My work was bringing me some much-needed positive recognition as I mounted another appeal to the pardon board. The Baton Rouge district attorney withdrew his opposition to my request for clemency. Former warden Henderson, now corrections commissioner in Tennessee, again supported my release. Phelps and Blackburn had been declaring publicly that I was rehabilitated. I had received an offer to write a book and another to make a movie about my life, offers I hoped would give me a good start when released from prison. Attorney Richard Burnes was going to make the case for my release near the end of Governor Edwin Edwards’s term in office.
The hearing was held in Baton Rouge in January 1980. NAACP officers from Lake Charles and state vice president Rupert Richardson showed up to support me. Ginger got state representative Joe Delpit and Reverend T. J. Jemison, president of the National Baptist Convention, two of Louisiana’s most powerful black leaders, to appear on my behalf, but only at the request of her boss, Camille Gravel, one of the state’s most influential white lawyers. White Lake Charles politicians and bankers had led a letter-writing campaign against me. Frank Salter, victim Dora McCain, and staff from the Calcasieu Parish district attorney’s office came to the hearing to oppose me. James Stovall, head of the Louisiana Interchurch Conference and former pastor for the McCain family, told the board that the most difficult thing he had ever done was to leave McCain’s side and join those requesting my release. The board voted 3–2 against me. The crushing loss was made worse when I learned that Johnny Jackson, Sr., the only black on the board, cast the deciding vote. White reporters covering the hearing assumed the roomful of whites to be my opponents, when in fact they were predominantly supporters of mine from New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
I had been imprisoned nineteen years, longer than 99.9 percent of the inmates in Angola. I had expected to regain my freedom through the traditional 10–6 clemency process that had routinely freed lifers since 1926. Now, despite evidence in court records to the contrary, state officials alleged that no 10–6 release practice had ever existed, generating considerable frustration and anger among the lifer population, many of whom had entered into plea agreements with the expectation they would serve only ten years, six months. In 1979, the Louisiana legislature voted to repeal the very 10–6 law that officials said didn’t exist. As we reported in The Angolite, Representative Raymond Laborde said the new law would “end the old myth that life in Louisiana means 10 years, six months. With this it will mean the rest of your life.” That meant that the only way out of prison for lifers like me was through the new pardon board, which had just turned me down. I pulled my Guitar Slim cassette out of the drawer and closed the office door. I needed to sink down into the gutbucket blues.
…
“The George Polk Award?” I asked, looking from Gresham to New York Times reporter Bill Stevens, who was sitting in her office.
“You don’t know what you’ve won?” he said, then explained to me that it was one of journalism’s most prestigious awards. After Stevens left, I asked Gresham to make Billy coeditor of The Angolite, since he had also won a Polk Award independent of my work. I told her it was the only way to ensure that he got equal media attention. She did not agree, but relented; and Billy was approved to become coeditor with publication of the May/June 1980 edition.
Following my interview with Stevens, the Times executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, whom I’d earlier asked for a job, phoned to congratulate me and wish me luck. He told me his paper would be keeping an eye on me. That was followed by a call from David Jones, the paper’s national editor, who inquired whether any other media had shown interest in my winning the Polk Award. I told him no. “That’ll change,” he said. Shortly after the publication of Stevens’s front-page story on me, the other national media descended. A barrage of phone calls was followed by a stream of reporters seeking interviews. One helicopter transporting an NBC team mistakenly landed in the Main Prison Trusty Yard instead of on the prison airstrip, alarming security officers. Had they landed in the Big Yard, they probably would’ve drawn gunfire from the tower guards.
Because neither Billy nor I could attend the awards ceremony at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, Blackburn and Gresham stood in for us. Gresham said they were besieged by agents, reporters, and cameras wherever they went: “It was as if New York City had just gone Angolite-crazy!”
A month later, “The Sexual Jungle” made The Angolite a finalist for the 1980 National Magazine Award, though it didn’t win.
