BY THE TIME Rubin Carter arrived in 1967, Trenton State Prison was an anachronism, a fortress frozen in time. Guards began their eight-hour shifts at twenty minutes after the hour—6:20 A.M., 2:20 and 10:20 P.M.—because those times coincided with the arrival of the trolley. But the last trolley ran in 1934. It didn’t matter. The trolley schedule still dictated the prison schedule. Built in 1836, the prison originally lay beyond Trenton, surrounded by open fields. But the city literally grew around the prison. By the sixties, the thirteen and a-half-acre institution was wedged in a working-class neighborhood of Poles, Slavs, and Czechs who toiled in steel mills and factories of their own grim design. To outsiders, the prison was an ominous and inscrutable stronghold, where the roar of an inmates’ softball game conjured up a neighborhood park while tower guards with shotguns, pistols, and gas grenades evoked the power of a police state to crush the criminal spirit.
No one doubted that Trenton State Prison crushed spirits, eighteen hundred at a time, criminal or otherwise, amid the brooding atmosphere of naked electric light bulbs, echoing corridors, walls encrusted with the paint of decades, and the stale air of rooms shut up too long. In this surreal and violent world, prisoners raised rats as pets and hid knives in wooden crucifixes over their cots. Fights among prisoners were common, but there was no handshaking, no touching of gloves, no wishing each other well when the bout was over. Just who was dead and who was alive, and dying in prison carried its own gruesome risks. Some inmates exacted posthumous revenge by mutilating an enemy’s corpse in the prison morgue.
The prison’s decaying innards pushed inmates to the edge of survival, or beyond. In 1973 a radiator pipe erupted in a cell, melting the flesh off a young prisoner named Daniel Hogan.* Summers were a scourge. The stone and brick buildings, with no air conditioning or proper ventilation, heated up like a pizza oven, and the steam pipes glistened with sweat. “Ninety-ninety days” were the worst: ninety-degree temperature, ninety percent humidity. The smallest cells were seven and a half feet long, four and a half feet wide, and seven feet high. The largest cells were less than twice that size; with up to four occupants, a bit of flatulence could set off a melee.
The sounds of the prison—the shrill bells, the cell counts, the wheezing radiators—had their own predictable, hopeless rhythms. So thin were the walls that a prisoner could not brush his teeth without being heard throughout the tier. The ceilings, the floors, the doors, the walls, the toilets, the sinks, the beds—everything was made of steel, including the “breaks,” the noisy contraptions that ran the locking system. Every hour of every day, prisoners heard corrugated steel rasping against corrugated steel, the constant clanging of steel doors opening and shutting in a deafening march to infinity.
An inmate at San Quentin once defined prison as “a metropolis of men without women, a beehive without honey, caged loneliness without privacy, a ranch where all the sheep are black, a cement park with barbed wire shrubbery, and an enormous microscope, under which psychiatrists study the smear from civilization’s ulcers.”
Trenton State Prison was to be different. Its original goal, inspired by reform-minded Quakers, was to keep inmates isolated in relatively large cells, where they could be rehabilitated through solitary meditation, Bible reading, and piecework. The oldest cells, now part of 4 Wing, have oak doors set low so that each time a prisoner enters or leaves he must bend his head in penance. But those fine goals had long since given way to an environment of en masse domination, where multi-tiered cellblocks enabled a few passing guards to monitor hundreds of men in their cages; inmates were subject to up to twenty counts a day.
An invisible web of rules and timetables dictated the prisoner’s every move. According to the Handbook for Inmates, issued to each new arrival, prisoners were to step promptly out of their cell when the prison bell sounded and report to the dining hall, to an industrial shop, or to another assignment. They were to walk in line, two abreast, and maintain good posture with their face held forward, their hands out of their pockets. They could not leave their place in line unless so ordered. Any violation of these rules would result in disciplinary action. An inmate could not spend more than $25 a month at the commissary for cigarettes, soap, toothpaste, and other items, and he could not receive or send more than five letters a month unrelated to his legal case. Each letter was screened by a prison employee.
Rubin Carter knew the rules of Trenton State Prison well. He had spent four years there, beginning in 1957, for robbing three people in Paterson and assaulting one of them. Carter called his crime the most despicable thing he’d ever done, and he served his time. Now, at the age of thirty, he was returning for a crime he said he did not commit. Wrists handcuffed, legs shackled, he was driven in an unmarked police car from Paterson to Trenton, with a different state trooper escorting the car through each county. John Artis rode in a separate car. Carter felt as if he were on public display. Instead of taking the New Jersey Turnpike, the fastest route, the caravan traveled through the small towns along Route 1, which allowed pedestrians to view the quarry.
When Carter reached the prison, he was still in the clothes he wore for his sentencing: an expensive gray suit with a light blue shirt, a gray-blue tie, and black patent leather shoes. He also wore a diamond ring, appraised at $5,000, and a gold watch, and he sported a thick goatee. His hands and feet freed, he walked through the main entrance, a small steel door with a slot of bulletproof glass, and was led down a hall lined with administrative offices, an area known as the Front House. Before him lay two more steel doors, the second of which would put him in the prison proper. But before he left this outer hall, he was taken to a different room. There, the prison began the process of sanding away an inmate’s identity.
