God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  Warden Cain had inherited an atmosphere of peace, a place where a warden could, if he wished, focus on something beyond security. Without his sanity being questioned, Cain could turn against prevailing cynicism, declare his mission the uplifting of men. He owed this latitude not only to the court mandates, but to a pair of former wardens who had brought the calm—and something more than calm—into being.

  Ross Maggio, wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and known as Boss Ross, took over Angola in 1976, soon after the court rulings. Short and puggish, he took his mandated budget and defied tradition, hiring and quickly promoting as many men with two- or four-year college degrees as he could lure to the prison. It wasn’t many, but he set a tone. Guards used to condoning rape, to arranging dates for the marriages of new inmates, to authorizing shanks for their favorite convicts, were retrained and, if necessary, fired. As for the prisoners who needed retraining, Maggio built Camp J. It was filled before the contractors finished screwing in the door handles.

  A work buck filled it. The inmates, accustomed to an idleness that had taken hold over the past few chaotic years, protested the centerpiece of Maggio’s program: labor. He believed in the tranquilizing value of sweat. And they, one afternoon following lunch, refused to return to their jobs. Maggio responded with his new emergency team, trained and armed with his new money. “Shields, helmets, and I had just bought some AR-15s,” he reminisced with me, from behind his tinted glasses, in the office where he was now vice president of a private corrections company. “Shoot, I was ready for war. The inmates, they’d never seen anything like it. Until then, the tac team was whoever with baseball bats. My guys came marching in cadence. Boom boom boom boom. The inmates thought the army had been called in.”

  Maggio herded all one thousand protesters into a small fenced area. They demanded that the media be called, that the governor come, that a prison-rights advocate be allowed to negotiate. Maggio told them to elect sixteen leaders. He told the sixteen there would be no audience. “Whatever happens here tonight it’s going to happen between us,” he remembered saying, and no other version I heard contradicted his showdown rendition. “You all want to be inmate leaders? We have any trouble, anyone in that crowd does anything, and you sixteen are doing hospital time. That’s a promise. Hospital time.”

  One of the elect, a contract killer there for attempting to murder the mayor of Baton Rouge, asked to resign.

  “Un-unh,” Maggio said. “Ain’t no resignations.”

  Magistrate Polozola had already been called. He had told the warden to do whatever necessary. Maggio chose the early opening of J. “They cut up when they got there,” he said to me, “so security gassed them till they were dishrags.”

  Listening to the stories of domination emerging from this small man, I felt vaguely nervous and weak, as though I belonged to a less clear-thinking species. I felt this even while he spoke about Angola’s flower beds. The botany had been his idea. Before he started as warden, smashed windows had stayed unfixed. Screens were torn. Every surface was filthy. The grass had been two feet high around the administration building. Maggio decided that the first thing he would do was clean up the grounds. He wanted—and got—everything pristine. It was that way still. I had seen the disciplinary cases, in their white jumpsuits, mopping the Main Walk twice daily. They even dusted the cinder-block walls. But Maggio had wanted something more, and found it on a family trip to Disney World. He came home with dozens of pictures, documents of the landscaping. “I want Angola to look like this,” he told the wife of one of his officers, a woman he knew “liked to fool with flowers.” He put her in charge of a beautification crew. He promised her all the inmates and all the security she asked for. “And she did a great job,” he told me. But then, as if the unmet goal still nagged at him, he added, “It never did meet Disney World. Really, Disney World is outstanding. I don’t know who they have in charge of those grounds.”

  And I felt the difference, my own lack of clarity and strength, as he toyed with a letter opener while recounting the most famous incident of his career.

  The night before the rodeo’s last Sunday in 1982, his parents were staying with him at the warden’s house, on the hill at the edge of the prison. At one end of the house, his wife bathed their four-year-old son. In the living room, Maggio and his father listened to the LSU football game on the radio. His mother went out to the carport to get a suitcase. There were screams. Maggio bolted to the sliding glass door, saw his mother held by two inmates. They yelled at him to back up. They shoved her into the house, into a corner of the living room. One of them ordered Maggio to lie down, and straddled him with a knife to his neck.

  With me, in his office, he raised the letter opener and pressed its point against his carotid artery. Through the rest of the story, which took about five level-voiced minutes to tell, he held the point there.

  His wife had seen the men from the bathroom window. She took a .357 from the gun locker and, leaving their son in the bathroom, came through the kitchen’s swinging door, aiming at the convict on top of her husband. The man threatened to cut if she didn’t leave. Maggio’s mother was shrieking, the second convict clutching a screwdriver in front of her. His wife backed out through the swinging door. One of the inmates demanded the warden’s car keys. Maggio pointed to his truck keys on a shelf. They walked him and his mother back outside. One convict opened the driver’s side of the pickup. “What’s that,” the man peered down, “a hydromatic?” Maggio had no idea what he was talking about. He realized only later that the inmate was confused by the four-wheel drive’s floor lever—he’d been imprisoned seventeen years. “Give the keys,” the other one seethed, “and let the warden drive the truck.”

