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May 10, 2009 -- Star-Telegram (TX)

On Sheriff's Watch, Rural North Texas Jail Became Den Of Drugs And Debauchery

By Tim Madigan, tmadigan@star-telegram.com

Return to Drug War News: Don't Miss Archive

Original: http://www.star-telegram.com/804/story/1367904.html

In a career spanning five decades, Bill Keating had been a Fort Worth cop, a district attorney's investigator, police chief in Watauga, then city manager there. He picked up plenty of enemies along the way, but many others swore by him, too, remembering a hard-drinking guy who had finally taken the cure and gotten sober, a smart, fearless lawman and competent city administrator.

But now it had come to this, a day in January in a conference room of the U.S. attorney's office in Dallas. Keating and his lawyer sat on one side of the table, across from Assistant U.S. Attorney Rick Calvert, who did most of the talking."I'm not going to sit here and listen to your BS," Calvert told Keating during the confrontation. "If you start lying, I'm walking out that door, because for the past two months, we've been interviewing people in close association with you. We have a good idea of what's going on."

Calvert referred to what had happened during Keating's last job in law enforcement. In 2004, he was elected sheriff of Montague County, a rural place of small towns and scenic hills about an hour's drive northwest of Fort Worth. Then, as in previous jobs, the new sheriff had chafed at authority and rubbed many the wrong way. But the January meeting in Calvert's office, and the national news stories soon to follow, had nothing to do with Keating's perceived arrogance.

Instead, they concerned the Montague County Jail, where drugs and other contraband had flowed freely, and the debauchery that the sheriff allowed, including rampant sex between inmates and jailers.

But Keating did more than tolerate it, authorities have alleged. They say the sheriff himself joined in, preying upon female prisoners who were drug addicts and prostitutes, women at their lowest, most desperate ebb. "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine," the sheriff would say to them, promising reduced jail sentences and jobs in the free world if the women would agree to take care of him sexually - whenever he wanted and for as long as he said.

"He was a joke to me," one former Montague County inmate, Lashana Dykes, said in a recent interview.

Dykes said she refused to succumb to Keating's advances.

"I felt pity for him," she said. "I really felt sorry for him where he would have to manipulate the girls that are in jail, when they are at their worst and their lowest, you know, knowing that some of them are going to give in to him just because he is a higher authority. It's ridiculous, really."

Keating was an intelligent man who probably knew that his victims were not likely to come forward, or be believed if they did. Then, last September, a male prisoner finally blew the whistle on events inside the jail. Texas Rangers and FBI agents got involved, turning Keating's office and jail inside out and retrieving a key piece of evidence, a semen-stained blue rag, from the Montague County woods. That led to the meeting that day in January.

Keating had become a bent and shriveled man from years of heavy smoking, a former lawman who would probably spend his final years in a federal prison.

"He pretty much admitted that near the end he was out of control," Calvert said. "Yeah. He wept. He was emotional. I would say he was ashamed. He put his head down on the table and didn't really say anything else."

On Thursday night, three months after Keating pleaded guilty to a federal civil-rights violation, came a Shakespearean ending to the tawdry and tragic tale. Keating, 62, who was awaiting sentencing, collapsed at his home in rural Montague County; he was dead of an apparent heart attack by the time the ambulance got to Bowie.

"Bill's death is a tragic end to a sad situation," said Keating's attorney, Mark Daniel, on Friday. "Bill was a tremendous public servant. He had more genuine friends than anybody I know. I have been contacted by countless people from every walk of life in the last 90 days, wanting to help in any way they could."

Calvert agreed that it is "a tragic situation."

"I feel bad for his family and friends," the federal prosecutor said. "Nobody wants an ending like this. It is what it is."

A Well-Regarded Officer

J.R. Shaw joined the Fort Worth Police Department in the late 1960s, and one of his first patrol partners was Bill Keating, another young officer who had been on the job a year longer. Keating was not a big guy, Shaw remembered, but he was tough as a boot and fearless - a cop who would walk into the city's toughest, seediest joints like he owned them.

