RUBIN CARTER, AT THIRTY-NINE, was back in Trenton State Prison. During his nine months of freedom, the State of New Jersey had not given away his prison identification number: he was still #45472. Since his 1967 conviction, he had spent 3,482 days in prison, although Judge Leopizzi, mindful of details, credited Carter with 3,496 days. The extra fourteen days stemmed from a two-week delay in sentencing after the second trial. Time served, however, meant little to Carter. In fact, his lot was far worse now than after his first conviction. He was not only a triple murderer but a racist triple murderer. He beat women—at least, that was how he was seen after Carolyn Kelley’s charges. He had alienated his white supporters from New York, such as George Lois and Richard Solomon, who had done so much to publicize his cause but ultimately felt slighted by his embrace of Kelley and his black allies. But he had also antagonized his black supporters with the Kelley fiasco. His reconviction seemed like an anti climax, the final turn in a downward spiral.
Thom Kidrin, who had attended the trial each day, tried calling Carter’s celebrity supporters to once again ask for their help. “The same system you were protesting six months to a year ago has done it again,” Kidrin insisted. Harry Belafonte and Muhammed Ali pledged their continued support, but most of Carter’s marquee allies turned their backs on him. Kidrin, sensitive to Carter’s shattered condition, shielded him from many of these rejections. He still hoped that Bob Dylan would continue to help. But several months after the reconviction, Kidrin tracked down Dylan in his dressing room before he was to appear on Saturday Night Live and gave him a letter from Carter, asking if the singer would visit him.
Dylan, however, had moved on from the social themes of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Now, dressed in white patent leather boots and sunglasses with “BD” set in rhinestone, he read the letter, looked up at Kidrin, and motioned toward a television set showing roller skaters. “Do you like roller-skating?” Dylan asked. “Look at the cool stuff they do.”
Kidrin was taken aback by the inane comment. He tried to bring Dylan back to the matter at hand: “Do you want to write something back to Rubin? I’ll be down there next week.”
Dylan remained opaque. “Tell Rubin I’ll be down there in the springtime of my life,” he said. He then began reciting a passage from the Bible.
If outsiders did not want to see Carter, Carter was equally reluctant to let them see him. Innocent or not, he always felt humiliated behind bars. But now he also felt as if he had let everyone down—his friends, family, supporters, and lawyers. He blamed himself for the stupidity of his affair with Carolyn Kelley, and he blamed himself for the courtroom loss. He continued talking to his lawyers, who were appealing the verdict, but he shut everyone else out, including his wife, Tee, who had visited him in prison regularly for nine years.
Tee was furious. She relied on welfare checks to support herself and their daughter, and now with a new baby to feed, she didn’t understand why Rubin did not seek some kind of plea bargain that would return him home. Nevertheless, she still remained loyal to him and took pride that her family, while separated, remained united. But the Passaic County prosecutors made such loyalty untenable. After the second conviction, they wanted to charge Fred Hogan, the investigator in the state’s Public Defender’s Office, with bribery for Alfred Bello’s recantation. Their theory was that Hogan used the $10,000 advance for The Sixteenth Round to make the alleged bribe. Hogan, however, testified that he gave the money, as Carter instructed, to Tee. Now Carter, some months after the second conviction, received a subpoena to appear before a grand jury in Princeton. When he arrived in chains and shackles, Tee was standing outside the courtroom.
“What are you doing here?” Rubin asked.
“I’ve got a subpoena,” she said. “It has something to do with Fred Hogan and the money.”
Rubin learned his wife was being squeezed. If she testified truthfully that Hogan gave her the book money, she would have to return her public assistance. If she testified that Hogan had not given her the book money, she would buttress the state’s case that Hogan had kept the book money and possibly used it for a bribe. Ultimately, neither Rubin nor Tee answered questions from the grand jury. When the judge threatened Rubin with contempt for refusing to answer, he calmly responded, “You’re right, Your Honor. I do hold this court in contempt.” No indictment was ever issued against Hogan, but the incident persuaded Carter that he should divorce Tee, that their marriage gave the authorities an avenue through which they could attack either him or his friends. Ending the marriage, for Carter, severed one more tie to the outside world.
