Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  Bill Brown assured the sheriff that last-minute requests for speakers to stay over were routinely granted. When he called, Peggi Gresham said she would normally approve it, except that we had to be in Denham Springs, sixty miles away, for a Jaycees meeting the next day. I was crushed.

  On the trip back from LaPlace, we passed a Klan rally, where a flaming cross burned brightly in the night. Still, the speaking trip was like heady wine. I wanted to travel as much as possible. But the administration would send speakers out only at the specific request of a school, or a social, civic, religious, or police organization, and speakers were prohibited from soliciting such requests. The more innovative inmates created all sorts of public service programs that would appeal to social-minded citizens and outside organizations, resulting in requests for speakers. The most alluring incentive securing the inmates’ cooperation was, unofficially, sex. Speakers always tried to set up schedules that lasted at least several days—many were a month or longer— preferably in smaller cities and towns, because local cops there were generally not hampered by big-city-type policies and procedures on the treatment of visiting prisoners. Most small-town officers saw no reason why inmate speakers should not be rewarded with “a little nooky” on a trip. Like so much else in Louisiana, it was unofficially okay as long as you didn’t get caught and it didn’t become public.

  6

  Crackdown

  1976

  Speculation about who would fill the top jobs in the penal system had become feverish. “It’s gonna be a whole new ball game when Maggio takes over, Rideau,” one security officer said to taunt me.

  One afternoon in mid-March, I was sitting behind my desk in the Angolite office with my feet up when the door opened. A well-built, good-looking blond man wearing a tan leather blazer stepped into the room. His movements exuded confidence, strength, and power, like the gunfighters in the cowboy movies of my childhood. “I’m looking for Rideau,” he said, walking over to the large chair and sitting down. “I’m Ross Maggio.”

  I didn’t move. “Glad to make your acquaintance,” I said. “From the way security talks, you’re the new warden, even though the governor hasn’t made a decision yet.”

  “I heard a lot about you and wanted to come by and see you. You’re the one who wrote that article on the rodeo a couple years ago, eh?”

  “I did. And did you give the behind-the-scenes order to have me locked up for writing it?”

  Maggio smiled. “Didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said. “What makes you think I had something to do with it?”

  I shook my head. “Just asked.”

  Ross Maggio, Jr., began talking about himself, his years with the corrections department, his philosophy. He was thirty-six, with a degree in agriculture. He looked and talked like he could have been a rancher, a businessman, or a hit man. There was a hint of violence about him.

  The next time I saw him was on March 20, 1976, the day after the governor appointed Phelps to head the corrections system. Griffin Rivers, thirty-six, the only Louisianian in the corrections system to hold a master’s degree in criminal justice, was to serve as his deputy, the first black ever to occupy that position. Maggio was named warden of Angola, the youngest ever.

  I went out that morning to cover the transfer of seven hundred Angola prisoners to Dixon Correctional Institute, a new facility opened to relieve overcrowding, and found Maggio supervising the operation. Beaubouef, no friend of mine, was at his side, implying a relationship between the men that gave me pause.

  That afternoon, a cheerful Phelps and Rivers visited the Angolite office. I had met Rivers some years before when, as a criminal justice instructor at Southern University, he brought his class on a tour of the prison. He was hip and sophisticated. He greeted me like a long-lost friend. “You know, walking through this place is sort of like walking through the old neighborhood where I grew up in New Orleans,” he said. “Man, I recognize a lot of old faces I came up with, men who disappeared somewhere along the way. Now I see where they disappeared to.”

  When Rivers left, I said to Phelps, “I’m glad for your appointment, but your new warden bothers me.”

  “He shouldn’t,” he said, looking into my eyes. “I’m his boss, and he’ll do what I tell him to do.”

  “Your office is in Baton Rouge,” I said, implying it was far removed from what was happening at Angola.

  “It may have been that way in the past, but it’s going to be different as long as I’m director,” Phelps said. “You’re going to see me around this prison almost as much as you did when I was warden. And I’m going to be dropping in on you to see how The Angolite is coming along and to visit and talk with you, just like I’ve been doing since we first met. There are a lot of things wrong with this place, and it’s going to take some drastic changes to put it in order. You’ve got a role to play because I want us to do with The Angolite what we said we’d do with it—I want it to be a meaningful source of information for the inmates and not some boarding-school newsletter. Nothing is changed in that respect. You are the editor. Peggi is your supervisor. Anytime you disagree with her on something, you can appeal her decision to Warden Maggio. And if you’re not satisfied with his decision, then you appeal it to me. I’m the publisher.

  “Don’t get pessimistic on me before you give it a chance to work. And the same applies to Ross—don’t prejudge him. He might surprise you. I’ve known him for a long time. We started working in corrections across the desk from each other on the same day. And Ross is who Angola needs as warden right now. This prison has been a headache for the state for longer than anyone can remember. If I do nothing else during my tenure as director, I’m determined to clean it up. We’re going to regain control of this penitentiary, end the violence and bloodshed, and make it safe.”