Ahead of Carter was an elderly black man with a carefully coiffed shock of silver-tipped hair. He gave his name, age, crime, and sentence to a guard behind a table. Then he disrobed, piled his clothes in a heap, and removed his jewelry. As another guard carted off his civilian belongings, the man submitted to a strip search. Still naked, he received a drinking cup, a spoon, blankets, and a khaki prison uniform with NJSP stenciled on the back and thick black stripes, about the width of a cell bar, along the sides. He also exchanged his name for a five-digit number, 45471. He was now a ward of the state, and his very self seemed to evaporate like a drop of water on a hot stove.
“Next!” roared the guard processing the new inmates. It was now Carter’s turn. “Where do you want your clothes sent? Here, fill out this form.” He threw a pair of striped prison pants on the table in front of Carter. “Take ’em off and put ’em in the box,” the guard said, motioning to Carter’s gray suit.
Carter looked at the guard, looked at the striped pants, then looked again at the guard. He suddenly realized what he had to do. If he was going to maintain his self-respect, if he was going to live with dignity, he had to treat the system as if it did not exist. Of course! He would ignore the prison. Why should I be a good prisoner when I haven’t been a bad civilian? That’s the depth of insanity.
“No,” Carter told the guard. He pushed back the uniform. “I would like to speak to someone in charge.”
The guard became livid. “Oh would ya? Well, people in hell would like a glass of ice water too. C’mon, get those duds off. Move it along. I ain’t got all day to fuck around with fish.”
“Fish,” in prison jargon, were newcomers, but this fish was not moving. The guard called out to his superior, a sergeant, a so-called white hat. (Prison guards at sergeant or above wore white hats; the rest, blue caps.)
“What’s the holdup here?” the sergeant asked.
“This guy’s not getting undressed.”
“What do you mean, not getting undressed?” The sergeant, outraged, looked at Carter. “Get undressed!”
Carter shook his head. “No, I won’t.” The inmates in line began to rustle, guards moved about, and the standoff escalated to a higher officer. The chief deputy keeper, his white hat adorned with a gold braid, walked into the room. He knew Carter from his previous stay.
“Carter, you’ve been here before,” the chief deputy said. “You know what the rules are.”
Carter wanted to reason with him. “Look, I realize you had nothing to do with my being here, and I’m willing to stay here until I can get out. But I’m not doing anything for you. I’m not working for you, I’m not eating your food, I’m not wearing your clothes, and I’m not shaving my goatee. You just tell me where to go, and I’ll go.”
The room was silent as Carter raised the stakes even further. “The one thing I will not tolerate at all is for anybody to ever put their hands on me. Because if anyone does, you’re going to have to kill me. Because if you don’t, I’m going to kill you. So that’s that. We’re straight now.”
Few things in prison were more foolish than disobeying a guard, but threatening to kill the chief deputy was certainly one of them. The chief deputy stared at Carter, face flushed, then barked, “Take him to the warden!” Surrounded by guards, Carter walked through two more sets of steel doors and into the Center, a large rotunda from which the cellblocks radiate out. Moving from one cellblock, or wing, to another required passing through the Center. A guard known as the traffic cop stood on a star and directed these mass movements, as inmates migrated from cellblock to industrial shop to the dining hall to the prison yard. The Center was also the prison’s administrative and communications hub, and now Carter, his bald head glistening, was the focus of attention. He felt the indignant, incredulous eyes of guards, administrators, secretaries, visitors, and inmates. The warden appeared, and the encounter was brief. “Carter, we heard you were coming,” he said. “Are you gonna put these clothes on?”
“No,” Carter replied.
“Take him to the ‘hole’!” Carter walked toward 1 Wing, but nobody touched him.
Trenton State Prison had different levels of solitary confinement, but the “hole” was the most punitive. At the far end of a dim corridor, a hole was literally cut into the wall. Three iron-barred gates guarded the entrance, with steps descending between each gate. About thirty five cells lined the narrow concrete tier. The “hole” was deeper than a grave.
Solitary confinement was to be the rehabilitative cornerstone of Trenton State Prison, sealing inmates from the “vicious association” of congregate living. But the ravages of isolation were soon apparent. Two years after the prison opened, the “keeper,” or warden, concluded that the hermitic life seemed to have little effect on criminal behavior. In fact, it caused deteriorating physical and mental health, “leading to solitary vices and mental degeneration.” This understanding caused Trenton State, among other institutions, to abandon solitary confinement for the general inmate population, using it instead strictly as punishment. It is, aside from capital punishment, the most severe form of legal retribution inside a prison. Nelson Mandela said he found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life, where the human mind played tricks and the pain of loneliness was palpable. After a time in solitary, he said, he relished the company of insects in his cell and found himself on the verge of initiating conversations with a cockroach.
Rubin Carter, still dressed for dinner at the Ritz, walked into the lurid “hole.” There were no showers. No faucet. No toothbrush. No toilet; only a bucket. There were no lights, no books, no contact with guards or inmates. Quiet was the rule, rancid the air. The door’s steel bars were so tightly aligned that Carter could not squeeze his fingers through them. He was fed through an opening at the bottom of the door: one cup of water three times a day, four slices of bread. His bed was a concrete slab.