"Everybody liked Bill," Shaw said. "You didn't have to worry about him. You walked into a place, you might die there, but he wouldn't leave you. Bill would stay with you, no matter what. Bill and I been through some tough times together. We worked together on the street, where your next move would get you killed if he doesn't do what he's supposed to."

Shaw heard Keating's life story as the two rode together on patrol. The senior partner was a descendant of Tarrant County pioneers and had grown up in the Riverside neighborhood of east Fort Worth. Keating delivered the Fort Worth Press as a boy and sat next to a girl named Catherine Steele at St. George's Catholic School.

"I had a strict, conservative Catholic education background - educated in the parochial school system that demanded strict discipline," Keating said in a 1988 interview. "That's the way I was brought up. Quite a few of the guys I graduated with at Nolan [Catholic] High School went into law enforcement."

He and Catherine dated while they attended Nolan, and they married a year after graduation. The couple eventually had three children. Catherine is described by friends as a keenly intelligent, pious woman who was a devoted wife and mother. Keating first supported his growing family with jobs at Texas Electric Service Co. and Bell Helicopter, until a position in the Fort Worth police reserves led to a full-time job with the department.

In those days, there were frequent neighborhood barbecues and Scrabble games among friends in which the couple excelled. Keating was also a regular at saloons where cops liked to hang out. But his hard drinking raised few eyebrows because it was common among police officers in those days and Keating was all business when on the job. After a few years as a Fort Worth beat cop, Keating joined Shaw as an investigator with the Tarrant County district attorney's office and distinguished himself there, too.

Shaw remembered how Keating, working undercover, had infiltrated a robbery ring and was nearly shot by Fort Worth police when the ring was busted.

"He just had that street sense," Shaw said. "He knew folks. He knew dirtbags. He knew how to talk their talk and get people on the streets to work with him. I'd work with him again in a heartbeat. I hated it when he left the DA's office."

That was in the mid-1970s. More than three decades later, word began to spread about the scandal in Montague County. Shaw was sickened when he heard about it, and at first he refused to believe that the Texas sheriff described in news reports was the patrol partner and investigator he had admired so long ago.

"This is just nuts," Shaw said. "When I heard this, you could have picked me up off the floor."

Shaw remembered the words of a Fort Worth training officer: "?'This badge will get you more ladies than you can shake a stick at. But those ladies will get this badge quicker than anything else.'?"

A few weeks ago, Shaw almost picked up the telephone to call Keating. But then Shaw talked it over with his wife and decided not to.

"I thought I better stay out of this," Shaw said from his retirement home in East Texas. "There ain't a whole lot to say, other than, 'Are you crazy, Bill?' It's been hard on me and his other buddies, almost as hard as on his family. I hate it, I really do.

"I never would have expected this, especially at Bill's age. We're not exactly kids anymore. This is something you just don't do in our line of work. Having sex with crack whores is just not something you do."

Drinking Problems

Cherokee County is a rural place, and to officers in the Sheriff's Department, Bill Keating, the new chief deputy, seemed larger than life.

"The way he carried himself, the way he walked, the way he talked, he just knew the law," former Cherokee County Deputy Elvis Stiefer recently remembered. "It was just maybe idol worship, so to speak, there at the beginning."

Keating had been brought to East Texas in the mid-1970s by the new sheriff, Danny Stallings. Stallings, a former narcotics investigator with the Texas Department of Public Safety, became friends with Keating when both men worked in Fort Worth.

Keating's brief stay in Cherokee County would be vividly remembered for other reasons. The chief deputy was among the first officers to arrive at the scene of a domestic disturbance. Keating confronted a man who had shot and wounded his wife. The man was killed in an exchange of gunfire with Keating and other officers.

"I think it may have had an emotional effect on him," Stallings said. "He was a Catholic, and I think for anybody who takes anybody else's life, there's always a negative emotion. I'm going to say he hadn't been out there over a year [when it happened]. And he didn't stay for more than two."

