Hurricane: The Life of Rubin Carter, Fighter

The Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office took the case to a special grand jury empaneled in the basement of the YMCA, convened to investigate the sensational killing of a young housewife named Judy Kavanaugh. On November 30, Carter heard a radio report on the loudspeakers in jail that the grand jury had indicted Kavanaugh’s husband for the murder. Paul Kavanaugh was in a cell near Carter’s. Then, almost as an afterthought, the announcer said: “Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter and John Artis were also indicted for the Lafayette bar slayings.”

The twining of the Kavanaugh and the Lafayette bar murders fueled rumors for many years to come. Speculation centered on the role that the mob may have played in persuading the prosecutor’s office to pursue enemies of the underworld. The Mafia connection was more direct in the Kavanaugh case. Eight months after the killing, a small-time hood named Johnny “the Walk” DeFranco died from a slit throat, the victim of a gangland-style murder. Prosecutors put forth a theory that Judy Kavanaugh had been involved in a counterfeiting and pornography ring and was silenced when she panicked, while DeFranco was later killed to keep him silent about her death. Five people were ultimately indicted for one or both crimes, including Harold Matzner, the young publisher of a suburban newspaper company in New Jersey. He had backed a series of articles that tried to link the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office to the underworld. All the defendants in both crimes, including Matzner, were ultimately acquitted amid allegations of witness tampering and gross misconduct inside the prosecutor’s office.*

Carter’s indictment also generated discussion about the underworld in Paterson. Mobsters had approached Carter about throwing fights, but he had always refused. In theory, this would give the mob an incentive to turn against him—just as the mob had an incentive to turn against Harold Matzner. Rumors circulated that mobsters, seeking vengeance against Carter, gave the prosecutor’s office conclusive evidence of his guilt, but the evidence could never be introduced because of its origins. The rumor is fantastic, but it gained some currency over the years as prosecutors, seemingly armed with little direct proof of guilt against Carter or Matzner, pursed each man with zeal. Other unsettling parallels between the Kavanaugh and Lafayette bar murders would surface in time.

When Carter heard about his indictment on the radio, he was shocked. Even though he had hired a lawyer, he still believed that the authorities planned to release him. But after being jailed for about six weeks, he guessed that prosecutors sought the indictment against him because they feared a possible lawsuit against Passaic County for false arrest. (Carter had no such intention.) If a jury returned a verdict of not guilty, prosecutors could say they had done their best with the evidence they had. Carter’s shock soon gave way to fury and fear. He was now trapped in jail until his trial. With little to do, he began writing letters to people who had seen him on the night of June 16 and who could serve as his alibi witnesses.

To those who knew Carter, the accusation didn’t make sense. His friends and family believed he was capable of killing three people, but not in the fashion of the Lafayette bar murders. Despite his inflammatory comments in the Saturday Evening Post, Carter was known for advocating self-defense, specifically against police harassment. Violence was justified, indeed necessary, against aggressors, he argued, but not against innocent bystanders. Why would he walk into an inoffensive bar and shoot a room full of strangers? It never made sense, and the authorities offered no explanation.

Moreover, when Carter did exact revenge and lash out, he used only his fists. The rules of the streets were clear. Punks and sissies used guns or knives; warriors used their fists. If Carter wanted to punish or even kill someone, he would consider it an insult to his manhood if he did not use his bare hands. He would want the victim to know that it was “Hurricane” Carter meting out his punishment. Carter owned and occasionally carried guns, but that was because of his own fears—perhaps exaggerated, perhaps not—that he would be shot at. What is clear is that until the Lafayette bar murders, no one had ever accused Carter of pointing a gun at another person.

The Lafayette bar shooting “wasn’t Rubin’s style,” said Martin Barnes, an acquaintance of Carter’s who was elected mayor of Paterson in the 1990s. “If you were bad, you did it with your hands, and Rubin did it strictly with his hands.”

