When I first learned that C. Murray Henderson was going to be assigned to the N5 unit at the David Wade Correctional Center in 1999, I made it clear to other inmates in the unit that no one was to bother him.

He was in N5 only few weeks before he was crippled with gout and had to be put in a wheel chair. Each day I pushed him to the prison infirmary, undressed, and bathe him.

I had never bathed another man in my life – and there I was bathing a former warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, more commonly known as Angola, who was once my bitter nemesis; the man I had filed so many lawsuits against I cannot recall the number. Suffice it to say, Sinclair v. Henderson became part of the legal lexicon in courts throughout Louisiana.

Life is indeed a bitch. And, yes, we all do die in the end. From there, who knows.

I listened to all of Henderson’s stories as he regaled other inmates about Angola. I knew they were bullshit, the embellished recollections of an old alcoholic who had long ago lost contact with reality.

I still treated him with the utmost respect. I called him “Mr. Henderson.” I wouldn’t have called the Governor at that time “Mister.” My wife, who met Henderson on several occasions, thought the world of the old man. She was always extremely kind and affectionate towards him.

Then in 2000 came the release of my prison memoir, “A Life in the Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story” (Arcade Publishing 2000), The book did not portray the infamous warden in a very good light.

He was devastated. I don’t know what he expected when he bought the book – perhaps a glowing account of his Angola administration.

It was not what he got. The former warden became bitter. He no longer spoke to me.

It really didn’t matter. I had seen too many people killed because of his incompetence and corruption.

The ex-warden would walk slowly down the tier, measuring each step in a futile attempt to walk a straight line.

He was 83 years of age at the time, with a thick mop of curly gray hair, and a right leg severely bowed by gout.

His full name was Charles Murray Henderson. He came to Louisiana in 1968 after establishing a nationally-acclaimed reputation as a “reform penologist” during his tenure as warden of the Iowa State Penitentiary. He was brought to Louisiana by former Gov. John McKeithen to “reform” Angola – the state’s only adult male penal facility at the time. It was the nation’s largest prison, and its most violent.

Henderson inherited this sprawling, insidiously corrupt prison that had a history of killing off more inmates than it ever rehabilitated while enriching the pockets of “good ole Southern boy” politicians. Prisons in the Deep South have always been, and mostly remain so, corrupt quasi-political complexes designed to bloody money political honchos.

During Big John’s eight-year tenure as Louisiana’s governor (1964-72), he rewarded prison inmates with more than 2,500 pardons (most at a price of $1500), “special” paroles (at a cost of $500), and a reform warden who became known to the public as C. Murray Henderson.

Angola proved to be unreceptive – actually hostile – to Henderson’s notions of penal reform. The prison became his professional quagmire. Its entrenched history of corruption, violence, and brutality was not impressed with his “progressive” penal “rehabilitation” approach. The prison all-white, “redneck” staff firmly believed it was better to beat and kill rather than heal and save.

In fact, the inmate-on-inmate violence so spiraled out of control during Henderson’s seven-year tenure as warden that Angola earned the richly deserved national reputation as “America’s bloodiest prison.” That reputation eventually led to federal court intervention in 1975 that declared the entire prison unconstitutional.

Henderson left Angola in the late fall of 1975 shortly after at federal court intervention. He went to Tennessee where he was named “commissioner” of that state’s notoriously brutal prison system. He would also leave there in the wake of scandal—a massive parole-selling scandal that sent Tennessee’s Gov. Ray Blanton to a federal prison.

Henderson returned to Louisiana several years later where he was placed in charge of the state’s hospital for the criminally insane – a St. Francisville facility that would also come under intense Federal court scrutiny during his charge. He then met, and married, a local journalist and freelance writer named Anne Butler.

Together, the couple wrote and published several books about Angola, its famous characters and events. Butler would later state a creative claim to all the “writing” in the books, crediting Henderson with being no more than a source of information in those literary endeavors.