Inspired by the honors our magazine received, the staff became even more aggressive. At Ethel Kennedy’s suggestion, we wrote about the mentally retarded offender, who is easy prey for the rapists and strong-armers. We revealed how mail-order companies use prisons as dumping grounds for shoddy, defective products. We exposed the gross inadequacy of medical services at Angola, after which we were advised that we had better not need medical care anytime soon.
Many of our best stories originated with an official or employee. During an interview in his office, I told New Orleans district attorney Harry Connick that I couldn’t imagine him being as candid with the mainstream media as he was with us. “You guys are different, Wilbert,” he said. “You understand this business from the inside out; the others don’t.”
Now people throughout the Louisiana corrections system wanted to be in The Angolite. Lonely prisoners hoped exposure would get them a girlfriend or freedom. Officials and employees yearned for the professional recognition we could confer, or sought to use us as a conduit for additional resources or change. The honors and publicity we received also raised prisoners’ expectations. We constantly fielded pleas to get a better prison job, improve an inmate’s custody status, and address all kinds of personal problems. I once received a letter from an inmate in the mental health cellblock who believed I was responsible for “the garbage” he was being fed and demanded I change his menu “or else.”
Billy and I traveled around the state unshackled and accompanied by an unarmed security officer to cover official events, to report on other facilities, to lecture at universities, and, in response to requests, to talk to at-risk kids.
We were sometimes overwhelmed by the demands on us and we knew we needed help. Tommy Mason had lost his job as the governor’s valet after getting drunk and making a play for a female guest at the governor’s mansion, and he had been returned to Angola. I asked him to rejoin The Angolite, though Billy opposed it.
I soon saw that there was a dark side to success. The ambitious and manipulative—inmates and employees alike—sought to cultivate us; the jealous and resentful, to bring us down. Some of my critics wrote letters full of lies to the pardon board (and God only knows who else) to sabotage my freedom efforts. A sympathetic official showed me some of the letters so I’d know who my enemies were and what they said and could protect myself.
More worrisome to me were the machinations of Jack Rogers, a Lake Charles attorney who, in talks with prisoners and in addressing a group of 10–6 lifers, was saying I was the biggest liability to the legal challenge they had mounted because “no judge will ever vote to let Rideau out of prison.” I complained to Blackburn, Gresham, and Phelps that Rogers was creating a dangerous situation for me. They assured me they would handle it, and I never again had trouble with Rogers or with the inmates he spoke to, but I wondered, when Angola security warden Walter Pence told me there were rumors of a contract on my life coming out of Lake Charles, if it had anything to do with Rogers. The rumor mill is one of the most maddening aspects of prison life, and prisoners used it regularly to inflict anxiety—and insomnia—on a foe. My paranoia was pricked, and I sent word to all my friends and allies throughout the prison to keep me abreast of all new arrivals from southwest Louisiana and arranged to have no new inmate from that area live or work around me. I was glad I had Billy and Tommy to watch my back.
In late 1980 Elin Schoen came down to research a story on The Angolite for The New York Times Magazine. Like many outsiders, she was puzzled by my inability to get cl
emency in Louisiana when it was routinely given to others convicted of murder. She went to Edwin Edwards, who had left the governor’s mansion some months earlier after eight years’ residence. She asked Edwards, whose liberality in granting commutations was legendary, why I couldn’t get one.
“Rideau was a black who had killed a white person,” Edwards told Schoen. “There has never been a case where a black had killed a black where there was this kind of furor over it when the criminal came up for clemency. It’s easy to raise community feelings over Rideau. But community feelings shouldn’t be given that much weight.”
I was stunned when I read of the nonchalance with which Edwards acknowledged the virulent racial animosity in white Lake Charles and the power that community had to enforce its will. More demoralizing still was Schoen’s discovery that before my clemency hearing, Edwards “phoned a pardon board member who was known to be a Rideau supporter and requested that this person vote against Rideau.” That person was, of course, Johnny Jackson, Sr. “It was just gonna be a hot potato,” a source requesting anonymity told Schoen. “Edwards wasn’t gonna make any friends in the Lake Charles area.”