Carter initially wanted F. Lee Bailey to represent him, but the famed defense lawyer was already embroiled in the Kavanaugh case, so instead he hired Raymond Brown from Newark. Brown was known for being the only black lawyer in the state to take on whites. He did not, at first glance, look like a dragon slayer in his rumpled brown and gray suits, Ben Franklin-type bifocals, and a plaid hat. He smoked a pipe and ambled around in a kind of slouch, as if he were getting ready to sit down after every step. But he was an expansive orator whose voice filled a courtroom, a firebrand with a rapier wit. In his fifties, he had short, dust-colored hair and a high yellow complexion; in fact, he was light enough to pass for white. When he was in the Army, an officer candidate once told him, “Be careful, some people will think you’re a nigger.” “I am!” Brown shot back.

The trial against Carter and Artis took place at the Passaic County Court on Hamilton Street, where grandeur and tradition welcomed every visitor. Completed just after the turn of the century, the building featured large white Corinthian columns and a ribbed dome with a columned cupola; on it stood a blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice. In the courtroom where Carter was tried, the judge’s large dark wood desk stood on a platform in dignified splendor. On the desk lay a black Bible with its red-edged pages facing the gallery. An American flag stood to the side.

Paterson was a tinderbox as jury selection began on April 7, 1967. The establishment was terrified that blacks would riot if the defendants were found guilty. Black youths had rioted three summers before, and a conviction of Paterson’s most celebrated, most feared, most hated black man could trigger another firestorm. To quell any possible disturbance, the courthouse was transformed into a fortress, with extra uniformed and plainclothes police perched in the building’s halls and stairwells, on the streets outside, and on neighborhood rooftops. The roads around the building were blocked off. The authorities questioned known troublemakers and even rummaged through garbage cans in search of contraband. According to an internal FBI report dated May 27, 1967, an informant told the agency that in the “Negro district, five large garbage cans were filled with empty wine and beer bottles and some beer cans … and these might be a source of Molotov cocktails … and this condition could be caused by the feeling of people regarding the Carter-Artis trial.”

Presiding was Samuel Larner, an experienced New Jersey lawyer who had recently been appointed to the Superior Court in Essex County and had already developed a reputation as a no-nonsense judge. Larner gained widespread acclaim in the 1950s when he spearheaded an investigation of government corruption in Jersey City. The inquest triggered more than fifty indictments, culminating in the suicide of one employee and the resignation of several others. Sam Larner knew Ray Brown well. The two men were co-counsel for John William Butenko, an American engineer, and Igor Ivanov, a Soviet national, who just a few years earlier had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage.

Judge Larner had been reassigned from Essex to Passaic County, evidently because Passaic was either experiencing a shortage of judges or a backlog of cases. Carter always suspected he had been reassigned to keep Ray Brown under control. Larner intervened often when Brown was pressing witnesses, and their jousting was a running sideshow during the trial.

Each day during the voir dire, for example, the proceedings lasted into the early evening. Then one afternoon Judge Larner abruptly rose at 4 P.M. and declared, “The court is adjourned.” The stunned courtroom silently watched the judge walk toward his chamber. Suddenly, Ray Brown stood up.

“Judge Larner!”

“What is it now, Mr. Brown?”

“Tell me, Judge Larner, why is this night different from all other nights?”

It was the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover, and the judge needed to get home. He first glared at Brown for his effrontery in questioning a judge’s decision to end the day prematurely. Then he realized Brown’s clever invocation of a line from the Passover Seder. Larner smiled at his former colleague and continued out the door.

Carter, however, found little to smile about. He had never been on trial before. When he did something wrong, he owned up to it, as he had ten years earlier when he pled guilty to robbery and assault. Carter figured he was in trouble during jury selection, a three-week ordeal that saw one potential juror dismissed for being a member of Hitler’s youth movement in Germany and another for believing that blacks who grew up in ghettos were more prone to violence. Despite such efforts, the jury that was selected comprised four white women, nine white men, and one black man—a West Indian. Fourteen jurors in all, two of whom would be selected as alternates at the end of the trial. This was a jury of my peers? Carter thought. Aside from being a different color than all but one of them, I probably had more education than any person sitting on the jury, and even I didn’t understand a damn thing that was going on.

