Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [176]
On a scale of one to ten, McDougal rated his anxiety level at a seven, and his depression at a six. Mainly, he was worried that this failure to “pee on demand” might count against his parole eligibility in some way. He was still scheduled to come up for parole in April of 1998. A drug-testing rap could ruin that opportunity. Clark’s report noted that McDougal’s “affect was slightly restricted” but that “no homicidal or delusional ideation was elicited.” The psychologist made a note to meet with McDougal again “in a month’s time, to check his progress.”
The next meeting came much more quickly. On Thursday, November 6, the Psychology Department was alerted that McDougal had been thrown into the SHU—the segregated housing unit or “hole”—the most restricted, maximum-security area of the prison. This had occurred, the warden informed the psychology team, because of a disciplinary violation. In the SHU, prisoners were stripped of clothing, subjected to full body searches for possible contraband, and then dressed in reddish orange jumpsuits to indicate that they had been banned from the general population. In the world of the Fort Worth prison system, it was the equivalent of being condemned to the hot fires of purgatory, one stop short of hell.
Clark entered the sally port through the electronically operated doors and walked to Cell B-26, a tiny, vaultlike room. Everything was “bolted to the walls of the floor so there is nothing loose that an inmate could use [as a weapon] within the cell.” A thick steel door separated the doctor from his patient. There McDougal could only communicate with his doctor through a three-inch mesh-covered hole in the thick steel door.
According to Clark’s notes of the visit, McDougal was “very irritated.” Through the peephole, he complained that he had been summoned to the prison’s disciplinary hearing board that morning and had been found guilty of a “110” violation for “failure to pee on demand.” He went on to charge that he was being “unjustly punished,” and whispered that he had “managed to get a phone call out before being placed into the hole,” letting the media know that he was being persecuted by the Bureau of Prisons.
His mistreatment by the prison was not a coincidence, McDougal said. On the very day he was placed in the SHU, he told Dr. Clark, the newspapers had reported that a freak act of God had recently unearthed a scrap of paper that (McDougal asserted) now conclusively proved that then-Governor Bill Clinton had played a role in some of the unorthodox business dealings at Madison Guaranty. A tornado had swept through southwestern Arkansas back in March, smashing windows and destroying an abandoned 1979 Mercury Marquis that was sitting in the lot of Johnny’s Transmission Shop on the outskirts of Little Rock. Records now indicated that the car had belonged to one Henry Floyd, a former Madison Guaranty employee who had been dispatched to drive boxes of Madison papers to a ware house for storage, but had dropped the Mercury off for repairs during a business trip, never returning to pay the bill. As the abandoned car was getting readied for the compactor, the owner opened the trunk and found long-lost Madison Guaranty documents, including a 1982 cashier’s check for $27,600 payable to “Bill Clinton.” The check bore no endorsement by Clinton; it was unclear whether the money had actually been paid to the governor. But McDougal insisted that this was the smoking gun that would blow Clinton’s denials to pieces.
Before being placed in the hole, McDougal had called the Associated Press and told the writer—for the first time—that Bill Clinton had taken a loan from McDougal’s failed savings and loan, used those proceeds to pay off his Whitewater debt, and then lied about it in his sworn testimony. McDougal had told the AP reporter: “They’re going to hang them [the Clintons] with the documents that they got.