Читать книгу Hurricane: The Life of Rubin Carter, Fighter - James Hirsch S. - Страница 9

IT WAS THE BREAK everyone had been waiting for. On October 14, 1966, the front page of the Paterson Evening News screamed the headline: “Mystery Witness in Triple Slaying Under Heavy Guard.” A three-column photograph, titled “Early Morning Sentinels,” showed tense police officers in front of the Alexander Hamilton Hotel on Church Street guarding the “mystery witness.” An unnamed hotel employee said he saw the police hustle a “short man” into an elevator the day before at 6 P.M. The elevator stopped on the fifth floor, where a red-haired woman was seen peering out from behind a raised shade.

The newspaper story raised as many questions as it answered, but the high drama indicated that a breakthrough had occurred in the notorious Lafayette bar murders, now four months old. Excitement swirled around the Hamilton, where a patrol car was parked in front with two officers inside, shotguns at the ready. Roaming behind the hotel were seven more officers, guarding the rear entrance. A police spotlight held a bright beam on an adjoining building’s fire escape, lest an intruder use it to gain access to the Hamilton. Two more shotguntoting cops stood inside the rear entrance, and detectives roamed the lobby. Overseeing the security measures, according to the newspaper, was Mayor Frank Graves.

John Artis saw the headline and thought nothing of it. He assumed he had been cleared of any suspicion of the Lafayette bar shooting after he testified before the grand jury in June and no indictments had been issued. At the time, Artis was at a crossroads in his own life. His mother had died from a kidney ailment a month after he graduated from Central High School in 1964. Mary Eleanor Artis was only forty-four years old, and her death had devastated John, an only child. He knocked around Paterson for several years, working as a truck driver and living with his father on Tyler Street. In high school, he had been a solid student and a star in two sports, track and football, and he sang in the choir at the New Christian Missionary Baptist Church. He had giddy dreams of playing wide receiver for the New York Titans (later known as the New York Jets). He also had a bad habit of driving fast and reckless—he banged up no fewer than eight cars—but he had no criminal record and never had any problems with the police. Neither of his parents had gone to college, and they desperately wanted their only child to go. By the fall of 1966, Artis had been notified by the Army that he had been drafted to serve in Vietnam, but he was trying to avoid service by winning a track scholarship to Adams State College in Alamosa, Colorado, where his high school track coach had connections.

On October 14, dusk had settled by the time Artis finished work. It was Friday, the night before his twentieth birthday, and an evening of dancing and partying lay ahead. He stopped at a dry cleaner’s to pick up some shirts, then went into Laramie’s liquor store on Tyler Street to buy an orange soda and a bag of chips. He and his father lived above the store. As he was paying for the soda, the door of the liquor store swung open. “Freeze, Artis!” a cop yelled. “You’re under arrest!”

Artis saw two shotguns and a handgun pointed at him. “For what?” he demanded.

“For the Lafayette bar murders!”

“Get outta here!”

Police bullying of blacks in Paterson was so common that Artis thought this was more of the same, an ugly prank. But then two officers began patting him down around his stomach and back pockets. Artis handed his clean shirts to the liquor store clerk and told him to take them to his father. His wrists were then cuffed behind his back. Damn, Artis thought, these guys are serious! On his way out of Laramie’s, Artis yelled his father’s name: “JOHHHHN ARTIS!” As he was shoved into a police car, Artis saw his father’s stricken face appear in the second-story window.

Rubin Carter was at Club LaPetite when one of Artis’s girlfriends approached him with the news: John had been arrested.

“For what?” Carter asked.

“I don’t know, they just arrested him.”

Like Artis, Carter had seen the “Mystery Witness” headline in the newspaper but hadn’t given it a second thought, and he didn’t connect the headline to Artis’s arrest. Carter, distrustful of the police, feared for Artis’s safety, so he got into his Eldorado and drove to police headquarters to check up on the young man. As he neared the station, he put his foot on the brake; then, out of nowhere, detectives on foot and in unmarked cars swarmed around his car.

“Don’t move! Put your hands on the wheel! Don’t move!”