The common thread that bound most who have written about the “history of Angola” is this: they were afflicted with “selective memories.”

These Angola historians were either motivated by self-interests or were supporting the official interests of those in charge of the prison at the time they wrote their accounts.

Angola historians like Henderson, Butler, Burk Foster, and a cadre of staffers (or ex-staffers) with the prison’s official publication, The Angolite, have all concocted various accounts or hand-me-down tales about the prison’s infamous history. I don’t place much stock in any of these accounts.

Mark T. Carleton’s 1971 book, “Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penitentiary,” is the only really accurate account of the prison’s bloody, corrupt history.

Henderson, in particular, was tortured by two insatiable human desires: a need for professional recognition of his penal accomplishments and a personal thirst for alcohol that begged 12-step intervention.

The two desires did not mix well.

A sense of self-created “greatness” became the former warden’s affliction, a need for embellished personal exploits that could be fueled by alcohol. The imagined exploits allowed him to cope with the curse of anonymity outside the world of prison. It was as though he was engaged in a perpetual struggle to force the world to recognize his greatness. Reality caved to perception of reality, leading him to foster professional misrepresentations about his tenures as a warden and his own personal life.

The limited regional interest in Henderson’s “books” quickly faded. Time slowly chewed him up and spat out the ugly remains. When the grandeur of being a “book” author did not materialize, he was left with a troubled marriage, a sense of failure, and an unlimited supply of booze. It was an inevitable recipe for human tragedy.

That tragedy occurred in 1998 when Henderson lost control of his personal life – just as he lost control of Angola in the 1970s. While in a drunken state, he shot Anne Butler five times with a .38 caliber pistol following a domestic dispute. He then sat and watched the life blood flow from her serious wounds. Although his wife ultimately recovered from those wounds, a series of painful operations and physical therapy wiped out her personal savings.

Henderson later claimed he had wanted to kill himself but not even booze could give him the courage to do that.

Who would be around to explain “why” he lost control?

Failed greatness demands explanation.

So the former warden decided to live – to face the scandal and embarrassment of being tried, convicted, and sentenced to fifty years in prison.

That’s how Henderson ended up at the David Wade Correctional Center—named after a man he despised—and assigned to N5 where he was embraced by most of its inmates.

He arrived at the Wade prison facility, just another inmate.

Obviously disoriented, the former warden was humble, polite, and eager to please his new “inmate friends.” He regaled them with embellished stories about the inmates he had saved or secured their release through pardon or parole.

The Angola he remembered, and spoke so fondly about with both inmates and guards alike, was not the same prison I knew. Henderson recalled it as a place of love, respect, and honor among keeper and kept; a place of good food, clean living conditions, and a safe environment in which all the inmates’ personal needs were met.

The ex-warden became known as “Mr. Henderson” to both Wade inmates and guards. He was accorded official deference with a litany of special favors and privileges. He had his own valet, a black inmate who shined his shoes, cleaned his cell, and carried his meals to his cell. Henderson would buy the valet large “canteen orders” in exchange for the special services.

Gradually the old warden’s social standing began to erode – his quick temper (the psychological spark that probably triggered the shooting of his wife), sense of class arrogance, and constant “complaining” gnawed away at his popularity.

But it was his perverse penchant for the Jerry Springer show – a program he watched religiously – and his prurient interest in hardcore pornography that did not sit well with his fellow inmates who had placed him on a higher intellectual pedestal.

“Why that ole sonuvabitch ain’t nothin’ but another ‘dirty ole man’,” they soon exclaimed.

The release of my memoir, “A Life In the Balance,” co-authored with my wife Jodie in 2000 offered a markedly different view of Angola than the one Henderson had presented to the N5 unit. It did not play well with him. While the former warden never said a word to me about the book, he made it clear to others that he was “furious” about the way he was portrayed in it.

To say the least, “Balance” did not enhance Henderson’s social standing in N5.