The end of Keating's tenure came on the night when Stiefer and other deputies converged on a rural home to execute a search warrant for drugs. The suspect lived with his elderly parents, so Stiefer decided to confine the search to the suspect's bedroom. Then Keating showed up unannounced. Beside him in the patrol car was a female deputy, in violation of the Sheriff's Department fraternization policy. Keating was also clearly drunk.

"He wanted us to tear the whole house apart," Stiefer recalled. "I refused to do it. I wasn't going to put those people through that. They were elderly, and this guy had stayed in one room. I knew better."

When Keating and the woman drove off, Stiefer tracked down the sheriff and told him about the incident. Stallings, in turn, ordered Keating to meet him at a private residence where the sheriff was visiting a friend. It was not the first time Keating's heavy drinking had caused problems on the job, Stallings said, but it would be his last.

"It was a bad evening, disappointing, emotional," Stallings recalled. "I had words with him on another occasion. I had to beat on his window to get him to work one morning. Then that night, he smelled like he'd been drinking, and you could see it. And he wouldn't have been brave enough to call me a political SOB if he hadn't been drinking. People who know me don't call me a political SOB. That's when I blackened both of his eyes."

Keating cleaned out his office the next morning. He moved back to Fort Worth, and in an unlikely turn of events, eventually landed on his feet as the police chief and city manager in Watauga. Keating clearly had made some changes in his life. Years after the eventful night in Cherokee County, Stallings invited Keating to lunch, hoping to put the past behind them.

"I had a glass of wine with lunch and he shook his head at me as if to say, 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself,'?" Stallings remembered. "He did well for a while. My understanding is that he did quite well."

Turmoil In Watauga

James Bennett had known Keating when both were officers with the Fort Worth police reserves in the 1960s. More than a decade later, in 1980, when Bennett was Watauga's police chief and had an opening for a senior officer, Keating turned up as one of the applicants. He had worked as a private investigator in Fort Worth since leaving Cherokee County but missed police work.

The move to Watauga would be a homecoming of sorts. More than a century before, Jeremiah and Mary Keating bought 200 acres along Watauga Road. Keating family relics remained throughout the community; his aunt, Penelope Margaret Keating, Watauga's third schoolteacher, still lived on the family homestead.

But soon after he was hired, Keating's drinking became an issue. A resident complained that Keating had been seen drunk off duty in Watauga, but Keating denied it when questioned by his boss. Then came the call from the police chief of a neighboring suburb, who told Bennett that Keating had been stopped for driving under the influence. He apparently was never prosecuted, but the incident led to an ultimatum.

"That's when I called Keating in and talked to him," Bennett said. "I told him that maybe he did have a problem. I gave him one of two choices. He could either get dried out or find himself another job. He admitted it had happened. He went and dried out."

Keating's stint in rehab lasted a week or two, and his drinking was never an issue after that, Bennett recalled. His job performance was such that when Bennett resigned in 1983, he endorsed Keating to take his place. The Watauga City Council eventually agreed.

"A couple of other council members said, 'No, he wouldn't make a chief because he had a drinking problem in the past,'?" former Watauga Councilman Andy Ivey remembered. "Yes, sir, he did, and he went and got some help for it. Every man deserves a second chance. We appointed him interim chief, and he did a splendid job."

So much so that when the city manager's post came open in 1984, Keating was promoted to Watauga's top administrative position. He remained Watauga's city manager for the next decade.

Depending on whom you talked to in those days, Keating was either a competent and no-nonsense administrator or a dictatorial bully who took orders from no one. Watauga residents began to wonder why Keating continued to carry a gun, though he was no longer officially a police officer.

In 1990, residents filled a City Council meeting to complain about an incident when Keating pulled his weapon on a car full of teenagers. Many were infuriated when the council declined to discipline him.

