Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

The inevitable question has arisen about why this site was created. Many of Wilbert Rideau’s supporters claim it is just an “old feud” between two former prison journalists. They ask, “why bring up all this (alleged dirt) now?”

The answer to the question is simple. Rideau made me and my wife, Jodie, a part of the social discourse when he attacked us in his recently released memoir. The famed journalist announced shortly after his release from custody in January 2005 that he would write his memoir and in 2007 he secured a $75,000 grant from the George Soros Foundation to subsidize this literary effort.

Based on the “bad blood” which has existed between us since 1986, and because Jodie testified for the prosecution at Rideau’s January 2005 trial, we anticipated there would be criticism of us in whatever book he published.

After five years, Rideau finally managed to complete and publish In The Place of Justice. Sure enough, me and Jodie were targets of criticism in the book. But is is not fair criticism based on facts. Rather it is vintage Wilbert Rideau: a mixture of lies, misrepresentations, and factual distortions rolled into a mix designed to make the award-winning journalist look like a “hero” and us the “villains.” Rideau has waged this campaign against us since our professional writing relationship dissolved on bad terms. To understand the nature of this split, it must be put in context with the following chronology of events.

In August 1986 I was approached by an official at the Louisiana State Penitentiary with an offer to buy a pardon for $15,000. My wife and I reported the offer to the FBI. At the time I was co-editor with Rideau of The Angolite, the prison’s award-winning newsmagazine. The bribe offer had absolutely nothing to do with my position as a prison journalist. The offer came from a prison official who was brokering pardon deals for Howard Marsellus, the chairman of the state board of pardons. I began working “undercover” for the FBI at the prison. Jodie wore a “wire” for the FBI during a meeting with the prison official, F. Berlin Hood, at which details of the illegal pardon deal was discussed. Jodie was working as a television reporter at the time.

While the federal investigation was in progress, Marsellus and a high-ranking state legislator were caught in a Louisiana State Police sting operation accepting $25,000 of a $100,000 deal to sell a pardon to a convicted murderer. The September 1986 arrest and indictment of these two officials by a state grand jury effectively put the federal pardons-selling investigation on hold.

Between September and November of 1986 I continued to provide information to the FBI. That information included a possible “contract” being placed on the life of a potential witness in the “pardons-selling” investigation.

I have every reason to believe based on information later given to me by State Police investigators that Corrections Secretary C. Paul Phelps had been told by someone in the Edwin Edwards administration that I was “working for the FBI.” Gov. Edwards had been made aware of the federal pardons-selling investigation in August after one of the FBI agents working the case boasted to a State Police detective that the Feds had a “man on the inside” who would bring down the governor. It was that “leak” which triggered the State Police’s sting operation that ensnared the two state officials.

In early November 1986 I was given information by a high-ranking security official at the prison that Rideau was making “secret” trips to Baton Rouge to meet with Phelps. These trips were not being logged in or out of the prison as required by security protocol. The security chieftain suspected the two were involved in some covert plot that might involve me. At that point I took this security official into my confidence and told him about my “undercover” role with the FBI. The secret trips Rideau was making to Baton Rouge suddenly became clear to him.

Rideau does not discuss these secret trips in his memoir. What he does discuss is a trip he reportedly made to corrections headquarters in Baton Rouge during the summer of 1986 to meet with Phelps. He described that meeting:

“During the summer, on one of my trips to Baton Rouge, Phelps expressed concern to be about Billy. Without going into details, he suggested I keep an eye on him. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘in the course of his everyday life, have you seen him behave strangely or do things that cause you to wonder about him?’

“‘Billy was withdrawn for a while, which we attributed to his frustration over not being able to get out, but lately he’s changed. He’s become more alive, more sociable, curious—always wanting to know about what’s going on,’ I said. ‘Tommy believes he’s up to something.’

“’What does he think he’s up to?’

“’We haven’t the foggiest idea,’ I replied, ‘but if you feel he can no longer be trusted and presents a potential problem to The Angolite, maybe you should consider moving him into a different position.’