Trenton State had changed a bit since 1967. Prisoners were now allowed to wear their own clothes, to sport beards, even to wear rings, and Carter still had his. But he had not changed his attitude about prison itself. If anything, he was even more defiant. He made this clear from the very start of his second term by refusing to cooperate with the prison system’s classification process. All incoming prisoners had to be classified at the Receiving Center, now at the Bordentown Reformatory. There, a panel of prison guards, social workers, and psychologists assigned convicts to one of the state prisons. Carter, however, sat in a holding cell and refused to appear before the panel. “I don’t have time,” he told a corrections officer.
His recalcitrance continued after he was sent to Trenton State. There, a guard told him to report to the tailor’s shop for work. Carter, sitting alone in his cell, simply replied: “I don’t have time.” He continued to refuse to eat prison food, relying primarily on Kidrin to bring him canned goods and other items once a month. (“That beef jerky you brought me last week was the best food I’ve had since I’ve been in this place,” he wrote to Kidrin.) Carter’s anger came to a head five months after he reached Trenton, when the prison insisted that he work in the laundry room. He refused and was given a disciplinary charge issued in the name of the state Attorney General William Hyland. Furious, on June 11, 1977, Carter fired off a four-page, single-space typewritten letter to the attorney general, citing the case law that excused him from having to work in prison jobs. He also wrote:
It is common knowledge within this institution, and any other institution that I have been in since being accused of this crime, that I have no time for anything except fighting for my freedom! … The question is simply this: Do I now forsake eleven years of almost inhumane struggling and at this time passively accept a job in the laundry of this institution which would benefit only in the perpetuation of a morally bankrupted system? That is the question!
The attorney general never answered.
Carter’s continued obstinacy earned him numerous trips to the prison “hole” and generated a raft of disciplinary charges. According to the prison records, corrections officer Marrero wrote on May 18, 1978: “Inmate refuses to participate in any aspect of the institution. Inmate has requested permanent idle status.” Now Carter even refused to carry his prison identification card, which referred to each prisoner by his number. This annoyed a guard named Roy Earp, who approached him one afternoon in the prison yard.
“Where’s your ID card?” Earp demanded.
“My name is Rubin Carter. I don’t need an ID card.”
Earp filed a disciplinary charge against Carter, lest other prisoners begin an ID uprising.
Carter often broke rules as a way to assert his own identity. He refused to post his name and ID number, as the rules required, on his cell door, on 2 Wing. Instead he put up a sign: “If your name is: Lola Falana, or Jayne Kennedy, or Sara Dash, you can wake me up. But if it’s Not: Then hit the road Jack—and don’t cha come back no more, no more no more no more! Hit the road, Jack!” Carter also made it clear, again, that he would not tolerate any guard’s touching him under any circumstance. When a rookie guard conducted his first “prison count” in Carter’s wing and found him sleeping, the guard reached into the cell and tapped his ankle. Carter shot out of bed.
“In here, motherfucker, if you want to keep breathing, you keep your hands to yourself.” As the guard left the tier, amid jeers from other prisoners, he yelled back at Carter, “At least I’m not a murderer!” Later Carter wrote in his prison journal: “I will simply say this: if you ever put your hands on me in anger—then 365 days after you have struck me, you would have been dead for one solid year!”
Any hopes for a quick, successful appeal were soon dashed. The second trial’s transcript was so voluminous that it took almost two years for Passaic County to give Carter’s lawyers a copy. Separately, his attorneys believed that new evidence indicating juror misconduct would be grounds for a new trial. An alternate juror, John Adamo, testified that a juror had made open jokes using the Italian word melanzana. The word literally means “eggplant” but is also a derogatory reference to black people, the equivalent of “nigger.” Adamo testified to hearing other racist remarks from both jurors and guards. A hearing was held in March of 1979 before the trial judge, Bruno Leopizzi, to determine if a new trial should be granted, but Leopizzi, doubting Adamo’s testimony, ruled that there had been no juror misconduct.