"When I became a City Council member, the whole city was used to answering to him, right down to the City Council and the mayor, all of them," said Terry Craig, who was elected in 1989. "Whatever Bill Keating said was pretty much the way it went. People didn't question Bill Keating."

But Craig and other new members of the council began to do just that. Keating fought openly with Watauga's new mayor, Anthony Girtman. One news report from that time described the embattled city manager as a grumpy man who "hardly smiles in public. Bags underline his fierce eyes. And he's quick to temper."

In 1994, Keating, then 47, resigned. He disappeared from the Metroplex, opening a barbecue restaurant in the tiny Montague County community of Forestburg, about 50 miles north of Watauga.

"I got to where I hated people, and that's not good for a public servant," he said at the time.

His career in public service, however, would have one final, notorious chapter. Last March, an Associated Press report described the Montague County Jail as "Animal House meets Mayberry."

"I knew him and his whole family. I'd been bird-hunting with him. Gone to dinner with him," said Ivey, the former Watauga councilman. "I've never seen anything like what's happened out there. Buddy, I don't have anything bad to say about him. When I read what happened, I was just shocked. People just change."

The story almost defied belief, particularly coming from a felon like Luke Bolton. But on that recent March morning, as the 32-year-old prisoner sat in a conference room at the Montague County Jail, Bolton swore it was all true.

Dressed in jailhouse coveralls, with his hands chained together, he spouted dates and details, down to the brand of cigarettes he earned for doing the jailhouse dirty work of Bill Keating, the local sheriff.

"This is some stuff straight out of Hollywood," Bolton said.

He told of stomping on the heads of incorrigible prisoners - at the sheriff's request. He described the flow of cigarettes, cellphones, cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana into the jail, a thriving enterprise from which Keating himself and another jailer were said to profit.

Bolton told of rampant sex between inmates and jailers, and his own repeated trysts with one female guard. And Bolton described how on several occasions, Keating had female inmates brought into his office for closed-door meetings that sometimes lasted for hours.

Given the overall implausibility of his tale, and his criminal record, which included assault and burglary, Bolton was asked that day why anyone would believe him.

"The FBI and the Texas Rangers believed me," the prisoner said, smiling.

Return To Law Enforcement

For Bill Keating, who was fed up with people, Montague County seemed a good place to go. Montague, the county seat, is an unincorporated town of less than 500, built around the boxy brick jail and a century-old courthouse with white columns. Many of the roads are still unpaved. The county itself has fewer than 20,000 people, spread among the little burgs and on ranches set in the rolling hills.

Keating moved to Montague County in the mid-1990s after spending a contentious decade as the city manager of Watauga, a growing suburb in Northeast Tarrant County.

"I got to where I hated people," he said at the time.

In the previous 30 years, he had been a highly regarded Fort Worth cop, a district attorney's investigator, a deputy sheriff in East Texas and Watauga's police chief. But that part of his life seemed to be behind him when he and his family moved to tiny Forestburg and opened a barbecue joint a few miles down a farm-to-market road from Montague.

"The people here are genuine," he said in his restaurant in fall 1994. "A handshake still makes an agreement. A car breaks down? Everybody stops. You don't see that down there [in the Metroplex]. A neighbor needs a tool? He borrows it and leaves a note."

But Keating's restaurant was short-lived, closing within months. For several years, Keating managed a private golf and lake community in Cooke County while still living near Forestburg. But the call of law enforcement eventually followed him there, too. Keating was befriended by a Montague County neighbor, Constable Herman Conway, and eventually became Conway's assistant.

Then, in January 2002, four inmates broke out of the Montague County Jail, which led to a call for new leadership at the Sheriff's Department. Conway figured that Keating, with all his law enforcement experience, would be a perfect fit. When Keating agreed to run, the constable drove the candidate around the county, introducing him to voters. Keating was elected in 2004.

"I thought we were getting a really good sheriff," Conway said. "I just felt like he would tend to his business all the way. When he started out, I think he was doing a darn good job. I had him pictured as being by the book.

