Rat emojis in prison taking costly toll
Guard sparked death threats, $100,000 payout
7:00 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 19, 2018. Robert Wilcox, a husky 39-year-old with a shaved head and goatee, showed up for work at Redgranite Correctional Institution where he had long been a sergeant. His main job responsibility: to oversee “security, custody, control and treatment of inmates.”
Wilcox took that day’s range board — the roster that lists which inmates are in which cells — and placed a picture of a rat by five names.
He printed two copies — one for the main sergeant’s desk and one for the officer’s desk across the wing.
Before the day was over, the list of inmate “rats” was circulating throughout the prison.
***
Yvonne Wilke smokes more than usual these days. The Camels help calm her nerves, she says.
Miller Lites do the same for her husband, Jason. On many days, he goes to the gym for an intense workout, then comes home, sets his .357 Magnum on the kitchen table, and pours himself a cold one. He pulls up a chair and soon pours another one. And another.
An AR-15 assault rifle sits loaded on a nearby counter, as does a Mossberg shotgun outfitted with a breacher barrel — in case the jagged tip is needed for an up-close assault, explains Jason Wilke.
The kitchen is where Yvonne and Jason — Capt. Jason Wilke as he is known in the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, where he worked for 20 years — spend most of their time.
The Wilkes stay away from their living room as much as possible and keep the lights dim. The front of the house is
the most vulnerable to a drive-by shooting.
Word came last October that one of the inmates — a high-ranking gang member — whom Wilcox had labeled as a “rat” wanted Jason Wilke dead. The inmate suspected that Wilke had leaked his name to prison guard Wilcox.
Threats are nothing new to Wilke, a longtime member of the Corrections’ Security Threat Group Task Force and president of the Midwest Gang Investigators Association. He’s investigated violent criminals in Wisconsin for the last 15 years.
This threat is different, he says. “Sure, I’ve had inmates say, ‘I’m gonna kill you when I get out of here,’ but nothing credible like this one. Nothing from a group that actually kills people,” Wilke says. “They don’t play games.”
***
More than 18 months after Wilcox first placed rat images next to the names of five inmates — labeling them as informants — the high-stakes fallout continues.
Careers have been damaged — and, in at least one case, ended. One endangered inmate sued the state, costing taxpayers more than $100,000.
Threats of violent revenge have spread both inside and beyond the prison walls.
And justice in the homicide of a toddler and in an alleged plot to kill a prosecutor has been jeopardized.
Wilcox’s punishment for identifying inmates as informants? A one-day suspension without pay.
Wilcox left the Department of Corrections by choice in May. He continues to collect a paycheck from taxpayers — now as a sheriff ’s deputy.
On Monday, Corrections Secretary Kevin Carr said that in the future he, personally, will be deciding on discipline for employees accused of serious misconduct. Previously, those cases were reviewed by the secretary only in limited instances, such as when administrators recommended termination.
“The buck will be stopping with me as far as the implementation of discipline in cases where acts of serious misconduct took place,” he said.
Carr, who was appointed to the position by new Gov. Tony Evers in January, eight months after Wilcox was disciplined, would not say whether he thought Wilcox should have been fired for the violation, only that he deserved more than a one-day suspension.
“I guess it would be fair to say that I believe the case warranted a different disciplinary outcome,” he said.
Carr also said he is considering reconstituting the internal affairs division, known previously as the Office of Special Operations. Former Gov. Scott Walker, who established the office in 2013, disbanded it in 2017.
Investigators in the unit uncovered many of the abuses that plagued Lincoln Hills School for Boys, the juvenile prison north of Wausau.
Carr formerly worked in the internal affairs division of the Milwaukee County Sheriff ’s Office. He said his review of the agency’s investigation into the informant-naming incident found the investigation to be “adequate.” He could not go back and reopen the case, since Wilcox had already been investigated and disciplined, he said.
“To this day, I still don’t understand what his true motivation was to do that,” Carr told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel speaking of Wilcox’s actions. “It didn’t make sense to me at all.”
Had Carr, his predecessor or law enforcement officials kept digging, they would have found more to the story.
***
Capt. Wilke was not working on Jan. 19, 2018 — the day Wilcox labeled the inmates as rats. He was at home when his phone rang and a supervisor told him that five of his confidential informants had just been outed.