“’We’ll see how things go,’ he said.”

That meeting did not take place before August 1986 as Rideau suggested. If it had, Rideau would have told Phelps I had moved out of The Angolite office into a converted storage room. Rideau knew I had moved out of the main office to get away from him and his unholy relationship with Howard Marsellus. Phelps could have used that as a basis to remove me from The Angolite. I would no longer have posed any “concern” to the convict editor.

I believe the meeting described by Rideau occurred, but it took place on one of those secret trips to Baton Rouge in October or November. Phelps wanted me out of The Angolite to discredit me as a potential witness. By his own description of the alleged pre-August meeting, Rideau was more than willing to assist in that effort.

But before Phelps’ plan could be carried out, the U.S. Attorney’s Office had federal marshals remove me from the prison and placed in protective custody. Phelps and Rideau had to quickly devise a new strategy—one that called for Rideau using his media sources to discredit me by saying I betrayed The Angolite, as well as my ethics as a journalist, when I became an “informant” for the FBI. Phelps gave Rideau carte blanche power in late 1986 and throughout 1987 to pursue that agenda.

This strategy began with a blistering “commentary” in The Angolite in which Phelps blasted me as having compromised the integrity of the magazine by becoming an “informant.” This same tact was followed  in 1987 articles that appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review and the New Orleans Times Picayune: I had betrayed the trust of The Angolite and violated my ethics as a journalist. In May 1987 The New York Times followed the lead of these publications damning me a “snitch” who compromised the integrity of the prison magazine. This unrelenting assault on my award-winning journalism continued in an August 1987 Shreveport Journal article with Rideau saying I had “threaten the magazine’s credibility” and the safety of other staffers by “turning FBI informant.”

I could not respond to the articles. I was under tight wraps as a “protected witness” who was not allowed access to the media. What disturbed me then, and still disturbs me two decades later, is that the entire slant and focus of the reporters who wrote those articles was the “integrity” of a prison magazine—not that I had exposed the largest pardons-selling operation in Louisiana history, or not that I was the only inmate offered an opportunity to buy a pardon who reported the wrongdoing. I still cannot fathom how free world reporters could have been so naïve that they bought Rideau’s betrayal of the “integrity of The Angolite” claim as a legitimate journalism issue.

Rideau also misrepresented in his memoir that Jodie had spent years trying to “smear” his journalism reputation with the media. As a matter of fact, Jodie did spend years in a relentless effort not to “smear” Rideau but to protect me from the convict editor’s unbridled campaign to destroy me as a writer and journalist. Jodie never once gave up trying to protect the “public record” from Rideau’s disgraceful pattern of providing the media with misrepresentations and outright lies not only about me but his role with The Angolite. There is only one truth in the world for Wilbert Rideau – the one he defines in pursuit of his self-interests.

This charge was evident with Rideau passing my Angolite work off as his own after I left the magazine.

In 1989 Burk Foster was a prominent criminal justice professor at the then University of Southwestern located in Lafayette, Louisiana. He had established a personal and professional relationship with Rideau and Ron Wikberg (the co-editor who replaced me on the prison magazine). The trio came up with an idea for a criminal justice textbook that would include articles from The Angolite, other state penal publications, and several from free world newspapers. They received permission from then Angola Warden Hilton Butler to pursue the project and to use Angolite articles. They also secured permission to use the articles from other prison publications and the free world newspapers. The task of selecting The Angolite articles for publication in the textbook, released under the title The Wall is Strong, fell to Rideau and Wikberg.

After the textbook was released, I purchased a copy and discovered that four articles appeared in it without a byline. I had written each article. One of them, “A Prison Tragedy,” appeared in a 1979 edition of The Angolite under my byline. I received the American Bar Association’s 1980 Silver Gavel for it.

I was upset about the omission of my byline. The obvious implication was that Rideau and Wikberg were the authors of the articles. That’s precisely what Foster thought. I wrote the professor a letter about the omission. He was patently hostile, rejecting the notion that I had authored the articles.