Here we go again, was all Carter could think. But this police encounter proved to be much more harrowing than his June confrontation. His hands were quickly cuffed behind his back, and he was shoved into the back seat of an unmarked detective’s car. According to Carter, the officers did not tell him why they had stopped him or what he was being charged with. Instead, with detectives on either side of him, the car doors slammed shut and the vehicle sped away, followed by several other unmarked cars. Carter had no idea where they were going, or why. Soon the caravan headed up Garrett Mountain, cruising past the evergreens and maple trees. Even at night Carter knew the winding roads because he often rode his horse on the mountain. The motorcade finally came to a stop along a dark road, and there they sat. Detectives holding their shotguns milled around, and Carter heard the crackling of the car radios and officers speaking in code. They did not ask him any questions. Damn! They’re going to kill me. They sat for at least an hour, then Carter heard on the car radio: “Okay, bring him in.” He always assumed that someone had talked the detectives out of shooting him.

At headquarters, Carter was met by Lieutenant DeSimone and by Assistant County Prosecutor Vincent E. Hull. It was Hull who spoke: “We are arresting you for the murders of the Lafayette bar shooting. You have the right to remain silent …” The time was 2:45 A.M. Unknown to Carter, Artis had also been taken to Garrett Mountain, held for more than an hour, then returned to headquarters and arrested for the murders. The Evening News said the arrests “capped a cloak-and-dagger maneuver masterminded by Mayor Graves,” who grandly praised his police department: “Our young, aggressive, hard-working department brought [the case] to its present conclusion.”

Some nettlesome questions remained. Though the police searched the city’s gutters and fields and dragged the Passaic River, they never found the murder weapons. The authorities were also not divulging why Carter and Artis killed three people. Robbery had already been ruled out, and the Evening News reported on October 16 that the police had determined there was no connection between the Roy Holloway murder and the Lafayette bar shooting. Such details were unimportant. The Morning News rejoiced at the arrest, trumpeting on the same day that the newspaper “exclusively broke the news that the four-month-old tavern murders were solved.”

Carter figured his arrest was tied to the November elections. Mayor Graves, prohibited by law from running for a fourth consecutive term, was hoping to hand the job over to his chosen successor, John Wegner. What better way to show that the city was under control than by solving the most heinous crime in its history? After the election, Carter reckoned he’d be set free.^*

But sitting in the Passaic County Jail, where each day he was served jelly sandwiches, Carter learned through the jailhouse grapevine that two hostile witnesses had emerged. Alfred Bello, the former con who had been at headquarters following the crime, and Arthur Dexter Bradley, another career criminal, were near the Lafayette bar trying to rob a warehouse on the night of the murders. Questioned by the police that night, Bello said he could not identify the assailants. But suddenly his memory had improved. Both Bello and Bradley now told police that they had witnessed Carter and Artis fleeing the crime scene.

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.

“Do you deny telling Officer Unger and Officer Greenough on the morning of the seventeenth of June, 1966, that one man was five eleven and the other was five eleven and that both were slim built? You deny that?”

“I don’t deny anything. If it is there, it must be true.”

Bello then tried to explain more fully what he did after he entered the bar. He did not have a dime to make a telephone call, he said, so he stepped over the bleeding dead body of Jim Oliver to reach the cash register. “I went in there to try to help, and when I went to the cash register to get that dime, basically I am a thief. I will admit that.” With the courtroom in titters, he continued. “I did go to the cash register to get a dime, but when I seen this money, knowing myself, knowing that I am a thief, I did take some money. But I am not an assassin. Remember that.”

With $62 of stolen cash in hand, Bello stepped back over Oliver’s corpse and left the bar.

Bello was grilled on the witness stand for two days, and Ray Brown ended his interrogation with a flourish of indignation.

“When you stole that money from the cash register sitting behind the bar, did you have to pass by Hazel Tanis lying there on the floor begging for help?”

“Yes,” Bello answered.

“And Mr. William Marins slumped on the barstool shot in the head?”

“Yes.”

“And Fred Nauyoks lying dead at the bar?”

“Yes, Mr. Brown.”