It was always dark in the “hole,” but there were layers of darkness. Along the corridor hung a wire mesh net; behind it guards sat at desks. The desks had individual lights, so yellowish rays eked through the mesh and fell hazily on the tier. This created an inner and outer darkness in the cell or on the tier, shadows within shadows, silhouettes of stale bread and urinous buckets and shades of passing humanity. Eyes adjusted, Carter could soon see nothingness.
Day after day, he silently fumed but never voiced his anger: a scream signaled that a prisoner was about to break, that the institution had won. Instead, Carter paced. His cell was barely wider than his armspan, but the length accommodated four strides. So Carter paced—one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four—and he seethed. He was furious at everyone: at Bello and Bradley, at DeSimone, at the prosecutor, at the judge, at the jury, at his own lawyer. Teeth grinding, fists clenched, he wanted to destroy everyone who had put him there. One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four. Carter could adjust to the isolation. He had always been a loner, spending countless hours by himself in youth reformatories, in prison, and in training. The near-starvation diet also didn’t bother him; he cared little about food. What he could not tolerate was that the authorities knew his incarceration was unjust. That knowledge—call it conspiracy among the powerful or acquiescence among yes-men—really got him mad. One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four.
Every fifteen days Carter was allowed to take a shower, and every thirty days he received a medical inspection. His suit was rotting off his emaciated body, but he still wore his diamond ring and gold watch. This deprivation did not dull his thinking, and he had a lot on his mind. From now on he only had one goal: to get out of prison. All his time, all his energy, would be dedicated to that objective. He decided he needed to do two things. First, he was going to study the law so that he would be able to direct his lawyers and guide his appeal. Second, he was going to write a book that would tell his life story and his side of the Lafayette bar shootings. He even had a working title: Kill, Baby, Kill. These goals were tall orders. He had never read a law book, let alone a legal brief, and he had never written more than five or six pages for a school assignment. But somehow Carter would learn the law and write his autobiography. He just had to figure out how.
To begin with, however, he had to get out of the “hole” on his terms—without wearing prison garb or giving up his ring, his watch, or his goatee.
One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four.
During one of Carter’s checkups at the prison hospital, the doctor discovered a serious problem. Slumped in a chair, weak, unshaven, his clothes dripping off, Carter was told a detached retina was forming in his right eye. It was probably an injury from his boxing days, and without surgery, vision would be lost in that eye. An operation sounded like science fiction to Carter, but going blind in one eye would end his boxing career, which he fully intended to pursue once he was released. The ophthalmologist wanted to operate in his own clinic, which had better equipment, but prison officials would not permit Carter to leave the institution. Like the authorities who feared he would try to escape after the verdict, the prison administrators feared that he would flee if he were allowed to seek medical care beyond the prison walls. So Carter was admitted to the prison hospital.
After the surgery, he stayed in the hospital for three or four weeks with a patch over his eye. Life was good there. He was able to shower, shave, and wear clean white hospital pajamas. The nurses and other prisoners brought him food and cigarettes—and no convalescence would be complete without some hooch.
Hooch was a sweet wine that prison “brewmeisters” concocted with water, juice, sugar, and yeast. The inmates rustled up the ingredients from kitchen confederates, stirred the potion together, and let it ferment for several days. Hooch emitted a nostril-searing aroma, and anyone caught with it was subject to disciplinary action. But the inmates found creative ways to conceal the smell, such as burying hooch jugs in the prison yard, sprinkling talcum powder on the top of containers, or even storing the wine in an empty fire extinguisher. Now Carter, dying for a drink, created his own hospital still.
He filled some extra water cooler jugs with the water, orange juice, sugar, and yeast. He sealed the top with layers of foil, then punctured it with a long, narrow hospital tube. He put the jug in a cupboard under his bathroom sink and pointed the tube out a small hole in the back wall of the cupboard so the vapors would disappear into the prison’s rotting entrails. Three days later, it was ready to drink. Best damn hooch Carter ever had.
Ingenuity would be Carter’s byword for years to come as he tried to survive prison without complying with its rules. While he was in the hospital, he figured out how he could dress like a free man without violating prison policy. Patients wore white cotton pajamas, and inmates who worked in the kitchen, the barber shop, or the hospital could walk about the prison in their white uniforms. When Carter left the hospital, he asked a prison tailor to turn his white hospital PJs into a respectable-looking uniform. The tailor sewed buttons on the open fly, flared out the legs with extra white material, and stitched on belt loops for a ropy waistband. He turned the pajama top into a tunic, with a high collar, layered front, and buttons. This combination blended in with the other white outfits, and no one demanded that he discard it. He also had to improvise to maintain his shaved head. He could still get Magic Shave in the commissary, but he normally shaved with a butter knife. So he traded some cigarettes for a kitchen spatula, spoons being the only utensils available to inmates, and shaved his head with an implement otherwise used to spread icing on cake.
