Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

In 1993, Life Magazine called Wilbert Rideau “the nation’s most rehabilitated prisoner.” Had the nationally respected publication talked to state and federal law enforcement officials who investigated the 1986 pardons-for-sale scam in the Louisiana prison system, it might have curbed its enthusiasm for the editor of The Angolite.

But Life was not alone in its rush to recognize Rideau. Other media have failed repeatedly to differentiate between fact and fiction in Rideau’s case, even when the facts were easily available.

They show that Rideau’s role in the scam betrayed the integrity of the award-winning prisoner generated magazine at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. That and his plagiarism – a violation of the most basic tenet of journalism’s ethics – raise serious questions about his allegiance to the public record and by extension, his rehabilitation.

He has passed my work off as his own, co-opting credit for my articles and national awards in his interviews with regional and national media in a pattern of deceit that recalls discredited New York Times reporters Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg. Their unethical exploits show that major publications – like Life Magazine and The New York Times- can be misled by stories that are too good to be true.

Rideau contends that he knew nothing about the pardons-for-sale scam. But it operated right under the nose of a prison editor who was constantly citing his reporting skills to the national media. Rideau’s close relationship with former Louisiana Pardon Board Chairman Howard Marsellus, who was indicted, convicted and sentenced to five years in a federal prison for running the scam, belies the prison editor’s ignorance of the pardon-selling operation.

It began shortly after Governor Edwin Edwards appointed Marsellus to Louisiana’s Pardon Board in 1984. As soon as he took office, Marsellus began visiting Angola frequently. Rideau quickly developed a close relationship with him.

By late 1985 and early 1986, the scam was no secret. It was a topic of whispered conversations among inmates in general population. Rideau took frequent phone calls in The Angolite office from Marsellus and relayed information from him to inmates who wanted pardons. Marsellus visited The Angolite office frequently, talking about what he could “get” from the board for certain prisoners.

I told Rideau that Marsellus’ conversations were breaking Louisiana law. It prohibits pardon board members from openly discussing the board’s private deliberations. But Rideau refused to break off his relationship with Marsellus. If the pardon board chairman’s behavior alarmed me, why didn’t it alarm Rideau?

Then, during the summer of 1986, F. Berlin Hood, the food manager at the prison offered to get me a pardon through Marsellus for $15,000. The offer verified the rumors that Marsellus was selling the highly coveted clemencies. Hood would later be indicted and would plead guilty to two criminal counts in Marsellus’ pardons-selling operation: One count involved a sentence commutation for an inmate named Leonard Pourciau, the Angolite’s talented graphic artist.

By then, I had already moved my Angolite work into a small storage room near The Angolite office to get away from Marsellus’ conversations with Rideau – activity that I knew was breaking criminal law. After Hood approached me, my wife reported his illicit offer to her cousin, Bill Archer, a long-time United States congressman from Houston. He arranged for the FBI to contact us. We began assisting federal authorities to expose the scam. My wife wore an FBI wire to a meeting with Hood in which he discussed the offer.

When I was taken into protective custody by the federal authorities in November 1986, the U.S. Attorney in Baton Rouge, Raymond Lamonica, told me that his office had received reports in 1985 and 1986 that The Angolite was “connected” to Marsellus and was possibly involved in selling pardons. It was during those years that Rideau was relaying messages from Marsellus to inmates seeking pardons.

They included a request from Marsellus to Rideau about Pourciau. The pardon board chairman wanted Pourciau to paint his portrait. Rideau persuaded Pourciau to make it a “gift” to the chairman. The portrait clinched Pourciau’s sentence reduction deal. Shortly thereafter, Pourciau received the commutation he was negotiating through Hood.

An inmate named Chris McAlister showed me a “Gold Seal” he got through Hood for $5,000 and several pieces of gold jewelry. It was the name that inmates gave to the document that commuted their sentences or pardoned them outright. Hood told me mine would cost more because I was a high profile prisoner whose release was strenuously opposed.

The very day that U. S. Marshals took me into protective custody, Rideau began a public campaign to discredit me. Articles quoting Rideau appeared in The New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and other media. They said that I had damaged The Angolite by violating journalism’s strict rule against reporters cooperating with law enforcement in criminal stings. He also told the press that The Angolite was not aware of any “pardon-selling” or associated in any way with Marsellus’ corrupt operation.