Most of the unit’s inmates had no frame of reference about the prison’s troubled past or Henderson’s role in it. So, quite naturally the historical perspective provided by “Balance” did not reflect well on the ex-warden’s role in that history.

Warden Kelly Ward was not pleased with “Balance” either – not only because it cast the Wade facility in a bad light but also because it treated Henderson “unfairly.” Henderson had given Ward his start in the prison business by hiring him at Angola, along with a half-dozen or more college elites who considered themselves “penal experts,” as a quasi-social worker/classification officer.

Shortly after “Balance” was released, Ward summoned me to the prison’s “security office” where he made it clear that he did not like the way Henderson had been portrayed in the book.

Ward’s anger was not surprising. He still felt an allegiance to the man who had introduced him to the corrections field.

“You got your ‘facts’ wrong, Sinclair,” the warden charged, sitting behind the desk in the security office. “There was nothing in the public record that Warden Henderson was ‘drunk’ when he shot his wife.”

I was not intimidated by Ward. He was just another tin-can warden. I met only one warden with balls during my 40-year stay in the Louisiana prison system—and it was not Kelly Ward.

“Jodie and I got our ‘facts’ right, Warden,” I replied. “Jodie got that information from Henderson’s daughter.”

Ward dismissed me.

The warden retaliated by banning the book in N5, calling it a “security threat.”

On the heels of “Balance,” Henderson’s conviction and sentence were upheld on appeal. The former warden became more sullen, withdrawn. Then came publication of yet another book. This one entitled “Weep for the Living” written by Ann Butler. It recounts her life with Henderson, including fresh and graphic details about the crime.

“Weep for the Living” shredded whatever remnants that were left of Henderson’s good name. He was truly crushed.

I would speak to the ex-warden but only when necessary. My wife had a special affection for the elderly gentleman she had met. I did not share her sentiments. I could not forget the wasted blood, the official corruption, and brutality under his Angola administration.

In 2003 the former warden sought, and was denied, clemency from the outgoing pardon board under the administration of former Gov. Mike Foster. He never recovered from that devastating denial. He accepted death in prison – and it came in 2004 in hospice in a prison infirmary at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, another facility named after a corrections director he hated.

He was 84 years of age.

It was in those last few months of his life that he came to realize he would never be free. He died a beaten, and bitter, old man—a warden who died in a prison.

All people tell lies. Some are necessary, most are not. There are a host of reasons why people lie. One of the most common reasons is to impress others, to enhance one’s standing in the public vision. Most people are never quite satisfied with who they are or what they have, so they lie to embellish their standing in the group.

Lying has become a new social art in America. We have the “Big Lie,” which can be attached to any given social, political or even individual situation we choose. One prominent news outlet clocked a former president as telling more than 30,000 big and little lies in a four-year period.

Lying has become so socially and politically acceptable that fiction has become fact and fact is now fiction.

You could very well be sitting in a public park eating an apple when someone walks up and says, “That looks like a good orange.”

“It’s not an orange,” you say. “It’s an apple.”

“Oh, that’s what they want you to believe,” orange man replies. “That’s an orange. Everybody knows it’s an orange. You must be some kind of apple-loving liberal.”

Who knows?

What I do know is that an apple is an apple; and like everyone else in this world, I know a liar. His name is Wilbert Rideau. Google his name or visit his Wikipedia page and you will know who he is as well.

In a recent New Yorker Magazine interview dealing with his prison literary accomplishments, Rideau had this exchange with interviewer John J. Lennon:

“What was the first book you read on death row?

“‘Fairoaks’ by Frank Yerby—a plantation novel. I was totally shocked that something like this existed, because, you have to understand, the world I came from didn’t teach slavery to the students.

“The first time you learned about slavery was reading Frank Yerby on death row?

“On death row!”

That’s a barefaced lie.

