Читать книгу Hurricane: The Life of Rubin Carter, Fighter - James Hirsch S. - Страница 8

AT THE TIME of the Lafayette bar murders, Rubin Carter was a twenty-nine-year-old prizefighter and one of the great character actors of boxing’s golden era. The middleweight stalked opponents across the ring with a menacing left hook, a glowering stare, and a black bullet of a head—clean-shaven, with a sinister-looking mustache and goatee. Outside the ring, Carter cultivated a parallel reputation of a dashing but defiant night crawler. He settled grudges with his fists and was not cowed by the police. His intimidating style sent chills through boxing foes and cops alike, making him a target for both.

Regardless of where he walked, Carter always turned heads. At five feet eight inches and 160 pounds, he had an oversize neck, broad shoulders, and trapezoidal chest, with contoured biceps, thick hands, a tapering waist, and sinuous legs. A broadcaster once said of Carter, “He has muscles that he hasn’t even rippled yet.”

He was obsessed with fine clothing and personal hygiene, passions he inherited from his father. Lloyd Carter, Sr., believed that immaculate apparel showed a black man’s success in a white man’s world. A Georgia sharecropper’s son with a seventh-grade education, Lloyd earned a good living as a resourceful and indefatigable entrepreneur. He owned an icehouse, a window-washing concern, and a bike rental shop, and he wore his success proudly. He had his double-breasted suits custom-made in Philadelphia, favored French cuffs, and wore Stacy Adams two-tone alligator shoes. He bought his children shoes for school and for church; but if the school shoes had a hole, church shoes could not be worn to classes. No child of his would enter a house of worship with scuffed footwear.

Rubin Carter was just as meticulous as his father, if somewhat flashier. He instructed a Jersey City tailor to design his clothes to fit his top-heavy body. He placed $400 suit orders on the phone—“Do you have any new fabrics? … Good. Put it together and I’ll pick it up”—and he favored sharkskin suits, or cotton, silk, all pure fabrics, an occasional vest, and iridescent colors. His pants were pressed like a razor blade. He wore violet and blue berets pulled rakishly over his right ear, polished Italian shoes, and loud ties.

Carter trimmed his goatee with precision and clipped his fingernails to the cuticle. He collected fruit-scented colognes while traveling around the United States, Europe, and South Africa, then poured entire bottles into his bath water, soaked in the redolent tub, and emerged with a pleasing hint of nectar. Every three days Carter mixed Magic Shave powder with cold water and slathered it on his crown and face. He scraped it off with a butter knife, then rubbed a little Vaseline on top for a shine. His wife, Tee, complained that the pasty concoction smelled like rotten eggs, so she made him shave on their porch, but the result was Carter’s riveting signature: a smooth, shiny dome.

Nighttime was always Carter’s temptress, a lure of sybaritic pleasures and occasional danger. On his nights out, he left his wife at home and cruised through the streets of Paterson in a black Eldorado convertible with “Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter” emblazoned in silver letters on each of the headlights. He strolled into nightclubs with a wad of cash in his pocket and a neon chip on his shoulder. He bought everyone a round or two of drinks and mixed easily with women, both white and black. An incorrigible flirt, he danced, drank, and cruised with different women most every night.

But club confrontations often got Carter in trouble. He faced assault charges at least twice for barroom clashes, including once from the owner of the Kit Kat Club. Carter, contending he was unfairly singled out because of his swaggering profile, was cleared. But stories swirled about his hair-trigger temper. In an oft-repeated tale, Carter once found a man sitting at his table at the Nite Spot. When the man was slow to leave Hurricane’s Corner, Carter knocked him out with a punch, then took his girl.

Carter pooh-poohs such tales, although he says he would have told the man to sit elsewhere if other tables had been available. His dictum was that he never punched anyone unless first provoked, but he acknowledges that he was easily antagonized and, once aroused, showed little mercy on his tormentor. Adversaries came in all stripes. He once knocked a horse over with a right cross. The horse had had it coming: it tried to take a bite out of Carter’s side. The knockdown, publicized in local and national publications, added to Carter’s street-fighter reputation and legendary punching prowess.

Hedonistic excess was hardly uncommon in the boxing world; nonetheless, it was not widely known that Carter was an alcoholic during his career. Some thought Carter drank to make up for his dry years in prison: between 1957 and 1961, Carter had been sentenced to Trenton State Prison for assault and robbery. The inmates surreptitiously made a sugary wine concoction, “hooch,” but good liquor was hard to come by.

Outside prison, vodka was Carter’s drink of choice. Straight up, on the rocks, in a plastic cup, in a glass, from a bottle, it didn’t matter; it just had to be vodka. He was not a binge drinker but a slow, relentless sipper, and he could drink a fifth of vodka in a single night. Carter stayed clear of the bottle, mostly, when in training, but when he was out of camp, he kept at least one bottle of 100-proof Smirnoff’s in his car; friends hitching a ride got free drinks.