  They pushed his mother under the dash with the knife at her back. The man next to Maggio grabbed his hair, put the screwdriver to his throat. “Now you gonna drive us out the front gate. You gonna get us out the front gate. The warden tells them let us through, they’ll let you through.”

  “And I want to tell you, Warden,” the man above his mother said slowly, “if anything goes wrong I’m gonna kill her.”

  Maggio drove down the hill. They got curious about the prison radio, the microphone on a cord from the dash. They wanted to know how it worked.

  “Well, what you do is you grab this mike, and you have to push this button.” Maggio pushed, said a few cautious words into it. The man beside him slapped it from his hand.

  “Motherfuck!”

  “Y’all calm down,” Maggio tried. “That wasn’t nothing.”

  “Anything goes wrong, anything…”

  “That wasn’t nothing.”

  “You stupid stupid fuck, I’m going to cut her, I’m going to cut, you hear me?”

  “We’re going to get through the gate,” Maggio said.

  They neared the main road. He told them to lie down, told them he was going to speed up.

  “Motherfucker!”

  “We’re going through,” Maggio shouted.

  “Anything. See this? Anything…”

  Maggio turned toward the gate. “Now crouch over,” he told them.

  As he jammed down the gas, they huddled low. Yanking the wheel hard, Maggio whipped the truck into the wall near the gatehouse. He squeezed fast out the crumpled door while the convicts sat dazed. Two guards rushed from the gatehouse, pistols drawn. He ran toward them. One of the inmates started to flee. “Shoot, shoot that son of a bitch!” Maggio screamed, but the guard didn’t fire and Maggio grabbed the pistol, shot and missed, and then he heard the truck door slam and looked back to the other convict inside with his mother. He ran up to the window and shot him dead. The second guard finally shot the fleeing man, stopping him. Maggio’s mother was tucked under the dash, unhurt.

  That, except for the wounded convict begging the warden not to kill him when Maggio came by the hospital a few days later, was the end of the story. But something had always bothered me, whenever I’d heard the incident told. And it confused me now. Hadn’t Maggio w
orried what would happen to his mother when he wedged himself out the truck door? I understood why he’d rammed the truck, that once they were outside the prison both he and his mother would likely be killed. But why, with the convicts stunned by the crash, hadn’t he tried to wrestle their weapons away? Why had he left his mother alone with them? It seemed he’d forgotten all about her.

  I phrased my question in a delicate way. He didn’t seem to glean my point. In his mind, he had taken the only reasonable course. “What went through my head was, that guy told me if anything went wrong he was going to kill her, and I didn’t give him a chance to find out if he meant it or not. He had a knife in there with her.”

  I saw that the same logic did not prevail for him and for me. His thinking was straightforward, and he had run toward the guards, toward their guns, to carry it out. What had gone through his mind was: Kill the problem.

  We talked, after that, about rehabilitation, and about Murray Henderson, the liberal warden who had preceded him. I had heard that one evening, a few weeks after taking over, Maggio put on his cowboy hat and ventured out for an impromptu inspection of Main Prison. Halfway through his tour, he opened the door to classification, a department whose role had always been ill-defined. It was supposed to assist in determining the status of inmates—big-stripe or trusty or cellblock. It was supposed to help convicts navigate the prison bureaucracy. It was supposed, generally, to maintain a slightly closer relationship to the convicts than security could. When Maggio opened the door, found the lights off, candles burning, and a group of inmates gathered on the floor around the classification man, he posed what even to me would have been a logical question: “What in the fuck is going on in here?”

  He asked me now, “What rehabilitation? Henderson was going to be a big rehabilitator and all that, but all I saw was the prison falling down around him. You can’t play patty-cakes. I was looking for results. In fairness to him, he didn’t have the money. But even if he’d had it, he wouldn’t have done it the way I did. He wouldn’t have got the results. I left that place one of the safest maximum-security prisons in the nation.”

  Ross Maggio had eliminated the unremitting sense of danger. He had killed the primary problem.

  John Whitley was Maggio’s protégé. Fresh out of college, hair down his back, he had started in classification six years before Maggio’s arrival. He planned, back then, to change all the inmates. “Yes, all they needed was a little understanding.” The guards despised everyone in his department, threatened them, sometimes made them wait an hour before walking over to open the internal gates. But they had a special disdain for Whitley, who favored a pair of striped bell-bottoms in red and gold, and a bandanna-like scarf, hip in Baton Rouge, fastened by a ring at his throat. Those scarves had a particular significance at Angola. They were a badge, worn only by the gal-boys. “Oh, we got a good one here,” the guards muttered before he caught on.

  The scarves went first, followed by the long hair and the bell-bottoms. And as the inmates took advantage of him, and as he witnessed their violence and the therapeutic flailing of his colleagues, his “liberal ways were left,” he said, “somewhere down the Walk.”

  Maggio promoted him, transferred him into security. He continued to rise after Maggio’s time; in 1990 he became warden. “I would never have hired the me I was when I came to Angola,” he said, wearing a white button-down shirt, brown slacks, cowboy boots. Half-hidden by his mustache, the corners of his mouth gave way to an almost imperceptible tremor as he related his stories, possibly from some physical ailment but seemingly from repressed laughter-over the lunacy of who he had been.