"It sure hurt me when I found out what went on."

Lawlessness Intensifies Under A Lame-Duck Boss

At first there were just rumors, mostly of drugs in the jail, but people would clam up whenever Kevin Benton, an investigator for Montague County District Attorney Jack McGaughey, went out to investigate.

What was known for sure was that Sheriff Bill Keating was hard to get along with. He often would not attend Commissioners Court meetings, sending his deputies instead, and generally wouldn't allow commissioners to inspect the jail. Smoking wasn't allowed in county buildings, but at his desk the sheriff would light one cigarette from another.

In April 2008, that growing unpopularity contributed to Keating's defeat in the Republican primary as he sought a second term as sheriff. His opponent was Paul Cunningham, another veteran lawman who was as folksy as Keating was standoffish and who went on to win the November general election. Thus, for nine months, between his April defeat and the end of his term Jan. 1, Keating ran the Sheriff's Department and jail as a lame duck.

Though it remained largely hidden from view, lawlessness and debauchery in the jail continued and intensified, according to interviews with authorities, jailers and prisoners. Luke Bolton's story, authorities say, is largely consistent with discoveries of state and federal investigators.

Bolton said that in 2006, a few months after his arrest for assaulting his girlfriend, jailer Calvin Morales approached him with an offer that came "from the very top." Keating wanted a misbehaving prisoner to be taught a lesson.

"It was a hit, in other words," Bolton said in the recent interview. "He said, 'If you handle this, it's two packs of cigarettes.' They moved [the other prisoner] to [Bolton's cell]. I whipped him down and stomped on his head.

"Morales [and another deputy] were standing at the window there outside of Cell 19b, and when they saw the blood, they came in and said, 'It's over.' They pulled him out, bandaged him up and put him in another cell."

Bolton said he was handed the promised packs of Marlboro reds within minutes, itself a violation of state law. In the months to come, Bolton said he was involved in 17 jailhouse fistfights, almost all of them at the request of the sheriff, either directly or through guards.

Bolton described a jailhouse drug ring that included both prisoners and jailers.

"We were distributing it throughout the jail .?.?. meth, marijuana, cocaine .?.?. and the sheriff was getting his 10 percent," Bolton said. "I was told this by Calvin Morales, that the sheriff was getting his 10 percent."

Guard-Inmate Sex

McGaughey, the district attorney, said his office is still investigating Bolton's allegations of jailhouse violence and drugs.

In any event, it was the sex that would later generate national headlines and lead to scores of state indictments. Bolton said many of his fellow inmates were regularly having sex with guards before his own dalliance with jailer Darlene Walker began in summer 2007.

It was an extraordinarily odd pairing: Bolton, the longtime criminal, and Walker, the jailhouse guard, who at the time was attending college. Walker, who left the Sheriff's Department last year and works at a state mental-health facility, declined to comment for this report.

"She just started spending a lot of time with me," Bolton said. "If she wasn't booking people in, she was in the cell with me, talking, getting to know me, bringing me goods from the free world, fajitas, cellphones, cigarettes. Then in September she said she wanted to be my girl."

One night in September 2007, Bolton said, Walker entered his cell in the middle of the night, and they had sex in the shower while several other inmates listened nearby.

"The first couple of times, it was all right," Bolton said. "It's a jail, and I hadn't had sex for a long time. But after that, I even told Darlene this, we needed to wait until I got out because things were becoming uncomfortable. Other inmates were wanting in on the action. I even got in a fight with another inmate over it."

Bolton said he complained to other guards and was sure that Keating knew about the relationship, one of several between inmates and jailers going on at the time. But the sheriff apparently did nothing to stop it, and Bolton himself seemed to have mixed feelings. The sex with Walker continued on a weekly basis, he said. And with a tattoo gun smuggled into the jail, he had Walker's name written across his stomach.