Carter concealed his drinking as much as possible. It was a sign of weakness and undermined his image as an athletic demigod. To avoid drinking in clubs, he picked up liquor in stores and drank in his car, sometimes with drinking buddies, sometimes alone. He tried not to order more than one drink at any one club on a given night. His wife rarely saw him imbibe and had no idea of the scope of his addiction. He carried Certs and peppermint candies to mask the alcohol on his breath, and he never got staggering drunk.

While Carter was a dedicated night owl, he was also a celebrity loner whose ready scowl stirred fear in bystanders, and he shunned close personal ties. He was often silent and moody, and many blacks in Paterson viewed him with a mixture of respect, envy, and fear. “Everybody loved Rubin, but no one was his friend,” said Tariq Darby, a heavyweight boxer from New Jersey in the 1960s. “I remember seeing him once in that black and silver Cadillac. He just turned and gave me that nasty look.”

Tensions were more overt between Carter and Paterson’s white majority as he flaunted his success in ways that he knew would tweak the establishment. He owned a twenty-six-foot fishing boat with a double Chrysler engine, which was docked at a marina in central New Jersey. He owned a horse, a once-wild mare he named Bitch, and rode in flamboyant style on Garrett Mountain. Dressed in a fringed jean jacket, a ten-gallon hat, and spur-tipped boots, Carter was hard to miss passing the white families picnicking on the hillside, and he didn’t mind when his riding partner was a white woman.

Carter’s shaved head, at least twenty-five years before bald pates became a common fashion statement among African Americans, had its own political edge. In the early 1960s, many blacks used lye-based chemical processors to straighten their curls and make their hair look “white.” White was cool. But Carter’s coal-black cupola sent a message: he had no interest in emulating white people. In fact, he shaved his head in part to mimic another glabrous black boxer, Jack Johnson, who won the heavyweight title in 1908 but was reviled as an insolent parvenu who drove fancy cars, drank expensive wines through straws, consorted with white women, and defied the establishment.

Carter’s showy displays jarred white Patersonians, who had a very different model for how a black professional athlete should act. They cherished Larry Doby, a hometown hero and baseball pioneer. On July 5, 1947, Doby joined the Cleveland Indians, breaking the color barrier in the American League. He was the second black major league player, following Jackie Robinson by eleven weeks. This feat spoke well of Doby’s hometown, Paterson, and Doby seemed to always speak well of the city. Never mind that Doby, who grew up literally on the wrong side of the Susquehanna Railroad tracks, knew well the racism of Paterson. As a kid going to a movie or vaudeville show at the Majestic Theater, he had to sit in the third balcony, known as “nigger heaven,” and he could not walk through white sections of Paterson at night without being stopped by police. Even after he became a baseball star, Doby was thwarted by real estate brokers from buying a home in the fashionable East Side of Paterson. He eventually moved his family to an integrated neighborhood in the more enlightened New Jersey city of Montclair.

But in public Doby was always a paragon of humility and deference. After he helped the Indians win the World Series in 1948, he was feted in Paterson with a motorcade. A crowd of three thousand gathered at Bauerle Field in front of Eastside High School, his alma mater, and city dignitaries gave effusive speeches about a black man whose deeds brought glory to their town. Then Doby took the microphone: he thanked the mayor and his teachers and coaches, concluding with these words: “I know I’m not a perfect gentleman, but I always try to be one.”

No white authority figure in Paterson ever called Rubin Carter a gentleman, perfect or otherwise. He was viewed not simply as brash and disrespectful but as a threat. Bad enough that he could knock down a horse with a single punch. Carter also owned guns, lots of them—shotguns, rifles, and pistols. He learned to shoot as a boy, practicing on a south New Jersey farm owned by his grandfather, and he honed his skills as a paratrooper for the 11th Airborne in the U.S. Army. He used his guns mostly for target practice but also for hunting, roaming the New Jersey woodlands with his father’s coon dogs. Carter could nail a treebound raccoon right between the eyes. He also owned guns for protection, and he had some of his suits tailored wide around the breast to accommodate a holster and pistol, which he would wear when he feared for his safety.

Like Malcolm X, Carter advocated that blacks use whatever means necessary, including violence, to protect themselves. He participated in the March on Washington in 1963, but two years later he rebuffed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s request to join a demonstration in Selma, Alabama. Carter knew he would not, could not, sit idly in the face of brutal attacks from law enforcement officials, white supremacists, or snarling dogs. “No, I can’t go down there,” he told King. “That would be foolishness at the risk of suicide. Those people would kill me dead.”

Carter did not accept the mainstream civil rights approach of passive resistance. He believed the sacrifices that blacks were making, whether on the riot-torn streets of Harlem or in the bombed-out churches of Birmingham, were unacceptable. Malcolm X had been killed. So too had James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three young civil rights workers, Medgar Evers, a black civil rights leader, and others unknown. Nonviolence is Gandhi’s principle, but Gandhi does not know the enemy, Carter thought.

When under attack, Rubin Carter believed in fighting back; in his view it was the police who were usually doing the attacking. But his many scrapes with the cops, plus some intemperate comments to a reporter, gave the authorities reason to believe that he was able, even likely, to commit a heinous crime.