Carter’s hospital sojourn, however, ended in disaster. When his eye-patch was removed, he saw only blurred images, then blackness. The operation that was supposed to save his right eye had, in fact, taken the eye. Although the doctor claimed he was handicapped by the prison facilities, Carter always believed that the original diagnosis was phony and that the prison intentionally took his right eye to make him vulnerable to attack. Inmate hierarchies are determined by toughness, and Carter had become the equivalent of a legendary but handicapped gunslinger—an easy target for some new quick-draw artist. No prisoner ever did challenge Carter, but the loss of the eye was still devastating. It took years for him to regain his equilibrium fully. And it meant, if freed, he would not be able to resume his boxing career, his only means of making a living.
When Carter was released from the hospital, he was sent not to the “hole” but to 7 Wing, the cellblock designated for “incorrigibles.” He walked down the corridor with one eye and his first pair of glasses, wearing pajamas and slippers. He was #45472, but he still had his ring, his watch, and his goatee, and no one touched him. Indeed, Carter tried to stick to the edicts he’d issued on his first day. He rarely ate in the dining room. Other inmates, particularly the younger ones who called him “Mr. Carter,” respected his celebrity and his warrior reputation, and they helped him maintain his independence by bringing him food. They brought mostly canned goods, beans, and soup, which Carter warmed up with a wire coil. When Carter’s family sent him a birthday cake, a guard crushed it in a search for weapons and handed Carter the crumbs.
He refused to see parole officers, and he rarely worked in any prison shop, even though an inmate’s sentence was reduced one day for each five days he worked. This calculation was meaningless to Carter. He could die in prison, and he would still owe the State of New Jersey two lives. Moreover, he rejected the traditional relationship between prisoner and prison, in which a mix of good behavior and contrition could be used to gain freedom. In his view, any type of parole or reduced sentence simply validated the court’s verdict. It was not freedom that Carter demanded. It was exoneration.
He did submit to four psychological exams, but to him, talking to prison shrinks was aiding and abetting the enemy. In one report, the consulting psychologist Jack Milgram wrote: “During the present interview, Carter was belligerent, held himself aloof from the interview and refused to discuss himself … By his total non-verbal manner, it is assumed that he will be manipulative and violent.”
Carter also loathed meeting with any prison representative because he had more important things to do. He was reading the transcripts of his trial and studying law books in the prison library. He even bought a few through mail catalogues, including a used copy of Black’s Law Dictionary, which opened up a strange and forbidding world. Sua sponte. Inter alia. Nolo contendere. Coram nobis. Writ of mandamus. Writ of error. Carter sequestered himself like a monk in the library, a small rectangular room with old school desks equipped with a writing arm. He tried to read everything that related to his case: about evidence, search and seizure, perjury. Law students who wanted to help prisoners brought Carter copies of legal material from the state library. He learned that an appellate court could overturn his conviction not on the grounds of innocence or guilt but only if the authorities violated any law in securing the conviction.
So he spent months studying the Miranda case, which had been decided by the Supreme Court just four days before the Lafayette bar murders. In Miranda v. Arizona, the high court ruled that a suspect in police custody must be warned that he has the right to remain silent and that he has the right to an attorney. Carter claimed he had never received his Miranda warning; no one even knew about Miranda, he said. He read not only the Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision but also its pedigree: the four cases and their appeals on which Miranda was based. He took notes on a legal pad and compared them with notes he had taken during his trial and with the actual transcripts.
Carter approached his appeal like a prizefight. He had to learn the rules, understand his enemy, overcome his own weaknesses, and execute a strategy. “He spent an incredible amount of time in the library,” said Robert Hatrack, the prison’s director of education. “He minded his own business and pursued his case, every detail.” Cell lights were automatically turned off at 9:30 P.M., but light from the tier fell through the window bars of Carter’s cell door. He sat with his back against the door and caught the pale rays on his books and court documents, and he typed out legal briefs that were used by his lawyer, Raymond Brown, in appealing his conviction to the New Jersey Supreme Court. Said Tariq Darby, the heavyweight boxer from New Jersey who served time with Carter: “He’d be typing his case all night long, and I would tell him, ‘You either innocent or you possessed.’”
On July 15, 1969, the New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed the convictions of Rubin Carter and John Artis with a unanimous vote, 7–0. The appeal failed because Lieutenant DeSimone asserted that he gave Carter the proper warning; the defendant had no way of proving otherwise. Also failing on appeal was the assertion that Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley perjured themselves in exchange for reward money and leniency from prosecutors. Chief Justice Joseph Weintraub said little about the credibility of the state’s two key witnesses. He did write that the ability of the lone survivor, William Marins, to tell what happened on the night of the murders was “obviously impaired” because he had been shot in the head, and “he could contribute little more than that the armed men were Negroes.” Evidently, Marins’s original statements exonerating the defendants didn’t count because he was “impaired,” but his impairment did not preclude him from identifying the race of the killers.
Carter was devastated. Whenever his wife and daughter visited him in prison, he always told them he would be getting out shortly. On one occasion, an inmate was taking pictures of prisoners and their guests; when Tee asked Rubin if they could be photographed, he said absolutely not. “I am a free man.” But on the Saturday after the state supreme court decision, Carter’s family visited, and he felt nothing but shame and humiliation. His legal fees had burned through his savings, and now Tee and Theodora were living on public assistance. Looking at them through the bulletproof glass, Carter wept. As he later wrote in a prison journal about his family’s going on welfare:
They were the first Carters … to accept such a disgraceful position in life … I have never talked about this because, first, it might well embarrass my wife and daughter; and, secondly, I know without a doubt that I am certainly capable of snatching the breath from a person who would make some kind of wrong remark about this situation.
