FRED HOGAN DID NOT believe it. He read the newspaper clips over and over again, the ones his father had just sent him. It was the summer of 1967, and the clips showed Rubin Carter leaving the courthouse in handcuffs and triumphant headlines announcing his conviction. “Holy shit,” Hogan kept muttering. Sitting on his Army cot in Augsburg, Germany, where he served in the 24th Infantry Division, Hogan was thousands of miles from his home in Jersey City. He had boxed as a teenager, and he had met Carter a few times at his training camp in Chatham. (Hogan’s father, a jailhouse guard, knew Carter’s manager.) Hogan had been mesmerized by Carter’s left hook and by his rhetorical jabs urging youngsters to stand up for themselves and act like men. Carter had given Hogan an autographed red and yellow poster promoting one of his Madison Square Garden fights, and Hogan hung the memento in his Army barrack. After Carter was charged with the Lafayette bar murders, Hogan’s father began sending him newspaper articles about the unfolding drama. The whole thing—the arrest, the trial, the conviction—smelled rotten. If the jurors really believed that two black men shot down three white people, they would have fried the killers. There was no mercy for blacks in Paterson, not in the sixties. And Hogan never believed that Carter would have wasted three people with a shotgun. He would have used his hands.
Discharged from the Army in 1968, Hogan returned to New Jersey and landed a patrolman’s job on the Atlantic Highlands police force. His Irish-Catholic, blue-collar upbringing gave him an affinity for the underdog; he only issued about ten tickets in two years and was more inclined to buy a bum a cup of coffee than to shoo him off the streets. That way he also made a friend. When he noticed a newspaper ad for job openings in the New Jersey Public Defender’s Office, he figured that would be a better way to help people in need. The job paid more as well, $8,600 a year. He was hired as an investigator in the department’s Monmouth County bureau.
Hogan had not contacted Carter since returning to the States. But his new job often took him to New Jersey’s prisons. On one visit to Rahway in late 1970, he decided to see Carter. They met in a visiting room, and Hogan immediately noticed that Carter was not wearing a standard brown prison uniform but some kind of modified white doctor’s outfit.
“Rubin Carter, my name is Fred Hogan, and you probably don’t remember me,” he began, explaining that he had visited Carter at his training camp.
Carter indeed had no memory of Hogan, who was now heavyset, had a thick handlebar mustache, and wore leisure suits.
Hogan got to the point: “I think you got fucked.”
Carter nodded but said little. He didn’t trust strangers under any circumstance, and when they visited him in prison, he felt he was on display in a cage, like a tiger in a zoo. “How do you know?” Carter asked.
“Based on what I’ve read, and I’d like to find out more.”
“You can do what you want.” Carter shrugged. The meeting ended quickly and edgily.
Hogan’s blunt, street-smart style made him popular among the inmates. After the Thanks-giving Day riot at Rahway, prisoners asked that he represent them on a negotiating committee with the administration. Hogan had another important attribute, tenacity, and it slowly won Carter over. He was willing to investigate Carter’s case on his own time, initially outside the auspices of the Public Defender’s Office. He got his own copy of the trial transcripts plus other court exhibits not available to Carter, and on weekends he drove the hundred-mile round-trip to Rahway. While sipping black coffee and piling up cigarette butts, Hogan and Carter pored over the record from the two-and-a-half-week trial.
“I believe you didn’t do it, but the truth has nothing to do with this,” Hogan told Carter during one meeting. “You can be antisystem if you want, but the only way you’re going to get out of here is through the system. You have to show me where you were wrongfully convicted.”
“Bello and Bradley,” Carter said, stressing the same points that Ray Brown had made in the trial: Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley committed perjury in exchange for reward money and leniency from the prosecutors for their own crimes.
Bello, as it happened, was back in jail for burglary by 1973, and Hogan heard through the prison grapevine that he was saying he was “troubled” by his Lafayette bar testimony. Hogan knew that the five-year statute of limitations for perjury had expired, so it was clear what had to be done. “If Bello and Bradley lied,” he told Carter, “then the key is getting them to recant.” Such statements, he assumed, would force the authorities to give Carter a new trial.
Hogan’s decision to investigate Carter’s case—on his own time—befit his maverick style, but he could also be irresponsible. He drank too much scotch and vodka, once rolling a state car while intoxicated.* His solo style in the Carter case irritated his superiors. They eventually assigned the case to him officially, but they feared his friendship with Carter and his willingness to devote so much of his own time could compromise the investigation. Hogan, in fact, did use poor judgment. He held Carter’s advance money for The Sixteenth Round, assuming a fiduciary responsibility for a client of the Public Defender’s Office. He thought he was doing Carter a favor, but Passaic County prosecutors later depicted Hogan as less Carter’s advocate than his business partner. Hogan’s chumminess with Carter also did not sit well with certain colleagues, and the investigator received anonymous letters at work branding him a “nigger lover.”
But Hogan was also the first true believer, someone outside Carter’s circle of friends and family who believed in his innocence. Unlike many later supporters, who saw Carter as a symbol of racial injustice in America, Hogan studied the details of his case and saw it as the fight for one man’s freedom. In the years ahead, Carter often said that he would have died in prison if not for Fred Hogan.
While Hogan prowled New Jersey for Bello and Bradley, Richard Solomon had much bigger ambitions. The young film graduate from New York University wanted to make the Hurricane’s fight for freedom part of the cultural zeitgeist. Solomon originally approached Carter strictly for his own reasons. He believed the convict’s life would make a compelling screenplay or documentary. Solomon had no film credits to his name, but he had watched Carter box on television and was captivated by his black-hat image. He was not particularly interested in the truth about the Lafayette bar murders or even in Carter’s innocence or guilt. Young, ambitious, and desperate for a break, he simply wanted a good story.
Solomon sent letters to Rahway after the Thanksgiving riot but never received a response. He finally went to the prison himself and saw Carter under the guise that he represented an attorney. (His father was a prominent labor lawyer.) Carter’s hard stares and stiff body language intimidated Solomon—he’s no Sidney Poitier, he thought—but he made his pitch: he wanted to make a film about Carter’s life, and if he made money on the project, Carter would make money. All he needed was Carter’s cooperation.
