WILBERT RIDEAU’S MENTOR: C. PAUL PHELPS
C. Paul Phelps became “Director” of the Louisiana Department of Corrections in 1976 following the untimely death of Elyan Hunt, a former Baton Rouge attorney who became the state’s first female director. Phelps had served under Hunt as her “Deputy Director.” His title as “Director” was changed to “Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections” in 1981 following a reorganization of state agencies. The change made Phelps more than the “head” of the state’s penal system. As Secretary of the DPS&C, he became the chief law enforcement officer in the State of Louisiana.
Wilbert Rideau dedicated his memoir, In The Place of Justice (Random House 2010), to Phelps, calling the late corrections secretary a “mentor and friend.” Phelps died of an unexpected heart attack in the spring of 1991.
Through all his national media connections and the prominence of The Angolite, the award-winning penal publication at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Rideau has long touted Phelps as being a brilliant and innovative force in the nation’s prison system, particularly in Louisiana. Like so many other things Rideau has touted (especially himself) during his years as a “famed prison journalist,” Phelps was highly overrated as a corrections leader. He was more a career bureaucrat who rose up through the ranks from his first career profession—probation officer/social worker, than a “corrections expert.”
I first met Phelps in 1976 during one of his many “tours” of Angola. I was a clerk in the prison’s culinary department. Someone in his entourage pointed me out to him. I was summoned by a prison guard to his group to meet him.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked as I approached the group with the guard at my side.
“No,” I said. “Should I?”
There was a subtle, superior arrogance about Phelps. He smiled.
“Well, Billy Wayne Sinclair, it’s not a good thing when the Director knows more about you than any other inmate …” He paused, “And not in a very good way. Your name even circulates around the Fourth Floor [the Governor’s Office].”
Phelps did not like me. I did not like him. Those feelings never changed with either of us, even after I spent nine years with The Angolite and was instrumental in helping convert the prison publication into its national award-winning status (as discussed here).
I had just come off a two-year stint in maximum security lockdown. I was trying to maintain a low profile, to distance myself from the “jailhouse lawyer” reputation of always attacking the “system.” Elyan Hunt and I had been bitter enemies. She either had a hand in or sanctioned the disciplinary frame up that sent me into the two-year lockdown. I didn’t need the same kind of open conflict with Phelps.
“I will take that as advice,” I said respectfully, “and not as a warning.”
“They’re often the same thing,” he said, abruptly turning and walking away with his entourage in tow.
“What the hell was that all about?” the kitchen guard asked me.
“Fuck, I don’t know,” I answered with a smile. “I’m lower on this totem pole than you.”
C. Paul Phelps had a strange, peculiar fascination with three inmates: Michael Burge, Douglas “Swede” Dennis, and Wilbert Rideau. They all had one thing in common: each was a cold blooded murderer. Phelps met Burge when the troubled teenager became one of his probationers in Baton Rouge. Burge was eventually convicted of several armed robberies as an adult and sent to Angola. Phelps was corrections director at the time. He came by The Angolite office one day and asked Rideau and I to do whatever we could to help Burge. But Burge quickly became part of the drug-dealing network of the Dixie Mafia, a group of hardcore white, Neo-Nazi type inmates. He was beyond our ability to help. He was a mean, dangerous dude—and he proved that in 1982 when he killed three black inmates (two of them before they could awaken from sleep in their dorm bunks and the third just after he jumped out of his bunk in a futile effort to defend himself). Burge was intent on killing a fourth black inmate but he managed to escape the dorm before Burge could get to him. Why did Burge kill them? They stole a pair of jeans from Burge’s prison punk.
Swede’s murders and his 1979 escape from the Louisiana State Police Barracks were detailed in my July 8th post (here). Many officials in the State Police at the time believed Phelps gave Swede advance warning that the corrections director was going to transfer the double-murderer back into the prison system. Barracks inmates were never given advance warning about an impending transfer from the minimum custody facility back into the prison system because of the potential for escape. Phelps reportedly told Swede he was going to have to move him from the Barracks to the Dixon Correctional Institute, a medium custody facility. Swede knew that if he was ever placed back in the prison system, he would never have a chance at freedom. The double-lifer escaped and managed to “stay on the lam” for ten years before his recapture. Phelps effectively gave Swede ten years of freedom. He is now 74 years old, wheel chair bound, and waiting simply to die in prison.
