Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
The Great Texas Prison Mess
During the gargantuan buildup of the Texas Prison System, everyone wanted in on the action—even Andy Collins, the boss himself. Here’s how greed, fear, and VitaPro produced the state’s costliest scandal.
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Graham had been busy with the Jena juvenile facility deal, but with the $37 million judgment hanging over his head from the N-Group lawsuit, he also began selling VitaPro—first in Louisiana and later (though without Barry’s permission) in Texas. He even printed up business cards advertising himself as a VitaPro distributor, though his correspondence with Barry makes it clear that Graham was to be considered merely a broker.
VitaPro’s merits have been much derided in Texas newspapers of late, perhaps unfairly. The company has dozens of corporate clients, and as an extender—a way of stretching ten hamburger patties into fifteen, for example—and as a meat replacement, the soybean product has a proven track record. Other reporters have made sport of the fast-talking ex-felon Barry, but the sins of VitaPro have little to do with him or his brainchild. Instead, they have to do with the way Collins crammed VitaPro down the TDCJ’s throat—particularly beginning in July 1995, when the soon-to-be-retired director extended VitaPro’s initial contract to a $33.7 million, five-year deal, without telling the board, his food-service managers, or his second-in-command, Wayne Scott. While staffers were wondering what to do with TDCJ’s new meat-packing facility in Amarillo and the hog farm it had just acquired from Texas A&M, Collins pressured his subordinates to market VitaPro to Texas schools, and when a market for the product failed to materialize, Collins ordered workers to rewrite prison menus so that they incorporated VitaPro as a meat substitute on a daily basis—an overusage Barry himself had never promoted and which food-services manager Janie Thomas fought until Collins ordered her to be “a team player.”
Upon retirement from the Texas prison system, Collins immediately began traveling all over America on VitaPro’s behalf. Yank Barry was thrilled with his new spokesman: “He was opening doors everywhere, doing unbelievable work for us,” Barry gushes. For the first two months of 1996, VitaPro issued a total of $30,000 in checks to Collins’ consulting company or to Collins himself. By Barry’s estimate, Collins stood to make as much as $80,000 from VitaPro by year’s end—and surely would have, just as he would have opened the Jena facility, were it not for his partner Pat Graham.
WHILE A 35-YEAR-OLD HOUSTON huckster named Rocky Harmon was sitting in the Harris County jail in June 1995, awaiting transfer to prison for being popped in a fraudulent basketball ticket scam, his mother called Pat Graham and chewed him out. “You’ve taken all my husband’s money. You’ve been a terrible influence on my son,” she yelled tearfully into the phone. “The least you can do, with all your big connections, is see to it that my boy, Rocky, doesn’t get mistreated in prison!”
Harmon’s mother had a point: The father had been taken to the cleaners in a couple of muffed ventures with Graham; the son had been something of a protégé. “I’ll do what I can to help the boy,” Graham pledged.
For once, Graham proved true to his word. At his behest, Collins arranged to have Harmon transferred to the Diagnostic Unit in Huntsville, where he was assigned a low-stress job. On July 29, 1995, Harmon’s parents and Graham paid him a visit. Collins showed up as well and, according to Collins, chatted with the parents for about five minutes, gave the new inmate “the standard keep-your-nose-clean speech,” and departed with Graham. But to the other inmates in the visitation room, a visit by the executive director of the TDCJ, for whatever length of time, was something out of the ordinary. They began to look at inmate 714443 a bit differently after that. Rocky Harmon took note of this and affected a certain swagger.
One day on the volleyball court, Harmon approached Dana McIntosh, an inmate serving 75 years for murdering his wife despite his claims of innocence. McIntosh was a special case, a brilliant computer specialist whose data-processing skills were much in demand at the TDCJ, and the staff handled him with uncharacteristic deference. Harmon began his first conversation with McIntosh by saying, “You know, you and I aren’t like the others here. We’re white, we’re educated—”
McIntosh, who had seen Harmon with Collins but wasn’t particularly impressed, cut him off. “We’re not alike at all,” McIntosh said.
But Harmon persisted. Later, in November, he approached the fifty-year-old inmate with a proposition. “I know you want out of here,” Harmon said, “and I know seventy-five years is a long time. I’ll bet you could buy your way out of prison.” Harmon then got more specific: The friend who had visited him in July was Andy Collins’ business partner. For a fee—and here, Harmon discreetly indicated that some of the fee would properly come his way—Collins and his partner could spring McIntosh.