After a gloomy session listening to the blues, I took heart in the Times Magazine revelation that Edwards’s behind-the-scenes finagling was responsible for the pardon board denial—meaning that if I had been judged on the merits, I would’ve gotten the recommendation. That gave me hope that I could win clemency from the new pardon board that had come in with Republican governor Dave Treen. Treen was reputed to be tough on crime and promised to be tightfisted with clemencies, but that didn’t worry me, because I knew that no one could match my record and my accomplishments. Moreover, I knew a couple of members of Treen’s newly appointed board to be sincere professionals, and I trusted they would be fair.
Meanwhile, Louisiana appeared to be nearing its first execution since 1961. News reporters were making the pilgrimage to Angola to do stories on the death penalty as a prelude to the scheduled April 8, 1981, execution of Colin Clark. Billy and I went to the death house at Camp F on March 17 to get photos for a single-topic edition we planned to do on capital punishment. We encountered two television crews there getting film footage of the electric chair and the death chamber. They wanted to interview us about the death penalty, and Warden Blackburn suggested we help them out.
A few days later we were interviewing Blackburn in his office when Baton Rouge WAFB-TV reporter Jodie Bell, whom we met at the death house, phoned and asked to talk to Billy. Billy took the call in a nearby office. When he returned, he said that Bell wanted to know how far it was from Angola’s front gate to the death house; I wondered briefly why she hadn’t just asked whoever answered the phone for that information. A couple of weeks later, Bell showed up at corrections headquarters in Baton Rouge, where we had gone to interview an official. Shortly thereafter, Billy told me he’d gotten a letter from Bell saying she had requested permission from the warden to see us again for her death penalty series.
She came alone. We saw her in a private interview room, unsupervised. We mostly chatted; occasionally she asked specific questions and jotted notes. Later she visited us again, to gather information for a story about us for Gambit, a New Orleans weekly.
One night soon after that, security summoned me from my office to take a phone call from the media concerning The Angolite. A distressed Jodie Bell told me that she had found out “everything about Billy” and angrily railed about his not having told her about his long criminal history.
“What’s with you and Jodie Bell?” I asked Billy, once I had returned to my office. He told me that they had been corresponding and communicating on the phone. “She just called me, and she sounded hysterical,” I said. “Call her. And tell her that she cannot call here like that again. She’s putting our Angolite phone privileges in jeopardy.”
The next morning, Billy confessed to being madly in love with Bell, the fortyish wife of a New Orleans journalism professor and mother of three. She had recently embarked upon a career in television journalism. She did her television work in Baton Rouge during the week and visited her family in New Orleans on weekends.
Billy said he was going to continue to see Jodie in the unsupervised, closed-door privacy of the room in which we had met with her previously; that would be possible only if Jodie requested the visits as legitimate journalistic interviews. I realized that my inclusion in her last two visits had been merely to give them credence. I told him that she should leave my name out of future “interview” requests because I would not jeopardize my hard-earned credibility by participating in their ruse.
Billy’s conduct put me in a bind. The Angolite was everything to me—both my mission and what made my life in Angola bearable and meaningful, and what I hoped would prepare me for life after my release. Billy was playing Russian roulette not only with his own life but also with mine.
What were my options? Telling Gresham about Jodie and Billy’s private trysts would likely lead to Billy’s dismissal from the magazine; Gresham would regard his actions as a betrayal of the trust she placed in him. Moreover, if Gresham learned that Jodie was abusing her journalistic credentials to have private romantic visits with Billy, she might severely curtail all media access to Angola and The Angolite, which was a benefit to the prisoners and essential to our operation. That would be good for no one.