Walker eventually hired an attorney for Bolton, the prisoner said, and the lawyer helped procure Bolton's release from the jail last June. For the next two months, Bolton said, he lived with Walker, who had recently left her job at the jail, at her home in nearby Bowie.

"He gets a job on a drilling rig, and the way he says it, their relationship soured when she didn't have the control over him that she had when he was in jail," said Bolton's attorney, Rex Easley, a civil-rights specialist in Victoria. "They began fighting over money, anything and everything."

Walker later told police that during one of those arguments, while the couple drove in the country, Bolton beat and raped her and imprisoned her in their vehicle. Bolton, who denies the allegations, was arrested Aug. 27 and indicted by a Montague County grand jury. But in another bizarre twist, those charges would prove to be the beginning of the end for Sheriff Bill Keating.

"At that point, he says, 'Enough is enough,'" Easley said of Bolton. "He was already fed up because of those jailers using him in their drug trafficking, and for the sex stuff."

On Sept. 2, Bolton sent a letter from his jail cell to the Texas Rangers, describing his experiences inside the Montague County Jail. For the first time since the local rumors began to swirl, someone in a position to know had started naming names.

"If you look at [Keating's] victims, they're all the same: prostitutes, drug users," said Rick Calvert, an assistant U.S. attorney. "They were not people who were going to be believed. It's certainly not far-fetched that these women would not come forward. If this letter had not been written, very likely none of it would have been known."

Propositions Alleged

State and federal investigators immediately launched an investigation into Bolton's allegations, though at first they were skeptical.

"Believe me, it was well-discussed that this guy was a piece of s- and we're not doing anything based solely on what he says," Calvert said. "That's when they started working back and they started finding victim after victim.

"One of the humorous things about the investigation is that they were doing some renovations in the jail in late summer, and the rumor [in the jail] was that the FBI had come in and planted bugs. The sheriff believed that, and so did all the employees. So when the employees were confronted, all of them confessed. They thought all of it was recorded, and none of that was true."

The stories of sex and drugs in the jail spilled out from multiple sources. Investigators also began to interview female prisoners, who described their treatment by the sheriff himself. One of the prisoners was Lashana Dykes, 30, a longtime Montague County resident arrested in September for a probation violation. She said she had been convicted of arson, a charge stemming from a car fire.

In a recent interview at a state prison in Gatesville, Dykes recalled her encounters with Keating. At least once a week, she said, she was taken from her cell, brought into the sheriff's office, served a soft drink or a cup of coffee and allowed to share the sheriff's cigarettes. Once Keating brought her a Big Mac, french fries and a piece of apple pie. The sheriff also let her play games on his computer. Keating propositioned Dykes during her third or fourth visit, she said. The sheriff promised to help her get out of jail and find her a good job on the outside.

"But in order for me to have that job, I would have to be at his beck and call pretty much," Dykes said. "We would have to find some place out of town and have sex or whatever. He said, 'I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine.' I told him I didn't need his job. He just said I would have plenty of time to think about it."

Keating made the same offer to several other female inmates, who were brought to the sheriff's office for closed-door meetings almost every day toward the end of his term, according to Dykes, former jailers and authorities. Several agreed to the sheriff's requests, telling investigators of dozens of sexual encounters with Keating after they had been released from jail, most of them in remote locations in Montague County.

"He said the same thing to every one of them," said Calvert, the federal prosecutor. "He told them, 'I love my wife dearly, but due to a cancer she had, she can no longer satisfy me sexually and I need someone else to do it.' He also said he was going to open up a whorehouse in Montague County when he got out of office."

In mid-October, investigators obtained evidence that corroborated the female inmates' stories. After one sexual encounter in the Montague County woods, one female inmate told investigators, Keating used a blue rag to clean himself, then tossed the rag out the window of his vehicle.

"I instructed the FBI to search those woods, and I'll be damned if they didn't find that rag," Calvert said. "It tested positive for semen. That's when we knew it was happening, that these stories weren't just being made up. That proved to be a very significant event."