Carter became more intemperate than ever, and his anger spilled over one day in 1970 when he pummeled a mentally disturbed inmate named Wallace. Carter said the man had been about to throw a pot of hot coffee on him in the dining hall and castigated the administration for allowing Wallace to circulate in the general population. But a prison psychiatrist, in a report dated April 24, 1970, said Carter was showing “paranoid symptomatology” and placed him on Thorazine, an anti psychotic drug. It was the last examination he ever submitted to by a prison shrink, for he viewed the head doctors as prison bureaucrats who rubber-stamped the warden’s opinions. The next time a guard came to his cell with a pass for him to see a psychiatrist, Carter said, without looking up, “I don’t have time. I’m busy.”
Trenton State officials had had enough of their obstinate inmate. For reasons never explained to Carter, in 1971 he was transferred about sixty miles north to Rahway State Prison, in Rahway, New Jersey. Built in 1896, Rahway looked like a starfish on steroids, with four wings of mustard brick radiating from a round building with a yellowish dome. It had originally been used as a youth reformatory and was more spacious and less oppressive than Trenton State. The inmates watched movies, shot pool, and had contact visits.
Despite the better atmosphere, a riot broke out on Thanksgiving eve of 1971. An inmate named Clay Thomas, drunk from hooch, walked into an auditorium where other inmates were watching a porno movie and threw a folding chair through the screen. Carter was in the audience, and he tried to convince Thomas, also a former boxer from Paterson, to stop. “Clay, why are you doing this shit, man?” he asked. “If the state police come in here, we’re all grass, and I’m on the top of the list.”
Carter feared a repeat of Attica, the maximum-security prison near Buffalo, New York, which had erupted in a riot less than three months before; forty-three people had been killed. Tensions in the Rahway auditorium rose when the warden, Sam Vukcevich, entered. “Let’s break this shit up, men!” he said. “You can’t win!” Thomas and some of the other inmates—there were six hundred in the auditorium—thought otherwise, and they began threatening the warden and more than twenty guards.
Carter told the boozy crowd that he would have nothing to do with their shenanigans and walked out, with many following him. But a rumble ensued in the auditorium, and Vukcevich was struck from behind with a fire extinguisher and a chair, repeatedly kicked, and stabbed five times with a switchblade. Seven guards were also beaten and taken hostage. About two hundred inmates took control of two prison wings, burning mattresses, looting cells, setting off tear gas, and raping other inmates; they hung a bedsheet from a window declaring, “Remember Attica.” Prison administrators turned off the water and heat. State troopers carrying shotguns circled the institution as massive lights were brought to the scene, lighting Rahway like Yankee Stadium. The riot ended after twenty-seven hours when the insurgents, hung over, cold, and hungry, released the hostages. Governor William T. Cahill sent in Raymond Brown, Carter’s former lawyer, as part of the negotiation team. Vukcevich’s life was saved when an inmate, once an Army medic, used a safety pin and thread to close his wounds. Remarkably, no one was killed in the worst prison riot in New Jersey’s history. Prison officials credited Carter, who had retreated to 3 Wing with other inmates and secured the safety of one guard, with preventing the riot from spreading further.
Carter felt contempt for the “big-time Mao Tse-tungs” who rioted with no purpose in mind and could have gotten everyone killed. But there turned out to be a silver lining for him inside the tear gas cloud. The riot drew the attention of Richard Solomon, a recent film school graduate in New York, who envisioned a movie or documentary about Carter’s life. He visited Carter frequently over the next four years and ultimately played a major role in his becoming a cause célèbre. He was also the rainmaker for Carter’s book. At the time, Carter had completed about a hundred pages, but he had not written a word in several years. Solomon recognized that a book could raise awareness about the case, rallying supporters to Carter’s cause and advancing his own film aspirations. He made a cold call to a twenty-three-year-old editor at Viking Press. Linda Yablonsky read the pages and was impressed by the energy and power of Carter’s writing. She persuaded the publisher to give Carter an advance of $10,000 to complete the manuscript.
Carter was stunned but euphoric. Viking’s commitment gave him some precious dollars to continue his legal appeals. It also meant he had the opportunity to tell his story unfiltered by prosecutors, witnesses, or anyone else. In addition, Carter and Yablonsky developed a close friendship, in which Carter tried to explain himself and his surroundings to his young editor, and she tried to help her author channel his rage into a cohesive narrative. Yablonsky often drove to Rahway for all-day meetings with Carter. At the time, she was having problems in her personal life, but Carter invariably cheered her up with funny stories about his own life or the offbeat characters in a prison. She liked visiting him, then one day realized the oddity of going to prison to feel better about herself. This pattern—Carter’s lifting the spirits of his sup porters, even playing the role of counselor or father figure—occurred several times during his incarceration. The prisoner knew that before these supporters could help him, he had to help them.