“Then you stepped over Jim Oliver lying dead behind the bar to get to the cash register. When did you do all of this, mister?”

“Do what?” Judge Larner intervened.

Brown whipped around and looked at the judge. “Slay the bartender,” he said.

“What!” Judge Larner screamed.

“When did he slay the bartender?” Brown repeated. “That is addressed to him,” pointing to Bello.

“Objection!” shouted the prosecutor.

“Answer that,” the judge told Bello.

“It is not to my knowledge,” the witness said defiantly.

“No further questions, Your Honor,” Brown snarled, stalking away. “Not to his knowledge,” he said derisively as he passed the jury.

Arthur Dexter Bradley, a lanky, red-haired twenty-three-year-old, already had six convictions under his belt by the time of the trial. But unlike Bello, he was locked away in the Morris County Jail, and he had additional charges pending on four armed robberies. He was a poor thief and a worse prisoner: he had tried to escape from jail and failed. He testified that he recognized Carter running down Lafayette Street after the shooting, even though he had only seen Carter once before, two years earlier. Asked by Hull to point out the man he saw running down the street, Bradley pointed to Carter.

“Pointing where,” Judge Larner asked. “Tell us again.”

This time Bradley spoke. “That Negro right there.”

That Negro, indeed. The dividing line of this trial had been clearly drawn, and it cut along race. The prosecutor and his staff were white. The investigators and police officers were white. The judge was white. The victims were white. Their family and friends in the courtroom were white. The state’s witnesses were white. The jury, save one man, was white. The courtroom clerk was white. The courthouse guards were white, and the courthouse attendees were white. Rubin Carter was black, bald, and bearded. His co-defendant was black. His lawyer was black. His alibi witnesses were black. His family and friends who crowded the courtroom were black. Could a white juror look at that contrasting tableau and not be affected? Carter feared not. He believed that once a juror is called to serve the government, he takes on the mantle of the government. The juror is now part of a famous case. He is now part of the system, and he is going to do what the system wants. In Carter’s mind, the juror thinks: Maybe the government didn’t prove it, but they must know something. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.

Carter kept his feelings about race to himself. In fact, he surprised both Brown and John Artis’s lawyer, Arnold Stein, by not complaining of racial prejudice. “With Bello and Bradley, I’d say, ‘Fuck these white sons-of-bitches,’” Brown recalled many years later. “Carter would say, ‘They’re sons of bitches,’ but he wouldn’t say they were white. To this day, I’ve never heard him say a racial epithet.”

Carter and Artis both testified. Carter gave the same account of his whereabouts on the night of the murder that he had already given the police and grand jury. He took the stand wearing the same clothing he had worn that night, including his cream sport coat. Patricia Graham Valentine had testified that she saw two well-dressed Negroes in dark clothes fleeing the bar.

After two and a half weeks of testimony, Ray Brown, in his closing argument, shambled over to the jury box and made clear what he thought this trial was all about: race. He started slowly, noting that the jurors needed to be guided by reason, “not passion, not prejudice, not bias. Reason. Reason. Reason.” He ticked off Carter’s alibi witnesses, who said they were around him between two and two-thirty on the night of the crime, then he reared back and lit into Bello and Bradley. He reminded the jury of the witnesses’ criminal records and that Bello in particular offered testimony that contradicted his previous statements. Is it not reasonable, Brown said, to assume that Bello “is testifying for hope, for favor?” He called Bello and Bradley “jackals” and “ghouls,” said the judge had prevented him from implying that they were responsible for the murders, but “I will imply with all my might” that they were somehow involved.

“Remember what [Bradley] said. It will remain with me forever for a special reason. I remember … he said, ‘That Negro over there.’ What is that, an animal? Well, I will tell you, in his voice it was there, and everything around this case revolves around that simple fact. They were Negro …”

Brown told the jury that his client had lived since 1957 “without a blemish” and that he “is now a human being standing in fear of his life … Can you believe that this man who did not run, who did not hide, did this, did these things? How can you believe this …?” Almost three hours into his summation, Brown reiterated that Carter did not fit the description of the killers; then, exhausted and with tears in his eyes, he closed by denouncing the courtroom proceeding and the city of Paterson.