In addition to the assault and robbery conviction in 1957, Carter, at fourteen, and three other boys attacked a Paterson man at a swimming hole called Tubbs near Passaic Falls. The man was cut with a soda water bottle and his $55 watch was stolen. Carter was sentenced to the Jamesburg State Home for Boys, but he escaped two years later. In the 1960s, his fracases with the police were common. In one incident, on January 16, 1964, a white officer picked him up after his Eldorado had broken down on a highway next to a meatpacking factory near Hackensack, New Jersey. He was driven to the town’s police headquarters, then accused of burglarizing the factory during the night. He had been locked in a holding cell for four hours when a black officer arrived and recognized him. “Is that you in there, Carter? What the hell did you get busted for, man?” Carter let out a stream of invective about the cops’ oppressive behavior. He was finally released after the black officer demanded to know the grounds on which he was being held. According to the official record, Carter had been arrested as a “disorderly person” for his “failure to give good account,” and the charge against him was dismissed.

Hostilities between Carter and the police, in New Jersey and elsewhere, escalated to a whole other level after a Saturday Evening Post article was published in October 1964. The story was a curtain raiser for the upcoming middleweight championship fight between the challenger, Carter, and Joey Giardello, the champ. The article, which introduced Carter to many nonboxing fans, was headlined “A Match Made in the Jungle.” Actually, the bout was to take place in Las Vegas, but “Jungle” referred to Carter’s feral nature. He was described as sporting a “Mongol-style mustache” and appearing like a “combination of bop musician and Genghis Khan.” With Carter fighting for the crown, “once again the sick sport of boxing seems to have taken a turn for the worse,” the article intoned. Giardello, photographed playfully holding his two young children, was the consummate family man. Carter sat alone, staring pitilessly into the camera.

In his interview with the sportswriter Milton Gross, Carter raged against white cops’ occupying black neighborhoods in a summer of unrest, and he exhorted blacks to defend themselves, even if it meant fighting to their death. He told the reporter that blacks were living in a dream world if they thought equality was around the corner, that reality was trigger-happy cops and redneck judges.

That part of the interview, however, was left out of the article. Instead, Gross printed his reckless tirade so that it was Carter, not the police, who looked liked the terrorist. Describing his life before he became a prizefighter, Carter told the writer: “We used to get up and put our guns in our pockets like you put your wallet in your pocket. Then we go out in the streets and start shooting—anybody, everybody. We used to shoot folks.”

“Shoot at folks?” Carter was asked, because this seemed too much to believe and too much for Carter to confess even years later.

“Just what I said,” he repeated. “Shoot at people. Sometimes just to shoot at ’em, sometimes to hit ’em, sometimes to kill ’em. My family was saying I’m still a bum. If I got the name, I play the game.”

This was sheer bluster on Carter’s part—no one had ever accused him of shooting anyone—but it was how he tried to rattle his boxing opponents and shake up white journalists. He invented a childhood knifing attack “I stabbed him everywhere but the bottom of his feet”—and the story quoted a friend of Carter’s who recounted a conversation with the boxer following a riot in Harlem that summer. The uprising occurred after an off-duty police lieutenant, responding to a confrontation between a sharp-tongued building superintendent and black youths carrying a bottle, shot to death a fifteen-year-old boy. Carter, according to his friend, said: “Let’s get guns and go up there and get us some of those police. I know I can get four or five before they get me. How many can you get?”

This fulsome remark sealed his image for the police and now for a much larger public. On the Friday-night fights, the showcase for boxing in America, Carter stalked across television screens throughout the country as the ruthless face of black militancy. He was seen as an ignoble savage, a stylized brute, an “uppity nigger.” He was out of control and, more than ever, he was a targeted man. (He was also not to be the champion. The Giardello fight, rescheduled for December in Philadelphia, went fifteen rounds; Carter lost a controversial split decision.)

After the Saturday Evening Post article appeared, authorities in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Akron, and elsewhere approached Carter when he was in town for a fight. On the grounds that he was a former convict, they demanded that he be fingerprinted and photographed for their files. At the time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s clandestine political arm, COINTELPRO (for “counter intelligence program”), was spying on Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and other civil rights leaders. Carter believed that by 1965, the FBI had begun tracking him, which simply made him more defiant.^* In the summer of 1965, for example, Carter arrived in Los Angeles several weeks early for a fight against Luis Rodriguez. The city’s police chief, William Parker, soon called Carter in his motel on Olympia Boulevard and told him to get down to headquarters.

“So, you thought you were sneaking into town on me, huh?” Parker said. “But we knew you were coming, boy. The FBI had you pegged every step of the way.”

“No, I wasn’t trying to sneak into your town. I just got here a little bit early,” Carter said. A woman whom Carter had seen tailing him at the airport and his motel was standing in the office. He motioned her way, then looked back at the police chief. “My God,” he said. “She’s got a beautiful ass on her, ain’t she?”