Much of the work between Carter and Yablonsky was conducted through the mail. Over a three-year period, his letters took her into his confidence and gave the clearest indication on record of his thoughts. For one thing, they revealed his disdain of the other prisoners. On June 22, 1972, Carter wrote:
I hate their half-ass revolutionary attitudes; their useless, empty rhetoric of would be Cleavers, Newtons and Bobby Seales … They want to be jailhouse-revolutionaries without having to suffer the consequences of being in jail; and then they want to be men instead of the insignificant males that they are—but they don’t know how to go about doing this either. Because they know that they are exactly what they appear to be: a bunch of fuck-up misfits just waiting for the next batch of dope to arrive so they can go back to their cells and continue their dreams about being revolutionaries.
But what emerges most often in these letters are the conflicting waves of Carter’s fury, the desire for destructive vengeance juxtaposed with his loneliness and despair, his righteous anger leavened with touches of pragmatism, vulnerability, and irrepressible flirtations toward his pretty brunette editor. On her visits to Rahway, Yablonsky wore short skirts, which made the guards nervous but also caught Rubin’s eye. On November 7, 1972, Carter wrote:
Dear Little Buddy:
… How are you baby? I hope to “somebody”—somewhere that you’re feeling better than I am; because this place is killing me! I’ve been down in the dumps the past few weeks or so, and can’t seem to pull myself up and out of it, either … There seems to be an ominous undercurrent of something terrible lurking in the deep bowels of this nasty cesspool. It’s intangible—but I can feel it; it is not something that I can put my hands on directly … yet its there everywhere …
The undeniable truth is that most of these jiveassed play-cops really think that every blackman in this joint is basically made up of the same synthetic material. They refuse to differentiate between different people, to recognize and respect a man’s individuality when they come across it, and I’m afraid that shiftless proclivity is going to be their downfall.
Because Rubin is struggling for his life and breath with every ounce of savvy at my command, trying hard to maintain my cool, fighting to stay out from under the ground; but if one of these fools—inmate or cop—fuck up and jeopardize these six long years that I’ve put in here and maybe my eventual freedom, too … I got to kill him! I got to take his life, and once started, I got to wipe-out everything around until I’ve been wasted myself … and that worries me. Because it can happen so easily.
I have no control over my own life, here … I only wish I could build me a hut far out in the fields by myself, and live there alone for the remaining time before going back to court. Because, if I get turned down there, this institution won’t have to come look for me … I’ll come looking for them. Because I’m afraid that my time ain’t long if this nonsense keeps building up the way it is. Morbid, huh? It’s even worse than that, Baby!
… While these stinking jiveassed motherfuckers are still walking around here drinking hooch, fucking fags and getting fucked—talking sideways out of their nasty faces. I hate these bastards! If I had a big bomb, I’d drop it in here even killing my own self; just to rid the world of these useless scum.
So, Linda, I haven’t been writing lately … haven’t even retyped the chapters we worked on yet. But I will. Have no fear. I’ll get myself together pretty soon. Your letter ought to do it. smile You know what? This may come as a surprise to you, but then again it may not … but I’ve actually thought about you a thousand times if I thought about you once. I wanted to write … really I did, I wanted to pour out how I felt; I needed somebody to talk. But again, I was under the impression that you were busy and didn’t wish to be disturbed. But even more than that, the way I was feeling, I might have insulted you. I might have overstepped my bounds, so to speak, because I’m not sure that I would have been able to separate State from Self; keeping this thing strictly on a business basis and not making a damn fool of myself. You know what I mean?
Sometimes a place like this makes insane thoughts for real strange companions. Maybe it’s only because you are the only woman that I come in physical contact with here. Oh well, marks-o-miss, its neither here nor there, but I have been rather concerned about you lately. What? No, don’t laugh … it ain’t funny worth a damn. I’m not the granite rock you make me out to be after all, you see … I like to be warm and cuddly too, sometimes (smile).
Take care of yourself, Baby. Let me hear from you more often, and let me know whenever you think that you’ll be coming out here … I wouldn’t miss that pleasure for nothing in the world. Be good now, you hear? And if you can’t be good … at least be careful. May whoever you worship—bless and keep you,
Always with Love
Rubin
P.S. I’m not trying to “pimp” but I could use some stamps about now. What you say? Well all right, then. (smile) Rubin
Years later, Yablonsky described the letter as “the most fantastic correspondence” she had ever received. And while she considered Carter a very special friend, the two did keep separate “state and self” and maintained a platonic relationship.
Carter’s fears about losing control, about trying to wipe out everything around him, almost came true in one very close call. Unlike his years at Trenton State, where he remained aloof from the general population, Carter became active in inmate politics at Rahway. In the aftermath of riots there, in Attica, and in other prisons, a jailhouse reform movement emerged. It typically featured the organization of inmate committees charged with airing grievances to prison administrators or outside officials. Carter initially ignored the Rahway Inmate Committee, but he then got involved amid the growing concerns of prisoners’ medical conditions, including his own. Problems with his wasted right eye returned. When he began to feel pain, he was sent to a hospital in Newark, where doctors removed the stitches left in the eye from the previous surgery. This deepened Carter’s anger at his medical mistreatment in prison. At the same time, Carter learned that another Rahway inmate had died, apparently from lack of medical attention. Faced with these concerns, he decided to plunge into prison politics.
