I watched what had been America’s most transparent prison for more than two decades fade to black. The outside media was routinely denied access to me. Our original office phones were returned to us a year after they were taken following a meeting of the state senate judiciary committee at which the chairman grilled Cain about their removal. Cathy Fontenot (formerly Jett) now told me whom I could and could not speak to on the phone. Few people wanted to talk, anyway, once I informed them that all calls were monitored and recorded. Information, the lifeblood of any news operation, had pretty much dried up.
The July/August 1999 Angolite was the first issue to reflect that. All six of the articles I wrote were insignificant. For the next edition I managed to do a good investigative report on the unprecedented and, I thought, questionable lockup of fourteen leaders of inmate organizations. It was the last report critical of the administration to see the light of day in The Angolite.
Censorship was now imposed without pretense. Cathy Fontenot began giving me direct orders as to what I could and could not publish. When an employee from another prison objected to the term “guard” in one of our articles, it was banned from the magazine by administrative fiat, replaced by “correctional officer.” A letter to the editor from a gay inmate grumbling about how he was treated by both inmates and employees was pulled from the January/February 1998 galleys. In 1979, you’ll recall, I had published an exposé of homosexual rape and enslavement at Angola. How times had changed. Another letter to the editor, from an inmate at the women’s prison, complained that certain inmates were dying from lack of medical care. Fontenot pulled that letter from the March/April 2000 galleys.
Even the mundane was now censored. For the March/April 2000 issue, I’d taken a photograph of officer Tracy Cage having her brogans shined by an elderly inmate. Fontenot called and told me I couldn’t put the guard’s face on the cover. I explained that I’d gotten permission from both Cage and the inmate to use the photo, but Fontenot insisted I find something else. I sent over a new cover showing just the inmate polishing the boot. My phone rang.
“Wilbert, you can’t use this cover,” Fontenot said.
“It doesn’t show the guard’s face.”
“Look,” she said, “I’ve discussed this with Warden Cain. It doesn’t look right to put a picture of an inmate shining a guard’s boots on the cover of The Angolite. It doesn’t reflect well on the officers or the inmates or the institution.”
“Miss Fontenot,” I argued, “I don’t see the problem. The photo reflects a fact of life here at Angola. The shoe-shine boy is simply doing his job—a job, I might add, that was created by Warden Cain. What’s wrong with that?”
“It doesn’t look right,” she snapped. “Find something else for the cover.”
“Is that a direct order?”
“It is,” she said, hanging up.
I thought about C. Paul Phelps, who lifted censorship at Angola in 1976 because he believed that shining light on its dark spots and educating the public about its inhabitants would help stimulate reform. He and a twenty-year succession of wardens and Angolite supervisors had supported openness and freedom of the press because, first, they had nothing to hide, and, second, they believed that if you didn’t want people seeing what you were doing, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. I was witnessing the dismantling of everything they believed in and my own life’s work, and there was nothing I could do about it.
The irony was that Cain continued to promote Angola’s longtime reputation for being open to journalists. In fact, only stories that were not critical of Cain or his administration, or those that cast them in a good light, were being written or aired—stories on the rodeo, the Bible college, religious revivals, the hospice program, execution stories anchored by Cain holding the condemned man’s hand and praying with him. The journalists he favored were grateful for any access at all to an American prison. “Half the time,” I told a visiting journalist friend, “they don’t even know they’re being led by the nose by a warden who has co-opted them for his own agenda.”
This warden surrounded himself with people notable for their blind loyalty and drove off many of the straight shooters and professionals who would second-guess him or tell him he was wrong. Mike Gunnells, Angola’s most competent and knowledgeable security warden in recent times, finally left in January 1999 after being demoted and then replaced with one of Cain’s cronies from a small satellite prison. Gunnells told James Minton that he feared security had been relaxed under Cain. Gunnells was no sooner off the prison farm than four inmates used two handguns smuggled in by an employee to escape on January 24, 1999.
In addition to employees who were inexperienced, corrupt, or lax, the power structure was destabilized as Cain tripled the number of assistant wardens, promoted and demoted officers, and flipped them around without regard to qualifications or experience. Opportunistic inmates used the power vacuum to make trouble for their enemies, attack guards, bribe employees to smuggle in money and weapons, and engineer escapes. On November 3, 1999, death row had been without a warden for two weeks when four men used ten hacksaw blades to escape from what was supposed to be the prison’s most secure facility. It was the first such breach to occur since death row had been created in 1957. The Angolite was not allowed to interview either inmates or employees.
The weeks that followed brought three separate incidents of inmate attacks on guards, which were not made public by the prison. But there was no keeping the fourth incident secret.