  As Phelps warmed to his subject, he grew indignant. “The inmates are going to holler that we’re fucking them over, but they don’t have to strong-arm, rape, and kill each other. I’m not going to let that happen. Ross is the right personality for this situation. The inmates will find that he’s willing to deal with them on any terms they choose. They want to cooperate—fine. They want to fight—Ross will oblige them. He has a job to do and how he does it is going to be primarily determined by the inmates themselves. But make no mistake—the job is going to be done.”

  While Phelps in his new job coped with the lawsuits, political pressures, and the howls of a public made even more hostile by the massive relocation of prisoners throughout the state, Maggio cracked down at Angola. Personnel were hit first; scores of entrenched employees were fired, demoted, transferred, or forced into retirement. “You can’t expect to rehabilitate the prisoners until you rehabilitate the staff,” Phelps explained. Among the first to go were Lloyd Hoyle and William Kerr, the two officials who had ordered me locked up in the Dungeon over the rodeo article.

  When a prisoner escaped from the cellblock, Maggio unprecedentedly suspended the top cellblock supervisor. “Whenever something goes wrong, they point the finger at the bottom-line correctional officer and fire him,” he said. “The way I see it, the man on the bottom will only do his job to the extent his supervisor makes him do it. When something goes wrong, it’s the supervisor’s ass I want, and I don’t care if he was a thousand miles away from the incident when it happened. Hold the supervisor responsible for what his men do, and he’s gonna make it his business to see to it that they do their job right.”

  Maggio also introduced surprise roadblocks along Angola’s blacktops to search employees’ vehicles, seeking to halt the flow of narcotics, weapons, and other contraband into the prison.

  In his first meeting with inmate leaders, Maggio brushed aside questions about his plans for rehabilitating them. “Rehabilitation has a hollow sound to it when you’ve got people being killed as they’ve been killed here,” he told us. “Before you can think about rehabilitation, you’ve got to have a degree of order and discipline. No prisoner should have to wonder whether he’s going to wal
k out of this place alive.”

  Unlike typical corrections officials who resort to wholesale lockdowns—where prisoners are confined to their cells or dorms, and all inmate movement is halted throughout the prison—to combat violence, Maggio shunned actions that punished rule-abiding inmates. He ordered the immediate but selective lockup of all known and suspected gang leaders and members, drug dealers, homosexuals who created problems, and suspected strong-armers who raped weaker inmates or forced them to pay protection. When lifer Terry Lee Amphy was stabbed to death in his dormitory—the first prisoner to be killed in 1976—Maggio swiftly ordered every inmate found with anything resembling a weapon to be locked up. Sophisticated electronic devices and walk-through metal detectors were installed. Searching—“shaking down”—prisoners at every gate inside the prison was now required, and there were surprise shakedowns as well. A special detail of officers was assigned the task. Officers could no longer warn inmates with whom they had alliances, something that had become a common practice. So many men were locked up that each of the prison’s two-man disciplinary cells overflowed with as many as eight men.

  Those prisoners without jobs or who had been ducking work were now sent to the fields. Prisoners complained that picking cotton would not train them for jobs in society. Maggio agreed, but told me, “We’ve got to have something to occupy their time, burn off some of their energy. Otherwise, they’ll just sit around, figuring ways to beat us or each other.”

  With the grip of the former inmate power structure and cliques broken by the massive transfer of prisoners out of Angola as well as the lockups, new and strict security regulations went into effect. The freedom of movement formerly enjoyed by inmates came to an abrupt end; passes were required to go through gates and to travel from one area to another. The security force grew from 450 officers to 1,200. An officer was stationed in every area of work and play, even locked inside the dormitories at night with the prisoners, armed with only a beeper that, when sounded, brought fellow officers stationed elsewhere in the prison rushing to his aid.

  Prison employees replaced prisoners who had previously served as clerks in many key prison operations, positions that enabled those prisoners to profit by exploiting other inmates. Inmates complained to Phelps about the shakedowns and charged that the stringent measures imposed by Maggio were unnecessary. “None of this had to happen,” Phelps replied, “but you’ve made it happen. You don’t have to do the things that you do to each other.”

  Maggio continued Phelps’s practice of not operating the prison from the warden’s office. He ordered all top officials to create a “floating administration,” moving about the prison and accessible to the inmate population. Maggio popped up everywhere, at any time, dressed in anything from a business suit to the blue denims worn by the prisoners. That kept his employees doing their jobs, which in turn kept them riding herd on the inmates—exactly what he wanted.

  Maggio was a man given to action, tolerating no nonsense and accepting no excuses. One day he fired a yard supervisor on the spot. When the officer disputed the dismissal, Maggio ripped the badge from the officer’s shirt and punched him in the face, knocking him to the ground in front of inmates and other employees. Except for rare instances like that, few prisoners knew that he was cracking down as hard on his employees as he was on them.

  One night he busted down doors in eliminating an illicit whorehouse on B-Line, which he had ordered closed when he took office. A week later, during a ceremony attended by employees and inmate organization heads, I asked him about the incident. He grinned, relishing it.