Carter initially resisted the offer. He thought this affluent but sheltered, skinny Jewish kid from Manhattan, sitting in this New Jersey prison, was from Mars. But Solomon kept returning to Rahway. Early sessions between the two were rocky, as Carter, scowling, rebuffed any questions. But he soon recognized that Solomon could help him. He did not really care about making money, but he hoped Solomon, through a film or other connections, could drum up support for him. Carter had nothing to lose, so he opened up and talked freely about his childhood in Paterson and his Army and boxing days. At the same time, Solomon shared his own fears about trying to make something of his own life, of the months he spent holed up in his parents’ apartment, of living up to family expectations, of his relationship with his girlfriend. Carter spoke to Solomon’s parents on the phone about their son. A close bond formed, and Carter became a surrogate father for the young man.
During this process, Solomon became convinced of Carter’s innocence. He had no doubt that Carter was capable of violence, even brutality, but he also concluded that Carter was thoughtful, calculating. The prosecutors’ theory—that Carter shot a room full of people, then picked up a neighborhood alcoholic, John “Bucks” Royster, then casually drove around the streets of Paterson until the police picked him up—didn’t make sense. Carter would have had to be both brutal and stupid, and he wasn’t stupid. Solomon still wanted to make a film, but now he decided he would directly help Carter’s fight for freedom.
While Hogan searched for new evidence, Solomon plotted ways to give Rubin’s plight “an aura of Greek tragedy.” With the civil rights era ebbing, he believed he could tap into pools of white guilt over continued racial inequities in the criminal justice system. While the publication of The Sixteenth Round, expected in the fall of 1974, might help, Solomon needed a respected journalist to investigate the case and legitimate Carter’s claims of innocence. He found Selwyn Raab.
In the fall of 1973, Solomon read a profile about Raab’s investigative work concerning the murders of two young career women in Manhattan ten years earlier. A young black man, George Whitmore, had allegedly confessed to the crime, but Raab pursued the story for eight years, initially for the New York World-Telegram and Sun, and uncovered exonerating evidence. Whitmore was eventually freed. Raab wrote a book about the case, and CBS bought the screen rights for a movie, transforming the rumpled reporter into a bald detective named Kojak. The success of the movie led to the Kojak series on television.
Living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Raab had boxed as a youngster, had a soft spot for underdogs, and was aware of the commercial value of breaking a big story. He was working at WNET, New York City’s public television station, when he got a call from Solomon. The journalist agreed to look into the matter but told Solomon—and later Carter—that if his investigation proved Carter guilty, he would report exactly that. He read the trial transcripts, visited Paterson, and conducted interviews and quickly became skeptical of the state’s case. In Paterson he retraced the steps of Bello and Bradley and concluded that Bradley had lied when he testified that he was standing outside the Ace Sheet Metal Company when he saw Carter driving down the street. The metal company was in a depressed lot, and Raab thought a clear view of a passing car was impossible.
Raab, who was no stranger to jailhouse interviews, spoke at length to Carter and found him convincing. He also interviewed John Artis and found nothing in his background or character that would explain the savagery for which he had been convicted. Finally, Raab found the defendants’ behavior on the night of the crime—specifically, picking up Royster like a limousine service after allegedly shooting four people in cold blood—ridiculously inconsistent with guilt.
Like Hogan, Raab believed the key to raising doubts about Carter’s guilt was finding Bradley and Bello. If Bradley was lying, maybe Bello was too. So Raab and Hogan worked together, tracking down Bello in Bergen County Jail in November 1973. Bello hinted that he hadn’t told the truth, but he wouldn’t talk in specifics; he then made bail and disappeared. Shortly thereafter, Raab was promoted to executive editor at WNET and had to give up his reporting. He handed his files over to a balding, bespectacled reporter named Harold Levinson, who continued the hunt with Hogan. When they found Bradley in May 1974 at his home in Wayne, New Jersey, he initially greeted them with a baseball bat in hand.
Like Bello, Bradley had also told fellow prisoners over the years that he had lied in the Carter case to save his own skin. Hogan and Levinson told him that now the five-year statute of limitations for perjury had expired, and they wanted his help. In a four-hour conversation in a parking lot behind his home, Bradley walked off a few times, but he was also angry with the police for not coming to his defense after his most recent arrest. He finally acknowledged that he had not seen anyone the night of the crime and that he had been pressured into testifying by police. He signed a statement of recantation.
That left Bello to seal the story. But by June Raab was back in the hunt. He had taken a job as a reporter with the New York Times, and he renewed his investigation. He found Bradley, who repeated his recantation. Then, in September, Bello resurfaced in Bergen County Jail, serving a nine-month sentence for burglary. This time he was ill, despondent, battling alcoholism—and angry with Lieutenant DeSimone, who had not kept him out of jail. So Bello talked, separately, to Raab, Hogan, and Levinson. And Bello too signed a statement of recantation.
Before Raab wrote his story, he drove to Paterson to interview DeSimone. Sitting in the lieutenant’s small office, Raab told him about the recantations. “These guys are liars,” DeSimone said. “We don’t manufacture witnesses.” When Raab persisted, DeSimone, who was coatless, leaned back in his chair, allowing a clear view of his sidearm holster. “I have a bad heart,” he told Raab. “If I go out, maybe you’ll be going with me.” He patted his gun.
“Who’s going to believe a scrawny reporter like me took you on?” Raab replied. “I have a job to do.”
DeSimone then brusquely kicked him out of the office. As Raab recalled years later, “DeSimone screamed invectives that would make a piano player in a whorehouse blush.”
For Rubin Carter, Raab’s arrival at the Times was a godsend: now the story that eviscerated the state’s case against him had the imprimatur of the country’s most powerful newspaper. Raab’s lengthy front-page article on September 27, 1974, did more than describe the recantations. It also depicted Passaic County investigators, particularly DeSimone, as bullying racists who were willing to do whatever necessary to convict Carter and Artis. “There’s no doubt Carter was framed,” Bradley said in the article. Both Bello and Bradley said that in return for false testimony, they were promised favorable treatment on criminal charges that each man faced. After Carter’s murder trial, for example, Bradley pleaded guilty to robbery and other charges in five different New Jersey counties. He could have received prison terms totaling more than eighty years. Instead, he served only three years. “There’s only one reason I testified,” Bradley said. “That was all the time” he could serve in prison. “They never would have got me to talk otherwise. I saw a way out of my own mess.” Bello also said he had committed perjury in hopes of receiving the reward money.
Both Bello and Bradley told Raab they were recanting out of remorse. Bradley said his conscience troubled him, and “sooner or later, I knew the truth would come out.” In addition, Bello said his recent arrest for burglary showed “the cops are out to get me anyway, and there’s no reason for me to protect them anymore.” Bello repeated his accusations in a press conference that day, although the handcuffed prisoner would not allow news cameras to shoot him head-on.