“I thought ‘What the f---,’ ” Wilke said. “I didn’t think that what the supervisor was telling me could have actually taken place.”
The “rats” identified by Wilcox were not ordinary confidential informants.
They were helping Wilke and other law enforcement officials on two highprofile cases. One involved the killing of 13-month-old Bill Thao in a 2014 driveby shooting. Baby Bill, as he became known, was playing with blocks on a relative’s living room floor when shooters sprayed more than 40 rounds at the front of the house. The assailants had the home confused with a suspected drug dealer’s house next door.
The informants labeled by Wilcox as rats were also part of an investigation involving the attempted murder of Laura Crivello, a Milwaukee County prosecutor, according to law enforcement officials.
“This directly impacted the ability of the DOJ to conduct its investigation,”
officials from the Department of Corrections later wrote in a report. Wilcox’s actions were “unsafe,” and created “substantial risk to the safety and security of staff and inmates,” they found.
Prison staff commonly monitor phone calls, read mail and talk with inmates who may have learned information from cellmates and are willing to trade on it in hopes of getting time off their sentences. These leads, when information proves credible, can be invaluable to detectives back in Milwaukee and elsewhere who can use those tips to pursue additional criminal cases.
Wilke and investigators from the Wisconsin Department of Justice were deep into the investigations.
In addition to torpedoing the investigations, Wilcox’s actions were cited as cause for a civil lawsuit by one of the inmates and spawned additional reports of death threats — not only against Wilke but also against the informants and their families.
“There are risks that come with his job when you’re weeding out hardcore gang bangers,” Yvonne Wilke said, standing at her kitchen sink, growing teary about the events that have unfolded over the last 18 months.
“That’s expected. That’s an acceptable risk. We picked that side a long time ago,” she said. “But when your brothers in arms, who are supposed to be on your side, betray you, that is not OK. We were betrayed by the people who were supposed to be fighting with us.”
***
Robert Wilcox joined the Department of Corrections in 1998, when he was a couple weeks shy of 19 years old. As a correctional officer, he moved through Kettle Moraine, Racine and later Fox Lake prisons, working his way up the ranks.
In December 2000, he transferred to the Redgranite Correctional Institution in northeastern Wisconsin as a sergeant.
In 2002, Wilcox took a “voluntary demotion” back to correctional officer, though his personnel file does not say what prompted the move. Two and a half years later, he was reinstated as a sergeant, according to records obtained by the Journal Sentinel.
Wilcox also sits on the Redgranite Village Board and is a member of the board’s Fire and Police Commission, which oversees the hiring and discipline of employees and other matters for the departments and the village.
For more than a dozen years, he worked on the Security Threat Group Task Force, interviewing inmates and gathering intelligence on gangs, and conducting training sessions across the
state.
As a member of the task force, he worked side by side with Wilke.
Over the years, Wilcox was repeatedly written up for calling in sick to work without medical documentation and for making lengthy personal calls from work phones while on duty.
“The number of calls and lengths of some of these calls while working in a position with responsibility for the supervision of inmates, is also of concern,” the warden of Redgranite wrote in a February 2008 letter to Wilcox.
Wilcox continued to have repeated unexcused absences in 2012, 2015, 2016 and 2017, according to his personnel file.
In 2016, after one of his unexcused absences, Wilke and another leader removed Wilcox from the security task force.
***
In documents from the investigation, emails and a 21⁄2 -hour interview with the Journal Sentinel, Wilcox gave shifting accounts of why he placed the rat pictures next to the names of the five inmates. He contradicted himself on whether he meant to label the inmates as “snitches,” and whether he knew they were assisting law enforcement with investigations. He said:
❚ He wanted to help co-workers keep track of the inmates that he suspected were informants. He said he knew that using a rat image equated them with “snitches.”
“Those are my snitches,” he reportedly told another sergeant the following morning, according to documents.
❚ To the Journal Sentinel he said: He didn’t mean for the rats to indicate “snitch.” “This is the honest-to-God truth, on my kid’s life,” he said. “That’s the first thing that popped into my mind, not thinking, not putting two and two together that a rat equals a snitch in prison . ... It had nothing to do with snitch, labeling them as a rat.”
He said the term “rat” isn’t used much around the Redgranite facility. “Snitch” is the more common word.