By June 1966, Carter’s last prizefight had been more than three months earlier in Toledo, against the Olympic gold medalist Wilbert “Skeeter” McClure. The match ended in a draw. He feared he faced increased police surveillance and harassment as black militancy became a greater force across America. Instead of young people marching together arm-in-arm and singing “We Shall Overcome,” new images emerged of combative black men and women wearing black berets and carrying guns, their fists raised in defiance. Social justice was not enough. Black separatism and empowerment were part of the new agenda. Malcolm X’s legacy was being carried on by charismatic leaders like Stokely Carmichael and Bobby Seale, whose cries for “black power” galvanized growing numbers of disaffected black youths while igniting a backlash from frightened whites. Paterson swirled with rumors that black organizers had come from Chicago to reignite the protests that had ripped the city apart two summers earlier.

Rubin Carter knew he needed to get off the streets.

Carter had a match coming up in Argentina in August, and he was moving to his training camp on Monday, June 20. Camp itself was a small sheep farm in Chatham, New Jersey, run by a man from India named Eshan. On Thursday the sixteenth, beneath a warm afternoon sun, Carter filled the trunk of his white 1966 Dodge Polara with boxing equipment. He could almost feel the canvas under his feet, and he was grateful.

In the evening his wife made dinner for her husband and their two-year-old daughter, Theodora. Mae Thelma, known as Tee, looked like a starlet, with dark chocolate skin, a radiant smile, and arched eyebrows. She sometimes tinted her hair with a bewitching silver streak. She was also quiet and self-conscious. As a young girl in Saluda, South Carolina, Tee had crawled into an open fireplace, disfiguring several fingers on her left hand. Thereafter she often wore long white gloves to conceal her scars, or she kept her hand in her coat pocket and slipped it under tables, sometimes awkwardly, at clubs or restaurants. Rubin had dated her for months before he finally caught a glimpse of the injury. On their next date, he pulled off to the side of the road, took her left hand, and pulled off her glove. “Is this what you’ve been hiding from me all this time?” he asked. “Do you think I would love you any less?”

When Tee told him she was pregnant, she feared he would abandon her; she herself had grown up in a fatherless home. Instead, Rubin promptly proposed, and they were wed on June 15, 1963. Carter families, Rubin knew, did not go without fathers, and their children did not go on welfare. Theodora was born seven months later. Rubin and Tee had an unspoken agreement: Rubin took care of his business, and Tee took care of Rubin. They each had their own friends and socialized separately. Tee never watched any of Rubin’s fights. Some nights, when they ended up at the same club, the people around them often didn’t know they were married.

This deception gave rise to some pranks. One night, sitting at the opposite end of the bar from his wife, Carter asked a bartender, “Would you please send down a drink to that young lady and tell her I said she sure looks pretty.”

The unsuspecting bartender walked down to Tee. “This drink comes from that gentleman up there, and he says you sure look pretty.”

She wrinkled her nose at Rubin. “Tell him I think he looks good too.”

The flirtation ended with Tee’s accepting Rubin’s offer to go home with him, leaving the bartender in awe of this Lothario’s good luck.

The couple’s three-story home, in a racially mixed neighborhood in Paterson, was comfortably decorated with a blondish wood dining room table, blue sofas with gold trim, African artifacts hanging on the walls, and an oil painting of the family. On the night of June 16, Carter watched a James Brown concert on television, doing a few jigs in the living room with Theodora. During the commercials, he repaired to the bedroom to dress for the night and returned to the living room with a new ensemble in place. Black slacks. White dress shirt. Black tie. Black vest. A cream sport jacket with thin green and brown stripes. Black socks. Black shoes. A splash of cologne, and a dab of Vaseline on his cleanly shaven head.

That night Carter decided to drive the white Polara, which was blocking the Eldorado in the garage. (He leased the Polara as a business car for the tax writeoff.) It was a warm evening, and Carter, at the outset, had business on his mind. He had a midnight meeting with his personal adviser, Nathan Sermond, at Club LaPetite to discuss the Argentina fight; the promoters were balking at giving Carter a sparring partner in Buenos Aires. Carter was also to meet, at the Nite Spot, one of his sparring partners, “Wild Bill” Hardney, who would be joining him in camp the following week. But by 11 P.M., the night was taking some unusual twists.

Sipping vodka outside the Nite Spot with a group of people, Carter bumped into a former sparring partner, Neil Morrison, known as Mobile for his Alabama roots. Carter had been looking for him for months because he suspected him of stealing three of his guns from his Chatham training camp. The theft—of a .22 Winchester, a bolt-action .22 rifle, and a 12-gauge pump shotgun—had occurred the previous fall when Morrison was staying in the camp. Morrison, dressed in dungarees and a white T-shirt, had just been released from prison, and Carter confronted him, accusing him of stealing the guns.

“Man, you know I would never do that,” Morrison said.

“I know a person who’s seen you with my guns,” Carter said. A childhood friend, Annabelle Chandler, had told Carter she saw Morrison with the weapons.

“The hell you do!” Morrison said.