I then filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Foster, Rideau, and Hilton Butler. Several days after the lawsuit was filed Rideau responded to it in the media. In a story published in the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate on October 26, 1989, Mark Lambert, Advocate Staff Writer, wrote the following verbatim account about the Rideau’s response:

“Wilbert Rideau, inmate editor of the prison magazine The Angolite, admitted Wednesday that a ‘technical error’ omitted former Billy Wayne Sinclair’s name from a Sinclair-authored article was reprinted in a book.

“Sinclair filed a federal lawsuit against Rideau and others that accuses Rideau and former Louisiana State Penitentiary Warden Hilton Butler of giving a University of Southwestern Louisiana professor permission to use four articles Sinclair wrote without getting Sinclair’s permission or giving him credit.

“Sinclair and Rideau were co-editors of the award-winning prison publication until Sinclair was transferred from the prison because of his cooperation with federal and state authorities in a pardons-for-sale scandal.

“Former Corrections Secretary C. Paul Phelps then dismissed Sinclair from the magazine, saying his journalistic integrity had been compromised.

“The omission of Sinclair’s name as author of at least one of the articles was ‘an innocent mistake,’ Rideau said Wednesday. ‘It slipped through the cracks.’

“Rideau said one of the four articles ‘A Prison Tragedy,’ ‘clearly was written solely by Billy.’ That article won the 1980 Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.

“However, Rideau denied the suit’s implication that Rideau plagiarized Sinclair’s work for the USL textbook.

“’I have never plagiarized anything in my professional writing career,’ he said.

“The suit charges Rideau with trying to damage Sinclair’s journalistic reputation, an accusation Rideau denies.

“’Nobody, to my knowledge, has tried to destroy his journalistic reputation and credibility,’ he said. ‘He did that to himself’ when he became a federal informant while working as a prison journalist.

“Sinclair’s wife, Jodie Sinclair, said her husband simply did the right thing when officials approached him with an opportunity to buy his freedom through a pardon.

“’What kind of person says that reporting wrong-doing causes a loss of credibility and integrity?’ she said. ‘I think it proves Billy’s rehabilitation. I’m proud of him. It hurts my heart to hear Rideau say Billy lost his credibility because he did the honest thing.’

“She term the omission of her husband name as author of the articles ‘a major factual mistake.’

“’I’ m obviously happy Rideau is correcting his mistakes,’ she said. ‘I just hope he never does it again.’

“Rideau also accuses Sinclair of trying to use the court system ‘as a mechanism for a vendetta.

“’I’m not worried about the suit,’ he said. ‘I’m just sad it’s come to this.’”

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?

But even more telling is the fact that while the lawsuit was pending, I discovered that Rideau and Wikberg were under contract with Random House to publish yet another anthology of Angolite articles. I obtained a list of the articles Rideau had submitted to the publisher for possible inclusion in the anthology. Several of my articles appeared on the list. Once again I had not been given byline credit. In an October 1990 letter, I alerted Random House’s general counsel about the articles and the omission of my byline credit. None of the articles I designated as mine were published in the Random House anthology: Life Sentences.

But what kind of journalist would submit articles for publication to a major publishing house without giving the author proper credit when he is being sued for having done the very same thing in another anthology?

Rideau tried to defend this behavior with a “memo” that had been written on Angolite stationery and 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.

That memo not only revealed the true nature of the unprofessional alliance between the Phelps and Rideau but underscored the professional arrogance of the convict editor who really believed he could use the memo to legalize his theft of my literary work product.

Ironically, Rideau told Mark Lambert that I was “using the court system” to wage a “vendetta.” Shortly after the convict editor made these public comments the federal judge handling the lawsuit had to severe reprimanded Rideau because the editor had written a personal letter to the judge trying to convince the him to dismiss the lawsuit as “frivolous,” The judge threatened to hold in contempt if he ever tried to influence the outcome of any case by personally writing to the judge.