As a man who had been deprived for far too long, I couldn’t condemn Billy for wanting romance with the willing Jodie Bell. Torn as I was, I kept my mouth shut and prayed that Billy and Jodie didn’t get busted.
8
Disillusion
1981—1986
The Angolite enjoyed remarkable freedom to investigate and criticize prison management, policies, and practices under Warden Blackburn, so it was ironic that what nearly brought us down in early 1981 was a story about a toilet and another about religion.
A maverick guard had put a lock on a communal toilet in the education building because he did not want to sit on a toilet seat used by an inmate. This was the sort of petty, arbitrary exercise of power—at once both humiliating and inconvenient to inmates—that gave daily prison life a sense of madness and superfluous cruelty. At The Angolite, we saw the guard’s action as an opportunity for satire, which we ordinarily avoided because we felt every aspect of prison life was serious business. Billy wrote an accordingly lighthearted piece for our January/February 1981 issue called “The Locked John.” The other feature in that edition was “Religion in Prison,” in which I observed that the Catholic Church, the biggest and most powerful in Louisiana, had turned a cold shoulder to the imprisoned, literally abandoning ministry to them.
When the magazine was distributed throughout the prison, Billy and I were on a speaking engagement in the northeastern part of the state. Walter Pence, Angola’s security warden, phoned to tell me there was growing anger among his guards, some of whom were threatening to firebomb the Angolite office because Billy had written “prison guards, like defensive linemen, are not known for their dazzling brilliance.” Other guards complained to their state legislators that we should be shut down. Pence suggested that we consider extending our speaking trip to allow the furor to diminish. But if prison had taught us nothing else, it taught us that you can’t solve a problem if you are running from it. We immediately returned to Angola, where I enlisted the help of Lieutenant Colonel Richard Wall, security chief of the Main Prison, and some other influential officers with whom I had good relations, to help mollify the angry guards.
At the same time, the bishop of the Catholic diocese of Baton Rouge, the Very Reverend John Sullivan—later discovered to have been a not-so-reverend pedophile—was offended by my article on the church and took his complaint and political clout to Governor Edwards, but Phelps stood firm.
Clinton Baudin, a vulgar, red-faced, beer-bellied officer, had meanwhile mounted a continuing vendetta against me and the magazine. On the last day of August, Louis Ortega, one of our two illustrators, overslept after working late th
e night before and thus missed reporting for his “extra duty” assignment that morning. Baudin cited Ortega for “aggravated work offense,” a serious disciplinary infraction, and removed him to the Dungeon. Before he left, Baudin turned to Larry Stegall, our second illustrator, and said, “You’re next.”
Shortly afterward, Major W. J. Norwood, who had locked up Billy almost a decade before for possession of narcotics, led three officers into the Angolite office, where they strip-searched Billy and had him wait outside while they shook down the office. After about an hour, the officers departed. They had rummaged through photos, files, mail, confidential notes, and interviews. Worse, they had obviously listened to a cassette containing an interview with condemned prisoner Colin Clark, which we had been keeping confidential at the request of Clark’s attorney.
When Phelps learned what had happened, he assured me, “I’ll handle Norwood and those officers—in my own way.”
A couple of weeks later, in September 1981, Phelps was fired. Republican governor Dave Treen, who’d assumed power the year before, said he ousted Phelps because of “philosophical differences.” Phelps, a Democrat, had been critical of the throw-away-the-key prison-building policies that were feeding a corrections system in which more than half of its inmates were confined for nonviolent property offenses. He was equally critical of the governor’s stinginess on clemency, which he predicted would make Angola the world’s largest old folks’ home.
Treen replaced Phelps with John T. King, a political crony who had a background in business. Within two weeks, the new regime restricted editorial content in all prison publications. Department of Corrections headquarters shut off its flow of information to The Angolite, canceled equipment purchases, curtailed supply orders, and put our staff under investigation.
Wilbert Rideau Page 21