Carter, Morrison, and two other Nite Spot regulars agreed to drive over to Chandler’s apartment, in the nearby Christopher Columbus Projects. There they found Chandler in the bathroom, sick. She had recently returned from the hospital and was suffering from cancer. Carter entered the bathroom and told her he had brought Morrison with him so she could repeat how she saw him with Carter’s guns.

“If I had known you were going to tell him, I wouldn’t have told you,” she told Carter.

“Well, forget about it,” he said in deference to her illness. Carter dropped the matter; his guns had been stolen and sold and lost forever. The group returned to the Nite Spot. Little did Carter know that in years to come, this chance encounter with Neil Morrison and quick jaunt to a run-down housing project to visit a dying woman would be used against him in a devastating way.

The night was unusual for another reason. Word had spread that Roy Holloway, the black owner of the Waltz Inn, had been slain by a white man, Frank Conforti. When the police arrested Conforti, a crowd of people, mostly blacks but not including Carter, angrily yelled at the white assailant. Holloway’s stepson, Eddie Rawls, was the bartender at the Nite Spot, and he pulled up to the club when Carter was in the midst of his dispute with Morrison. Carter expressed his condolences to Rawls, who was coming from the hospital. The group chatted for several minutes before Rawls went inside the club.

There was a buzz at the Nite Spot and other black clubs about a “shaking,” or retaliation of some sort, for the Holloway murder. Carter, however, had never met Holloway and was never heard to express any anger over the murder. He had other things on his mind. Thursdays were known as “potwashers night.” Domestics were given the night off, and the women got into the Nite Spot for free through the back door. By 2 A.M., as the crowd began to thin out at the Nite Spot, Carter was still looking for a date. When last call was announced, he approached the bar and asked for the usual, a vodka. He took out his wallet, but when he discovered it was empty, he told the bartender he’d have to pay up later.

Carter had planned to go to an after-hours social club, so he had to head home to get some money. He spotted his sparring partner, “Wild Bill” Hardney, and asked if he would go with him so Tee would not complain about his going out again. But Hardney, preoccupied with his girlfriend, begged off.

Then Carter noticed John Artis on the dance floor. The former high school football and track star was a sleek, high-spirited dancer who practiced his steps at home, following the advice of one of his uncles: “When you dance, be original and be different from the others. Take a step and change it, and always be smooth.”

Nineteen-year-old Artis loved fast cars and pretty girls, and that night, dressed in a sky-blue mohair sweater with a JAA monogram, matching light blue sharkskin pants, and gold loafers, he was certainly on the prowl. But it had been a long boozy evening—he had been sick earlier—and he was winding down. He had just performed a dazzling boogaloo when Carter called out to him. “Nice moves, buddy,” he said. “Wanna take a ride?” Overhearing the conversation was John “Bucks” Royster, a balding alcoholic drifter who was friendly with Carter. Royster, figuring drinks would be available in the car, asked if he could join them. Outside, Carter flipped Artis the keys and asked him to drive. Then Carter climbed in the back seat, slumped down, and called out directions to his house, about three miles southeast of the Nite Spot.

Artis had only met Carter a couple of times. He rambled on about how boxing was not his favorite sport, but his friends would be impressed when they heard he’d been driving Hurricane’s car, even if it wasn’t the Eldorado. There was talk about women they knew, who was looking fine and who wasn’t, and other idle conversation. Their chatter came to a quick end at 2:40 A.M. when the Polara crossed Broadway and a police car, lights flashing, pulled up next to it. A policeman motioned Artis to stop about six blocks north of Carter’s house.

Artis pulled out his license as Sergeant Theodore Capter, flashlight in hand, approached the car. A second officer, Angelo DeChellis, walked behind the car and wrote down the license number, New York 5Z4 741. Artis handed over his driver’s license but couldn’t find the registration. “It’s on the steering post, John,” Carter said as he sat up in the back. Carter was relieved when he saw Capter, a short, graying officer who had been on the force for eighteen years and had always gotten along with him. “Hey, how you doing, Hurricane?” Capter asked, flashing his light in the back. “When’s your next fight?”

“Soon,” Carter said. “But what’s wrong? Why did you stop us?”

“Oh, nothing, really. We’re just looking for a white car with two Negroes in it. But you’re okay. Take care of yourself.”

Carter shrugged off the incident. Unknown to him, a police radio call had gone out a short while earlier indicating that a white car with “two colored males” had left a shooting scene at the Lafayette Grill. Capter and DeChellis had spotted a white car followed by a black car speeding out of Paterson. The officers gave chase, jumping on Route 4 heading toward New York, but they never saw the cars again. So they had returned to Paterson when they saw and stopped Carter’s car.

Artis drove on to Carter’s house, where Carter went inside, collected about $100, and told Tee he was going back out. The trio returned to the Nite Spot, which was closing down, so Carter instructed Artis to drive to Club LaPetite, on Bridge Street, to look for Hardney. But they discovered that that club too had closed; after sitting in the car for a few minutes, Artis and Royster decided to call it a night.