  “Finally it dawned on me. These guys are not here to learn a trade. They’re here because they’re pretty bad people.”

  I asked about the sincerity of the religion many of the inmates adhered to.

  “You’ve been up there awhile,” he returned the question, “have you seen Jesus yet?” His lips quivered briefly with sly mirth—at my lunacy as well.

  During his later years there, he confided, if he saw some horrible crime on the TV news he sometimes wrote down the name of the man arrested, thinking, “Now when he gets here, I’m going to be waiting for him.” He had to fight to put that part of him aside. “They have to be just another inmate in your presence.” But sitting in the cramped, street-level office in Baton Rouge where he now worked as Polozola’s specially appointed prison expert, his thinking was a very long way from Warden Cain’s (“You have to forgive to be forgiven”), from Gain’s offering to every prisoner a new beginning, a kind of free grace.

  “When I first got to Angola,” Whitley said, “I didn’t believe in the death penalty. There was no way we should claim a human life. I didn’t even believe in carrying guns. And right now I could hold off a National Guard unit from my living room. That’s the change you go through. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not that sociable anymore. When you work in a prison for twenty-five years and you see nothing but the bad, when you’re reading inmate records, checking them out for specific jobs, and you see the crimes they committed, you finally just get disgusted, and you start thinking this guy here”—he pointed toward a man crossing the parking lot outside his office window—“might be packing a gun, might do something. You have to have been there, and you have to have gone through it, to understand what I’m talking about. It just kind of turns you off from wanting to be with any group of people at all.

  “No, I have no problem with the death penalty. I could stack them all up at one time, and if there was enough voltage, or enough poison to inject, I would give the signal.”

  He said all this, spoke much like Maggio, but with Whitley I did not feel the same sense of my own inferiority, of my own tangled thinking. His lips quivered not only about the past but the present: his arsenal of weapons; his embrace of execution. His current self seemed as comical to him, as extreme, as his old one. The huge change itself seemed ridiculous. His frequent, barely detectable laughter was a way of confessing that nothing seemed right.

  Whitley revered Maggio, but he had left Angola’s inmates with a very different sense of the man who governed them. There were many who actually remembered Whitley with affection. That he had run Angola after Maggio’s era gave him a huge advantage—he didn’t have to fight so hard for mere control. And then there was the residue of the past, the naiveté—or hope—he had “left somewhere down the Walk.” The residue hadn’t fully evaporated. Some of the programs Cain described proudly and talked ardently of fostering had gotten their start under Whitley. He didn’t mention it, but I knew that the CPR team had come together under his administration. Inmate tutors had begun working with illiterate convicts. And to death row, Whitley had brought one day of contact visits each year.

  He was remembered, most of all, for what happened in 1991 when the state switched from the electric chair to lethal injection. A gurney had to be built, a table where the man would lie while the chemicals flowed in. Whitley toured state prisons in Nevada, Colorado and Texas to find the best design. He resolved on one resembling a slightly bent cross, to give easy access to the veins in the arms.

  He returned to Angola, discussed blueprints with the officer in charge of the prison’s industrial complex, and was told the metal shop could handle the project. The next thing he heard, one inmate, then two, had refused to work on the gurney. Whitley sent an assistant warden over to the complex. By then the entire metel shop had balked, and before Whitley could think what to do next, he learned that a D.B. court had been convened right in the middle of a prison passageway (rather than in the remote, closet-like rooms where the mini-trials were usually held). Every inmate walking past could watch as the entire metal shop was convicted of disobedience and sentenced to the fields. Worse, they could find out why. And news spread fast: that the brother of a recently executed man had been one of those assigned to construct the gurney, and that the metal-shop officer had tried to trick the men, telling them the gurney was a new kind of bed for the mental-health
ward. That afternoon, four hundred inmates protested, would not go back to work.

  Whitley responded as Maggio had fifteen years earlier. He knew that to lose hold here meant losing command of the prison. The tac teams marched in. Special marksmen aimed down from the roofs. All four hundred were locked up in cells. But then Whitley did something Maggio would never have done. He let every protester go. He announced to the inmates that he’d “screwed up.” He took the blueprints and contracted them out.

  The admission and reversal were unheard of. They created an unprecedented trust. For the next four years, Angola’s peace was based on communication as much as militaristic order. When Whitley stepped down, Cain’s appointment came with this advantage. Just as Whitley had benefited from Maggio’s resolve, just as Whitley’s reputation for candor was made possible by the lasting effects of Maggio’s control, so Cain inherited both legacies. He was given order, and he was given trust. His improbable mission had a great head start.

  FOUR

  STRINGS OF CHRISTMAS LIGHTS FANNED OUTWARD from the top of the guard tower near the front gate, and giant, luminous angels encircled the base. More angels trumpeted through B-Line. In their camps, the inmates were on vacation from their jobs, hoping for—or refusing to hope for—visits that would not come. Those who were surprised sat for a few hours with their mothers or sisters or children, gazing at a four-foot tree and the words “Merry Christmas” written in a sweeping curve, in gold tape, on cinder block.