  “Chief, you shouldn’t underestimate those B-Liners,” I said. “Some of them are not much different from inmate gangsters down the Walk. They play for keeps, and they’ve put skates under wardens before you.”

  Maggio’s ego was pricked. “They may have run other wardens, but they’re not going to run this one,” he said, turning dead serious. “They may kill me, but I won’t run. I don’t back down.”

  In the beginning, he and Beaubouef roamed about the prison armed, supervising and policing everything. Maggio personally led the manhunts for escapees in the rugged wooded terrain around the prison, a pistol strapped to his leg. He got lost once and radioed in. Told to stay where he was, that a search party would go out and meet him, he replied angrily: “You just tell me my goddamn location, then tell me which way those prisoners went!” Maggio was in his element; he was a man who enjoyed the macho games and was determined to succeed at them. His behavior won him respect in Angola, to the point that inmates dubbed him “a gangster,” the ultimate compliment. He loved hearing that.

  As Maggio settled in, my profile grew and my writing career blossomed. Penthouse published my feature about the plight of incarcerated veterans in its April 1976 issue. Louisiana’s second-largest paper, the New Orleans States-Item, did a front-page series on Angola on April 14. One article, “Rideau: Piercing the Walls with Words,” was a lengthy profile by reporter Jim Amoss about my self-education and rehabilitation during the fifteen years of my imprisonment; another article, “Jungle,” was by me. The timing was fortunate, I thought, because in a month the state pardon board would be hearing my plea for freedom.

  But two weeks after the States-Item articles appeared, I received my first and only disciplinary report when a guard searched my locker and found “contraband”—a bottle of Wite-Out I had taken to my dorm so I could continue working after hours on The Angolite. It was the only disciplinary report ever issued in Angola’s history for Wite-Out, a product universally used by inmate clerks. In an environment where strong-arming, dope peddling, prostitution, and fights were the stuff of disciplinary hearings, the disciplinary court declared me guilty but gave me only a verbal reprimand. Achieving prominence while in prison, I learned, exacts a price.

  Even that reprimand anguished me, because I had hoped to present a blemish-free conduct record in support of my petition for clemency. “We’re interested in what’s happened to a man since he landed in the penitentiary, rather than in the circumstances of the offense,” pardon board chairman John D. Hunter had explained to Amoss. “If a man has a good prison record and shows a willingness to rehabilitate himself and gives us an indication he can operate in free society, we often give him a cut to a certain number of years, if the situation warrants it.” As I said, I expected a favorable response from the board.

  I was not permitted to appear before the pardon board to plead my own case, so others were to appear on my behalf: my mother; Sister Benedict Shannon, who was still my spiritual advisor; Lake Charles NAACP president Florce Floyd; and Louis Smith, the director of the Baton Rouge Community Advancement Center, who sponsored Vets Incarcerated, our self-help program at Angola for military veterans.

  I knew I was in trouble from the moment I awoke on May 19, the day the board convened in Baton Rouge to hear my petition. The inmate who slept in the bunk next to me told me he had heard on the radio that “Frank Salter is personally appearing with your victim to oppose your release. They talked about you pretty bad, man.”

  It was the first time in Salter’s sixteen years as a district attorney that he made the 125-mile trip from Lake Charles to Baton Rouge to oppose clemency for anyone, including a string of murderers whose sentences were commuted during that time.

  He would be there because of a scandal he was involved in. A failed extortion attempt by Lake Charles AFL-CIO union boss Donald Lovett to force Arizona industrialist Robert Kerley to hire a company partly owned by Salter to construct an ammonia plant had culminated in mob violence on January 15 and the murder of construction worker Joe Hooper. Lovett was indicted for manslaughter, and his trial was set for May 10, nine days before my pardon board hearing. Salter had by then become the subject of increasing criticism as his long, corrupt relationship with Lovett was exposed by the media. His appearance at my hearing was a public relations ploy on his part to win back some public favor.

  I went to my office and sat quietly behind my desk. An hour or so
later, a classification officer came to the door. “Long distance,” he told me in a hushed, conspiratorial tone as we moved toward his office, where I closed the door behind me to take the unapproved call. It was Louis Smith.

  “Man, it’s all bad news,” he said. “We had everything down pat and the board had told us it was a sure thing, especially since Warden Henderson was requesting that you be released to him in Tennessee. We were all waiting for the hearing to begin when Salter showed up. Florce Floyd looked like he had seen a ghost. He walked up to Salter and said, ‘Frank, you promised me that you wouldn’t come.’ The bastard just smiled and said, ‘I changed my mind.’ He came with Baton Rouge district attorney Ossie Brown, and they brought their own reporters. They set up TV cameras in the pardon board room, and you could just see the reaction on the board members’ faces. They were intimidated.”

  I thanked Smith for his efforts and returned to my office.

  Salter’s appearance gave him the desperately needed dose of law-and-order publicity he was looking for. He exaggerated and even fabricated various aspects of my crime. I couldn’t challenge him, because the board’s policies forbade granting clemency to a prisoner who disputed the facts of his case; that was seen as a refusal to accept responsibility for his crime. In my office, I suddenly felt old and very, very tired.