Rideau has documented his personal relationship with Phelps in his memoir. I will not dwell on it any further. One thing Rideau left out was Phelps allowing the convict editor to use his “free world lecture circuit” trips for sex liaisons with various females. Rideau told me that he and the corrections secretary had discussed sex opportunities available to inmates on “speaking trips.” “All I can do is put you in a position where you have the opportunity,” Phelps told Rideau. “What you do with the opportunity is up to you.”
I don’t know if Phelps actually told Rideau that, or if was just another attempt by the convict editor to embellish the perception of power he enjoyed with the corrections secretary. What I do know is that Rideau took frequent advantage of those opportunities that Phelps gave him.
In his memoir, Rideau listed a number of pieces of advice from Phelps in an effort to reflect the sterling character of the corrections secretary:
- “I don’t care how other people play. I play fair, and if I can’t, then I won’t play at all.”
- “Sometimes life shapes roles for us not of our own making.”
- “You have a responsibility to act for others when you’re the only person in a position to do so. It’s how you handle it that separates the great from the mediocre.”
- “Always aspire to greatness.”
- “Always take the high road; never let your enemies drag you down to their level.”
Too bad that neither Phelps nor Rideau had the courage or character to live by the foregoing sage advice.
I don’t know if Phelps ever offered any of the foregoing advice to the convict editor. Rideau manufactured so many events and fabricated so many conversations in his memoir that nothing in the book can be taken for granted. What I do know is that Phelps gave Rideau the following quote for The Angolite (Nov.-Dec. 1986) concerning my role as a government witness who exposed a massive pardons-selling network in the Louisiana prison system in 1986:
“Unlike other publishers, I wear more than one hat. As publisher of THE ANGOLITE, I have to regard the integrity of the press and the profession as paramount. Subsequently, I can neither condone nor tolerate staff behavior that compromises it in any form or fashion. 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. And I’m fairly certain that almost any publisher or editor in the country would probably fire him for what he did. However, as secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, I am also a law enforcement official and, as such, obligated to encourage action against crimes and improprieties. If I, as publisher, fired Billy Wayne for betraying the trust of his position then I, as a law enforcement officer, am placed in the position of punishing a person for having assisted law enforcement. It creates a dilemma.”
That statement personifies the true nature of C. Paul Phelps. There was no “dilemma.” Phelps was the state’s chief law enforcement officer. There was nothing in his job description that designated him as “publisher” of The Angolite. The magazine was nothing more than a prison publication. No other law enforcement official would compare his responsibilities as a state’s chief law enforcement officer to any self-assumed responsibilities he may have as a “publisher” of a prison publication.
And what did I do? I was offered an opportunity in 1986 to buy my way out of prison for $15,000 through a corrupt pardon board official. The offer was made to me by a ranking prison official. The offer had nothing to do with my position as co-editor of The Angolite. It was strictly a criminal offer. I had three choices: report it offer, accept it or ignore it. The two latter choices were criminal. The only honest, responsible choice was to report it to law enforcement.
The decision to report the bribe offer was never an “integrity of the press” issue involving a betrayal of trust by a journalist. That was a red-herring created by Rideau and Phelps to cover up The Angolite’s deep involvement in the corrupt pardons-selling network. They manipulated the integrity of the press issue to deflect the media from asking the basic question: how did the state’s largest pardons-selling scheme operate under the noses of the award-winning convict editor and the innovative corrections secretary for two years without them knowing about it?
I don’t know of any publisher who would publicly state, as Phelps suggested, that he/she would fire a journalist for reporting criminal wrongdoing discovered outside of his/her job responsibility.