Artis, who was still driving, dropped off Royster on Hamilton Street sometime after 3 A.M. With Carter now in the front seat, he continued down Hamilton, then turned right at East Eighteenth Street. At the intersection of East Eighteenth and Broadway, Artis put on his right blinker and waited for the signal to change. Suddenly, a patrol car came screeching behind them. The cop hurriedly said something into his car radio, opened his car door, and hustled over to the bewildered Artis and Carter. Then they recognized Sergeant Capter again.

“Awww, shit, Hurricane, I didn’t realize it was—” But before he could finish, four other squealing police cars arrived at the intersection. Someone else took charge and as Capter stepped away, Carter made eye contact with him and said, “Aw, fuck!” Other officers, their guns pulled, circled the Dodge. “Get out of that car,” barked one cop. “No, stay in the car,” another yelled. After a few more moments of confusion, an officer looked at Artis and pointed in the opposite direction on East Eighteenth Street. “Follow that car,” he yelled.

“What car?” Artis asked. But there was no time to talk. The sirens went off and the police cars began to peel away. Artis turned the car around and the cavalcade began racing up East Eighteenth. Artis had never been arrested and had never had any trouble with the police. Now he looked into his rearview mirror and saw a cop leaning out the window of the car behind them, pointing a shotgun at him. Artis felt his testicles tighten. “Damn, Rubin, damn! What’s going on?” he yelled.

Carter was also petrified. He had no idea where they were heading, only that they had turned East Eighteenth Street into the crazy backstretch of a stock car race. He saw landmarks fly by. There was a cousin’s home on the corner of East Eighteenth and Twelfth Avenue. There was the Nite Spot on the corner of East Eighteenth and Governor. But then the juggernaut sped beyond the black neighborhoods into unknown territory. Finally, the lead police car slowed down and made a sharp left turn at Lafayette Street, five blocks north of the Nite Spot. A crowd of people in the brightly lit intersection scattered as the pacer car screeched to a halt. The other vehicles followed suit.

Everything seemed to be in miniature. The streets were so narrow, the intersection so compressed, that any car whipping around a corner could easily crash into an apartment building or a warehouse. “What the fuck are we doing here?” Carter blurted. Neither he nor Artis had ever been inside the Lafayette bar; Carter had never even heard of the place. These are not my digs, but whatever went down, it had to be bad.

A scene of chaos lay before them. An ambulance had pulled up next to the bar, where a bloodstained body was being hauled out on a stretcher beneath the neon tavern sign. The throng of mostly white bystanders, many in pajamas, robes, or housecoats, milled about the Dodge, parked on Lafayette Street and hemmed in by police cars. There was panicked crying and breathless cursing, the slap of slamming car doors, and the errant static of police radios. Whirling police lights gave the neighborhood’s old brick buildings a garish red light as about twenty white cops, wearing stiff-brimmed caps, shields on their left breast, and bullet-lined belts, whispered urgently among one another.

The neighbors, some weeping, began to converge on the Dodge. Peering into the open windows, they looked at the two black men with anger and suspicion. Carter and Artis both sat frozen, unclear why they had been brought there but fearing for their lives. This is how a black man in the South must feel when a white mob is about to lynch him, Carter thought, and the law is going to turn its head. Finally, a grim police officer approached Artis.

“Get out of the car.”

“Do you want me to take the keys out?”

“Leave the keys.”

Then another officer intervened. “Bring the keys and open the trunk!”

“No problem,” Artis said.

As Artis headed to the rear of the car, Carter hesitated. If I get out of this car, it could be the worst mistake I’ve ever made. Artis opened the trunk, and a cop rummaged through Carter’s boxing gloves, shoes, headgear, and gym bag.

Another officer motioned to Carter to step out. Carter opened the door, but he had held his tongue long enough. “What the hell did you bring us here for, man?”

“Shut up,” the officer shouted as he cocked the pistol. “Just get up against the wall and shut up, and don’t move until I tell you to.”

As Carter and Artis walked toward the bar at the corner of Lafayette and East Eighteenth, a hush settled over the crowd. With bystanders forming a semicircle around the two men, Carter and Artis stood facing a yellow wall bathed in the glare from headlights. Artis turned his right shoulder and searched for a familiar face, maybe someone from racially mixed Central High School, his alma mater, but he saw only white strangers. The police frisked them brusquely but found nothing on them or in Carter’s car or trunk. Another ambulance arrived, and Artis felt the hair on his neck rise when he saw another body, draped in a white sheet, roll past him on a stretcher.

Finally, a paddy wagon pulled up and someone shouted, “Get in!” Carter and Artis stepped inside and were whisked away. Sitting by themselves, the two men were once again speeding through Paterson, heading to the police headquarters downtown. No one had asked them any questions or accused them of anything. They could see the driver through a screen divider but were otherwise isolated. “Something terrible is going on, but what’s it got to do with us?” Artis asked.

Carter, disgusted, told him to stay calm. “Don’t volunteer anything, but if someone asks you any questions, tell them the truth. The cops are just playing with me, as usual. It’ll all be cleared up soon.”