The Incident That 'Changed Everything'

Another such event occurred Nov. 14. That night, as Keating and his deputies served a warrant in a drug investigation, they converged on a home where the suspect and his girlfriend were asleep in their bed. When the man was arrested and taken away, Keating ordered a deputy out of the room so the woman could get dressed. The sheriff shut the door himself and told the woman, "You are about to be my new best friend," according to the account of federal authorities.

Unless she complied with his requests for sex, Keating said, the woman "would go straight to jail." The sheriff then drove the woman to an isolated spot and forced her to perform oral sex.

"He then drives her back to the Sheriff's Department, put her in an office and says, 'Now you've passed the first part of the test,'" Calvert said. "'The second part is that you're going to give me oral sex again.' She said, 'I don't want to do this. If you want to arrest me, arrest me.' Then he punches her in the face. Ultimately, he lets her leave."

Within days, the woman had told her story to federal investigators, who until then had no evidence that Keating had threatened or coerced female prisoners in exchange for sex. Without that proof of coercion, the sheriff faced, at most, only a few months in jail.

"The victims were not put in any worse situation than they were already in," Calvert said. "He didn't say, 'If you don't do this, I'm going to put you in the hole or have you beaten up.' It appeared to be consensual. If you're the sheriff and you do it, but don't kidnap or beat them, then it's a misdemeanor. To me that's crazy. That needs to change.

"[But] that November victim changed everything. That was the only case that we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a federal civil-rights violation had occurred."

A few days after the November incident, authorities moved all female prisoners from Montague to the jail in neighboring Wise County.

"We were going to do a full grand jury investigation, and that was going to take time," Calvert said. "In the meantime, he had a full month and a half of his term. We were concerned about the female inmates. We had to get them out. That's when [Keating] knew he was going to be in trouble."

Stepping Into Chaos

On New Year's Eve, incoming Sheriff Paul Cunningham attended a party with friends and was sworn in at the Montague County Courthouse a few minutes after midnight. Then he and his new deputies walked across the street to the jail.

The stench of cigarettes in what was supposed to be a smoke-free facility hit Cunningham first. A malfunctioning fire alarm blared, and inmates were screaming and out of control. The new sheriff found that inmates had covered cell windows with candy wrappers and made curtains for their bunks out of paper towels. Some prisoners enjoyed recliners in their cells and big-screen TVs to play video games or watch pornography. Drugs were lying about in plain view.

Cunningham was stunned. He was aware of the state and federal investigation but had no clue how far things had gone.

"I thought, 'Oh, crap,'" Cunningham said. "'Is it too late to back out now?'"

The next day, all prisoners were moved to Wise County. Cunningham closed the jail for extensive repairs.

'End Of Ballgame'

A few days later, in the U.S. attorney's office in Dallas, Calvert confronted Keating with the evidence against him, including the semen-stained blue rag.

Keating's reaction was unmistakable: "Broken, defeated, head on the table, end of ballgame," Calvert remembered. "He knew that we knew, could prove everything that had been going on."

The former sheriff couldn't deny his behavior. He had exercised absolute power over powerless people, in an out-of-the-way place where no one was likely to be looking.

"He was getting more and more bold as his term was rapidly ending," Calvert said. "I think a lot of it was just a power play. You think you're above everybody out there. You forget the world just doesn't consist of Montague County. You're responsible for your actions."

On Jan. 29, in a federal courtroom in Wichita Falls, an ashen-faced Keating pleaded guilty to the federal civil-rights violation, which carries a maximum punishment of 10 years in prison. A federal magistrate, after hearing testimony of Keating's longtime marriage, ties to the community and poor health, decided that he could remain free on his own recognizance until his sentencing in June.

In late February, after the largest investigation of its kind in county history, Keating and 15 Montague County prisoners or jailers were named in state indictments that ranged from drug trafficking to illicit sexual relations between guards and prisoners. Prisoner Luke Bolton and former jailers Darlene Walker and Calvin Morales were among those charged.