Rideau went to the racially segregated Second Ward Elementary School and W.O. Boston High School in the late 1940s into the 1950s in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The schools may not have taught “slavery to the students” as part of their curriculum, but every black student, either elementary or high school, knew they were in segregated schools, not “white schools,” because they were descendants of slaves.

One of the first things every Black child learned in an African-American household in the Deep South in the 1940s and 1950s was “slavery.” Rideau came from a good, decent, smart family. He was taught the dos and don’ts by his family about how to live in a white imposed segregated world. The word “slavery” was woven into the fabric of Black existence in America at that time.

Rideau dropped out of high school in the 9th grade. He got a job working at a downtown haberdashery.

There was a very tall statue of a Confederate soldier on the courthouse lawn in downtown Lake Charles. The “Johnny Reb” statue had stood there since 1915 in honor of the Confederacy that fought to preserve the brutal institution of slavery.

While working downtown, Rideau saw the “Johnny Reb” statue every day. He knew exactly why the statue was there and what it stood for as did every Black man, woman and child in the city.

To say that he did not know slavery even existed until he read Yerby’s “Fairoaks” on Louisiana’s death row in 1962 at age 20 is simply not true. Every time he was forced to sit at the back of the bus, or drink from a “Colored Only” water fountain, or attend a segregated school he knew “slavery” was the reason.

So why tell such a trivial lie?

It feeds into Rideau’s personal narrative he created more than four decades ago with media outlets that he was a poor, deprived, uneducated Black kid who had never read a book, much less having being taught about slavery, until he picked up Yerby’s “Fairoaks” and had an educational epiphany about the plight of African-American people in America.

It was a neat little fabrication that made him exceptional: a Fairoaks’ racial enlightment that launched him into a fight to improve the penal existence for Black inmates. And in many ways through a 44-year incarceration he accomplished that objective.

But, more often than not, Wilbert Rideau prefers a lie to the truth. It allows him to fuel the mystique he has created around himself. It’s like a man saying he fought in the war but never joined the military yet he comes to believe he actually fought in the war. The lie makes him exceptional.

The problem with lies is that they are so easily believed. Most, if not all, of The New Yorker readers will believe that Rideau never knew about slavery—never even heard the word—until he read “Fairoaks” on death row. It’s such a casual, easy thing to believe—until you take a moment or two to apply just a touch of logic and the lie collapses.

Now back to that damn apple and orange.

It’s sorta like this folks: Gov. Kristi Noem is now trying to lie her way out of why she killed little Cricket. She has transformed a mischievous 14-month-old puppy into a man-eating Cujo on steroids. And many people will believe that lie. Why? Because it sounds better than the truth.

The CDC just announced that 107,941 people died from drug overdose in the United States in 2022. This continues a two-decade increase of drug overdoses. Most of these deaths involved illegal drugs such as opioids (fentanyl) or stimulants (methamphetamines).

An illicit drug transaction is simple: it involves, first, a choice by someone who wants to purchase the drugs, and, second, a willingness by someone to sell the drugs.

That choice/willingness is a crime.

The crime entails inevitable consequences for both parties. The user succumbs to a failed, miserable life that impacts everyone in their orbit with each swallow or injection of the drug which has the potential for fatal overdose. The seller lives in a world of constant stress and anxiety trying to maintain supply and demand knowing that death or prison are inevitable.

It is a sick marriage (much like incest, I suppose) between two individuals incapable of understanding the values it takes to live a decent, responsible life.

Will I shed a tear over the loss of those 107,941 drug-related deaths?

I think not … at least not at this point in our human existence.

The World Counts reports that a one child in this world dies every 10 seconds from hunger while another 13 million live in hunger each day.

I will shed countless tears for those lost lives and that human suffering.

The Catholic Connect Foundation reports 40 million people in the U.S. are hungry; that 3 million children don’t have breakfast before or at school.

With innocent babies and defenseless children—none of whom caused one ounce of harm in this life—dying from bombs, bullets, and starvation in Gaza, don’t expect any tears from me because some junkie in the dark side of a city or some rich suburban mom OD on illicit drugs.