The most incendiary part of the Times’s article was the racist comments attributed to law enforcement officials in Paterson or Passaic County. According to Bello, detectives referred to Carter and Artis as “niggers, Muslims, animals, and murderers.” They told him he would be performing a “public service” by “getting them off the streets,” thereby protecting whites. “They told me, ‘Help your own people,’” Bello said, “and I went for it.” Raab, describing his brief but fiery encounter with DeSimone, wrote that the lieutenant said these comments were “nonsense,” then “ordered this reporter to leave his office.”
The timing of the article could not have been more propitious for Carter. It came one month after Richard Nixon had resigned from the presidency, when government cover-ups and official corruption dominated the news. The analogy between Watergate and Carter’s case was promptly established in an October 3 editorial in the Times, “New Jersey Justice.” Calling for the case to be reconsidered by the New Jersey courts, the editorial concluded, “[If] Watergate taught nothing else, it did teach there is no greater threat to society than illegal abuse of power by those sworn to uphold the law.”
The Sixteenth Round had also just been released. Even critics who faulted the book’s excessive finger pointing—at duplicitous boxing promoters, perfidious prosecutors, and white America in general—had to acknowledge that the recantations bolstered Carter’s claim that he had been framed.* But Carter knew that his autobiography and the Times article were not enough to broaden his support. He needed to reach the masses. He needed public outcry. He needed an advertising man, and he found one in George Lois.
The son of a Greek florist, Lois became Madison Avenue’s wunderkind in the 1960s by designing outlandish, arresting covers for Esquire magazine. There was Richard Nixon, in 1968, receiving a makeover with lipstick, nose powder, and hair spray; a smiling Lieutenant Calley, on trial for the My Lai massacre, photographed with four Vietnamese children; and Muhammad Ali, posing as the martyr Saint Sebastian—head tilted in anguish, arms behind his back, and bloody arrows affixed to his body. Lois, screaming, scheming, coaxing, persuaded Jack Nicholson to pose nude, cigar in hand, for a cover, but it was killed before publication. Fiery resolve was the lanky adman’s trademark. He once got kicked out of his YMCA in Manhattan for fighting during pickup basketball games, but he was readmitted after he got testimonial letters from Bobby Kennedy, Mickey Mantle, and other luminaries he rubbed shoulders with in the overlapping worlds of politics, sports, and advertising.
Lois, like many boxing fans, had followed Carter’s case in the newspapers and figured Carter was guilty, that the murders were a doomed extension of the hostility he showed in the ring. Then Lois got a call from Solomon, who asked if he wanted to help drum up publicity for Carter. Lois was already reading The Sixteenth Round. When he finished, he called Solomon back and expressed interest. Solomon, who had been rebuffed by other advertising executives, cautioned Lois that if he took up Carter’s cause, he could lose clients. “Hey, schmuck, you working for or against this nigger?” Lois said. “I’ll do it.”*
Lois visited Carter in Trenton State and mapped out a full campaign that included a large celebrity drive, fund-raising activities, bumper stickers, videotapes of Rubin speaking, brochures invoking Watergate, and a T-shirt that read: “The Only Innocent Hurricane.” In March 1975, Lois bought a one-column, three-inch ad on page 2 of the New York Times. Signed by Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, No. 45472, it began: “Counting today, I have sat in prison 3,135 days for a crime I did not commit. If I don’t get a retrial, I have 289 years to go.”
Lois understood the nexus of celebrity, media, and public opinion, and he knew he needed to repackage Carter for the masses—or at least the white masses. Carter was not simply an angry black man fighting for his freedom but a victim of racial bias whose plight defined America. In one publicity brochure, Carter was photographed behind bars with the tag line: “All who love America would love to see this man free.” Lois believed that Carter was innocent, but he also recognized that the former boxer could fill a political void. At the time, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate had run their course. The political left was complacent. Rubin Carter, charismatic, persuasive, betrayed, could change all that.
By the spring of 1975, Lois and Solomon had launched the Hurricane Trust Fund to raise money for legal expenses. They sought out power brokers and business leaders, the gorgeous and the glamorous, attaching them to the masthead like amulets. Lois worked his connections in the worlds of sports, entertainment, business, and politics. The pitch was straightforward. The only witnesses who placed Carter at the scene of the crime now admit they lied. There were no fingerprints, no murder weapons, no motive; just a bunch of redneck cops off the Jersey turn pike. There was already talk about an executive pardon from New Jersey’s governor.
“Of course Carter’s innocent!” Lois would yell at a prospective supporter. “But all he’s asking for is a new trial!”
Solomon courted celebrities differently. Viewing them as jaded stars desperate for a new thrill, he said he had something to offer that was better than money or drugs or fancy cars or pricey furs. “Hey, you want to go to a maximum-security prison?” he would tell a potential backer. “You can meet a black guy they say has killed three people.”
The entreaties worked. A slew of celebrities, white and black, put their names on the Hurricane Fund or spoke out on Carter’s behalf. From Hollywood came Dyan Cannon, Ellen Burstyn, William Friedkin, and Burt Reynolds. Entertainers included Roberta Flack, Harry Belafonte, Stevie Wonder, Ben Vereen, and Johnny Cash. The presidents of Bristol Myers Products and Gulf & Western Industries wrote to the governor of New Jersey. There were politicians: Congressman Ed Koch, Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton, Mayor Lee Alexander of Syracuse, and Mayor Kenneth Gibson of Newark. Also signing on were Claude Brown, Coretta Scott King, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Geraldo Rivera, Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, Henry Aaron, Walt Frazier, and Don King.
Carter held court for these big-name entertainers. The talk show host Mike Douglas interviewed Carter from prison, with Dyan Cannon, a flower in her hair, sitting nearby. Tom Snyder arrived for an appearance on the Tomorrow show. “I have not been rehabilitated because I have not committed a crime,” Carter told the silver-haired host. “I was making $100,000 a year at the time. Why should I stick up a bar for pennies?”
Lois and the others visited Carter in rented Rolls-Royces and Ferraris. The adman wanted to create the impression that financial heavyweights were backing Carter, a tactic that might convince New Jersey’s governor to grant Carter a pardon. Lois also figured that blue-collar guards would associate wealthy supporters with political power and therefore not mistreat Carter lest the entire prison bureaucracy suffer. These supporters were soon promoting the idea of Carter’s running for public office while Solomon wrote his screenplay and sold it to two independent movie producers. (It was never made.)
