Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  As the scandal began to dominate the news in the ensuing weeks, the governor declared that he would sign no more pardons until a grand jury investigation was over.

  As the scandal grew, Billy acted increasingly odd, especially after his office was searched in a surprise security action. When I pressed him, he revealed to Tommy, me, and our illustrator, Poochie, that he and Jodie had been cooperating with an FBI sting operation on Berlin Hood, the prison’s food manager, who offered to arrange a pardon for Billy for $15,000, that Marsellus was involved, and that it went all the way up the line to the governor.

  We were shocked, not only because of the FBI connection but also because Billy and Hood were close, and had been for more than a decade; Hood was his mentor, protector, and advocate.

  “This only has to do with Hood,” Billy said, “not anyone else in this prison.” He said he couldn’t explain everything right then but suggested that we watch reporter Chris McDaniel’s special series featuring Jodie on Channel 9 the following evening. He said that would be followed by the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate publishing a feature on him.

  After Billy left the office, Tommy said, “Well, I’ll be damned. They betrayed Hood to the FBI, then betrayed the FBI to Channel 9. This is going to raise questions about us, too.”

  I sat alone in the darkness of my office, deep into the night, trying to decide what—if anything—I should do. I knew that if I repeated down the Walk what Billy had told us, one of those inmates whose clemency hopes had vanished because of the scandal would take him down. I had tried hard to help Billy, yet he had caused me more problems and anguish than any other inmate during my entire prison experience.

  With the morning light came clarity. Just because people labeled us criminals didn’t mean we had to be criminals. I had survived everything prison had thrown at me, and I would survive this, too.

  That morning Billy left Angola in the custody of federal marshals. A Channel 9 camera crew was conveniently at the front gate to film and report the story of his entering protective custody after being part of a federal investigation into pardon selling. It was headline news throughout the state.

  The following afternoon, Phelps met with the Angolite staff.

  “To answer the question foremost in your minds,” he said, “Billy Wayne Sinclair is in the East Baton Rouge Parish jail, where he is being debriefed by federal and state investigators. While it’s supposed to be about Hood offering him a pardon for fifteen thousand dollars, he’s volunteering everything he knows about everybody to anybody who’ll listen.” He paused, looked at me, and continued. “He says you and Marsellus are close, that you call him at home, and he’s heard you discussing the cases of inmates on the Angolite telephone, suggesting that your dealings with Marsellus were improper, if not criminal.”

  “Of course I’ve talked to Marsellus about inmates,” I said, “just as I’ve talked with past pardon and parole board members who ask my opinion on trying to help inmates. I’m the editor here, and everyone calls for both information and my opinion—grant hustlers, researchers, journalists, state officials, wardens. I’ve been doing this for the last ten years. I’ve never seen it as a big deal, nor has anyone else. But in all my dealings with Marsellus he never once suggested anything improper or offered to sell a pardon, either through me or to me.”

  “Does anyone have any idea why Billy would want to create problems for The Angolite?” Phelps asked. “It’s apparent that he wants to.” Phelps was concerned that our staff might be seen as complicit in Billy’s informant activities and his busting Hood, a popular prison employee.

  “Well, we’re about to learn how much respect we command and the extent of our credibility among the inmates,” I said.

  A less courageous man in charge would have shut us down, but Phelps used the incident as an opportunity to reinforce the administration’s commitment to us. He said his concern was The Angolite and what Billy did. “That’s something that I, as publisher, have to address,” he said, “so get out your tape recorder.”

  He gave a lengthy statement, which I published in its entirety in the November/December 1986 issue of the magazine, following a brief report on Billy’s role as an FBI undercover informant. “What Billy Wayne did certainly compromised not only the integrity of the magazine but also the safety and well-being of the rest of the staff who had nothing to do with his extracurricular activities,” he said, in part.

  Not long after the Sinclair affair, Phelps expanded journalism at Angola to include KLSP, the nation’s only federally licensed, inmate-operated radio station.

  We Angolite staffers met with inmate leaders, making a point of being seen with them and becoming even more accessible to the general population. Our survival required all of Angola to see that we were not part of Sinclair’s sting and that we had no knowledge of it. Tensions ran rampant at the prison, with rumors of widespread investigations into individuals and operations. Inmates were on edge. Employees were wary. But our integrity remained intact.

  Contrary to his expectations, Billy would serve another twenty years in prison, in protective custody. Jodie, who stuck with him, eventually went into public relations work in Houston.

  9

  Soldiering On

  1986—1990

  Which is worse: death by execution or spending the rest of your life in prison? That was a question I was asked to answer on July 1, 1986, when I went to the studios of WBRZ-TV in Baton Rouge to appear by hookup on Nightline. With twenty-five years served on a life sentence, I was at that time one of the longest-serving lifers in America, which qualified me as an expert on the subject. Ted Koppel was exploring it because serial killer Ted Bundy was scheduled to be executed that night—a date with death he dodged only temporarily.

