State did business with man indicted JAMES MINTON Publication Date: November 14, 2010 Louisiana’s prison system placed purchase orders totaling more than $500,000 with a Lake Charles man while he was under indictment for defrauding the state through fertilizer sales, records show. Wallace Eugene Fletcher, 69, pleaded guilty Oct. 19 to one of 30 counts of mail fraud brought against him by a federal grand jury in Lafayette. He faces up to 20 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines and restitution, but a sentencing date has not been set. Fletcher admitted in court that he billed the state for 26 tons of fertilizer, but his supplier delivered only 16 tons. Federal prosecutors said in a document filed in connection with the guilty plea that Fletcher did not maintain an inventory of fertilizer but “operated solely as a middle man in supplying fertilizer.” Randy Whitstine, a retired Prison Enterprises employee at Louisiana State Penitentiary, said Fletcher routinely took advantage of a state regulation that allowed a vendor to deliver more product than ordered, up to 10 percent of the purchase order amount. “If we wanted 100 tons of urea (fertilizer), he could send 110 tons. That was all legal,” Whitstine said. Whitstine said “higher ups” at Prison Enterprises appeared to be favoring Fletcher, including never weighing any of the trucks that delivered fertilizer to Angola. “The thing that struck me funny was, if you needed 200 tons, why were we getting 220? Where is it going? Come to find out, we weren’t getting it,” Whitstine said. Whitstine worked for Prison Enterprises for 23 years and ran the Angola prison’s farm warehouse when he retired in 2002. He said he was scheduled to testify for the government against Fletcher.

A grand jury charged Fletcher in a sealed indictment on June 10, 2009, with four mail fraud counts involving fertilizer sales and with 13 more counts in a superseding indictment that was publicly revealed on Sept. 21, 2009. Despite the indictments, officials with Prison Enterprises continued doing business with Fletcher’s Feed and Farm Supply, even when the number of mail fraud counts rose to 30 in another superseding indictment. The third indictment alleged that Fletcher bilked the state of more than $200,000 in a 22-month period. State Purchasing and Travel Director Denise Lea said Fletcher was afforded the presumption of innocence until he agreed in September to plead guilty. “We know of no statute that specifically allows us to cancel (a) contract for someone under indictment,” Lea said. The first purchase order issued to Fletcher’s firm in the 2009-10 fiscal year — $19,075 for wheat seeds delivered to Angola — came through bids taken eight days after the U.S. attorneys in Baton Rouge and Lafayette announced the indictments. In the next 12 months, Prison Enterprises issued purchase orders totaling $586,641 to Fletcher for coffee, fertilizer, cottonseed hulls, vegetable seeds, cattle medicines and salt for cattle feed, according to state purchasing records. The bulk of the purchase order amount — $362,980 — was for instant coffee packets for resale to prisoners in prison canteens. The contract was for all of 2010 and was a renewal, at the same price, of a 2009 contract. Fletcher offered prices lower than Community Coffee for 10,000 cases of the coffee packages. After receiving notice of Fletcher’s intention to plead guilty, Lea rejected a Fletcher bid in September for a mixture of fertilizer and rye grass seed. In a Sept. 23 letter, Lea told Fletcher that state law allows a public entity to reject a bid or not award a contract to a business if one of its owners has pleaded guilty or no contest to a federal felony crime “committed in the execution of a contract awarded under the Louisiana Procurement Code.”

Fletcher’s contract to supply coffee extended until Dec. 31, but Lea said in a Nov. 9 e-mail “we are canceling his existing contract.” Whitstine said Angola had certified scales that were used to weigh trucks carrying prison-produced cotton, corn and soybeans to buyers. “When Fletcher’s trucks came in, they never weighed them,” he said. “The only verification we had was what the doggone invoice said. Everybody played stupid, and it was kind of like thin ice. You didn’t ask questions,” Whitstine said. He said his Prison Enterprises supervisors were concerned about the amount of farm produce that left Angola for market, “but they weren’t too concerned about these tons and tons of fertilizer, every year, that were coming in.” Fletcher’s guilty plea is the third in a federal investigation that apparently began when rodeo producer Dan Klein went to the FBI in April 2004 with a complaint that Angola Warden Burl Cain forced him to give a $1,000 donation to a prison chapel fund. Cain has denied the allegation, saying Klein was a willing donor. “I feel confident that the wheels of justice have not stopped turning,” Klein said Friday. Former Prison Enterprises Director James H. Leslie pleaded guilty in 2006 to witness tampering after he attempted to get Klein to lie on a recording Leslie was supposed to make for the FBI. Leslie was unaware that Klein himself was recording the exchange for the FBI. U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola sentenced Leslie in May to five months in federal prison and five months of home detention and fined him $10,000. In July 2009, retired Angola horse trainer Julius H. “Buddy” Truax pleaded guilty to four counts of mail fraud in connection with a scheme to sell state-owned horses at Angola to selected individuals by making it appear they were sold at public auction. U.S. District Judge Tucker Melancon gave Truax a suspended sentence of one

month of probation, saying Truax probably did not understand the public bid laws he violated when he sold several horses at the request of a superior, who has not been named.