Muhammad Ali was Carter’s most high-profile advocate. The heavyweight boxing champion, who was friendly with both Lois and Carter, admired those who bucked the system and refused to compromise with the powers-that-be. His world title had been stripped from him in 1967 after Ali, a Muslim, refused to serve in the armed forces on religious grounds. Ali now saw Carter as a kindred spirit, a black man who had been unfairly punished because of his race. As Ali promoted his October 1, 1975, fight with Joe Frazier, the “thrilla in Manila,” he pleaded Carter’s case in television appearances, to newspaper reporters, and even in the Ali-Frazier fight program. Ali handwrote, in a sloppy blue scrawl, that he and Frazier didn’t like each other but they agreed on one thing: “We dedicate ourselves to doing all we can in helping free Rubin Hurricane Carter, a Great Man who was unjustly imprisoned.” In a rare show of amity, both Ali and Frazier signed the note.
Public backing for Carter slowly grew. The NAACP compared Carter’s case to the Scottsboro trial. A group based in Newark, the New Jersey Defense Committee, collected fifteen thousand signatures demanding that Brendan Byrne, the state’s low-key governor, free Carter. More than a dozen elected officials from New Jersey and New York appealed to Byrne to order an investigation into the handling of the case. Mayor Gibson of Newark declared September 6 “Rubin Carter Day” in his predominantly black city. That same day, the nearby city of East Orange renamed one of its main thoroughfares “Justice for Rubin Carter Avenue.” Nelson Algren, the radical novelist known for bestsellers like The Man with the Golden Arm, moved to Paterson in December 1974 to research Carter’s case.*
Lois’s strategy paid off as Carter’s cause took on the accouterments of an antiwar protest or a civil rights demonstration. On October 17, 1975, Ali led a one-mile march through Trenton on Carter’s behalf, culminating in a rally of sixteen hundred shouting, shoving demonstrators outside the state capitol. Using a microphone on the State House steps, surrounded by Muslim bodyguards carrying walkie-talkies, Ali called Carter’s case “New Jersey’s Watergate,” blithely predicted that Carter would be freed in a few days, and extended his hand to an unlikely comrade. “I’d like to thank my number one friend, Joe Frazier,” who joined the protest march less than three weeks after Ali had beaten him in their brutal fight.
Protesters hoped to pressure Governor Byrne to grant Carter and Artis executive pardons, which would end the case with their release, or clemency, which would release them from prison temporarily, until the judicial proceedings were completed. One protest sign wryly noted: “Gov. Byrne: Release Carter & Artis, win two sure votes.” Another said: “My God, they pardoned Nixon.” The governor, an Ivy League product whose blond hair and good breeding gave him a golden-boy image, sent out ambiguous signals about the case.* On the day of the protest, Byrne met with a small group of celebrity supporters, but he was less impressed with Ali and Frazier than with Ellen Burstyn, whom he admired. But Burstyn did not leave much of an impression regarding the Carter case. At a news conference after the meeting, the governor had little to say about Carter except that he would consider a clemency petition, if filed, on its merits.
The Carter bandwagon proved to be a mixed blessing. It deepened the hostility toward Carter among his adversaries, particularly New Jersey law enforcement officials. In addition, boosters who saw Carter as a trendy cause did not know the background of his case, and they later bailed out at the first whiff of trouble. Just as liberal support of the Black Panthers in the late sixties gave rise to “radical chic,” Rubin Carter’s cause acquired a certain opportunistic sympathy.
Ultimately, neither the politicians nor the protesters were going to free Carter. As Fred Hogan had told him, his passage to freedom would come by working through the judicial system. Unfortunately, that passage seemed forever clogged. By 1974, both Carter and John Artis were indigent, and they were represented by lawyers from the state’s Public Defender’s Office. The lawyers asked for a new trial following disclosure of the recantations in September. The following month, a hearing was held by the original trial judge, Samuel Larner of the New Jersey Superior Court. It was a peculiar arrangement. For Judge Larner, accepting the veracity of the recantations would be admitting that two petty thieves and the state’s two key witnesses—had made a mockery of him and his courtroom. But under New Jersey law, the presiding trial judge was required to hear the first stage of an appeal, on the theory that the judge was already familiar with the case. In this particular case, Judge Larner decreed on December 11 that the recantations “lacked the ring of truth.” In a stinging, forty-six-page ruling, he seemed offended by the demand for a new trial, writing:
Does the mere fact that state’s witnesses give recanting post-trial testimony necessarily entitle the defendants to a new trial? Absolutely not! If mere recantation in itself dictates a new trial, the entire judicial process could be frustrated by the mere whim of a witness recanting his testimony.
Carter then fired his public defender lawyers, saying they had failed to consult him properly on legal strategy. He convinced an experienced criminal lawyer in New York, Myron Beldock, to take his case. Lewis Steel, another New York attorney, agreed to represent Artis. The change in counsel meant that Carter desperately needed to raise money, even if it meant paying only a fraction of his legal expenses. The Hurricane Fund brought in sympathy checks from outraged liberals, but that was not enough. He needed to spread the word beyond the liberal elite and blacks. It would take the man who made “blowin’ in the wind” a catchphrase for mournful dissent to turn the Hurricane into a pop icon of social injustice in the seventies.
Carter was not a Bob Dylan fan, but the ever-present Solomon was. The aide-de-camp felt he had grown up with Dylan’s social protest songs in the sixties, and he believed the songwriter could use Carter’s travails to express similar themes in the seventies. He wrote an impassioned letter to Dylan’s office in the spring of 1975. He did not ask Dylan to write a song about Carter; he simply explained the injustice that had been committed. Some weeks later, the phone rang in Solomon’s apartment.
“What do you want from me?” Dylan asked.
“I’ve followed your music for a long time,” Solomon said, “and based upon that, I thought this might interest you. Do you want to meet him?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“He’s in a maximum-security prison,” Solomon said.
“Is it dangerous?”
“No.”
“Let me give it some thought.”
When they hung up, Solomon turned to his girlfriend. “You watch and see. He’ll get involved in this case and write a song.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because that’s what he does for a living.”