Not even that judicial reprimand curbed Rideau’s arrogance. He refused to obey court orders requiring him to comply with discovery. The judge was forced to impose monetary sanctions on the convict editor to force him to comply. The judge ordered the sanction funds removed from Rideau’s account and placed in mine.

The federal lawsuit was subsequently dismissed without prejudice. The federal judge ruled that since none of the articles in The Angolite had been copyrighted, there was no copyright infringement. The judge, however, took pains to point out that I had stated a “breach of contract” claim that could be pursued against Rideau in state court. I did not pursue the lawsuit any further because I had secured a “written apology” from Foster, got my articles removed from the criminal justice textbook, and prevented Rideau from further using my work in the Random House anthology.

In 2000 me and Jodie published my memoir A Life In The Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story (Arcade Publishing, New York). It marked the first time in sixteen years I had the opportunity to speak publicly about the pardons-selling investigation, my role in it, and my relationship with Rideau. While I served up substantial criticism of Rideau, I really gave him a “get out of jail free” pass on his role in the pardons-selling scheme. He was still imprisoned with a life sentence and facing continuous clemency efforts. I let that proverbial sleeping dog lie. It proved to be a mistake.

In 2004 Jodie was contacted by the Calcasieu Parish District Attorney’s Office which was preparing to try Rideau a fourth time on his murder charge. Jodie was asked to authenticate a videotape of an interview she did with Rideau at Angola on March 17, 1981. Rideau and I were at the death house at Angola that day taking pictures and gathering information for an article we were doing on the state’s first execution since 1961. Jodie was there getting information for a series on the death penalty for a Baton Rouge television station where she worked. She had never met either Rideau or I. She knew nothing about us or our cases except a few bare bones details.

Jodie was one of two television reporters at the death house that day. Warden Frank Blackburn suggested to each reporter that they might want to interview Rideau and I since we both had previously been sentenced to death and had spent time on death row. Jodie and the other television reporter agreed. Jodie interviewed me first. She asked me about my crime and what I thought about the death penalty. It was a straightforward interview. Rideau was standing a few feet away watching and listening to the interview. When it came his turn to be interviewed, Jodie asked him about his crime and how it had happened, just as she had done with me. Rideau stumbled. He said he cut his victim’s throat because “I think I ran out of bullets.” He also said he believed in the death penalty and that he should have been executed for his crime.

In his memoir Rideau is now saying that Jodie misrepresented the subject of the interview; that he has been led to believe it would be just about the death penalty. That is a bald faced lie. He knew exactly what the interview was about. He stood there during my interview, and, in fact, referred to what I had said in my interview several times during his own interview.

That videotape is Rideau’s worst nightmare. It severely undermines the message he is trying to get out through his memoir about his crime—that it was an accidental killing which occurred during a fit of panic. He is now saying he did not line up all his victims; that he did not cut Julia Ferguson throat; that he did not say it will be “quick and cool” to Ferguson before slashing her throat; that he did not plan the robbery; and that he did not mean to hurt anyone.

Since he cannot cut the videotape, Rideau’s only option is to shoot the messenger—Jodie. This strategy began at his trial and continues in his memoir—that Jodie violated her journalism ethics in the way she developed her relationship with me, thus the videotape must somehow be flawed. Rideau describes the violation in his memoir:

“A few days later [after the March 17 interview with Jodie] we were interviewing Blackburn in his office when Baton Rouge WAFB-TV reporter Jodie Bell, whom we met at the death housed, 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 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 him 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 journalism 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 the future ‘interview’ requests because I would not jeopardize my hard-earned credibility by participating in their use.

“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.”