Like most prisons, Rahway had conflicting factions—Muslims, Italians, Hispanics, urban blacks, and others. Carter sought the support from the toughest man in each group, who collectively made up the leaders in the prison. Promising to expand prisoners’ rights and improve conditions, Carter was elected chairman of the Rahway Inmate Committee. He changed the name to the Rahway People’s Council and pushed for humanitarian changes, such as replacing the long, impersonal dining tables with smaller tables for four. Carter, who was still wearing his own clothes, typically dungarees, prodded the administration to allow all prisoners to wear civilian clothes, mustaches, and beards, to permit televisions in cells, and to install two pay phones on each wing. There were plans to increase the medical staff. Carter demanded that prisoners be treated with respect and that they take pride in themselves. “Don’t leave your manhood at the front gates and expect to pick it up on your way out,” he would say.
The changes reflected the reform spirit of the time, and some would have taken place without Carter’s prodding. He remained the consummate rebel—he wore a black turban because he knew it was forbidden—and his growing power base was seen as a threat to the administration. He and the warden, Robert Hatrack, the former education director at Trenton State, clashed over such issues as Carter’s desire to turn Rahway’s administrative segregation area—its version of the “hole”—into a holding center for refugees. Carter, according to prison reports, talked openly about “getting rid of Hatrack” and allowing the inmates to run the prison. Hatrack believed that he was out of control. When Carter signed a consent form on March 7, 1974, allowing a photographer to shoot his picture, Carter scratched out “inmate” at Rahway Prison and wrote “God.” Was he delusional or simply tweaking his captors? The administration wasn’t taking any chances.
On April 30, tensions in the prison were high with rumors of a “lockdown,” in which all inmates were confined indefinitely to their cells. Carter called a meeting in the prison’s Drill Hall at 7 P.M. Standing on a table and using a microphone, he gave a speech before two hundred inmates. According to prison records, Carter criticized the administration for being untruthful and disparaged the medical and education departments and the prison food. But he also urged restraint, pleading with the inmates to channel their grievances through the council. “We don’t want revolution but evolution,” Carter declared. “We have won the battle [in prison improvements], but we’re losing the war because we’re not working as one. Your committee knows what to do with the victory … Rioting,” he said, was not necessary, but he exhorted the inmates “to make the state serve you and not you serve the state.” He concluded: “If there is going to be a fight around here or if there is going to be any killing, I will be the first to die.” Carter stepped down to cheers.
Later that night, Carter lay on his cot reading the galleys of his autobiography, The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472. These pages were the climax of an arduous two-year struggle for Carter, who could not read without moving his lips. Often sitting shirtless in his cell, he would run his index finger down the pages of a pocket dictionary. When he found the right word, he voiced each letter and searched his antiquated Underwood typewriter for the corresponding key. He struck each one with the focus and intensity of a left jab. To a prisoner in a nearby cell, L. J. Cochran, the pecking sounds all night long tap, pause; tap, pause—were the equivalent of Chinese water torture.
Carter spent many nights scrubbing the typewriter’s metal hammers with steel wool so that the letters printed cleanly. He bristled at Yablonsky’s cuts and objected to Viking’s title, believing that the reference to #45472 was dehumanizing. Still, he was proud of his achievement, confident that his story—a rending mix of impassioned grievances and operatic violence (in Paterson, in youth reformatories, in the Army, in the boxing ring)—would pierce the conscience of readers and generate support for his cause.
Carter’s joy that evening, however, was tempered by a growing unease. Nighttime was hazardous for inmates who ran afoul of the administration. Guards rarely beat inmates during the day, lest other prisoners intervene and set off a full-scale riot. But at night, when inmates were locked in their cells, guards could deliver their punishment discreetly.
The tier lights were supposed to be dimmed at 10 P.M., but tonight the lights stayed on. Any deviation from the clockwork schedule was ominous. Carter knew that the Drill Hall meeting had not been sanctioned by the administration, that his day of reckoning had finally come. And he knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to fight. He had spent fifteen of his thirty-six years behind bars, and now he would take out as many guards as he could before they took him out. Carter put away his glasses and peeled off his dungarees and T-shirt. He pushed his footlocker and his desk in front of his door. He put on a black hooded sweatshirt and matching black sweatpants, then smeared Vaseline across his face as a protective layer against Mace and pulled up the black cowl, the better to slip the guards’ heavy clubs. He sat, waited, and watched. Finally he heard the rumblings of heavy boots, first softly, then louder, echoing up the metal stairs and along the concrete corridor. His door was solid except for a rectangular opening at eye level, and Carter watched as a battalion of guards, at least twenty, surrounded his door. They wore riot helmets with plastic shields over their eyes, bulletproof vests, and combat boots; they carried riot sticks and Mace. One held a video camera to film the impending furor. If they killed Carter, they could show it was self-defense. The Hurricane, sweating as in the old days, his eyes narrowed, was ready to rumble.
There was a knock on his door and Bobby Martin, a squat, rugged North Carolinian with blond hair, peered inside. Martin commonly took his beefs with prisoners out in the yard, where he and his foe took their shirts off and settled the matter in a straight-up fight. Martin usually won. Carter admired his toughness, and a friendship had blossomed. A few years earlier, two Muslim prisoners cornered Martin on 4 Wing, and the guard had no escape. Carter suddenly appeared and told the inmates, “If you want him, you’re going to have to take me first.” The Muslims left; Martin didn’t forget.