Solomon sent Dylan a copy of The Sixteenth Round. Impressed, Dylan agreed to visit Carter that summer. Carter prepared for the meeting by reading a book of Dylan’s lyrics and listening to his songs. Dylan, for his part, knew little of Carter beyond Solomon’s letter and the book. But the two men, sitting across from each other in the morning hours at the prison library, quickly found common ground.
Both men were performers and crowd pleasers. But they were also reclusive, shy, and restless. Carter, the black middleweight with a vicious left hook whose parents were raised in the Jim Crow South, could appreciate Dylan, the Jewish troubadour with a harp rack whose ancestors escaped the tyrannies of the Russian czar. They both felt an affinity for the powerless and thought they had a responsibility to speak out on their behalf. These connections emerged in their first conversation. Carter did most of the talking—about his case, about prison, about religion, about society, and about how this country seemed to be promoting nothing but concrete. He had brought a poem with him about a bird in search of flight and freedom, and he told Dylan that his songs would have much more power if his music reached a multiracial audience.
“You’re a sixteen-cylinder man operating on four cylinders,” Carter said.
Dylan laughed, but he saw the toll of prison life. He was taken aback when he heard about Carter’s looted right eye, and he feared that Carter’s anger was giving way to exhaustion and apathy. He tried to empathize with Carter, telling him he had been in France because “people just suck my soul, just suck me dry.” But Dylan was mostly taciturn—which reminded Carter of himself, who hadn’t spoken much as a youth because of his stuttering. Dylan listened, asked questions, took notes. He was different from the many others who had questioned Carter. Over the years, most people who met Carter—reporters, lawyers, law clerks, prisoners—believed in his innocence. But Dylan was not simply probing his innocence or guilt. To Carter, the folksinger was searching for something else entirely, as if he were asking, “Who are you, man? What are you? Are you what I see?”
Dylan felt as if it was the first time he had really talked to someone in ages, and he had no doubt that Carter would be vindicated. Carter’s commanding presence also made Dylan believe that he was a natural leader. “I want to come back,” Dylan said as he left. At dusk, as he drove away from the prison, he saw a billboard that read: “Wallace and Carter.” He chuckled and said to himself, “That might be the next [presidential] ticket.”
Dylan did not attach his name to the Hurricane Fund. He did not want to be part of the crowd; that wasn’t his style. He wanted to make his own statement. Dylan had strayed from his protest music of the early sixties. But in those songs he had used the plight of a single victim to amplify broader social struggles. Class conflict and racial inequity lay at the heart of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” about the 1963 death of a hard-working domestic whose attacker, a wealthy socialite, received a light sentence because of his politically prominent father. (The victim’s race was never mentioned but was assumed to be black.) Carter’s plight gave Dylan a similar opportunity. Initially, he struggled with the lyrics, but he drew on his passion for movies for guidance, structuring “Hurricane” as if he were writing stage directions on a film script. Thus, the first stanza read:
Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night
Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall
She sees the bartender in a pool of blood
Cries out, “My God, they killed them all!”
Here comes the story of the Hurricane …
Dylan, who wrote the song with Jacques Levy, was to record it on October 24 at Columbia Studio 1 in Manhattan. But that afternoon George Lois, who had been consulted on the lyrics, discovered a factual error. The writers had confused Bello and Bradley, placing Bradley at the scene of the crime. Lois, pacing in his Fifth Avenue office in a surplus safari jacket, made a series of phone calls to Dylan at the Gramercy Park Hotel. “Yeah, yeah, they say it’s potentially libelous the way it stands now. It was Bello in the bar, not Bradley.” Several minutes later Levy called Lois, who grabbed a pen and scribbled the corrections. “And another man named Bello, right, moving kinda mysteriously—that’s great, that’s a great image, you can just see him prowling around, great correction, yeah, yeah.”
Lyrics in hand, Dylan went to the studio with a clutch of musicians, including Scarlett Rivera, whose Gypsy violin would provide a haunting interplay with Dylan’s harmonica. The group arrived at 10:30 P.M., but nothing seemed to go right. Technical problems pushed off the recording time until midnight. Dylan’s harmonica slipped from his harp rack during the first take. Dylan botched a take when he blew a line about Bello. In a previous version Bello robbed “bodies.” In the new version it was “registers.” Dylan was told that “bodies” was libelous; “registers” was not. After five hours, Dylan and his entourage departed, leaving his producer with eleven takes from which to construct the story of the Hurricane.
At eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, “Hurricane” was an ode to Rubin Carter’s innocence, pitting him against “criminals in their coats and ties [who] are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.” Carter thought it was a great piece of music, even though he couldn’t dance to it. The song used simple street language, was accessible to the masses, and, in the words of Allen Ginsberg, “was the kind of song that the last rebels of the sixties were demanding [Dylan] write.”
In fact, “Hurricane” became the centerpiece of a Dylan tour that tried to recapture the spirit of the sixties, a traveling hippie musical revue whose changing cast of characters included Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Ginsberg, several film crews, a writer, and relatives of the entourage. Conceived in a Greenwich Village bar in the summer of 1975, the tour began in October and was called the Rolling Thunder Revue. It traveled through small New England towns, played primarily in more intimate venues, and charged as little as $8 a ticket. Publicity about Carter and fund-raising on his behalf gave the tour a mission beyond its music. This served Carter’s purpose as well as Dylan’s. At a time when political apathy was more prominent than activism, Carter was the perfect choice to reestablish the links between artists and social issues.
Dylan agreed to end the tour on December 8 with a benefit concert for Carter, called “Night of the Hurricane,” at Madison Square Garden. But he also wanted to perform before Carter himself. So the night before, the Rolling Thunder Revue, accompanied by George Lois, rolled into the Clinton Correction Institution for Women in Clinton, New Jersey. The previous month, Carter had been transferred there amid concerns that the Trenton prison could not handle the crush of journalists, supporters, and others suddenly interested in his case. Clinton was a far cry from Trenton State. It used to be exclusively for women; now a third of the three hundred inmates were men. The prison looked more like a modern farm, with low-lying buildings, rolling hills, and green grass. This relatively comfortable setting, however, wreaked havoc with Lois’s hopes for a heart-wrenching publicity photo of Dylan providing succor to a tormented prisoner.
“I can’t believe this place,” Lois said, walking through the prison. “I didn’t know it was this open. I can’t find any fucking bars. Where are the bars, Rubin?”
“There ain’t none,” Carter said.
This was a PR man’s nightmare, a prison without bars. “What a fucking image. This joint looks like a country club.”