Humans have just so many tears to shed in this life. The children among us should have the first—and perhaps the exclusive—shot at those tears. If there’s any left, I may shed one or two for that junkie and mom.

The Russian president, and dictator, just secured a corrupt fifth term in office.

In the weeks before the election, the little runt of a guy was saber-rattling about how Russia is prepared to use nuclear weapons to protect its territorial nterests. It was a direct shot at America and its NATO alliance.

But the nuclear saber-rattling was nothing more than a coward’s bluff—a little man’s fear of the dark, ghosts, goblins, and the like.

Putin, nor any other dictator with nuclear weapons, is going to unleash a nuclear war. They live and survive on power. A nuclear exchange with America would annihilate the little man’s power. His stolen wealth and luxury living would cease to exist. His kingdom would be a radiation contaminated rubble. Moscow would look like one of the thousands of cows that perished in the recent Texas wildfires.

Can you imagine little rootin-Putin climbing out of his nuclear protected bunker to find a wasteland like that left behind by those Texas wildfires with a few horribly burned Russian survivors ready to rip him apart before they die.

No, scared of his shadow Putin will never start a nuclear war. That’s why he was too afraid to even say Navalny’s name when the activist was alive and why his “super army” cannot even defeat little Ukraine.

In fact, I would be willing to wager two chocolate-covered donuts, and six donut holes, that our own South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham could beat Putin in a fist fight—and Lindsay can’t fight his way out of wet paper bag.

We do not ask for this life. It is given to us through procreation between a man and a woman. It can be produced by physical intercourse between a man and a woman or by any of the four methods of artificial insemination. Any other methods are beyond the pay grade of my understanding.

We come into this world crying and, more often than not, leave it regretting.

Life provides us with three parental paths: nurture, neglect, or brutality. Our lives are generally shaped by which of those paths life imposes on us. We have no choice over the initial path that ultimately leads to the next path in our individual journeys toward free will—choices in deciding what we want to do or become in life.

Roughly two-thirds of our lives are spent under the false pretense (illusion, if you will) that death will never come or it is too far in the future to demand much attention. The last third of our lives are spent preparing for the end of life: wills, preparing financial security, making funeral arrangements, and paying closer attention to things that once seemed so unimportant.

I sit on my porch, glass of ice tea in my hand, with Fred, my faithful dog lying beside my chair on point for any potential danger. I wonder what he is thinking or even if he is capable of thought. Is everything in his world controlled by instincts? Does he have a yesterday or can he conceive tomorrow?

There are more than 8 billion human lives on this planet. Fred’s dog life is better than the lives of three billion of these human lives. I treat Fred better than Vladimir Putin treats his human prisoners.

I saw a video the other day of a pack of hyenas attacking a single lion. The pack eventually killed the lion, of this I’m fairly certain, just as I know that the lion was more than likely once in a pack of lions that killed a lone hyena.

It struck me like a lightning bolt in the center of the brain that the pack attack is the essence of all life, human or animal: survival against all odds. There are patches of sunshine and green grass along life’s path but most of the path is desert dry, littered with the bones of lives senselessly and meaninglessly lost.

The violence shredding Haiti once again and the innocent children dying in Gaza because of some fucked up religious belief defines human life. There has not been a single moment since man left the tree and started walking straight up that they have not been killing each other in packs, all the while trying to devise more ways to take more human lives.

Someone said to me the other day in a Facebook comment that God’s tears are endless for the suffering.

I ask, why did God create suffering to begin with?

Man is now trying to build a space station on the moon so he can send man to Mars and beyond. His mission is to fuck up life on Mars and across this universe, and throughout all universes beyond just as he has fucked up this life here on Mother Earth.

That’s the message that Haiti, Gaza, and the recent hate crimes the girls’ basketball team faced in Idaho gives to us. And that is the message human life will take to Mars and beyond.