“You see it on the prison shows out in California, that’s all they call them, ‘rat, rat, rat,’” he said. “Here, everyone knows what it is, but it’s not common tongue.”
❚ He told the Journal Sentinel he thought the informants might be trying to spy on staff and that’s why he identified them as rats.
“We always get the feeling, especially with Wilke, that his informants were always used to get staff in trouble,” he said. “That happens a lot, they use the inmates to see what staff are doing.”
❚ He said repeatedly he didn’t know the informants were assisting with any serious investigation.
He and his supervisor had talked “at length” about the inmates who were working as informants. His supervisor had “negative” views about their cooperation and concluded it was a “waste of time,” he said, and that “there doesn’t seem to be anything coming out of these investigations and there are no results.”
Wilcox also said that he resented Wilke for kicking him off the security task force.
“I feel like I got trashed on,’ he said in his statement to Redgranite investigators.
And Wilcox said he was “pissed” at the informants’ behavior; that “they walk around here and do as they please without giving a care in the world what we say to them because they feel they are safe because they are informants.”
He said he didn’t expect the list to get in the hands of the inmates and that putting rats by the names was just a “dumb” mistake.
“I’ve been trying to think what really triggered me to do something like this, and I don’t know,” he told the Redgranite investigators.
In a written statement provided to internal investigators, Wilcox disputed claims from Department of Corrections officials that he “interfered with an open and high-level undercover law enforcement investigation which hampered its success.”
Wilcox stated, “In order to interfere, one must have knowledge of something existing in order to complete this action. It is known that I was not aware of any such investigation being conducted …”
Emails obtained by the Journal Sentinel through the state’s open records law contradict Wilcox’s claim.
They show Wilcox knew at least one of the inmates he outed was assisting in a major investigation — one involving the suspect in the toddler’s homicide. He was the same suspect law enforcement officials were investigating in the plot to kill Crivello, the Milwaukee County prosecutor.
The suspect: Steven Jordan, a leader of a violent gang called Bless Team.
An Oct. 5, 2017, email forwarded to Wilcox by his supervisor made clear one of the inmates he later outed was assisting in an investigation into Jordan. The email alerted Wilcox that “Jordan is a major heroin distributor in the Milwaukee area” and that the informant, who needed to be moved to a cell closer to Jordan, was “gathering intel for us …”
The email was written by Wilke and sent to the supervisor, Kelly Mueske. Wilke requested that Mueske keep the information confidential. Instead, she forwarded the complete email to Wilcox.
And in an email 10 days earlier, Wilke sent a note to Mueske requesting Jordan not be moved because they were gathering information about him from other inmates.
“This is in relation to an ongoing investigation,” he wrote.
Mueske also forwarded that email to Wilcox. Within one minute, Wilcox responded, acknowledging he received the email.
Wilcox told the Journal Sentinel he didn’t know much of anything about Jordan: “I never knew him from anyone else. I didn’t have any information on him. Nobody gave me a heads up Steven Jordan is this and that, watch out for him.”
Jordan had been convicted in 2016 of multiple counts of heroin dealing and was sentenced to 14 years.
The informants outed by Wilcox had been sharing information about Jordan, who they said had been offering $7,500 for somebody to “pop” Crivello, according to court records and interviews with law enforcement investigators.
Angry at Crivello for her role in his conviction and sentence, Jordan had been ranting regularly to inmates at Redgranite about having her beaten up or killed, the informants said.
At the time Wilcox labeled the inmates as rats, Wilke and other investigators with the Department of Justice were finalizing plans to hide microphones in several cells and other areas hoping to capture Jordan talking about the suspected plot to murder the prosecutor who put him behind bars.
Jordan clammed up when he learned the inmates he was talking to — one of whom he thought was going to help him execute the hit — had been pegged as rats and were probably providing information to authorities, investigators said.
Jordan’s mother, Latasha Savage, was charged in July 2018 in connection with the plot, accused of agreeing to help facilitate the payment. She was convicted in January of conspiracy to commit battery to a prosecutor.
Jordan was charged at the same time with conspiracy to commit battery to a prosecutor and solicitation to commit homicide.
Jordan’s trial is set for later this year.
Evidence against Jordan and his mother would likely be far stronger had the confidential informants not been exposed, Wilke and other investigators familiar with the case say.
