Five For The Fourth

Happy Independence Day everyone. I'm heading out of town for the weekend, so here are a few to keep you busy.

Dan Barry from Cameron, La, Lane DeGregory on the reality of a development; Kruse with a guy born on the Fourth Of July, and, from George Madden, my good friend in Oklahoma City, David Brooks and Changing Bedfellows.

And don't think about missing Goffard's latest: Deep inside a hushed fortress at the edge of the Colorado Rockies, behind razor-wire coils and reinforced steel doors, one of America's most feared inmates was being carefully watched.

There was little that T.D. "The Hulk" Bingham could do that escaped the attention of intelligence agents at the Supermax federal prison, the nation's tightest lockup.

They feared that Bingham, believed to be one of the walrus-mustached warlords of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, might launch his soldiers into a bloody race war. They monitored his visitors, tapped his phone calls, studied his mail.

But in August 1997, an alleged order slipped out of Bingham's cell in "the Alcatraz of the Rockies," sneaked past impregnable walls and gun towers, foiled a network of cameras and surveillance lasers, and unleashed carnage at another high-security compound 1,700 miles away. At the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa., Brotherhood members armed themselves with shivs and charged black inmates, slaying two.