An exception was a story in the May/June 1987 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review by Lee Kravitz. It asked the operative question:

Are convict journalists always bound by the same standards as free journalists?

If a convict writer – sentenced to prison for a crime – discovers criminal wrong-doing, does he report it and help authorities stop it, or does he cover it up to protect the integrity of a prison publication? If he covers it up, is he rehabilitated? If he reveals it to prison authorities, will they silence him to protect themselves?

Louisiana’s Corrections Secretary C. Paul Phelps – later arrested and convicted of shop-lifting – said the integrity of the penal press came first.

“All journalists,” Phelps said in Kravitz’ article, “whether in or out of prison, function on trust.” He added that I had violated that trust when I became an informant for the FBI. He then made it policy throughout the entire corrections system in Louisiana that no inmate journalist could “compromise his publication’s credibility and endanger its staff” by being an “informer.”

Was Phelps covering up his own knowledge of the pardon-selling scheme or his lack of supervision of the corrections department thereby protecting himself? Reporters never asked that question.

Rideau’s media assault against me continued unabated in the regional and national press. On May 25, 1987, a Times Picayune reporter named John McQuaid wrote an article on the front page of the paper’s Metro section about the trouble I had caused The Angolite by exposing the pardons-for-sale scam. He wrote of Angolite staffers who said that I was jealous of Rideau because my attorney, John, “Jack” Martzell, a high-profile New Orleans lawyer, had advised me to stop doing interviews with Rideau. They said that Martzell’s advice, which I followed, left me out of the limelight and made me envious of Rideau. In fact, Martzell advised me that Rideau’s 1961 crime was so heinous it would compromise his legal efforts to free me if I continued appearing with my co-editor.

McQuaid’s article, reported that Angolite staffers told him all I had to do was “quietly” resign and then work undercover to expose the scam. Would that have exposed me sooner to the danger that caused federal authorities to move me into protective custody? In prison, a sudden resignation would raise questions. Questions can end up in interrogations. Interrogations attract dangerous attention.

McQuaid also reported that I declined to be interviewed for his story. Prisoners in the custody of the Louisiana State Police – where I was being held for my own protection – were not allowed to talk to the press. That fact was not mentioned.

To McQuaid’s credit, he reported that my departure was a “professional loss” to the magazine, that during the nine years that I worked on The Angolite, it gained a “national reputation” and that it “was a voice in the wilderness, well written, powerful and hard hitting.” But he also reported that prison officials told him I was “not being charged” in the scam and that “no charges were brought against the official who offered to sell me a pardon”. There was no reason to charge me. I was a cooperating witness in the state and federal investigations, the one inmate who refused to buy a pardon and who alerted authorities to the scam.

Two years after McQuaid’s story appeared in the Times Picayune, Berlin Hood pled guilty to pardon-selling in court. Why wasn’t he charged in 1987 when McQuaid was writing his article in the New Orleans newspaper?

The reason is that C. Paul Phelps quashed the State Police investigation into wrongdoing at Angola that year. And quashed it again in 1988. In 1989, when a local federal court in Baton Rouge finally ordered an investigation of the prison, the State Police uncovered massive wrongdoing. Hood’s role in the pardons-for-sale scam was revealed at that time. Phelps had stonewalled McQuaid. And the reporter never knew it.

McQuaid, then and now, is a nationally respected reporter. But his article demonstrates the media’s inability to cover prison stories accurately. Reporters have to rely on interviews with self-serving prison officials and prisoners who are easily pressured by those same officials. Independent sources are rare, leaving reporters at the mercy of sources that can deliberately mislead them. McQuaid wasn’t the first seasoned reporter to be caught in that trap and he would not be the last.

There are also reporters with conflicts of interest that interfere with accuracy and common journalistic practice. In 1987, David Anderson, the former criminal justice editor at The New York Times, a staunch Rideau supporter, persuaded the Times, nominally the most influential paper in the world, to run an editorial damning me for my role in exposing Louisiana’s pardon-selling scam. Rideau and Anderson had become friends when Anderson was editor of Corrections Magazine. Anderson did not try to contact me, my wife, or law enforcement officials to get the facts about the pardon-selling scheme and my role in exposing it. His editorial called me a “snitch” who had “shattered The Angolite’s credibility.”