Walker was accused of delivering drugs and a cellphone to prisoners and of having sex with Bolton in the jail on three occasions in September 2007. Morales is charged in relation to the drug-trafficking allegations. Six indictments against Keating described various sex acts between the former sheriff and prisoners that dated back to April 2008.

After his federal sentencing, the former sheriff was expected to admit to the state charges.

But Keating would never make it to prison.

On the evening of April 30, he collapsed at his Montague County home, apparently struck down by a heart attack.

Word of his death spread quickly among friends and former colleagues from a five-decade career. They remembered a fearless, stalwart cop and brilliant investigator.

The morning after Keating's death, one former colleague with the Fort Worth police tried to sort through conflicting feelings.

"He ruined his life and reputation and hurt everybody who carries a badge," said J.R. Shaw, who went back with Keating four decades. "People didn't want it to end this way, I can assure you. There's no good outcome to this, period, no matter how you look at it."

He said, 'I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine.' I told him I didn't need his job [on the outside]. He just said I would have plenty of time to think about it."


May 10, 2009 -- Friends of Justice (TX)

Sheriff's Fall Symptomatic Of A Broken System

By Alan Bean, friends of Justice

Original: http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/sheriffs-fall-symptomatic-of-a-broken-system/

At first, Luke Bolton's story was too bad to be true. But in the end every lurid detail checked out: prisoner-guard sexual trysts, free-flowing drugs inside the Montague County jail, prisoners paid in Marlboros for beating up cellmates. And then there was Bill Keating, the former Fort Worth police officer and investigator who presided over the chaos in his jail, raking off his 10% from the drug trade and making female inmates offers they couldn't refuse.

A number of short pieces about Keating and his infamous jail have appeared in North Texas papers over the past few months, but Tim Madigan's feature length story in this morning's Fort Worth Star Telegram digs beneath the shocking details to place this tragic tale in proper context.

The Keating story is an egregious case of normal. The American Gulag generates an enormous power differential between inmates and their overlords. It is often easier to get drugs in prison than on the street. Female prisoners are frequently raped by prison guards and it has been estimated that between 200 and 300,000 male inmates are raped every year. Sometimes the sexual stuff is considered "consensual"; but the brutal realities of prison life drain all meaning from the word "consent".

These dreadful conditions occur even in well-run prisons under the watchful eye of by-the-book wardens. But it is not unusual for prison authorities to use rape, brutality and gang violence as instruments of social control. It is virtually impossible to quanify prisoner abuse (most of it subbed out to the inmates themselves); the consequences of blowing the whistle are too severe.

Many of America's larger prisons use racial strife to keep the inmate population divided and distracted. White, black and Latino inmates are often afraid to engage socially across racial lines for fear of reprisal from fellow inamtes. Inter-racial hatred is promoted by prison guards in many prisons. When inmates are beefing with each other they are less likely to turn their hostility on the guards. Outside California (which has an incredibly strong prison guard union) prison personnel are usually poorly paid, undertrained and often demoralized.

Do all prisons fit this apocalyptic profile? Certainly not. Much depends on the attitude of administrators. Some wardens and sheriffs maintain a vigilant watch for inappropriate, unprofessional, unsafe and illegal behavior; some, like Montague County Sheriff Bill Keating, actively encourage the choas; most prison administrators fall somewhere in between. A certain amount of rule-bending is considered good for business.

Probably the best book on prisons and the criminal justice system (though now a bit dated) is Christian Parenti's "Lockdown Nation: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis." Parenti argues that the sadism and rampant abuse within America's prisons and jails is symptomatic of misguided criminal justice p0licies. (Here's a brief synopsis of his perspective.) I'll have more to say about Parenti later.

As you peruse the jaw-dropping contours of Bill Keating's North Texas hell hole ask yourself how so much outrage eluded public awareness.

Also visit our "Prison and Police Abuse" section.

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