The prosecuting attorney was Vincent Hull, the son of a state legislator, whose precise, low-key manner contrasted sharply with Brown’s showmanship. Hull was young, slim, and conservatively dressed with prematurely gray hair. In his opening statement, he described how the two defendants, after circling the bar in Carter’s 1966 Dodge, parked the car, walked into the Lafayette bar, and without uttering a word “premeditatedly, deliberately, and willfully” shot four people, killing three of them. Hull meticulously described the victims and their wounds and asserted that Detective Emil DeRobbio found an unspent 12-gauge shotgun shell and an unspent .32 S&W long bullet in Carter’s car. Those were the same kinds of bullets, Hull said, used in the bar shooting. When Hull completed his opening, he thanked the jury and sat down.

Judge Larner turned to the defense table. “Mr. Brown,” he said.

Ray Brown rose from the table, his glasses perched on his nose and a legal document in his hand. While the prosecutor had not mentioned race except as it related to the identification of the suspects, Brown argued that Carter stood accused because the police were looking for a Negro on the night in question, and therefore every Negro was suspect. Brown told the jury that Carter didn’t know what happened in the bar and refuted Hull’s assertions point by point, including the alleged discovery of bullets in the Dodge. If the police actually found the bullets on the night of the crime, Brown asked, why wasn’t Carter arrested then instead of four months later?

To convict, the state needed a unanimous vote of guilt from the jurors, so Brown’s strategy was to direct his entire defense to the West Indian juror, hoping to persuade him that the state was victimizing his client. “Any man can be accused,” Brown thundered, “but no man should have his nerves shredded and his guts torn out without a direct charge.”

“Mr. Brown!” Judge Larner exploded. “I don’t want to interrupt you, but I think it is time you limited yourself to the facts to be shown, and let’s get beyond the speeches on philosophy.”

“This is not philosophy, Your Honor. This is a fact.”

The state’s first witness, William Marins, who lost his left eye in the shooting, set the tone for the trial. Carter had hoped that Marins, a balding, stocky man in his forties who was the lone survivor of the tragedy, would convince the jurors that he and Artis were not the gunmen in the same way he had convinced the police at St. Joseph’s Hospital after the shooting. Marins was now an unemployed machinist—and an unsympathetic witness. He told the court that on the night of the crime, he had been shooting pool and drinking beer with another patron, Fred Nauyoks. Also in the bar were Jim Oliver, the bartender, and Hazel Tanis. Suddenly, two colored men entered the place between two-thirty and three o’clock in the morning, shooting everyone inside. One gunman, with a mustache, swung a shotgun. The other, standing directly behind him, had a pistol. Marins said he felt a sharp pain in the left side of his head, noticed smoke curling out of the shotgun barrel, and passed out. When he awoke, “I was bleeding and bleeding and bleeding. I waited for the police to come.”

Throughout the questioning, Marins emphasized that he was in a state of shock after the shooting and was in no condition to identify the gunmen. By the time Brown began his cross-examination, it was clear Marins was not about to exonerate Rubin Carter and John Artis.

“Do you feel like testifying some more, Mr. Marins,” Brown asked, “or would you like a glass of water?”

“No,” Marins snapped.

“You gave a statement to the police about what happened in this place, did you not?”

“Yes, but I was in a state of—”

“I didn’t ask you, sir—” Brown said.

Judge Larner interrupted. “Just answer the particular question, Mr. Marins.”

Brown produced numerous official statements that Marins had given about the shooting, one as late as October 20, 1966. “Now, you repeatedly told these officers, did you not, that [the gunmen] were thin, tall, light-skinned Negroes, didn’t you?”

“I said they were colored,” Marins protested.

Carter, of course, was short, thickly built and black as soot, so Brown homed in on Marins’s previous descriptions, which seemed to have ruled Carter out as a suspect. Shuffling between the witness stand and the defense table, Brown noted that his description matched that of Hazel Tanis, who told police before she died that the gunmen were about six feet tall, slimly built, light-complexioned and had pencil-thin mustaches. Isn’t that the same description you gave? Brown asked Marins.

“No!” Marins insisted. “I told [the police] the man had a dark mustache, or well, it was a mustache. I didn’t look at him that long … I was in a state of shock.”