As far as I know, I am the only prison inmate in the United States to be damned by The New York Times for helping law enforcement stop criminal activity.

In 1995, an investigative reporter with WWL-TV in New Orleans interviewed Marsellus after his release from federal prison. Bill Elder’s story accurately documented my role in exposing the scam. Details of Rideau’s involvement in the scam also appeared in the book my wife and I wrote that was released nationally by Arcade Publishing in New York in 2000. But they received little play in the media, just like the warning signs in the Blair and Bragg cases that were ignored.

The pardons-for-sale scam raised another question that the media did not ask. How is it that a national award-winning prison editor, who claimed he had sources all over Angola among corrections officers, wardens and inmates, did not know that a member of The Angolite’s small staff of four was buying a pardon?

Rideau’s plagiarism and literary theft raise more questions about the media’s ability to cover stories about the incarcerated. The facts about those issues were available long before Life Magazine dubbed him “the nation’s most rehabilitated inmate.” They show how easy a cunning inmate can manipulate the media and the well-meaning.

A case in point: In 1989, Burk Foster, a Louisiana criminal justice professor, asked Rideau and Ron Wikberg (The Angolite co-editor who replaced me) to assemble an anthology of criminal justice articles from the prison’s magazine, other state penal publications and several free world newspapers. Foster was head of the criminal justice department at Southwestern University in Lafayette. The university published the anthology. It was called The Wall Is Strong, co-edited by Foster, Rideau and Wikberg. Its preface implied that Angolite articles printed without a byline were written by one or both of The Angolite’s extant editors.

Four of my articles appeared in the anthology with no byline. One of them, “A Prison Tragedy,” appeared in a 1979 edition of The Angolite. My byline was clearly attached. In 1980, I received the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel for that article, the ABA’s highest, national, literary award.

I wrote Foster about the discrepancy. He was hostile, rejecting the notion that I had written any of the Angolite articles that Rideau and Wikberg had sent him.

I then filed a federal lawsuit against Foster, Rideau, and Angola’s warden. Foster gave me a written “apology” in exchange for being dismissed as a defendant. Rideau responded to the media’s questions about the lawsuit on October 26, 1989 in an article in The Baton Rouge Morning Advocate called “Prison Editor Says An Error Left Credit Off.” He conceded that I had written at least one of the four disputed articles: “A Prison Tragedy.” He told Advocate reporter Mark Lambert that omitting my byline was “an innocent mistake,” something that “slipped through the cracks” in the selection process.

How could Rideau forget that I had won the Silver Gavel for that article? More to the point: how did he overlook my byline, clearly attached to the article, as he went through past editions of The Angolite during the selection process?

Rideau tried to defend the lawsuit with a “memo” which had been written on Angolite stationery that was signed by Phelps on his last day in office in March 1988. The memo bestowed upon Rideau the “right” to market and sell all articles and material which had appeared in the prison magazine during his tenure as its editor. The federal court refused to give it legal standing. The memo revealed the unprofessional alliance that existed between the corrections secretary and the convict editor. Rideau used the memo in an attempt to legalize his theft of my four articles because it was written on the prison magazine’s stationery and was signed by a corrections secretary who was an admitted thief.

Other media stories about Rideau gave him credit for articles I had written and for the awards I had won. He never corrected the “public record.”

After we both won the 1979 Robert F. Kennedy Award and each won George Polk awards in 1980, Rideau and I had several conversations about the potential for a professional rivalry developing between us. The Angolite’s prison supervisor expressed some concern. Rideau’s solution was to suggest that the magazine drop our bylines and print a disclaimer stating that articles without bylines were written by one or both editors. I agreed. As it worked out, it opened the door that allowed him to begin taking credit for my work which he did frequently then and through the ensuing years.

I learned through the discovery process in my lawsuit against The Wall Is Strong in 1990 that Rideau and Wikberg were under contract with Random House to publish yet another anthology of articles from The Angolite, this one called Life Sentences.