Phelps further told The Angolite:
“All journalists, whether in or out of prison, function on trust. Whether Billy Wayne used his journalistic credentials in his undercover activities or not is, as I see it, irrelevant. A journalist, like a priest or a policeman, cannot easily make that kind of separation between what he is and represents professionally and what he does personally, and that’s especially true in the prison world where power, operations and integrity too often embodied in personalities. A journalist conducting an undercover investigation to expose improprieties and wrongdoing in his professional capacity is one thing. A journalist, on the other hand, doing this solely for law enforcement purposes is whole different ball game. As a private citizen, it can be argued that he has a right to do it, and he has – but, still, there’s an overlapping effect that you can’t so easily escape in your professional life. While I am not as well-versed in the ethics of this as my commercial counterparts, I perceive a problem in this. How the professionals perceive and handle this is their business. But, where it involves the prisoner press, I dictate policy. And it is my thinking that prisoner publications and journalists should not involve themselves, in a collaborative effort, with prison security or law enforcement operations, whether as informants, undercover operatives, or what-have-you. That is not compatible with maintaining the integrity of the publication or their role as journalists. To do so runs the risk of compromising the credibility of the publication as well as possibility placing the safety of the staff in jeopardy, either or all of which should warrant dismissal.”
In effect, Phelps, as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, decreed that a prison “journalist” could not report criminal wrongdoing under any circumstances. The state’s top cop embraced the “don’t snitch” gutter code of silence. Phelps tried to dress the beast up with phrases like “maintaining the integrity” of prisoner journalists and protecting “the credibility of the publication.” It was all bullshit. Wilbert Rideau and I were convicted murderers. We were “journalists” only as a prison job assignment. I was not involved in any “collaborative” effort with law enforcement when that prison official offered me a criminal opportunity to buy my way out of prison. That prison official provided with all the details and players involved in the corrupt network which went all the way to the Governor’s Office. Had I not reported the offer and had that fact later became known to law enforcement, I could have been indicted as a co-conspirator or at the very least an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.
I certainly could not take the pardons-selling information to Phelps, the state’s top cop. He and Rideau had their heads so far up each other’s ass that I would have been placed in lockdown for my “own protection” and ultimately placed in a situation where some henchman involved in the criminal enterprise would have slit my throat. The Angolite was dirty, Rideau was dirty, and Phelps was dirty. That’s why in the weeks preceding my removal from Angola by U.S. Marshals Rideau was traveling to corrections headquarters to have secret meetings with Phelps about what to do with me.
The only hope for survival an inmate has when it comes to reporting prison corruption is to report it to the proper law enforcement authorities who have nothing to do with the prison system. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars involved in the pardons-selling scheme and another $4 million involved in a homosexual “mail scam” controlled by Kirksey McCord Nix, the reputed leader of the Dixie Mafia. Both of these interrelated criminal conspiracies resulted in a state court judge and his wife being murdered in Biloxi, Mississippi in September 1987. The Angolite, Phelps, and Rideau had an indirect role in those murders to the extent that the judge and his wife would be alive today were it not for the actions they took to protect the prison publication.
I have one question for any journalist or media publication who agrees with Phelps position on prisoner journalists: Do you think the corrections secretary would have let me publish the pardons-selling conspiracy in The Angolite? Hell no! He would have not only quashed the story but done everything he could have, both legally and illegally, to make sure former Gov. Edwin Edwards and his pardon board chairman, Howard Marsellus, were protected from criminal liability.
So I really had no choice at the end of the day except to report the bribe offer to the FBI as I did. The people involved in making the bribe offer to me clearly understood that I “knew too much” had I refused their offer and walked away. I would have been an “expendable liability.” That was very much a consideration in mine and my wife’s thought processes as we discussed what to do with the information. We knew immediately that honesty demanded we report the offer—the only question was how and to whom. But we also had to consider the danger involved. The prison official had given me too much information. His only protection, and the protection of the conspiracy, rested with the belief that I was going to pay the money.
So while Wilbert Rideau may remember C. Paul Phelps as a mentor and friend, I remember him as the man who caused an innocent judge and his wife to be murdered because he quashed a state police investigation that would have uncovered the murder plot before it was carried out. That’s the Phelps I know—a man who, by his own admission, said his responsibility as the publisher of a prison publication exceeded his responsibility as the state’s chief law enforcement officer.
