It was the week before retirement when they came to her, Cheryl Wheeler said, and it all came crashing down.
After 19 years as a guard at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, her career derailed because of her decision to smuggle tobacco and cell phones into the prison for $5,000 in bribes.
"I don't know why I decided to do it," she said Tuesday, hours after she'd been sentenced to eight months in federal prison. "When I got caught, I thought, 'This is one of the dumber things I have ever done in my life.'"
Wheeler, 53, told the Star Tribune that her life was a mess in 2009 when she started taking bribes. She wasn't making excuses, she said. "I don't want to trivialize what I did. This is a huge betrayal of the people I worked with," she said.
She said her daughter, a Bureau of Prisons employee in another state, was trying to flee a dangerous relationship at the time. Officials here, however, would not respond to Wheeler's requests that her daughter be transferred to Minnesota.
"That's when these guys came in and wanted to know if they could make me some money," she said. "They'd been after me for a while to bring things in."
They were relatives of a couple of inmates who were willing to pay her to smuggle tobacco. Wheeler said she previously brought in tobacco for sweat lodge ceremonies without taking money. So she decided to do it to help support her daughter.
Wheeler, of Wabasha, Minn., admitted that from July 2009 through February 2010, she took money for supplying those inmates with tobacco. She also admitted providing cell phones to an inmate. Officials confronted her about 8 a.m., just as she was finishing a late shift.