***
Laura Crivello, the former prosecutor, said the murder-for-hire plot targeting her has upended her life.
“I look over my shoulder every day when I walk into the courthouse,” Crivello told the judge at the sentencing hearing for Latasha Savage, Jordan’s mother.
“I am escorted in by an armed guard. Every day when I leave the courthouse for lunch, when I come back, I am escorted in and out because this is a gang. This is a gang, that by locking them up, I’m not protected, because clearly they have forces and contacts on the outside that can get to people.”
Crivello’s worry extends to her husband and children as well as friends.
“This is outrageous how they have affected my world and my family’s world. I have friends who don’t want their kids coming to my house because they’ve read in the newspaper about this case and they’re fearful about their kids being around my kids.”
“These people have not only put me at risk, they have put my world at risk,” Crivello said. “This affects my life, every day, all day.”
Crivello said Wednesday she could not discuss the events with the Journal Sentinel due to Jordan’s ongoing case. Transcripts of her comments at Savage’s sentencing don’t mention her thoughts on what impact Wilcox’s actions might have on the case against Jordan.
***
Joseph Benson sits behind bars, where he’s been for much of the last 20 years for his involvement in a pair of armed robberies.
Benson’s name was among the five to be labeled by Wilcox as a rat. He’s now under investigation by Juneau County law enforcement, accused of making the death threat against Wilke.
Benson insists he didn’t do it. He says the inmate who reported his alleged plot to have Wilke killed was just looking to get time off his sentence by making the story up and then cooperating with law enforcement.
Benson hasn’t been charged. Kenneth Hamm, the Juneau County district attorney, said he expects to make a charging decision before the end of summer.
Earlier this year, the security director at New Lisbon Correctional Institution, where Benson was when the allegation surfaced, said he was told the threat was “unable to be substantiated” by law enforcement, according to an email obtained by the Journal Sentinel. Hamm said his office is making its own determination.
Benson also denies that he was working as an informant, despite being labeled by Wilcox as a rat, and even though he signed documents stating he would cooperate with law enforcement.
He said that after he signed the agreement, officers tried to coerce him into saying things that were not true about Jordan. Benson said he was told, “all you have to do is say this, this and this.”
Benson said he’s now retired from the Vice Lords and that just because he’s a criminal doesn’t mean he’s guilty of every crime.
“Every criminal has a set of principles to live by,” he said. “I might rob a bank, but I’m not going to commit sexual assault.”
He called the accusation of a death threat against Wilke “outlandish.”
“He hadn’t done anything to me to want to see him harmed,” Benson said.
Benson sued the Department of Corrections in April 2018, after Wilcox labeled him as a rat, naming Wilcox, Wilke and others as defendants. He alleged harassment, racism, failure to protect and other violations of his constitutional rights.
The state settled with him in April for $110,000.
***
A copy of the board with rats next to inmates’ names sat on a desk in a protected area where correctional officers sit, called the “bubble.”
On that January afternoon, a correctional officer arrived and heard other guards talking about the rat images — wondering who put them by the inmates’ names and why. The officer, Jordan Grenier, saw one of the inmates whose name had a rat next to it walking down the stairs and called him over. Grenier asked him why he had a rat next to his name and showed him the board through the window.
The inmate was upset and soon word spread. Other inmates wanted to see the board and began to gather.
“The inmates were pretty jacked up” Kris Allen, a sergeant who was there that night, said in an interview with the Redgranite investigators looking into the incident.
At some point later in the day, corrections officials say, an inmate found the second copy of the list Wilcox had made on an officer’s desk.
The list was passed around the prison’s dayroom, Allen said. “It seems that at one point every inmate out there had it.”
Other corrections workers there that night reported a similar reaction from inmates.
“Then figuratively speaking, all hell broke loose,” Sgt. Tom Dobberstein said.
Inmates were “visibly upset,” Lt. Terry Jaeger reported. “They didn’t want to be viewed as snitches.”
Grenier was not disciplined for showing the roster — which also contains medical and other personal information — to inmates.
***
The initial investigation into Wilcox was flawed from the start, a review by the Journal Sentinel found.
The warden at Redgranite, Michael Meisner, did not seek an outside or independent investigator and instead assigned two people who worked closely with Wilcox to look into the incident. The pair neglected to obtain emails, phone and external bank records, to determine whether Wilcox had any ties to Jordan, and they failed to interview some of the key people involved, including Wilke.