The facts are these:

• Jodie and I wrote about our first “visit” in the interview room with Rideau in our book Balance. It was not a “private” room. A security station was less than six feet away and the door had a window through which security could see.
• As for the “distressed” telephone call from Jodie to Rideau in the control center, Rideau was the only staffer allowed to take such calls. He had given Jodie the control center number, telling her to call anytime she needed help or advice. He did this with all reporters.
• Rideau made several “collect” calls to Jodie’s residence after our March 17 meeting. This was also a tacit he employed with most female reporters as he tried to enlist their attention or affection toward him. When he realized that he was not the object of Jodie’s interest, he discontinued the calls to her. Rideau perversely believed that he had “first dibs” on any female reporter who interviewed Angolite staffers. He was really sick that way.
• As for my relationship with Jodie being a “secret,” that’s nonsense. Gresham knew early on in the relationship that there was something “personal” about it. She asked me in a telephone conversation, “is there something I should know about your relationship with Jodie Bell?” I told Gresham the relationship was personal. She had no problem with it as long as it did not cause a “problem” for The Angolite. Rideau knew Gresham was aware of the relationship.
• As for the future “visits” in the interview room passed off as “media interviews,” that’s nonsense also. Gresham made Warden Blackburn aware of the “personal” nature of mine and Jodie’s relationship. Warden Blackburn personally approved our “visiting” arrangement in the interview room because he felt our visiting in the main prison visiting area would provoke too much unnecessary attention. Rideau himself had a number of “special” visiting arrangements. Can anyone possibly believe that Warden Blackburn would have kept approving “media” interviews between Jodie and I?
• As for my behavior jeopardizing The Angolite, Rideau was one of the few “approved” outside inmate speakers. He frequently used his position with The Angolite and inmate organizations to arrange “speaking engagements.” Blackburn, on instructions from Phelps, would assign a “favorable” security officer to escort Rideau on these outside trips. Rideau maintained a number of romantic and sexual liaisons with women during these “speaking trips,” some of whom were married and a couple of whom were very prominent in the community. He did not have the magazine’s interest in mind, or the rest of the inmate population in mind, when it came to his need for sexual and emotional gratification with married women.
• The conversation Rideau said he had with me following Jodie’s telephone call did not happen. Jodie did call. And she was upset. The only exchange between Rideau and I was: “I think you better go call Jodie. She’s upset about some old newspaper files she’s come across dealing with your case.”

These and a host of other misrepresentations Rideau chose to include in his memoir about me and Jodie are why this website was created. Rideau made us an issue in the social debate his memoir invites: whether his record of prison accomplishments is sufficient to bestow upon him social redemption. That’s the basic premise of the memoir: social redemption based upon past performance. As Rideau told Erin Moriarty on CBS’ Sunday Morning on April 25, 2010, he misses being the “big shot” he was during his prison years. In the precious free world, he said, he is just a “nobody.” And Wilbert Rideau has never been satisfied with just being the proverbial small fish in the big pond. He craves being the biggest fish in the smallest pond.

But me and Jodie pose a threat to his social redemption claim. We know too much about him. That’s why he portrayed me in his memoir as an irresponsible, criminal type person he tried to help who, in turn, betrayed him and his precious Angolite. He demeans and lessens my role with the success of the magazine in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. He continues to hog the credit, much like a sow in slop, for the Angolite being transformed from a typical prison publication into a nationally prominent, awarding-winning “newsmagazine.” So hungry was he for all the credit that he repeatedly passed my work off as his own and took all the credit for journalism awards garnered by the magazine during our joint tenure as editors.

As for Jodie, she has the “smoking gun”—the videotape of an interview during which he describes the horrific, cold blooded nature of his crime. The video doesn’t square with the “manslaughter” theme he is promoting today: that he acted in a state of sheer panic when he kidnapped the three victims, tried to kill them all, and managed to kill one. The videotape cannot be discredited. As Pope John said, “it is what it is.” So he has to discredit Jodie.

Rideau’s supporters will say “why bring up all this old stuff” or “why rehash the past” or ‘y’all just waging a vendetta because you’re jealous.” Rideau’s supporters—or anyone else for that matter—can believe what they will. That is the right of all free-thinking individuals. But a well-informed debate includes all the facts, all the information. Rideau does not have the right to control the debate—not when he is the reason for the debate.

At the end of the day, when the debate is over, if anyone chooses to believe Wilbert Rideau is the new Nelson Mandella of the Western World, that is his/her prerogative. We will have said our piece and made peace with it.