On December 28, 1999, there was a rebellion in the education building at Camp D. One guard, the greatly disliked David Knapps, was killed. Numerous inmates, some innocent, were brutalized when employees responded. One was shot in the back of the head, a fact confirmed by the autopsy photos. When the inmate’s fiancée tried to get his body, she was told he had already been cremated according to Angola’s standard practice. I wondered what the hell was going on. I had never known an Angola inmate to be cremated. The Angolite again was refused access. The brutalized inmates were isolated. Guards were afraid to talk. Two guards who’d been held hostage during the rebellion disappeared. I sent a message to James Minton through a visitor: “Find and talk to the two hostages.” He couldn’t locate them. My next message to him was a prediction that Knapps’s killing would never go to trial because authorities wouldn’t want whatever they were hiding to come to light in a courtroom. Lawsuits by two of the inmates who were beaten were quietly settled out of court.
The outside world no longer had any way of knowing the truth of what was happening inside Angola. The policies Elayn Hunt and Phelps had put in place a quarter century before in cooperation with the Justice Department to ensure inmates had confidential telephone and mail communications with outside media, as a check against the total and arbitrary power wielded by their keepers, had been abolished. The Angolite’s role of ferreting out and exposing problems, or simply providing factual information, had in effect been ended. The only information coming out of Angola was what Burl Cain wanted the public to know, and there was no way for anyone to check its accuracy.
I knew, as I knew at The Angolite’s difficult birth twenty-three years before, that I had to tread carefully because I was no good to anyone if I didn’t survive. But life without the meaning real journalism had allowed me to weave into my prison existence was tedious. There was little to look forward to. At the end of the day, I locked up the office, walked back to the dorm, and said to myself, I’ve got to get out of here. I lived from one Sunday to the next, desperate for Linda’s visit. I clung to the hope that the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals would reverse Judge Polozola’s ruling denying me a new trial.
On December 22, the court did indeed reverse Polozola’s ruling and threw out my forty-year-old conviction. I absorbed the miracle as I had so many miracles before and wondered what God still had in store for me. I was to remain in Angola while the state appealed the Fifth Circuit’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
• • •
They felt the door, looked at each other, and kicked it open. Flames and smoke poured out. I ran back into the Angolite office to grab my legal mail and notes I’d made for my lawyers. Turning from my desk, I saw smoke billowing into my office under the door. I rushed out into the hallway, which had become pitch-black with smoke. I realized I might now be trapped. The only way out was down the smoke-filled corridor. Holding my jacket to my nose, I ran blindly down the black hall until I hit the light of the Main Prison Office lobby.
“Are there any more people back in those offices?” Captain Anthony asked.
“No one but me was working down there,” I said.
We all walked out of the building and stood with other inmates and officers gawking at the fire licking the night sky. It took seven fire trucks from Angola and surrounding communities to put out the blaze.
Sergeant Tate came over to me. “You saved my life,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“If you hadn’t been in your office to smell the smoke and alert me, what do you think would have happened to me, locked inside that MPO?”
We both knew the answer to that question.
The next morning Cain said firefighters thought the fire was caused by a defective electrical cord on the air conditioner.
“That’s not what caused the fire that burned down your office,” one of the inmate electricians who had looked at the site told me. “Something else is going on.” The fire marshal who inspected the remains told me pretty much the same thing.
As the one who discovered the fire, I was called that morning to be interviewed by Ken Pastorek of WBRZ-TV, after which I was restricted to my dorm for the rest of the day. When WAFB-TV and James Minton arrived that afternoon to interview me, they were directed to Burl Cain’s houseboy, Johnny Dixon, and informed that he could tell them everything about the fire because he had discovered it while doing paperwork for his religious organization in an office two doors away.
After the fire marshal and other investigators finished going through the charred offices, it was determined that Wali, the orderly, caused the fire by drying some clothing on a chair over a space heater that was left on. Two of the inmate electricians told me that could be true; they also told me this was a method of setting a delayed fire, so that the culprit is nowhere around when it begins.
I can never prove that someone set out to kill me. But I knew for certain that I had better watch my back.
12
Behind Enemy Lines
2001—2005
A black gate officer poked his head into my office and told me to call Linda immediately. I didn’t stop to ask how the message made its way to me at 9:30 on a Thursday evening in July through all the forbidden levels of bureaucracy. As I walked into the office of a sympathetic captain where I was to make the call, the phone was ringing. The captain handed it to me. It was Warden Cain.
“Wilbert, I just got a court order for you to go to Calcasieu Parish. They wanted to come take you right now, tonight, but we told them we can’t turn loose nobody till we can verify the court order.” Maybe I heard it wrong, I thought. I hung on to the phone in silence.
Cain’s voice picked up again: “Go on and take the rest of the night packing and telling everybody good-bye.” Stunned, I raced to the dorm to call Linda. She’d seen on the five o’clock news that I’d been reindicted and had tracked down George Kendall in Washington to give him the news. I told her they were moving me in the morning. She assured me that she would arrange for either Julian or George to meet me at the Calcasieu jail in Lake Charles within a day or two. She made me promise to call her as soon as I could get to a phone in the Calcasieu jail to let her know I was okay.