Lois was in despair as he walked through the prison lobby. Then he stopped short and pointed to a grille hanging down from the ceiling.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a gate, sir,” a guard said.
Lois’s eyes lit up. “What does it look like when it’s down? Does it look like bars?”
“I suppose.”
“Pull it down, pull it down,” Lois screamed. The steel grille descended from the ceiling. “We got our bars!” He was exuberant. “Get Dylan. Tell him Rubin wants to talk to him.” Dylan arrived with Ken Regan, a photographer for the tour.
“Hey, Rube, how you doing, man?” asked Dylan, dressed in a feathered hat and multiple scarves. He poked his fingers through the steel latticework to meet Carter’s as Regan clicked away with his Nikon. A few weeks later, a two-page photo of the celebrities would appear in People magazine with the caption: “Bridging a prison gate in New Jersey, Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, inside, and Bob Dylan, out, rap before showtime.” Never mind the deception. It was one of Lois’s niftiest publicity coups.
The three major networks taped Dylan’s prison performance of “Hurricane,” with Carter nodding to the beat. Afterward, Carter held a press conference. Even though he had filed a pardon application with Governor Byrne, he made no effort to extend an olive branch. Carter was still fuming, and neither an eponymous ballad nor a country club prison would slake his anger. He referred to “the powers-that-be” as “criminals who have covered this up, who are now cringing in their wormy corners, they know that if people stay together, that means power.”
When a reporter said, “We know that a new trial is coming up—” Carter cut him off. “There is no such thing as ‘we know there is almost a new trial.’ There is no such thing. We’re talking about right and wrong here. Two men in prison illegally for nine years for being framed for committing a crime, and there’s no evidence anywhere that suggests they did anything. So we’re talking about right and wrong, talking about in jail or out of jail. We’re not talking about almost out of jail. So I am in jail, so until I am out of jail, then we can start talking about a new trial. But until that time there’s no such thing, because the very people who created this monster in 1966 are still in power today.”
While the recantations raised public support for Carter, they never persuaded any court to overturn his conviction. Rather, it was a remark able blunder by the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office that opened the door to Carter’s freedom. As the office prepared for the recantation hearings before Judge Larner in October 1974, Assistant Prosecutor John Goceljak learned that Lieutenant DeSimone and Sergeant Robert Mohl had secretly taped one of their interrogations of Alfred Bello on October 11, 1966, and Goceljak listened to the interview on the scratchy tape. Early in the questioning, which took place in Wayne, New Jersey, DeSimone told Bello, “Now, I understand you have some information for us … I’m interested in one thing, Al, and that’s the truth.”
Goceljak thought he had hit the jackpot. The tape, he believed, would counter Bello’s claim that the police had coerced his testimony. Goceljak entered the transcript into the recantation hearing. “This is a great tape,” he told DeSimone.
The tape, however, included far more than DeSimone’s appeal for the truth. It revealed promises that DeSimone made to Bello in exchange for his testimony. This disclosure contradicted Bello’s claim on the witness stand that he did not receive any promises from the police for his testimony. Moreover, the tape was a raw display of the character and style of these two men, and it wasn’t pretty. DeSimone swooped around his prey like a hawk, mixing racial appeals, subtle threats, leading questions, and religious zeal to produce the statement he wanted. And Bello proved he was an execrable thief, indifferent to human suffering, and capable of bending even the most trivial truths. In one priceless exchange, DeSimone asked Bello his age.
“Twenty-three,” Bello said.
“And your date of birth?”
“Twenty-six November, 1943.”
DeSimone did the math and realized that Bello was wrong. “That means this November, this year, this November you’ll be twenty-three. You’re really twenty-two now.”
“No,” Bello insisted. “Twenty-four this November.”
Confused, DeSimone persisted. “This November you’d be twenty-four? Forty-three is your date of birth? Nineteen forty-three?”
“The twenty-sixth day, November,” Bello replied confidently.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Mohl chimed in. “He’ll be twenty-four this November.”
DeSimone, defeated, moved on to other subjects. Alfred Bello, age twenty-two, was twenty-three years old for the interview.
DeSimone’s views on race were cast in sharp relief. He repeatedly referred to Carter as “boy,” even though Carter was twenty-nine at the time. That may have been the harmless old-school vernacular of a gruff cop, but DeSimone clearly played on Bello’s racial fears to win his confidence. Bello, who was on parole at the time, was asked his parole officer’s name.
“Mr. Bailey,” Bello replied.
“Uh, is this a white man?” DeSimone asked.
“Colored,” Bello said.
“You see why I ask you this, Al, I’m interested in your welfare,” DeSimone said. “Now let me say this is one of the main reasons we’re at Wayne today and not in Paterson. You follow me?”
“Yes.”
“You can understand that we coulda talked to you at Paterson, but we’re not talking to you at Paterson for a specific reason. Now, I understand you have some information for us.” The shift—from the race of the parole officer to the need for information—was seamless. Then DeSimone explained to Bello why he raised the matter of the parole officer’s race. “I understand that you have fear. You understand what I mean? Of the colored people and their supposed movements where they are strictly for the colored. You understand what I mean?” The message was clear: the colored parole officer would not follow Bello to the city of Wayne. There, a couple of white guys could talk in peace.
DeSimone, however, offered Bello more than a buffer from colored people. In exchange for his testimony, the lieutenant vowed that he would try to transfer Bello’s parole to another state. When Bello asked if DeSimone could get his parole dropped, he said, “I assure you I will go to the top people in the State of New Jersey. I promise you this.” And Bello could trust him, DeSimone said. Even prisoners knew the lieutenant was a man of his word. “You ask them about DeSimone,” he told Bello. “You know what the word that comes out of there is? Rough but right. I don’t bullshit. If I tell them I’m gonna do something, I do it. I’m not an easy guy. You understand what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“But I’m right because I live by the good book.”
Bello was shown a photograph of John Artis and asked if he was one of the gunmen. “It’s possible, but I’m not actually sure,” Bello said. He was then shown a photograph of Carter and asked if he had ever seen him before the night of the shootings. “Uh, no,” Bello said. After prodding from Sergeant Mohl, Bello agreed that he did know Carter.
“Well, I mean,” Mohl continued, “can you tell the lieutenant whether that was Rubin Carter or wasn’t Rubin Carter fleeing the bar?”
“Well, it was Rubin Carter as far as I know, or his brother,” Bello said.
