Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

In the first chapter of his memoir, In The Place of Justice (Random House 2010), Wilbert Rideau takes the reader through a chronology of events leading up to his decision to rob Gulf South National Bank in February 1961. While the author tries to convince the reader that the crime was a sort of a “spur of the moment” decision, the details he presents undermine that contention.

In 1959 Rideau got a job at Halpern’s Fabrics in the Southgate Shopping Center in Lake Charles. He was seventeen at the time. He made $70 every two weeks, and, as he pointed out, that was “good pay for a colored in a non-construction job in 1959.” He said it was enough money to “help out” his mother, buy “nice clothes” for himself, and spread the money around among friends.

So by his own admission, Rideau had a good job and no reason to steal. In fact, the manager of the store, Martha Irby, took the time to teach Rideau everything about the fabric business, including the store’s “bookkeeping” with the advice “you never know when this might one day benefit you.” How many 17-year-olds in 1959, especially a “colored” one, would have  embraced this as a wonderful opportunity to prepare for adult life? Plenty.

But not Wilbert Rideau. He looked for every “opportunity” to see himself as a “victim,” especially of racism. This character flaw manifested itself in his reaction to the first pay raise he received at Halpern’s. Pleased with his initiative and ability to assist in all aspects of the store’s operation, Mrs. Irby recommended to the store’s owner, Alvin Halpern Jr., that young Rideau be given a fifty percent pay raise. Mr. Halpern apparently thought that was a bit extravagant but did give Rideau a raise of $2.50 a week, increasing his pay to $75 every two weeks.

“Mrs. Irby was embarrassed,” Rideau wrote. “I seethed.”

Rideau expects the reader to “seethe” with him—to casually and blindly accept that the $2.50 raise was just another example of how “white people” screwed him over. A $2.50 pay raise in 1959 or 1960 at any job was nothing to sneeze at.

“I was fed up with a white society that marginalized me,” he explained “I brooded about that, and about the fact that I had no real friends, only some people who would become chummy when they hit me up for cash. I felt my life was empty, and I despaired of things ever being different.”

Let’s try to wade through these victimized feelings. Rideau’s had a good job; made excellent pay. He was an “intelligent” kid by his own admission. But somehow “white society” had marginalized him and “black society” liked him only when he had money. Damn, what a terrible, horrible hand to be dealt in life—the fate of virtually every teenager, especially black ones, in America in the 1950s.

Rideau then brings the reader to February 15, 1961—the day before that infamous bank robbery. It was payday for him. He went to the bank and cashed his check. He then took a bus to Waldmeier’s Pawn Shop located in downtown Lake Charles. He went to the pawn shop, he said, because he had been “thinking off and on about getting a gun.” He described himself as a “puny nineteen-year-old” who had been “picked on, bullied, and harassed” throughout his life. The final straw that “broke the camel’s back” came after he was “slapped and threatened in front of others at nightclub by a guy with a knife.” He walked away from that incident ‘fuming” and vowing it “would never happen again.” He decided to get a gun for self-protection and to prevent any future humiliations.

A recurring problem in Rideau’s memoir is the contradictions he expresses throughout it. For example, on page 16 he wrote that he had “no real friends” but on the very next page he said “many of [his] buddies had knives.” Friends and buddies generally denote the same kind of relationship. So did he have friends or did he not have friends?

Let’s assume Rideau did get “slapped” and he decided he needed a gun for self-protection because he was “puny.” Although seething because of the embarrassment at having been slapped in front of others, he took pains to say he did not purchase the gun “to hurt anyone;” only to “deter” anyone from trying to push him around again. It just a matter of coincidence that on the way out of the pawn shop he saw a “hunting knife in a scabbard” which caught his eye so he bought it “on impulse.”

As soon as he left the pawn shop, Rideau took a bus back the Southgate mall area where he bought a “box of .22 caliber cartridges at an army surplus store.” Another contradiction. An empty gun can “deter;” a loaded gun has the potential to “hurt” someone.

On the morning of the robbery, February 16, Rideau reported to work carrying the loaded .22 pistol and knife in his coat pocket. The question that immediately arises is why he needed so much weaponry for self-protection at work. Going to Halpern’s was not like going to some seedy “nightclub” where you might encounter a brute ready to smack you in the face.

Rideau offered no logical explanation for carrying the weapons to work with him. He simply directed the reader’s attention to the point that working at Halpern’s “was my future—a dead-end job.” He said that realization made him “restless” and consumed with a “gnawing need for things to change.”

Perhaps a good-paying job, with trust and responsibilities and an opportunity for advancement, was a “dead-end” future for a 19-year-old “colored” kid in Lake Charles in 1961. I don’t know. I was not a “colored” kid in Lake Charles in 1961. But I do know Wilbert Rideau. I understand the dynamics of the personal discontent he had in 1961 and continues to have this day. He expressed it in the book. He had just heard that “California was a good place for colored people, with plenty of opportunities for good jobs and a chance to be somebody.”