  A couple of weeks later I received a note from Dr. Linda LaBranche of Northwestern University, a Shakespeare scholar who had learned from my Nightline appearance that I “wrote for the prison newspaper” and decided—against all her instincts, she later confessed—to write to me to offer whatever I might need in the way of pens, writing tablets, or books. She sounded like a prim and proper English teacher who was patting me on the head like a good little boy. I sent a return note thanking her for her interest and asked her to write again. I enclosed articles about me from The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor and the Times-Picayune editorial advocating my freedom. After reading the articles, she wrote back asking why my clemency had been denied. It made no sense to her. I wrote back, and she did, too—almost daily, telling me about her life and asking me for more information about my case. I sent her a two-inch-thick file of photocopied news clippings. In return, the following week, she sent me a thirty-page “briefing” on my case that she had prepared for the media, along with cross-indexed listings of the articles I’d sent.

  I was amazed at the amount of work she’d done, even though the “briefing” was far too long to be of any value to the media. She said she was dividing the days of her summer vacation between scholarship and reading up on the criminal justice system, to which she’d never before given a thought. She found the whole thing fascinating. I wondered if she was just a crazy old lady, and if not, if she’d be willing to help me in some way that might lead to clemency. I didn’t know what that might be, but the biggest problem that every prisoner faces in trying to get out of prison is a lack of help on the outside—someone to write letters, recruit other supporters, show up at pardon hearings, gather evidence, organize. When I asked her to send me a photo of herself, she sent a one-inch-square mug shot from a school ID card. Quite possibly crazy, I thought, trying to discern from the miniature photo what she might actually look like.

  C. Paul Phelps was going to a corrections convention in Chicago in October and I asked if he would check her out for me, if she was willing to meet with him. It was a meeting that would change my life. He thought she was charming, smart, and very well informed about my case. He grilled her with questions, she grilled him, and by the end of the long dinner they
shared, he urged her to come to Louisiana and talk with me in person before she agreed to put her reputation on the line to try to help me.

  Linda announced she would come during the Thanksgiving break. When the day arrived, I was on edge, still a bit wary that someone might want to take out their frustrations on me because their clemency hopes were damaged by the pardon-for-sale investigation.

  Linda stepped off the prison bus wearing high heels and a teal blue suit, definitely overdressed. She stood five-foot-two and weighed less than a hundred pounds, which were packed into an hourglass shape that would have been the envy of a twenty-five-year-old but that the typical black man from my era would have found too thin. Her hair was a light auburn, thanks to henna, which complemented her light complexion and highlighted big eyes that changed from bright blue to green or gray depending on the color of the sky or her clothing. She was thirty-eight years old, and although she was not beautiful in the classic sense, I could tell that she had always been a magnet for men the way pretty women are when they exude warmth. As we talked, I learned that she had left home as a teenager to find a better life than the one she was born to, that she was fiercely independent and possessed acute analytical skills that she had acquired from her life and had honed during her journey through academia. The only sign that betrayed her Ph.D. was an unrelenting desire to discuss everything from crime and punishment to politics in terms of Shakespeare’s plays or dramaturgy. If it hurt her feelings that I showed no interest in what was then her life’s passion, she didn’t show it.

  I never expected Linda to be in my life very long. She had been a rolling stone, making her way at nineteen to New York City and shifting from city to city ever since. I met her shortly after her return to the United States from Bangkok, where she’d been teaching at a university she walked into one day while backpacking around the world at age thirty-five, sleeping in youth hostels and train stations. She was clearly an adventurer, and I figured I was just the latest adventure. That was fine with me. In prison you learn to be grateful for what you can get.

  “From what I gather, you have a lot of people who support you and your cause for freedom,” she said to me as we sat at a concrete table, watching some inmates visiting with their families, others playing volleyball with their kids. Lush green trees formed a border around the spacious, parklike visiting grounds built into a slope of the Tunica hills. It was an oasis, a spot of beauty and peace accessible to trusties as a reward. “What you don’t have—and I think you need—is a soldier,” said Linda, “someone on the outside who will actually do for you the things that you need done. I can be that for you.”

  I doubted she could be the sort of foot soldier she seemed to imagine herself, since much of what might help me could be done only in Louisiana, and she lived in Chicago, far away from where any research, schmoozing, arm-twisting, or ongoing brainstorming might be done. Moreover, I could now see she didn’t understand the peculiar social culture of the South and was a complete political innocent, which meant that even as smart as she clearly was, she lacked the necessary frame of reference to be an effective advisor, much less a soldier. But she was easy to talk to, fun to be with, and I figured that she might visit once or twice a year.

  Several months later, Linda accepted a position on the English faculty at Loyola University in New Orleans, 140 miles from Angola. That dramatically altered her potential to contribute to my life. Not only could she help with some of my efforts to be released from prison, she could provide companionship as well. She brought a much-needed dose of normality to my life. Twice a month I could escape the madness of prison, its pettiness, the constant need for watchfulness, the game playing and posturing of inmates and employees alike, the bickering of small minds over small matters, the daily grind of whistles and counts and forced associations. Twice a month I could sit at a picnic table, eat some barbecued chicken or pork chops, and talk to an intelligent, rational woman about anything and everything.

