Rubin "Hurricane" Carter

The Story of the Hurricane

For members of a generation, Paterson and Rubin "Hurricane" Carter are synonymous with a song. But Carter's life is much more than what was condensed into Bob Dylan's 1976 protest song.

 

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, shown in a promotional image c. 1950s-1960s

Tufts University

Early life

Born in Clifton, New Jersey, on May 6th, 1937, Carter grew up in Paterson. The fourth child of seven, Carter had a troubled relationship with his disciplinarian father. At age eleven, he acquired a criminal record for assaulting a man with a knife, and was sentenced to a New Jersey juvenile reformatory at age twelve. He escaped the detention center in 1954, climbing through a basement window. Two weeks later he told a recruiter that he was from Philadelphia to hide his New Jersey criminal record, and joined the United States Army.

Completing basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Carter's first duty station was in West Germany. While there, he began his boxing career, joining the U.S. Army Boxing team. In just two years, he won the European Light Welterweight Championship with a record of fifty-one wins and five losses. Shortly thereafter, in June of 1956, he was discharged as unfit for service or duty after four court-martials for disciplinary issues.

After his discharge, Carter returned to the United States. Arrested for a pair of muggings, he was sentenced to prison, and was released in September of 1961. During that year, he became a professional boxer in the middleweight class, and two years later he surprised the boxing world by defeating previous and future world champion Emile Griffith. Carter had a career record of 40 fights - 27 wins, 12 losses, 19 knockouts (KOs), and 1 draw - and was a top-ranked contender for several years until another bell rang, signaling a new, very different round in his life.

 

Neighbors & police stand outside the Lafayette Bar & Grille on July 17th, 1966, the morning after the shooting inside

The Paterson Museum

"Fighting for his Name"

At approximately 2:30 am on June 17^th, 1966, a shooting was reported at the Lafayette Bar and Grill on the corner of East 18^th and Lafayette Streets in Paterson. Reports of a triple murder soon spread, committed with a .32 caliber pistol and a shotgun, and the Paterson police went looking for the suspects. Bartender James Oliver and a customer, Fred Nauyoks, had been immediately killed - another customer. Hazel Tanis would succumb from her wounds a month later in hospital. Willie Marins, a third customer, survived the attack, (losing sight in one eye from his head wound). When questioned, both Tanis and Marins told police the shooters had been black men with a shotgun and a pistol. Ten minutes later, as Rubin Carter, John Artis, and John Royster (Artis at the wheel) drove home from a nearby bar in a rental car - a white 1966 Dodge Polara with New York license plates - they were stopped by the police for the first time that day.

Why the men were stopped the first time has been disputed - some argue he was one of the few cars driving nearby at the time, while others point to racial profiling. Carter and his companions were released from the stop. Meanwhile, two eyewitnesses outside the bar - Alfred Bello and Patricia Valentine (the latter lived above the bar) - described a double-parked getaway car roughly matching the vehicle Carter was driving. A third neighbor, Ronald Ruggiero, concurred. Officers pulled Artis and Carter over a second time (Royster had been dropped at home by this time) at approximately 3:00 am. At this point, the two men were ordered to drive with police to a station house, where they were arrested.

Discrepancies in identification and procedure from this day would be argued over for years. "Clean" lie detector tests of the suspects and witnesses taken at the time and in subsequent years would be pointed to by each side. Police reported finding a .32 caliber bullet under the front seat and a 12-gauge shotgun shell in the trunk of the rental - found during a second search five days after the vehicle was impounded, neither matched those which killed the victims. Neither Carter nor Artis were positively identified by Bello or Valentine. Bello would later admit to acting as lookout for another man, Arthur Dexter Bradley, who was robbing a nearby warehouse, and was found to have money from the bar's cash register. Bellow - and Bradley, who came forward later - "positively" identified Artis; based upon this, Carter and Artis were arrested and charged.

 

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter exiting the Paterson Court House after a portion of his trial. Standing to his right (photo left) is John Artis

The Paterson Museum

The prosecution sought the death penalty during the trial. The defense, led by criminal defense lawyer Raymond A. Brown, focused upon inconsistancies in the identification made by Marins, Valentine, and Bellow, producing witnesses who testified Artis and Carter were still at the other bar (the "Nite Spot") at the time of the shooting. The jury convicted both men of first-degree murder, recommending life sentences instead of execution at the end of the trial in 1967. Judge Samuel Larner imposed three concurrent life sentences for Artis and one concurrent and two consecutive life sentences for Carter.

In 1974, Bello and Bradley made a motion to recant their testimony - the judge denied their motion. Two appeals were filed based upon this, and a motion was later made to the New Jersey Supreme Court. It was at this time that public campaigning began bringing the arrest and trial to national focus, and during this time that Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy co-wrote "The Hurricane," the song most associated with the event and, for many, Paterson. Notably, Dylan would perform this song at the Trenton State Prison on December 7th, 1975, where Carter was concurrently held for some time.


Evidence of Bello and Bradley having made deals in exchange for testimony were unanimously pointed towards by the New Jersey Supreme Court as having failed to disclose and prejudicial to the jury by not being so, and a second trial commenced. After nearly nine hours of deliberation, the jury again found Carter and Artis guilty of the murders and their sentences were reinstated.

Artis was released on parole in 1981, while Carter's legal team continued appealing. The trial went before a federal judge under a writ of habeas corpus, as both men believed they were wrongfully imprisoned. Judge Haddon Lee Sarokin granted a writ, noting the prosecutions had been made "predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure." Many considered the all-white jury to be far from one of "peers" of Artis and Carter, one of several charges of racism made against the original trial. In his ruling, Judge Sarokin said the 1976 convictions were based on ''…an appeal to racism rather than reason, concealment rather than disclosure.” Prosecutors, noting the difficulty of pursuing another verdict after 22 years and with witnesses either unavailable or now considered "unreliable," declined to prosecute, and Carter was freed without bail in November, 1985 at age 48.

 

Later Life

Carter eventually became a Canadian citizen, and lived most of the remaining years of his life in Toronto and Ontario. While in Canada, he became an executive director for the Association in Defense of Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC) and a motivational speaker. In 1993 the World Boxing Council recognized him with an honorary championship title belt. In 1996 Carter would be briefly arrested in Toronto after being mistaken for a suspect in their thirties who sold drugs to an undercover officer - the 59 year old Carter was released upon recognition of the error.

Carter's last round of life began in March of 2012. Diagnosed with prostate cancer, he succumbed on April 10th, 2014. Cared for by John Artis, he surpassed doctor's estimates of up to six months, living past diagnosis by a year and a half. Artis would pass away of an abdominal aortic aneurysm on November 7th, 2021. In the last days of his life, Carter worked on clearing another man of false incarceration: David McCallum, incarcerated for murder in 1985, releasing an opinion piece titled "Hurricane Carter's Dying Wish" two months before his death. On October 15th, 2014, McCallum was exonerated.

Rubin Carter's life inspired movies, songs, and became part of popular culture. But his story was more complex than the often simplified depictions many people are familiar with (the most famous example, Dylan's song, was re-recorded due to legal concerns and takes some artistic liberties). But whether in the ring or in the courtroom, one theme ran consistently through "Hurricane" Carter's life: he was a fighter.