The paddy wagon stopped downtown, and the doors swung open at police headquarters. Built in 1902 after a devastating fire wiped out much of Paterson, the building is a hulking Victorian structure with dark oak desks and wide stairways. But Carter and Artis had barely gotten inside when there was another commotion. “Get back in!” someone shouted, and the two men returned to the wagon, which peeled off again. Now they headed on a beeline south on Main Street, eventually stopping at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Paterson’s oldest, where plainclothes detectives were waiting. Carter and Artis were hustled out of the truck and into the emergency room. Everything seemed white, the walls and curtains, the patients’ gowns and nurses’ uniforms, the floor tile and bedsheets. The room had that doomy hospital smell of ether and bedpans and disinfectant. The only patient was a balding white man lying on a gurney, a bloody bandage around his head, an intravenous tube rising from his arm, and a doctor working at his side.

“Can he talk?” asked one of the detectives, Sergeant Robert Callahan.

The doctor, annoyed at the intrusion, shot a disapproving glance at the detective, then at Carter and Artis. “He can talk, but only for a moment.” The doctor lifted the lacerated head of William Marins, shot in the Lafayette bar. The bullet had exited near his left eye, which was now an open, serrated cut. He was pallid and weak.

“Can you see clearly?” Callahan asked the one-eyed man. “Can you make out these two men’s faces?”

Marins nodded his head feebly. Callahan pointed to Artis. “Go over and stand next to the bed.” Artis walked over.

“Is this the man who shot you?” Callahan asked.

Marins paused, then slowly shook his head from side to side. Callahan then motioned for Carter to step forward. “What about him?”

Again, Marins shook his head.

“But, sir, are you sure these are not the men?” Callahan asked in a harder voice. “Look carefully now.”

Carter had been relieved when the injured man seemed to clear him and Artis. But now he concluded the police were going to do whatever they could to pin this shooting on them. Previous assault charges against Carter had been dismissed. Police surveillance had yielded little. Now, this: pell-mell excursions through the night, an angry mob outside a strange bar, a one-eyed man lying in agony, and Carter an inexplicable suspect. He had had enough. As Marins continued to shake his head, Carter closed his eyes, clenched his fists, and spilled his boiling rage. “Dirty sonofabitch!” he yelled. “Dirty motherfucker!”

Back at police headquarters, in the detective bureau, Carter found himself in a windowless interrogation room. It was familiar ground. He had been questioned in the same room twenty years earlier for stealing clothing at an outdoor market. (His father had turned him in.) Two battered metal chairs and a table sat beneath a cracked, dirty ceiling. Artis was left to stew in a separate room, which had green walls, a naked light bulb, and a one-way mirror in the door. Artis could see, between the door and the floor, the black rubber soles of the officers outside his door. He knew they were watching him.

Both men lingered in their separate rooms for several hours, their alcoholic buzz long worn off. They simply felt exhaustion. At around 11 A.M., the door to Carter’s room opened and Lieutenant Vincent DeSimone, Jr., walked in. The two men had a history. DeSimone joined the Paterson Police Department in 1947 and had been one of the officers who questioned the teenage Carter after he assaulted the man at the swimming hole. DeSimone was a coarse and intimidating old-school cop, who would quip about suspects, “He’s so crooked, they’ll have to bury him standing up.” A relentless interrogator, he was known for his ability to elicit confessions through threats and promises. He would do anything for a confession, including pulling out a string of rosary beads to bestir a guilty conscience. He hated the 1966 Miranda decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that no confession can be used against a criminal defendant who was not advised of his rights. The ruling, DeSimone feared, gave confessed criminals a loophole.^*

In the 1950s he joined the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office as a detective specializing in homicides, and he was known for keeping index cards in his pocket so he wouldn’t have to carry a notebook. His bosses viewed him as the finest law enforcement official in the state, their own Javert, and his power and reputation were unquestioned.

But on the streets of Paterson’s black community, DeSimone had a different reputation entirely, for he embodied the racist, bullying tactics of an overbearing police force. His confessions had less to do with gumshoe police work than with intimidation, and he was feared. Frankly, he looked scary. In World War II he had taken a grenade blast in the face, and despite several surgeries, his jowly visage was disfigured. A scar inched across his upper lip, which was pulled tightly back, and drool sometimes gathered at the side of his mouth. He had thick eyeglasses, spoke in a gravelly voice, and wore an open sport jacket across his thick, hard gut, revealing his low-slung holster.

DeSimone was tense when he entered Carter’s holding room. He had been awakened at 6 A.M. with news of the shooting, and he stopped off at the crime scene before going to the police station. Despite his many years in police work, this was his first interrogation for a multiple homicide.

“I’m Lieutenant DeSimone, Rubin. You know me.” He sat down heavily and pulled out his pen and paper.

“You can answer these questions or not,” he continued. “That’s strictly up to you. But I’m going to record whatever you say. Just remember this. There’s a dark cloud hanging over your head, and I think it would be wise for you to clear it up.”