But after repeated questioning, Bello concluded that the two men he saw were undoubtedly Carter and Artis. DeSimone also made a blatant attempt to coax Bello into identifying the getaway car as Carter’s. Initially Bello said that he saw a “white Pontiac or a white Chevy.” Moments later he again referred to the white car. DeSimone saw an opening.
“It was parked near there,” he said, “in that vicinity, a white Dodge, right?”
“Well, I don’t know if it was a Dodge,” Bello said.
“Oh well, a white car. All right.”
Bello later described how he walked into the bar to see four bleeding bodies. He heard the cries of the two survivors, but, he told DeSimone, he said to himself, “I should clean this fucking place out … I’ll take a little bit of … pin money.” He estimated he stole about twenty-five singles. But it soon occurred to him that people were dying, and maybe he should help.
“So I figure if I leave the bar and there’s this woman and she’s bleedin’, and the other guy, he’s fucked up. So I figure, you know how people are, they’re not going to walk down to that bar [and help]. So I figure if I call the police, maybe they’ll get there, maybe they’ll save somebody’s life. You know what I mean?”
Toward the end of the interrogation, DeSimone invoked the Ten Commandments in a thunderclap of indignation: “Look, let me say this to you, let me say this to you, Al. There are laws of man and there are laws of God.”
“Yes.”
“If these guys did it, they not only violated the law of man, they violated the law of God, which says, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ … You understand what I mean?”
Carter’s lawyers understood that they now had grounds for another appeal. They petitioned the New Jersey Supreme Court in November 1975, arguing, among other things, that the prosecutor suppressed evidence by failing to disclose to the defense the contents of the tape—specifically, the promises of help DeSimone made to Bello.
But by now the case had taken another bizarre twist. Governor Byrne needed guidance or at least political cover on what to do. In September he asked a black state assemblyman, Eldridge Hawkins, to investigate the matter. Hawkins, a Democrat from Essex County, was one of the most prominent black politicians in New Jersey, and he studied the Carter case with Prentiss Thompson, an investigator with the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office who was a former karate champion from Canada. Hawkins’s investigative style was not entirely conventional. He used a hypnotist to try to elicit truthful testimony from one witness, a black woman named Annie Ruth Haggins who said she was at the Lafayette bar right before the shooting. Hawkins also told John Artis that he should answer questions about the murders while under hypnosis or after taking truth serum. Evidence of Artis’s truthfulness, Hawkins said, would be weighed heavily by the governor.
According to Artis, Hawkins offered him more than truth serum advice. At the time, Artis was considered a model prisoner at minimum-security Leesburg State Prison and was participating in an inmate college program at Glassboro State College. As he was preparing for school one morning, Artis was told he had a one-day furlough to visit his father in Paterson. He had not been home in nine years. When he arrived, he was met by his father and Hawkins.
“I know you didn’t kill anybody,” Hawkins said, “but you were there or you knew about it. If you sign a statement saying that, I can guarantee you’ll be home by Christmas”—three weeks away. Artis refused to sign the statement because it would have implicated Carter. He told Hawkins that even a Christmas homecoming would not prompt him to admit to a crime that neither he nor Carter committed. “If you know I didn’t kill anybody, why don’t you go back and tell the governor that?”
Hawkins, in so many words, did just that. His report, submitted in December, posited that Carter and Artis were not the gunmen but were in or around the tavern at the time of the shooting, making them an accessory to the murders. Hawkins concluded that two other black men, Elwood Tuck, the manager of the Nite Spot, and Eddie Rawls, whose stepfather had been murdered earlier in the evening, were the likely killers. This report, however, was ignored by the governor and the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office, leaving the impression that Byrne had ordered the investigation to buy time until the courts settled the case.
“The Night of the Hurricane” at Madison Square Garden began with a drink flung into the face of a U.S. congressman and almost ended with the announcement of a gubernatorial pardon. On one level, the December 8 event represented the peak of Carter’s transformation into a cultural icon. The Garden had sold out the day the event was announced. The tickets, priced at $12.50, were going for $75 outside the Garden. On the guest list, among many others, were Ed Koch, Coretta Scott King, Bill Bradley, and Candice Bergen. Rumored appearances by John Lennon, George Harrison, Ray Charles, and Marvin Gaye did not materialize, but Roberta Flack, whose soulful ballads were hardly associated with Bob Dylan, was added to the bill, and Joni Mitchell was still on the tour.
The concert, however, also marked the beginning of the end of the Carter coalition. Specifically, it laid bare a racial schism among supporters. While George Lois and a handful of whites ran the Hurricane Trust Fund (rechristened Freedom For All Forever), a black activist named Carolyn Kelley, a bail bondswoman in Newark, was recommended to Carter to start up the New Jersey Defense Committee. Carter had been concerned about the dearth of black supporters. Kelley remedied that through a New Jersey petition drive, demonstrations in Trenton and Newark, and other publicity efforts. But hostilities emerged between Carter’s white and black supporters over money, publicity, and control. Lois was accused of turning Carter into the ultimate advertising campaign and receiving an excessively high reimbursement—$43,000—for his agency’s promotion of the Garden concert. Kelley, a Muslim, was said to be leveraging her position as Carter’s spokeswoman in a self-serving bid for leadership in the New Jersey black community. She was also accused of squandering money on limousine rides and expensive hotel suites.
The dissension literally spilled out into the open before the Garden concert at a nearby hotel, where Muhammad Ali and his entourage were staying (and running up a $3,000 bill, paid for by the concert’s proceeds). Lois and Paul Sapounakis, who ran the Blue Angel restaurant, strolled through Ali’s floor and encountered John Conyers, the black congressman from Detroit who had taken up Carter’s cause. According to Lois, Sapounakis and Conyers had gotten into an argument when Lois came to his friend’s aid.
Conyers was sitting at a table. “Are you part of that group?” he asked Lois.
“Yeah,” Lois said.
“You white guys think you’re pretty hot stuff,” Conyers said.
Lois was happy to return the salvo: “Fuck you, and your mother and sister too!”
“You’re slimy bastards,” Conyers shot back.
With that, Sapounakis flung his highball into the congressman’s face, ice cubes and all, then he and Lois spun around and made a quick exit.
The concert itself had some zany moments. During a song by Jack Elliot, the sweet voiced country singer from Brooklyn, Joan Baez ran onto the stage with a blond wig and white go go boots. She was hauled off by security after thirty seconds of dancing the hustle. Then there was Dylan himself, weaving about onstage, resplendent in a white Wallace Beery shirt, black vest, white makeup, and a lavishly flowered, feathered Pat Garrett hat. Ali took the stage, telling the predominantly white crowd that it had “the connections and the complexion to get the protection” for Carter. Carter himself listened to the event on the telephone and, through a loudspeaker, thanked Dylan and the audience for their support.