Redgranite officials reviewed but did not save video of the events that day.
No additional safety precautions were taken when Wilke and Wilcox returned to work. Nor were the inmates who were labeled as rats provided added protection.
Wilcox himself, back at work the next day, said he was worried for his safety as the inmates he labeled as rats were staring at him. “I was on edge the entire night,” he later told internal investigators. “I watched my back.”
Wilke, too, reported to work with no added security measures.
And the five inmates who were labeled as rats remained at Redgranite — where they reported being harassed and fearful — for months before being relocated. One inmate wasn’t transferred to a different facility until August, more than seven months later.
One of the informants received anonymous letters from two people, postmarked from Milwaukee, threatening him and his family as well as another inmate. “I got my money on your head,” one of the letters read.
Department officials didn’t notify inmates’ families that there were threats made on their lives until this month — nearly a year after the letters were received — after the Journal Sentinel began questioning. State Sen. Lena Taylor, D-Milwaukee, also questioned corrections officials after learning of the threats against the inmates’ families, some of whom live in her district.
Following the reported death threat against Wilke, warden Meisner refused Wilke’s request for home surveillance cameras.
“I communicated with Jason that we wouldn’t do that,” Meisner said in a March 2019 interview with DOC officials. “Home security was a personal choice.”
Meisner said he instructed his security director to contact Redgranite police about the death threat.
Redgranite Police Chief Kyle Tarr said he was the one who reached out to DOC after he heard from Wilke about the reported threat. Tarr then alerted surrounding law enforcement agencies.
“When someone makes a death threat, I don’t take that lightly,” the chief said.
“DOC did not contact me,” he said. “I alerted them to the threat.”
And, when the Waushara County District Attorney’s Office considered criminal charges against Wilcox — more than a year later — the county investigator, too, failed to review the internal emails of those involved.
District Attorney Steven Anderson concluded he didn’t see evidence of criminal wrongdoing. He said he was unaware of emails between Wilcox and his supervisor about gang leader Steven Jordan.
Soon after the investigation, Wilcox went to work for Waushara County. The Sheriff’s Department hired him as a deputy.
Wilcox said in a recent email to the Journal Sentinel that he believes his actions did not constitute “serious misconduct,” and that his discipline was appropriate.
“Warden Meisner and his administration did their ‘Job’ and followed the policy as written in an ethical and professional manner,” he wrote.
In reaction to publicity in May about his new job, Wilcox wrote on Facebook: “Much love to those who feel my life is your concern. You’ve failed how many times now … Time to move on boys. ~ Untouchable.”
***
A bowl of candy sits on the Wilkes’ kitchen table full of Smarties and Lemonheads, untouched since last year when the neighbor kids stopped coming around.
The back door is always locked now, so it’s not as easy for them to just pop in, like they used to do, before the reported death threat.
The toddler toys and high chair are gone. The Wilkes’ son and his fiancé, who had been living with them, moved away with their grandson. The Wilkes don’t blame them.
“We’d look at our grandson on the floor and we’d say, ‘Is he going to be the next Baby Thao?’”
Yvonne feels more isolated than ever. Her friends are nervous to be around her. She notices how some friends change their plans last minute when they learn she’ll be joining the group for dinner or other outings. It seems to happen too often to be coincidence, she thinks.
“They can’t relax, they’re afraid,” she said. “It’s sad, but I understand. They have a right to be scared.”
Like Crivello, Yvonne gets escorted to and from work. The local Sheriff ’s Department follows her car.
Jason Wilke took a medical retirement from the Department of Corrections in February — the stress of the ordeal has been overwhelming. He plans to file a lawsuit against the department alleging discrimination and retaliation.
A German shepherd named Finley is the newest addition to the Wilke family. The Wilkes have enrolled him in training classes — but not the usual sort.
Trainers reward Finley for behavior that gets most dogs punished: biting.
And not just chomping down on flesh; he’s learning to hold on and not release until commanded. At 11 months, Finley is like a teenager who suddenly realizes he’s taller and stronger than his parents, testing out his power and pushing the boundaries.
“We love him. He’s our pet,” Yvonne said. “I hate that we have to train him to take a bullet for us.”
Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.