  Linda arrived in Louisiana in the summer, a hectic time for The Angolite. Tommy and I were canceling speaking engagements in an effort to stay atop things. I was in the middle of an investigation into the absence of any official program in the state’s penal system to deal with the threat from AIDS, then a new and little-understood disease that was generating paranoia among both guards and prisoners. But what was generating the most media interest in Angola was the resumption of executions after a two-year moratorium, with such frequency that the state briefly became the execution capital of the nation. Four inmates—Benjamin Berry, Alvin Moore, Jr., Jimmy Glass, and Jimmy Wingo—were put to death in the electric chair during a nine-day period in June, followed by three more—Willie Celestine, Willie Watson, Jr., and John Brogdon—in July.

  Covering the executions strained the Angolite’s resources. We had to go to death row to talk to the condemned, research his legal case, talk to many of those involved, attend the all-day pardon board hearing followed by the death vigil, and then follow through with post-execution information gathering.

  Determined to have a diverse staff (in part for the sake of credibility), I persuaded Ron Wikberg, an affable, blond-haired lifer and brilliant jailhouse lawyer, to join us. He had spent eighteen years in prison for the 1969 killing of a Lafayette store owner in a robbery that went bad. Like most of Angola’s convicts, Ron did not participate in prison evils: drugs, homosexual rape, gambling, or gangs. He was a workaholic; he had helped run the medical clinic during the prison’s bloody years, and he was now keeping warehouse inventories straight at Prison Enterprises. A decent guy with a huge heart, he was always ready to volunteer his services for activities that benefited the prison community, whether prisoner or personnel. Ron saved for years until he could pay for a paralegal correspondence course, then provided free legal services to both employees and prisoners. His most notable accomplishment was winning freedom for “Cowboy Jack” Favor, a former national rodeo champion, whose imprisonment had resulted from a criminal conspiracy. He was intelligent, perceptive, a great researcher, and a good writer, with invaluable knowledge of the prison world. Since he had reported on legal developments for The Angolite as a stringer after Billy stopped doing it, he knew what we needed in a staff writer.

  I wanted Ron to do an insider’s report from the inmates’ perspective on the rash of executions and the impact it had on the world of the condemned. In the past, we had simply been able to go to death row and talk to anyone willing to talk to us. Now we were told by corrections headquarters that we were to be treated the same as commercial media, which meant we first had to obtain the permission of the attorneys, who were generally reluctant to approve our request because they feared their clients might attract media attention and thereby complicate legal efforts to avoid execution. I told Phelps that men on death row had asked to talk to us.

  “The lawyers requested the restriction,” he explained. “What if I, in the name of giving you an insider’s view, were to allow you to view the actual execution. Would you watch it?”

  I looked at him and shook my head. “Man, it messes me up every time I see those guys being led away,” I said, “knowing they’re gonna die, sometimes seeing the panic in their eyes.”

  “Why don’t you turn away?”

  “I can’t. I’ve got to look at them, so they can see that I—if no one else—understand how they feel. It’s never lost on me that there but for the grace of God go I.”

  “But if given the opportunity, would you watch the execution?”

  I thought long before answering. “I don’t want to watch someone die. They can dress it up in rhetoric, but they’re killing a defenseless person against his will. It’s a deliberate act of murder, done in as cold-blooded a fashion as is imaginable. I don’t want to watch that, and I wonder about those who do.”

  Phelps smiled. “I haven’t watched one, either—for pretty much the same reasons. Does that surprise you?”

  It did. “But you’re the one responsible for the human organization that kills the g
uy.”

  “Distance makes it manageable, and subordinates pretty much handle everything. We never have to worry about a shortage of curious volunteers to serve as witnesses. We get so many requests that in some cases it becomes a bit of a problem because many come from officials and politicians, and there are only a certain number we can accommodate.”

  Once settled into an apartment near Loyola University, Linda obtained the transcripts of my second and third trials (none existed of the first), including the voluminous appeals, and thus became the first person to read every document on file from my arrest to the present day. My revelation astonished her. “Look, I’m guilty,” I explained during a visit, “and like most of these guys here, I’m not looking for excuses. I don’t want to read the testimony; I heard it at trial. I’m ashamed of what I did, and I don’t enjoy revisiting that.”

  “How much of the crime and the trials can you recall?”

  “The overall crime, I remember,” I said. “The actual violence—not very much. It happened so fast it was unreal, like a dream. I was so scared, and it was so dark that night that I could barely see—I have in my head murky, disconnected snapshots of what happened. But remember, I’ve wanted to forget—and that goes for the trials. I paid little attention to most of the proceedings because I felt intuitively that they were going to kill me. I knew that the trials were just a formality.”

  “You made it easy for the state to kill you, and so did your lawyers. They didn’t challenge the evidence or even question the witnesses!” Linda said in disbelief. “They didn’t even present to the jury obvious logical impossibilities or contradictions in the witnesses’ testimony, or even hint that something was amiss in the state’s case. What can possibly account for your lawyers’ behavior?”