Brown had one more card to play. “Your Honor, please. At this time I would like to ask that Your Honor unseal depositions given by this man in a civil suit brought by him in January of 1967.”

Carter had no idea what was going on.

“Mr. Marins,” Brown said, “do you know that you are the plaintiff in an action against Elizabeth Paraglia owner of the Lafayette Grill?”

“True.”

“Do you recall having testified in depositions taken before a notary public … on December 16, 1966?”

“True.”

“Do you recall signing these depositions and stating under oath they were true?”

“True.”

“You were out of the hospital?”

“True.”

“You had been discharged?”

“True.”

“Your health then permitted you to go to a lawyer’s office and give depositions, is that correct?”

“True.”

“Your lawyer was present?”

“True.”

Brown bored in. “You were asked, ‘Did you recognize the men who shot you?’ Your answer: ‘I know they were colored, light-colored, and one in particular, the first one with a shotgun, had a mustache that I just happened to see, and the man in back of him was about the same height.’ Did you give him that answer?”

“True,” Marins replied meekly.

“You were asked, ‘How tall are they?’ You said, ‘Six feet, maybe five eleven, six feet.’ Is that correct?”

“Well, I said six feet. Maybe.”

“Isn’t it a fact that you told Detective Callahan six feet, slim build, sir?”

“When was this?”

“June 17, 1966, in the emergency room.”

“I don’t remember because I was in a state of shock.”

“Were you in a state of shock in December 1966?”

The judge had seen enough. “He said no, and he doesn’t remember what he told Detective Callahan, whether it is the same or not.”

Brown had cut Marins to shreds, but there was no joy at the defense table. The lone survivor had inexplicably changed the very statements that had once helped clear Carter and Artis of suspicion, and Carter quietly seethed.

Despite his renowned temper, Carter remained calm during the proceedings. Hundreds of times he had to stand up before prospective jurors to be identified, but he never balked or showed any annoyance. The Evening News said he acquired the stance of a “mild-mannered student.” His wife brought him a clean suit and dress shirt every night at the jail, and throughout the trial he took copious notes on a yellow legal pad. Only once did Carter vent his rage in the courtroom. His nemesis, Vincent DeSimone, sat next to Hull at the prosecutor’s table. During one recess, Carter’s daughter wandered over to the table and began playing and laughing with the lieutenant. Carter bolted out of his seat and grabbed the three-year-old.

“Come here,” he said. “You don’t talk to this punk. He’s trying to put your father in jail.”

DeSimone leaned back and smiled.

“Fuck you, you fat pig,” Carter said. “You leave my daughter alone.”

The state had little evidence linking Carter and Artis to the shooting. The police had neglected to brush the Lafayette bar for fingerprints or conduct paraffin tests on the defendants’ hands after they were picked up. There were no footprints, no bloodstains, no murder weapons, no motive. There was conflicting testimony about Carter’s car. One witness, Patricia Graham Valentine (Patricia Graham at the time of the shooting), lived in an apartment above the bar. She said Carter’s white Dodge “looked like” the getaway car; both cars had triangular, butter-fly-type taillights. But another witness, Ronnie Ruggiero, also saw the getaway car and testified that he thought it was a white Chevy, not a white Dodge. Ruggiero, a white boxer, had driven in Carter’s Dodge Polara before. Then there were the bullets. Detective DeRobbio testified that he found a .32-caliber S&W lead bullet and a Super X Wesson 12-gauge shotgun shell in Carter’s car. But ballistics experts testified that the bullets found at the crime scene were .32 S&W long copper-coated bullets and Remington Express plastic shells. The bullets in Carter’s car were indisputably different from those used in the crime, but Judge Larner allowed the lead bullet into evidence because it could have been fired from a .32-caliber pistol. The same could have been said for the 12-gauge shell, but Larner still excluded that as evidence. His logic confounded the defense team.