“You’re the only dark cloud hanging over my head,” Carter said.

DeSimone was joined by two or three other officers. Over the next couple of hours, Carter recounted his whereabouts on the previous night, from the time he left his home after watching the James Brown special to his two encounters with Sergeant Capter. He mentioned his trip to Annabelle Chandler’s and various club stops. When DeSimone finally told Carter that four people had been shot, Carter waved off the suspicion: “I don’t use guns, I use my fists. How many times have you arrested me around here for using my fists? I don’t use guns.”

Carter was certain the interrogation was just another example of police harassment for his bellicose reputation. He felt his position on fighting was well known to DeSimone and the other officers: he would fight only if provoked. He did not imagine that even an old antagonist like DeSimone would consider him a suspect for killing people inside a bar he had never entered.

During the questioning, DeSimone shuttled back and forth between Carter and Artis in parallel interrogations. It was more difficult to write down the answers from Artis, who spoke faster. DeSimone also told Artis that “there was a dark cloud hanging over you,” but he said the young man had a way out. “When two people commit a murder, you know who gets the short end of the stick? The guy who doesn’t have a record, and you don’t have a record. That’s the guy they really stick it to. Tell us what you know.”

“I don’t know anything,” Artis said.

By midday Carter’s wife heard he had been picked up, and she came to the station.

“Do you want me to call a lawyer?” Tee asked.

“What do I need a lawyer for?” Carter responded. “I didn’t do anything, so I’ll be out of here shortly.”

Later, while Carter was heading to the bathroom, he was taken past several witnesses who supposedly saw the assailants fleeing the crime scene. One was Alfred Bello, a squat, chunky former convict who was outside the bar when the police arrived. He told police at the crime scene that he had seen two gunmen, “one colored male … thin build, five foot eleven inches. Second colored male, thin build, five foot eleven inches.” Another was Patricia Graham, a thin, angular brunette who lived on the second floor above the bar and said she saw two black men in sport coats run from the bar after the shooting and drive off in a white car. Both Bello and Graham would later provide critical testimony in the state’s case against Carter, giving different accounts from those in their initial statements.

A police officer asked the group of witnesses if they recognized Carter. “Yeah, he’s the prizefighter,” someone said. Asked if he had been spotted fleeing the crime scene, the witness shook his head.

After DeSimone completed his questioning of Carter, he gathered up his papers. “That’s good enough for the time being, but there’s one thing more that I’d like to ask. Would you be willing to submit to a lie detector test?”

“And a paraffin test, too,” Carter said without hesitation. “But not if any of these cops down here are going to give it to me. You get somebody else who knows what he’s doing.”

At 2:30 P.M., Sergeant John J. McGuire, a polygraph examiner from the Elizabeth Police Department, met Carter in a separate room. A barrel-chested man with short hair, McGuire had just been told about the shootings, and he was in no mood for small talk. “Carter, let me tell you something before you sit down and take this test,” he said in a tight voice. “If you have anything to hide that you don’t want me to know, then don’t take it, because this machine is going to tell me about it. And if I find anything indicating that you had anything to do with the killing of those people, I’m going to make sure your ass burns to a bacon rind.”

“Fuck you, man, and give me the goddamn thing.”

McGuire wrapped a wired strap around Carter’s chest, and Carter put his fingers in tiny suction cups. He answered a series of yes-or-no questions and returned to his holding room. After another delay, McGuire showed up and laid out a series of charts tracking his responses. DeSimone and several other officers were there as well. Pointing to the lines on the chart, McGuire declared, “He didn’t participate in these crimes, but he may know who was involved.”

“Is that so?” DeSimone asked.

“No, but I can find out for you,” Carter said.

Sixteen hours after they had been stopped by the police, Carter and Artis were released from the police station. Carter was given his car keys and went to the police garage, only to find that the car’s paneling, dashboard, and seats had been ripped out. The following day, June 18, Assistant County Prosecutor Vincent E. Hull told the Paterson Morning Call that Carter had never been a suspect. Eleven days later Carter, as well as Artis, testified before a Passaic County grand jury about the Lafayette bar murders. DeSimone testified that both men passed their lie detector tests and that neither man fit the description of the gunmen. Notwithstanding the adage that a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich—prosecutors are given a wide berth to introduce evidence to show probable cause—the prosecutor in the Lafayette bar murders failed to indict anyone. Carter traveled to Argentina and lost his fight against Rocky Rivero. The promoter never did give him a sparring partner. The thought flashed through Carter’s head that he should just stay in Argentina, which had no extradition treaty with the United States. That way, the Paterson police would no longer be able to hassle him. Instead he returned home.

On October 14, 1966, Carter was picked up by the police and charged with the Lafayette bar murders.

^* FBI files released through the Freedom of Information Act indicate that Carter was under investigation at least by 1967. The report could not be read in full because the FBI had blacked out many sections, evidently to protect its informants.

^* The Miranda decision had been issued only days before the Lafayette bar murders. DeSimone testified that he gave Carter his Miranda warning, which Carter denies.