisburg Penitentiary.
The “Dapper Don” at the Big House
No chronicling of Lewisburg’s “Mafia Row” would be complete without the man who perhaps defined the modern era of the American Mob: John Gotti. Known as the “Dapper Don” for his expensive suits and flamboyant personality, Gotti was a high-profile resident of the United States Penitentiary Lewisburg during a pivotal period of his criminal career.
What He Was In For: Gotti served time at Lewisburg in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1968, he was convicted of cargo theft involving a series of truck hijackings at JFK Airport (then Idlewild Airport). While his later, more famous conviction in 1992 would be for racketeering and murder, his stay at Lewisburg was during his rise through the ranks of the Gambino crime family.
The Lewisburg Experience: During his tenure at the “Big House,” Gotti was part of the storied lineage of organized crime figures like Al Capone and Jimmy Hoffa who turned the prison into a base of operations. At Lewisburg, Mob figures often enjoyed a level of influence that allowed them to live “the good life” behind bars, reportedly dining on smuggled Italian delicacies and maintaining their power structures within the prison walls.
Mob Informant Henry Hill … What Chained Birds and Wise Guy Have in Common
Mobster informant Henry Hill, made famous by Nicholas Pileggi’s 1985 book Wise Guy: Life in a Mafia Family—and then more famous still by the movie adaptation Goodfellas five years later—served six years in Lewisburg Prison for extortion from 1972-1978.
In my December 2023 Chained Birds book proposal for WildBlue Press, I compared the role of Henry Hill, an associate of New York’s Lucchese crime family, to my inside informant Kevin Sanders, who helped me shed light on abuses and corruption at Lewisburg’s Special Management Unit in the early 2010s.
From my proposal:
When Wise Guy was published, Hill was still a wanted man by his gangster associates. Similarly, in Chained Birds, two hit orders are placed on Kevin Sanders’ life by two separate prison gangs, the Aryan Brotherhood and the Montañistas. And the Montañistas continue to stalk Kevin even after he goes free.
Whitey Bulger Stories Exclusive to Chained Birds
In 2014, inmate Kevin Sanders stepped off a ConAir flight from Pennsylvania to Orlando and, on the tarmac, met an “old timer” in an orange jumpsuit wearing the same belly chain and shackles. The ornery felon with a sharp tongue and Southie Boston accent turned out to be the notorious Boston mobster Whitey Bulger. Whitey had recently been captured after 16 years on the lam, after a Boston jury in 2013 found him responsible for the murders of 11 people.
On that Florida tarmac, Kevin and Whitey were slated for the same prison bus, bound for the same prison, USP Coleman II. Their chance encounter sparked a friendship between the two convicts that lasted for four years — right up to Whitey’s transfer and murder in a West Virginia medical prison in 2018.
Kevin, who was my inside source for the abuse and corruption occurring at Lewisburg Prison’s SMU program, told me plenty of stories about Whitey over the years, which I relay in four chapters of the book, including:
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- How Kevin and Whitey sized each other up on an hour-long bus ride, with Kevin teaching Whitey how to escape their belly chains and Kevin offering his friendship and “assistance” at their new facility.
- How Whitey described being given LSD as an “experiment” in his early days of incarceration at an Atlanta prison, which left him with lifelong night terrors and the inability to sleep without a light on.
- How Whitey explained his love for his girlfriend, Catherine Greig (with whom he spent years on the run as a wanted criminal) and how he begged Boston prosecutors to give her a more lenient sentence in exchange for his death penalty.
- What led to Whitey’s transfer to a West Virginia prison, where he was bludgeoned to death with a padlock-in-a-sock for being a “rat” FBI informant.
You can read all about it in my award-winning true crime memoir, Chained Birds: A Crimemoir. Available on Amazon and other widely distributed platforms.
Special Thanks to The National Archives for Providing This Copyright-Free Photo of Historic Lewisburg Prison
I wish to thank the National Archives’ Hilda Gitchell, from the Archives’ Still Picture Reference department, for providing me with a courtesy scan of the above 1947 photo of Lewisburg Penitentiary and confirming there are no known copyright restrictions for the image.
Carla Conti is a journalist and the award-winning author of Chained Birds: A Crimemoir. Her next true crime book, The Jacklighter, is set for release in 2026. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, who supports her true crime habit.