The guard was off duty when he heard that Carter was in trouble, and he was still in civilian clothes when he reached Carter’s door.
“Hey, Rube, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Carter said. “But they’re coming to get me.”
“I don’t know where you’re going, but I just know you’ve got to go. What are you going to do?”
“Whatever’s necessary.”
“Rube, they told me you’re going to kill the first four people who go in there.”
“Yeah?”
“Who do you think is going to be the first one in there, Rube?” After a long pause, Martin answered his own question: “Me.”
“Aw, shit; this is supposed to be your night off!” Carter said.
“You can knock out the first twenty that come in, but it makes no difference. There will be twenty more.”
“Bobby, I’ve got my galley proofs here. This is my way out. I can’t let them take this because I know that’s what they’re going to do.”
“Rube, if you put the manuscript in your pants, I’ll cuff you and go wherever they send you. I’ll make sure the manuscript stays safe and gets sent wherever it needs to go.”
Carter pondered the offer. “You would do that?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
Carter was immediately brought before a prison tribunal called the Adjustment Committee, three people who conveniently enough all worked for the prison. Neither Carter nor any other prisoner could be transferred from Rahway unless he was found guilty of violating prison rules. The committee promptly found Carter and four other council leaders guilty of “inciting and holding an illegal meeting.” Prisons often crack down on ringleaders and make examples of them to the rest of the inmates. In this case, Carter and Tommy Trantino were singled out. Trantino, like Carter, was a charismatic prison rebel who had been convicted in 1964 for slaying two police officers. Nicknamed “the rabbi”—he was half Jewish, half Italian—Trantino became New Jersey’s first long-haired inmate when he refused to cut his hair on Death Row in Trenton, and he published a book about prison life just a few months before the Drill Hall incident. While the other three inmates found guilty of inciting were transferred to Trenton or Leesburg State Prison, Carter and Trantino were ordered to the “Vroom building.”
Carter had been inside the New Jersey corrections system since he was fourteen, and he thought he knew of every holding cell, every assignment center, every death trap, in the statewide complex. But he had never heard of the Vroom building; he just knew the name had a wicked ring. With Martin at his side and a restraining belt around his waist, Carter was hauled down to Trenton. But instead of going to the state prison, he was driven along a winding country road. The car stopped at a huge, Gothic-looking structure set back from the road on desolate grounds. Carter later learned that this was the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, and behind it was a small brick building officially known as the Vroom Readjustment Unit, or VRU, which held the criminally insane and other incorrigibles.* Sending prisoners to a mental hospital recalled the Soviet treatment of dissidents, and Carter was not prepared for the experience. He gave the galley proofs to Martin; then, still shackled, he entered the VRU in the dead of night. A guard walked him down a long gray corridor to a set of sliding doors that opened automatically. After they walked through, the doors closed—but the next set of doors stayed sealed. For a long moment they were trapped, interred in the stomach of a century-old building … until the other doors opened. Carter stepped through quickly. He was led down another corridor lined with human cages, from which soft cries and occasional screams escaped. The front of the cells was lined with steel mesh, which prevented the prisoners from throwing feces at passersby.
The Vroom building was defined by the isolation it imposed. The inmates rarely left their cells except for brief trips every few days to a prison yard. Meals were served in the cells. The units had cement extrusions that prevented communication with adjacent inmates, and the guards refused to talk to or even acknowledge the existence of their captives—except at night, when Carter saw and heard guards beating and brutalizing prisoners.
Carter, fortunately, had help on the outside. His transfer was publicized in newspaper stories, and lawyers who specialized in prisoners’ rights filed a suit in federal court alleging that the State of New Jersey illegally transferred Carter and Trantino to the VRU. In the meantime, Dave Anderson, a sports columnist for the New York Times who had written previous stories about Carter in Rahway, visited him at the VRU. It was a blistering June day, and as Anderson was escorted down a hallway, he heard an odd hiss. He looked around and noticed old radiators chugging out heat. Heat! Anderson met Carter in a small windowless room, and as the interview progressed, the temperature rose and the room became a sauna. Both men were sweating and, after twenty minutes, Anderson had had enough.
“Rubin, this has nothing to do with you,” he said, “but coming in here I heard this hissing, and I heard the radiator was on, and it’s ninety-five degrees out!”
“In the winter,” Carter replied, “they turn the motherfucker off.”
He would not be in the Vroom building much longer. After a hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Clarkson S. Fisher ordered that Carter and Trantino be released from the VRU, ruling that their due process rights had been violated and that “inciting” was not a recognizable offense under the prison’s disciplinary rules. Carter’s suit for damages was not resolved for nine more years, but after ninety two days he was freed from the clammy purgatory of the New Jersey corrections system. Carter was returned not to Rahway, however, but to the more restrictive Trenton State Prison. Little did he know that the biggest surprise in his legal battle was about to occur.
* The death resulted in the dismissal of two guards for neglect of duty.
* The building was named after New Jersey’s former governor Peter D. Vroom, Jr., who advocated prison reform in the 1830s.