I filed an Application for a Preliminary Injunction to bar publication of the book until a hearing could be conducted to determine if Rideau had submitted any of my work to the publishing house for that book, which as it turned out, he had. After I received that information, I wrote to Lesley Oelsner, Associate General Counsel for Random House, Inc. on October 1, 1990 detailing my concerns about the proposed anthology. My letter contained a list of articles under consideration and the misrepresentations Rideau had made about their impact. I learned of his bogus claims about the articles from a letter that Rideau wrote in 1989 to a Random House editor which was turned over to me in the discovery process. The articles included:

• “The Escape of Nigger Joe” (July/Aug. 1980) I was with The Angolite when Rideau wrote this article claiming Joe Williams was innocent. A reader in New York was so appalled by Williams’ plight that he hired a private investigator to reopen the case. Williams failed the investigator’s polygraph test. The investigator also uncovered other facts that convinced him Williams was guilty. For years, the New Yorker pleaded with Rideau to publish the facts but they never appeared in The Angolite.
• “The Execution” (Jan./Feb. 1984) Rideau did not put my byline on this article although I wrote it and every major piece on capital punishment in The Angolite between 1977 and 1986.
• “Religion in Prison” (Jan./Feb. 1981) I was with The Angolite when Rideau wrote this article. He told Random House it prompted the local Catholic bishop to demand that Governor Dave Treen shut down the magazine but Corrections Secretary Phelps refused, so Treen fired Phelps. Phelps was fired because he refused to step down so the newly-elected Treen could appoint his own corrections secretary. Treen was a Republican. Phelps served under Governor Edwin Edwards, a Democrat.
• ‘The Scam Tier” (May/June 1989) Rideau told Random House that this article guided the State Police’s 1989 investigation into corruption at Angola. By then, I was in protective custody at the State Police Barracks. A State Police Task Force investigating corruption at the prison was acting in part on information supplied by me and Chris McAllister, an Angola inmate who had bought a pardon through Hood and was also in protective custody at the State Police Barracks.
• “The Omen” (May/June 1989) Rideau claimed that this article prompted a federal judge to declare a state of emergency at Angola on June 21, 1989. But Judge Frank Polozola issued the federal order in the wake of a series of suicides, escapes, and assaults at the prison and because information had been developed that Phelps suppressed the 1987/88 State Police investigations. The day after the press reported the state of emergency order, Rideau told the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate that there that there was no “emergency” at the prison and that the federal judge must have had a “hidden agenda.”

 

Rideau told many interviewers that he is the first inmate ever to win the George Polk Award, second only to the Pulitzer Prize. Rideau and I received simultaneous Polk awards in 1979 for articles that we wrote. His was for “The Sexual Jungle.” Mine was for “The Other Side of Murder.” Perhaps Rideau bases his claim on the fact that the letter “r” comes before “s” in the alphabet, putting the name “Rideau” on the “Special Interest Reporting” list of Polk awards before the name “Sinclair.”

Rideau has also taken exclusive credit for the 1979 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, although his latest memoir credits me with being a co-recipient of the award. The Kennedy award was given to both of us as co-editors of The Angolite. It was based on three articles in The Angolite. I wrote two of them.

Rideau has also taken exclusive credit for the 1981 Sidney Hillman Award. It was given to the magazine, not its co-editors. It was based on my article “Louisiana Death Watch.”

Rideau won the 1979 ABA Silver Gavel Award for his article “Conversations With The Dead.” I won the same award in 1980 for my article “A Prison Tragedy.” Rideau tried to pass off “A Prison Tragedy” as his own work in The Wall Is Strong.

Rideau has repeatedly told the media that before he became the editor of The Angolite, he organized two “underground” publications at the state penitentiary: The Lifer and The Jungle.

Rideau’s prison writing career began when he started writing the column “The Jungle” for a group of weekly African American newspapers in Louisiana and Mississippi. There was nothing “underground” about the column. The newspapers were available in the prison’s library.

The Lifer Magazine had the administration’s approval. The Lifers was a self-help prison club that operated with official permission because it was considered rehabilitative. There were a dozen or so similar organizations at Angola, including the Dale Carnegie Club and the Angola Jaycees. Most had their own publications. They were all approved by the administration. None were underground.