“This is probably the last place in the entire world where a trial like this could go on,” he said. “Where else would they tolerate three weeks of picking a jury? Where else would they tolerate lawyers sometimes bumbling, sometimes stumbling? … Where else would they tolerate this in the world, where else but here? Why then must this man suffer because he rode the streets of Paterson, minding his own business, a black man driving a white car? I know you won’t stand for it. Thank you.”

The courtroom was stirred by Brown’s stem-winding broadside—muffled sniffles, angry voices—although the jurors sat with stone faces. After the lunch recess, Vince Hull made his methodical summation in a monotone, shoring up maligned witnesses and reconciling contradictions in testimony. Marins could not be held accountable for failing to identify the defendants at the hospital, Hull said, because he was under sedation. The prosecutor acknowledged that financial rewards were offered in June of 1966 to anyone who helped the police solve the crime, but if Bello and Bradley were testifying for money, why did they wait until October? While Hull lacked the drama of Ray Brown, he was able to turn the weaknesses of his case into apparent strengths. For example, the testimony of Bello and Bradley revealed numerous contradictions in their accounts of what happened that night. Bello said he saw three people driving by in a white car. Bradley said he saw four people. Bradley said he saw the car going west on Lafayette Street. Bello saw the car on Sixteenth Street. These and other inconsistencies only proved one thing, Hull said, that these witnesses had to be telling the truth! Lying witnesses would have been more coordinated. “If they were so interested in the reward,” Hull asked, “why didn’t they get their stories straight?”

Hull proved himself a master rhetorician. For example, several character witnesses for John Artis, including Robert Douglas, his pastor, testified that the defendant was a nonviolent, honest young man. Given that no motive was adduced, the jurors might very well doubt that a peaceful, law-abiding kid would brutally kill three people without any provocation. Hull’s response: The character witnesses did not know their man. “What weight can their testimony have as to [Artis] being law-abiding and nonviolent after hearing all of the testimony as to what transpired in and around the Lafayette Grill on the morning of June 17, 1966.” This sophistry bewildered Artis. Hull discredited his character witnesses by citing the very crime that his character witnesses said he was incapable of committing.

Hull finished his summation with a bit of high theater.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, when you retire to the jury room, all of the exhibits in this case that have been admitted in evidence will be in there with you, including this bullet, this .32 S&W long Remington Peters. That will be one of the items that goes into the jury room with you, and after you deliberate upon the facts in this case, and weigh all of them carefully, that bullet, small in size, will get larger and larger and larger, and that bullet will call out to you and say to you, Bello and Bradley told the truth. That bullet will call out to you and say to you that Carter and Artis lied, and that bullet will get louder and larger and it will cry out to you like three voices from the dead, and it will say to you Rubin Carter and John Artis are guilty of murder in the first degree …”

Hull then emptied out three bags of bloody clothes on a table in front of the jury, each bag’s contents in a separate pile. Beside each heap he placed a picture of the decedent whose clothes they were, the photos showing each person laid out on slabs in the morgue.

“There once was a man,” the prosecutor continued, “a human being by the name of James Oliver, a bartender at the Lafayette Grill, and he wore this shirt, and he looked like this when he was placed into eternity by a 12-gauge shotgun shell. There once was a man, a fellow human being by the name of Fred Nauyoks who lived in Cedar Grove, and he had the misfortune of going to the Lafayette Grill on June 16–17, 1966, and this is how his life ended when he was murdered in cold blood with a .32-caliber bullet through his brain. And there once was a human being, a woman by the name of Hazel Tanis, and she wore these clothes, these bullet-riddled clothes, when she was shot, not once, not twice, not three times—four times; two of the bullets passed through her and two remained in her body, and she clung on to life for nearly a month, and on July 14 of 1966 she passed away, and this is what became of this fellow human being.

“Ladies and gentlemen, on the question of punishment, the facts of this case clearly indicate that on the morning of June the seventeenth of 1966, the defendants, Rubin Carter and John Artis, forfeited their rights to live, and the State asks that you extend to them the same measure of mercy that they extended to James Oliver, Fred Nauyoks, and Hazel Tanis, and that you return verdicts of murder in the first degree on all the charges without a recommendation. Thank you.”