Meanwhile, chaos reigned behind the scenes. During the concert, Channel 5 News in New York reported that Governor Byrne was preparing to pardon Carter. According to Larry Sloman, whose book On the Road with Bob Dylan recounted the Dylan tour, Carter urged Dylan to announce his imminent freedom to the crowd. “Okay,” Dylan said. “You’re going to hear a roar like you never heard before.” But then Lois and Sapounakis stepped in and said the report should be confirmed. They raced through the Garden’s musty corridors before finally locating a phone. When a security guard blocked them from using it, Lois yelled, “Look, man, Dylan’s about to announce something to twenty thousand people and we’ve got to confirm it first and we got to use these phones.” Tempers rose, and Lois, out of control, threw a wild punch; only the intervention of a Garden official defused the confrontation. Lois finally called the governor’s office to learn that there was no truth to the pardon report. Just as Dylan walked onstage to announce it, Lois barreled out and yelled: “Don’t announce anything!” Dylan, barely, was saved from prematurely releasing Carter and making one of the most embarrassing gaffes of his career.
The concert capped the minuet between Dylan and Carter, a relationship that was founded on good faith and respect but that also served each man’s interests. “Hurricane,” released the following month on Dylan’s Desire album, shot up the charts. It created an indelible impression of justice gone awry on a generation of music fans, who would never forget its plaintive line: “And an all-white jury AGREEEED!” The ballad also showed that fame had not diluted Dylan’s own social conscience. As the New York Times wrote in its review of the concert: “Mr. Dylan has reinvigorated the flagging folkrock scene, and he may well have reinvigorated the fashion of political commitment among artists. Most important of all, however, he has reinvigorated himself.”
For Carter, the song became an anthem, bringing him national and even international recognition. Long after he himself left the spotlight, “Hurricane” still lamented the “hot New Jersey night” that put “an innocent man in a living hell.” The association between boxer and songwriter waned in the coming years, when their individual interests were no longer aligned, but Carter would always be grateful to “the sixteen-cylinder man” for amplifying his cause and immortalizing his name.
While Governor Byrne would probably not have issued a pardon to Carter and Artis under any circumstance, the issue became moot when the two men withdrew their pardon application on December 16. Carter said a pardon could be interpreted as an acknowledgment of guilt. Only complete exoneration—or a new trial, in which he was acquitted—would satisfy him. And he soon got his chance. On March 17, 1976, the New Jersey Supreme Court, in a 7–0 decision, overturned the convictions of Carter and Artis. The court ruled that the prosecutors, in failing to disclose the Bello tape to the defense, withheld material evidence favorable to the defendants, thereby violating the defendants’ right to a fair trial. The 1974 recantation hearing also revealed for the first time that DeSimone had made similar promises to Bradley, saying that he would appeal for lenient treatment with every prosecutor’s office in the state where charges against Bradley were pending. This promise, too, was never disclosed to the defense, which could have used these promises to impeach the testimony of Bello and Bradley and further undermine their credibility.
The opinion was written in dry, bloodless prose, but it represented a rout for many people: for DeSimone and former Assistant Prosecutor Hull, who suppressed the evidence; for Judge Larner, who on appeal upheld the conviction; and for the new Passaic County prosecutor, Burrell Ives Humphreys, who argued the case before the state’s highest court. At the time, Dylan’s “Hurricane,” mocking the New Jersey authorities as criminals, triumphantly blared across the airwaves. The singer was right. Muhammad Ali was right. The Madison Avenue spinmeisters and the Hollywood jet-setters and the political blowhards were all right.
But worst of all, at least to the losing side, Rubin Carter was right.
Wearing an orange print dashiki over an orange turtleneck sweater, Carter entered a room full of reporters at the state prison in Clinton the day the state supreme court’s decision was announced. His arms were linked with those of Carolyn Kelley and the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, the civil rights leader and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Carter sat at a long table draped with a white cloth. A sign on the table read: “Rubin Hurricane Carter, Victim.”
“What you are seeing is a person who has been raped of his freedom for nine and a half years,” Carter told reporters. “What you’re seeing is a person who has become blind in this penitentiary for lack of proper medical attention. What you’re seeing is a person who has been without his wife and daughter for nine and a half years for crimes he did not, would not, and could not commit.”
Carter spewed inflamed but hollow rhetoric. Asked if he was bitter, he said, “I think you say I sound rather bitter because I am bitter, that I have a right to be bitter. But I think that you are saying that I sound bitter because you are only looking at what you want to see and don’t recognize what you see.”
Three days later, Ali posted much of the cash bail for Carter ($20,000) and Artis ($15,000). He also gave Carter a roll of hundred-dollar bills. Now thirty-eight, Carter was free, but he was not celebrating. The Passaic County prosecutor had already announced that he was personally going to retry the case. “I’m home, but I’m not free,” Carter told friends on the night of his release. “You don’t know the enemy.”
* Hogan became an alcoholic in the late seventies, but he kicked the bottle in 1982.
* The New York Times, while disclosing racism in the Carter case, was not without its own blinders. In its October 15, 1974, review of the book, the Times ran the headline “Even the Inarticulate Testify.” Nothing in the article suggested that Carter was inarticulate; in fact, he is well-spoken, but the newspaper evidently assumed that a black prisoner could not be articulate.
* According to Lois, Ed Horrigan at Cutty Sark pulled an $8-million-a-year account from Lois’s agency, Lois Holland Callaway Inc. Horrigan told Lois to “stop working for the nigger.”
* Algren wrote a magazine piece about Carter before the Times published the recantation story. Algren suggested that Carter was innocent, but both Esquire and Playboy, apparently uncomfortable with this thesis, rejected the piece. Algren then tried to write a book about Carter’s case, but he ultimately settled for a fictitious account in The Devil’s Stocking.
* Governor Byrne had indirectly been involved with the original case. As the Essex County prosecutor in 1967, he made a leniency plea on behalf of Arthur Dexter Bradley. Byrne and four other county prosecutors were asked to do so by the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office as consideration for Bradley’s testimony. Byrne’s intervention later fueled conspiracists’ claims that Carter’s jailing implicated even the governor of the state.