The older inmate was left with much to consider. Yes, McIntosh wanted out. But not this way, and besides, any arrangement involving a clown like Rocky Harmon was bound to be botched—most likely Harmon’s friend would just take McIntosh’s money and skate with it. On the other hand, what if the executive director of the TDCJ was involved? What would happen to an inmate like McIntosh if he didn’t take Collins up on such an offer? How many days would he last in prison? In the middle of November, McIntosh told his girlfriend, Karyn, about the proposition during a Sunday prison visit. She agreed to contact the FBI, and by the beginning of December, the sting was on.
On December 19, Karyn says, she agreed to meet a man who identified himself on the telephone as Harold Robert—the first and middle names of Pat Graham’s father, as it turned out. At a Houston Galleria restaurant, a jowly man in a nice suit sat at her table. According to Karyn, he was without a doubt the man investigators had shown her in photographs—that is to say, Pat Graham. “He said he was the deputy director of the TDCJ,” she says. “He said there were a certain number of inmates who shouldn’t be in the system, and this was a service they provided. For $250,000, they would change Dana’s inmate status and transfer him to the John Sealy hospital unit in Galveston and put him on a detail where he would be alone and could walk about freely. After giving another $250,000, I could then pick up Dana at the unit and drive off to the airport. Then they would fly us to Louisiana. After that we would catch a plane to Miami, then another plane to the American Virgin Islands, and then take a boat over to the British Virgin Islands. Then we’d fly to Costa Rica and wait six or eight months. And then, for another $250,000, Dana would receive a pardon from the governor, and we could go wherever we liked.
“He was about the creepiest man I’ve ever met.”
During the month, Karyn had several other conversations with “Harold Robert,” most of which were taped by investigators. On January 3, the FBI provided her with $150,000 in cash. The following morning, she says, Graham called and told her to bring the down payment to a Mexican restaurant on the northeast side of the city. In the parking lot next to the restaurant, Graham climbed inside Karyn’s car, whereupon she handed him the box stuffed with fifteen $10,000 bundles. He was just putting the third bundle into his briefcase when law enforcement agents swarmed the car.
Even as the investigators handcuffed Graham and read him his rights, he seemed to mutate before Karyn’s eyes. “He looked like this perfect citizen,” she remembers. “The countenance on his face was that of a guy who was only trying to help.”
IT WAS THE KIND OF HELP COLLINS didn’t need. Five days after Graham’s arrest, on January 9, the police questioned the just-retired prison director about his role in the escape ploy. He told them the same thing he told me a few weeks later: “I didn’t know a thing about it. Graham was just using my name. The guy duped me.”
Apparently lost on Collins was how easy a dupe he had become. He had chosen to view Graham as the vehicle for his own metaphorical jailbreak and was unable or unwilling to see that Graham could only drag him down. Sure enough, Graham’s association with both VitaPro and Collins added to emerging questions about the soybean product’s contract with the TDCJ, and before long, Collins had become a liability to VitaPro, necessitating Yank Barry’s request on February 26 that Collins resign. And now here was Andy Collins in self-imposed exile north of Houston, pondering the folly of it all while others determined his fate. In a similar limbo reposed a nearby resident, Pat Graham—who Collins now insisted had been scarcely more than an acquaintance: “I could probably count the times I dealt with Pat on one hand. And the conversations we had were never more than five minutes.”
The ex-director was cutting and running from Graham, defending each and every one of the alleged sweetheart contracts, and above all, proclaiming his right to go to work for the recipients of said contracts. “If I can’t do business with the people I know,” he declared, “who am I supposed to do business with?” The question legal investigators will be contemplating, however, is not who Collins did business with, but how and when and why he did business. For now, no evidence exists that Collins committed any crimes—that he took money or was promised employment in exchange for awarding contracts, or even that he violated some obscure purchasing law. But his actions, legal or not, raise character questions about Collins that have no doubt cast a pall over his consulting career.
“I had a whole list of companies to contact,” he told me at the first sign of evening, just before he broke out the Scotch and the cigars. “I could’ve gone to work for anybody—because I knew everybody. And I knew how these places worked. I knew how to build stuff. I privatized more prisons than anyone.” The name of a prominent private-prison operator who had apparently been interested in Collins’ services came up. “The guy’s an idiot—he knows nothing about prisons,” said Collins. “I could’ve helped him. I could’ve made millions for him.”
But Collins’ fatal flaw was the same as his business partner’s. Over and over, sources had told me that Graham, for all his sleaziness, had possessed more than a few good ideas—if only he had played them on the up and up. And now the same could be said of Collins. If only he had played it straight with the state. If only he had waited to set up shop until after he resigned. If only he had held out against the greed of the prison expansion instead of becoming its facilitator, its victim, and at last, its ignominious poster boy.
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