The Lifers asked Rideau, Tommy Mason, and Robert Jackson—all lifers themselves—to take over its magazine. Rideau transformed it from a “club newsletter” into a magazine format. He asked me to write a couple of articles for the publication to give it “credibility” with inmates. There was also nothing “underground” about this publication. It operated with prison approval.

It was the quality of Rideau’s writing in The Jungle and The Lifer that prompted Warden C. Murray Henderson to make him The Angolite’s editor in 1976, not his race as he has often claimed. He was chosen when Bill Brown, the magazine’s editor was released from prison. Although Henderson was aware of the need to integrate the magazine’s staff – the prison had just been integrated two years before – he needed a good writer for the job.

Rideau had been editor of The Angolite a little more than a year when he asked me to write free lance articles for it. He then went to bat to get me assigned full time to its staff in 1977. I had seen the prison’s violent side during my years on the Big Yard where I lived with some of the prison’s most dangerous convicts after I left death row in 1972. Like all the other inmates under a death sentence at the time, I was re-sentenced to life imprisonment in November of that year under a Louisiana Supreme Court order following the Furman v. Georgia decision by U.S. Supreme Court in June which had effectively eliminated the death penalty in America.

Myself and Irvin “Life” Breaux, the subject of the article “A Prison Tragedy,” successfully integrated the Big Yard in July 1973 without a single incident of violence. The integration came at a time when Angola was at its height of violence. Rideau never really saw this level of violence. Thus, it is terribly misleading when he tells reporters that he was released straight from death row into Angola’s general inmate population when things were so violent.. He left death row in 1969 after his conviction was reversed a second time. He was convicted and sentenced to death again following a third trial in Baton Rouge in June 1970. He appealed. In May of 1973 his third conviction was upheld by the Louisiana Supreme Court but the court vacated his death sentence pursuant to the Furman decision. He was re-sentenced to life imprisonment shortly after the state supreme court vacated his death sentence. Rideau was committed to Angola in early summer 1973. He was assigned to the Big Yard before becoming a trustee where there was virtually no threat of violence.

Given my first-hand knowledge of the prison’s violence on the Big Yard, Rideau wanted me on The Angolite staff because he believed I would bring credibility and the perspective of a jailhouse lawyer to the magazine. He had been unable to establish any meaningful credibility with either the black inmates or the white inmates. More of the magazines went into the trash can than were read when they were placed in the dorms.

Rideau’s Wikipedia page states that the convict editor is credited with bringing “peace and reform” to the “bloodiest prison in America.” While he may have seen some of the violence during his brief stint on the Big Yard, Rideau was never really touched by it. He always had safe job assignments at Angola. He never sweated in the fields doing farm work with the bulk of the prison’s inmates. He first worked in the prison’s commissary before securing a better position as a “clerk” in the classification department in the Main Prison’s Control Center—one of the safest places in the prison, and the place where The Angolite office was located. Thus, he was always in a position that insulated him from any real threat of being attacked.

The Angolite itself did not become an instrument of “reform” until it started winning major journalism awards in 1979 and 1980. By that time Angola had been tamed by former Warden Ross Maggio. He turned it into the “safest maximum security prison in the nation.” In an article titled “Boss Ross” which appeared in the Sept./Oct. 1983 edition of Louisiana Life Magazine, which bears our bylines, Rideau and I wrote this: “It took Maggio one year to accomplish a task that many wardens around the country say can’t be done—make the prison safe.”

The Louisiana Life article also pointed out that Angola was “bloodiest prison in America” between 1971 and 1974 when there were “360 stabbings and 40 stabbing deaths at the prison.” Most of those occurred in 1972/1973 before Rideau was even placed in general inmate population. At best, Rideau was in Angola for a scant 14 months between late 1973 and 1974 during the “bloodiest prison in America” era. Since he was not assigned to the The Angolite during the “bloodiest prison” era, Rideau was in no position to bring about the peace or reform credited to him in the Wikipedia profile.

The bogus claims that Rideau has made through the years are not accidents. Neither were the bogus claims of Rick Bragg and Jayson Blair. They paid for their lies with the loss of their reputations and their high profile positions among journalism’s stars.

What if anything, will be asked of Wilbert Rideau now that the facts are on the record?