My eyes scanned the office that I had made into a home for myself. Like any home, it contained mementos of people and places I treasure, evidence of my life and times. Hanging on the wall was the pen-and-ink portrait of me that Troy Bridges, our former illustrator, drew as his application for the job twenty-three years earlier. On my desk were precious photos of loved ones taken during visits, which had gotten me through long and lonely nights, along with the cassettes of various blues artists. A quarter century of notes and files sat stacked in boxes and stuffed in cabinets, along with old, unpublished manuscripts, a smattering of moldering legal documents from the first three trials, and love letters dating back to the 1970s. I couldn’t even begin to sift through all this in the few hours I had.
Two Angolite staffers with me suggested taking only what I would need in jail to avoid giving the Calcasieu cops a chance to go through all my things.
“Look, if you win, you’ll come back and pick up your stuff,” said one of my colleagues. “If you lose, you’ll need it all when you get back.”
I took only a tiny box of essentials with me.
It was 4:00 a.m. when I showered and shaved, then woke friends to break the news to them. No one knew what to say. All the men understood the difference between local jails and Angola. They knew, as I did, that I was headed into the worst stretch of time in my entire forty years of incarceration, worse even than death row. Local jails, for the most part, are full of untamed, testosterone-charged youngsters. They’re designed to be temporary holding stations for people awaiting trial or those serving short sentences. A prison like Angola is a place where inmates live for a long time, and as a result, it is a community with its own culture and with a responsible inmate power structure, social and recreational activities, sports teams, religious organizations, self-help clubs, and health care. Jails, with their transient population, have none of this: Life in a jail is idleness overlaid with chaos.
The assistant warden of the Main Prison arrived about 7:00, just as I heard again on the morning news that I’d been indicted once more. An easygoing and decent man, he assumed a confidential tone: “The people coming to get you are hateful. They’ve been fighting you a long time, and they won’t turn the past loose. They’re going to put you in chains and probably try to humiliate or hurt you in different ways. To them you’re just a low-life prisoner, not a human being. You need to be prepared not to let them beat you down. You’re stronger than that. I’m hoping you win this, and they don’t send you back to Angola. We’re keeping your bed and everything open just in case.”
I had the most desirable real estate in my dorm, the second bunk from a huge fan that blew away some of the stifling heat as well as whatever germs were incubating in the dorm. I appreciated the kindness but realized, of course, that he expected me to return to Angola in no time.
At 8:00, the assistant warden and I got into a car and traveled a couple of miles across the sprawling prison complex to the Reception Center near the main gate, where I was photographed and had my fingerprints taken. Now I saw the face of doom approach—a Calcasieu deputy sheriff. He put shackles on my ankles, a chain around my waist to which he attached handcuffs, and the dreaded black iron box was affixed between the cuffs, designed to stop escape artists by holding the hands rigid and immobile, away from the cuffs so the locks can’t be picked. The box tightens the chain on the handcuffs. They bit into my wrists. The deputy was all business, li
ke a butcher tying up a rump roast. I hated the restraints, and I was scared, but I remained perfectly calm. If prison taught me nothing else, it taught me never to betray weakness.
The Calcasieu deputy loaded me into a van, and we drove away slowly. Right outside the gate, he pulled over by a car in which four armed cops were waiting. They undid the box and cuffs to frisk me and then stick me in a flak jacket.
“You expecting trouble?” I asked.
“You never know,” the deputy responded grudgingly.
With me in the middle of the large van and a police car taking up the rear, we tore through the Friday-morning sunshine all the way to Lake Charles, two hundred miles away, without exchanging a single word.
About noon, we pulled up to the jail—a squat, forbidding fortress made of cinder block and brick. There are clones scattered throughout Louisiana, monuments to the runaway prison industry Burl Cain helped create.
As we wheeled into the fenced-in compound, the officer in front donned a flak jacket just before stepping out of the van into the view of cameras, both still and video, operated by other deputies. This was their own carefully controlled photo op. I was led, in shackles and flak jacket, out of the van and into the path of the cops’ lenses. One backpedaled in front of me, rolling video even inside the jail. There were deputies everywhere; the sense of being engulfed by Calcasieu cops took me back forty years, except now there were some female and some black faces mixed in. I’m fifty-nine, too old for this, I thought.
I was put in a room and the shackles were taken off. Someone handed me a plate of food, but I was far too traumatized to eat.
A black lieutenant with a military bearing tried to explain the jail rules to me. I told him there were too many for me to digest all at once. He told me George Kendall was flying down to see me tomorrow. Thank God, Linda reached him.
Later, a black female deputy had me taken to her station to get background information from me.
Wilbert Rideau Page 34