The following day, May 26, 1967, Judge Larner gave the jurors lengthy instructions, advising them that they had to return with a unanimous verdict. He also pointed out that “the race of the defendants is of no significance in this case except as it may be pertinent to the problem of identification.” Finally, he turned to a woman who had been seated at a desk beside him throughout the trial. “All right. You may proceed, Miss Clerk.” The woman got up and started to spin the wooden lottery box that held the names of the fourteen jurors. Carter frantically tugged Ray Brown’s coat sleeve.

“What the hell is she doing?” Carter hissed into his ear. “Get her away from that damn box.”

“Shh, Rubin,” Brown whispered back. “She’s only picking the twelve jurors who will decide the verdict. Two of the fourteen will have to go.”

With a sweep of her hand, the clerk pulled the West Indian’s name out of the box, leaving an all-white jury to decide the defendants’ fate. It did not take long. The jurors deliberated for less than two hours, then returned to the courtroom, which quickly filled with spectators and reporters. Court officers searched the purses of entering women to guard against smuggled weapons. There were wild rumors that Carter’s allies, in the event of a guilty verdict, would try to break him out. City detectives, plainclothes policemen, and uniformed officers from the county Sheriff’s Department circled the room and lined the building’s corridors. Outside, patrolmen were on alert that a guilty verdict could trigger riots in the street.

In the courtroom, the four women jurors had tears in their eyes. The others took their seats with bowed heads. Rubin Carter, John Artis, and their lawyers rose from their seats. A hush fell over the room as the jury foreman, Cornelius Sullivan, announced the verdict: “Guilty on all three counts.” After a long pause he continued: “And recommend life imprisonment.”

Carter’s head dropped, but he showed no emotion. Artis’s legs buckled, and he clenched a fist. The stunned silence of the courtroom was suddenly pierced by a scream from Carter’s wife, her prolonged wails sending a dagger into Rubin’s heart and alarming seasoned court observers. “She let out a scream the likes of which I’ve never heard before or since,” said Paul Alberta, a local reporter, many years later. “It was the kind of scream of someone being physically tortured.”

Tee thought the trial would have a Perry Mason ending: a defense attorney would spin around, point to a member of the gallery, and identify the true killer. Now she collapsed to the floor, unconscious; a friend and three attendees carried her limp body out of the room. Judge Larner asked that the jurors be polled to be sure that they agreed with the verdict. Each one announced: “I agree.” One juror, a short, elderly woman with gray hair and glasses, looked at Carter on her way out. “I feel nothing for him,” she said, then pointed to Artis, “but I feel so sorry for him.”

The summer of 1967 was the worst of the decade’s “red hot summers.” From April through August, violence raged in 128 cities from Jersey City to Omaha, from Nashville to Phoenix. The most destructive conflagrations erupted in Newark, where 26 people were killed, and Detroit, where 43 perished. In all, 164 disorders resulted in 83 deaths, 1,900 injuries, and property damage totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Paterson remained calm. The convictions of Rubin Carter and John Artis brought to a close the worst crime in the city’s history. Judge Larner, noting Carter’s “antisocial behavior in past years,” sentenced him to three life sentences, two consecutive and one concurrent. Artis, as a first-time offender, received three concurrent life sentences. The only thing that surprised Carter was that the jury did not recommend the electric chair. Why would a white jury spare the life of two black men found guilty of such a barbaric act? Mercy? Shit! They’ve fried niggers for less. Maybe the jury felt pity for Artis and thus spared them both from the chair. Maybe the jury had doubts about their guilt. It didn’t matter—not now, not ever. One lie covers the world, Carter thought, before truth can get its boots on.

^* Even with Carter in jail, Wegner lost to the reform candidate, Lawrence Kramer.

^* In a letter to Governor Richard Hughes in 1968, F. Lee Bailey, who represented Matzner, wrote: “I have never, in any state or federal court, seen abuses of justice, legal ethics, and constitutional rights such as this case has involved.”