On broad lines, this story coincides with what officials have said publicly and off the record about the breakout plan. After she pleaded guilty, Susan Watland, 48, of Jackson, Maine, was sentenced this summer to three years’ imprisonment on charges related to the plot.
Cible says he let authorities know of Watland’s plans by writing a letter to Deputy Warden O’Farrell on Saturday, October 21, “simply alerting him that a visitor was going to smuggle a gun to a prisoner in the next few days,” he wrote me, “and if O’Farrell would guarantee my safety by transferring me to another prison, I would disclose all I knew about it.” He said he wanted his lawyer at a meeting with O’Farrell.
Cible expresses amazement that O’Farrell waited three days to arrange a meeting with him, in mid-morning, Tuesday, October 24. Knox County District Attorney Jeffrey Rushlau and Cible’s lawyer Philip Cohen, of Waldoboro, were present (though Rushlau was excluded, Cohen says, when Cible told his story). O’Farrell agreed to transfer him, and he told everything, Cible says, including the story of the computer breaches and the extremely important fact that Susan Watland had scheduled a visit for that afternoon.
Cohen says of his client: “He’s single-handedly responsible” for preventing the breakout attempt.
NAACP weighs in
Since Maine and New Jersey corrections officials will discuss little related to Cible with the Phoenix, it is difficult to confirm his claims. In our interview, he confessed to being “devious” (though confessing this was not a very devious thing to do), and there are small inconsistencies in his story (though without frequent contact it is almost impossible to address them).
But Cible’s good deed in the Maine prison is not disputed. Neither is the fact that he was in sufficient danger in New Jersey to be, eventually, separated from the prison population. A spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Corrections confirms that Cible was put in protective custody on May 14 “after information from Maine,” though he says the prison system would not be able discuss anything about an attack on Cible or medical treatment related to it. In our interview and in his correspondence, Cible comes across as seeking redemption — a moral payment that would deliver him from his sin of killing someone.
Adding to the credibility of Cible’s claims, the regional branch of a respectable national organization has become convinced of his cause. After the Reverend Fagerburg spoke in July to officials of the Massachusetts-based New England chapter of the NAACP, the group decided to help Cible.
“We are concerned about his safety,” says its president, Juan Cofield. “No consideration has been given by the corrections system for the intelligence he provided.” Cofield was dismayed that the Maine Department of Corrections had sent Cible to “one of the most violent prisons in the United States,” referring to the New Jersey State Prison.
Cofield says he has met with Magnusson: “The commissioner acknowledged that [Cible] saved all these lives.”
Possibly as a result of the NAACP’s intervention, on August 24 Cible was moved to a federal detention center in Philadelphia — but his name and location were now available on a federal Web site. And in this new prison the pressure on him became so great that he briefly “cracked up,” his mother says, and had to be put in a mental-health unit for a night. He has no history of mental illness, she says.