The state’s case rested on the shoulders of its two eyewitnesses, Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley. As a thief, Bello was more pathetic than petty. By the age of twenty-three, he had already been convicted five times on various charges of burglary and robbery. In one instance, he robbed a woman of a makeup case valued at one dollar, a cigarette case valued at two dollars, and a pocketbook valued at twenty dollars. Carter assumed that the reward for his conviction, now up to $12,500, looked mighty tempting compared to such nickel-and-dime thieving. A heavy drinker who had threatened his classmates with a penknife in grade school, Bello had spent so much time in Paterson’s police headquarters that DeSimone’s secretary referred to him as the lieutenant’s adopted son. Bello was short and fat with greased-back hair. He talked too loud and he wore high-heeled shoes. He had a tattoo on his right arm that read: “Born to Raise Hell.” He had been discharged from the Army for fraudulent enlistment. He had also been in state reformatories off and on for several years, and he was out on parole when the Lafayette bar shooting occurred. At the time of the murders, he was serving as “chickie,” or lookout, for Bradley’s break-in at the Ace Sheet Metal Company.

He was the state’s “mystery witness.”

Bello took the stand with an air of insouciant invincibility, basking in the spotlight of his sudden fame. In his answers to Hull’s questions, he gave his account of the night in question. While waiting for Bradley to break into the warehouse with a tire iron, Bello said he saw a white Dodge driving around the block with three colored men inside. He thought he saw something sticking up between one of their legs that looked like a rifle barrel. Then he decided he wanted a cigarette, so he walked to the Lafayette bar to buy a pack. As he walked toward the tavern, he heard two shots, then two shots more, then he saw two colored fellows walking around the corner, talking loud and laughing. One had a shotgun, the other a pistol. They were fourteen feet away and saw Bello, but Bello ran to safety. So the gunmen drove away in their white car. The two men, Bello said, were Rubin Carter and John Artis.

Bello then walked to the bar and saw the bodies on the floor. He went to the cash register to get a dime to call the police; instead, he stole money from the register. He left the bar, gave the pilfered cash to Bradley, and then returned to the tavern because he feared a witness had seen him leaving the crime scene. He saw Carter and Artis when the police brought them to the bar and later at the police station, but under questioning by police, he did not identify them. Then in October, Bello gave another statement to police, claiming he saw the two defendants fleeing the crime scene. He said he did not identify them on the night of the murders because he feared that doing so would endanger him.

The lies, at least to Carter, were transparent. Why would a man engaged in a surreptitious criminal activity decide to walk to a bar and buy a pack of cigarettes? How could an overweight, high-heeled Bello elude a world-class professional athlete and a former high school track star? Why would testifying now put him in less danger than on the night of the murders? Why would Carter have let the police take him to the bar if he knew somebody had seen him? Shit! Carter thought. I wouldn’t have lost anything by killing the police too—if I had been the killer!

Ray Brown’s cross-examination entangled Bello in a thicket of half-truths and inconsistencies. Even the most innocuous inquiries caught Bello in lies.

“Where were you living in June of 1966?” Brown asked.

“One-thirty-eight Redwood Avenue,” Bello answered.

“Did you tell the police on June 17, 1966, where you lived?” Brown asked.

“Yes.”

“Where did you tell them you lived?”

“It had to be Redwood Avenue,” he said.

“Would you look at this please.” Brown showed him a written statement. “I show you S-40 for identification. Is there a date in the upper left-hand corner?” he asked.

“June 17, 1966,” Bello said.

“Is that your signature?”

“Yes.”

“What does it say with respect to your full name, age, and address?”

“Maple Avenue,” Bello conceded.

“Where did you live in June of 1966?” Brown asked again.

“On Maple Avenue.”

“You lived in Clifton?” Brown asked.

“Yes.”

“You have difficulty recalling where you lived less than a year ago?”

“I’m not very good on dates,” Bello said.

“You’re not very good on memory either, are you,” Brown snapped.

Bello conceded that he had lied to the police on the night of the murders when he said the assailants had chased him up the street; now he claimed the gunmen did not chase him at all—and he also tried to backpedal from his initial description of the men.

“You told, at the very scene, other police officers … that these men were of slim build, five eleven or so, is that correct?” Brown asked.

“I meant to say one was a little taller than the other,” Bello said.

The witness said he could not recall exactly what he had told the police. Brown pulled out Bello’s original police statement on the description of the two gunmen.