In his memoir and media interviews about the memoir, Rideau laments the fact that he’s been unable to secure and maintain steady employment since his release from prison. He got a $75,000 grant from the Soros Foundation in 2007 (and his wife got a $75,000 grant the year before) to subsidize the writing of his memoir. He told Erin Moriarty on CBS’ Sunday Morning that he missed being a “big shot” in prison; that he’ s just a “nobody” in free society.

That’s why he was so “restless” in 1961. He could not stand being a “marginalized” nobody—a “colored” kid working in a fabric store in Lake Charles, Louisiana. California was different. It offered him a chance to be “somebody” just as prison gave him the opportunity to be a “big shot.” I’m sure  Rideau could have found work after his release from prison, but it would have been the same kind of anonymous labor he performed at Halpern’s–the kind suited only for a “nobody.” He was not going back there once he got out of prison. Just as the Gulf South National Bank offered him a chance to be “somebody” in California, In The Place of Justice offers him a chance to be a “big shot” out here in the free world

But back to Rideau’s claim that taking the pistol and knife to work did not mean he had pre-planned the bank robbery. He said the bank robbery idea just evolved out of the day’s mundane events. He not feeling well at work, he said, so he knocked off “about two o’clock.” He walked to a nearby men’s store “to visit with the janitor there.” He said the janitor, who must have been a “friend” of sorts, asked Rideau to help him move some things around. Apparently Rideau was over the illness he had experienced earlier, at least enough to help the janitor with his work He worked so long in fact that he missed the bus to take him home. So he decided to wait for the next bus in his cousin’s car which was parked at the rear of the shopping center. He fell asleep “until almost 5:30.” By that time, he had missed yet another bus home.

He then “meandered to Weingarten’s Supermarket, where [he] talked to the bag boys and porters [he] knew and arranged for a ride home with one of them who was leaving at 7:30,” he wrote.  As with the janitor, it can reasonably be assumed that these “bag boys and porters” were friends of his because at least one of them was willing to give him a ride home. This certainly does not comport with the image of the “puny” kid with no friends as he tried to portray himself. He was strong enough to move heavy rolls of fabric around at Halpern’s, strong enough to help his janitor friend “move some things around,” and friendly enough with the bag boys and porters at Weingarten’s to catch a ride home.

Still, Rideau insisted the plan to rob the bank suddenly popped into head while sitting on a bench outside Weingarten’s sipping a soft drink and waiting for his ride home. It was about 6:15 or so. The overcast sky caused by smoke “belching from the city’s chemical plants” suddenly made him “feel totally alone, miserable, frustrated, and desperate.” He decided right then and there that he needed a “new life away from Lake Charles” and the only way to accomplish that was to rob the bank which “was stuffed with money.” With all that money he could “buy a new life someplace else.”

There you have it: the decision to rob the bank was spontaneously hatched outside Weingarten while sipping a soda and having a difficult time dealing with the “overcast sky.”

But  as soon as Rideau gets one story straight, he contradicts it with another. He pointed out that “three people worked at the bank, but on Thursday evenings only the manager, Jay Hickman, and one teller worked.”

Now, how would “puny” little Rideau know that operational detail unless he had been monitoring the work schedules of the bank employees–a sure sign of a planned robbery?

While sitting on the bench of Weingarten’s, Rideau theorized he could tie up the bank employees and leave them in either a coffee room or in the bank’s vault. “It shouldn’t take but a few minutes,” he wrote, “after which I’d return to Weingarten’s to catch my 7:30 ride home, pack some clothes, leave my family some money, and tell them I was going on a vacation and not to worry about me.”

And he added:  “When would an opportunity like this occur again?”

He made his decision. He went to the bank. “What do I have to lose?” he asked himself.

But the best laid plans always have flaws. About midway through the robbery attempt one of the female bank tellers managed to make a telephone call to the bank’s main branch and informed them that something was going on at the Southgate location. The police were alerted. Rideau said “everything … suddenly spun out of control.” But not so much so that he was about to leave the money.

“I told Hickman to fill the suitcase, and hurry,” Rideau wrote.

Suitcase!

What the hell is a suitcase doing in a bank—unless the robber brought it to stuff the money in it.

Rideau wrote about taking the gun and knife with him to work that morning but he made no mention of the suitcase. The “suitcase” appears suddenly in the middle of the robbery. The news media have long reported that, along with the gun and knife, Rideau bought a Samsonite suitcase and carried it with him into the bank.

Rideau does not explain the origins of that suitcase in his memoir—and for good reason. The idea to rob the bank could not have spontaneously sprung into his head sitting at Weingarten’s if he had bought a Samsonite suitcase and took it with him to work that morning. He could explain taking the gun and knife as self-protection, but not the suitcase.

The presence of the suitcase in the bank destroys the spontaneous, un-planned decision to rob the Gulf South National Bank on February 16, 1961.

And if Rideau lied, even by omission, about the suitcase because it undermined his claim about the spontaneous decision made at Weingarten’s to rob the bank, then what can be believed in the memoir?