In the first year of his second term, Carter showed familiar patterns of behavior. He pushed his lawyers hard, threatening to fire them, and was once again frustrated by their lack of progress. In a letter written on April 2, 1979, he chastised Myron Beldock for his failure to respond to his messages and warned him that the Passaic County prosecutors were outflanking him on his appeals. “I know you to be a better lawyer than the lawyering that is presently being lawyered, and I can’t understand what’s holding you back.”
He wrote to Kidrin, asking him to buy a stylish blue-tinted monocle with a twenty-four-inch thin silver chair. He even drew a diagram to make absolutely clear what he wanted. He wrote to a friend in London about making his case a worldwide cause and to a theatrical producer who had once expressed an interest in his life. His rage against his enemies also had not abated. In his prison journal, he wrote: “DeSimone is so nasty; that when he was a kid his mother had to tie a pork chop around his neck so that his dog would play with him.” He also wrote of Don King, who had mistreated one of Carter’s friends: “We come here not to bury Don King but to praise him—although the vote was close.”
Carter’s anger and sarcasm masked deeper personal changes. Even the most strong-willed prisoners are inevitably worn down by sustained captivity, and the effects surface in different ways. As one long-term prisoner recalled in With Liberty for Some: “Visiting the zoo as a child, I’d been struck by the way a lion—pacing then as I was pacing now—would progressively shorten the distance covered each time, anticipating the presence of the bars before he reached them, anticipating the need to turn and turning a step sooner … until finally he was no longer pacing but turning on himself, revolving on his own axis.” He now found himself behaving the same way as the animal in the cage.
Carter knew the signs of becoming “institutionalized,” the point at which convicts can no longer function outside the prison. Those inmates did not keep their cell clean or have their clothes laundered. They stopped taking showers. They no longer read newspapers or books. Their friends and family stopped visiting or putting money in their prison account. They could not buy toothpaste, mouthwash, or cigarettes. They prowled for cigarette butts in the prison yard, where they’d scavenge for shreds of tobacco to roll into secondhand smokes. Broke, desperate, and abandoned, they were permanent wards of the state. When such a prisoner was released, he was usually back within a year or so—just long enough, it seemed, to accumulate some spine-tingling stories that could be used to regale other inmates on his return.
Carter could feel himself slowly falling into this spiral. After his first conviction, he was energized by his efforts to free himself: studying the law, writing his autobiography, marshaling support for his cause. It was a dizzying, breathless experience … and it failed. Now, he increasingly felt exhaustion and despair. He had no money for his lawyers, for his family, or even for cigarettes. A two-pack-a-day man, Carter quit cold turkey so he too would not have to scrape tobacco out of discarded butts. His weight dropped to 139 pounds.
Carter’s fears surfaced in a conversation with one of his New Jersey lawyers, Louis Raveson. The attorney was involved in inmate rights’ issues and had ample exposure to a prison’s corrosive environment. His wife was also a lawyer, and on one prison visit, a guard yelled out to her: “The kike is here to see the spic!”
Carter was typically upbeat when he saw one of his lawyers, grateful that someone on the outside was there to help him. But during one visit with Raveson, he was oddly downcast, and the lawyer tried to find out why.
“Inmates have to basically repress who they are,” Carter told him. “They have to take so much crap from authorities, it is so destructive, it becomes irreparable.”
Carter described the process by which other long-term prisoners become institutionalized and why leaving the pen carries so much risk: “For all these years, they have so much anger that they have to swallow that the first person who looks at them the wrong way, they lose it. There comes a point where the prison should never set you free.”
Raveson realized Carter was not talking about other prisoners but about himself. It was a sobering moment for a lawyer who was trying to win his client’s freedom. But the admission revealed a great deal. To Carter, the prison was hell—but at least it was his hell. He knew when the lights came on, when the bells rang, when the cell doors opened. Outside the prison, everything was random and moved too fast. Freedom had become an abstraction. He still craved liberty—but he craved it as proof that he had cleared his name. When he won his first boxing match in South Africa many years earlier, the fans roared, “KAH-ter! KAH-ter!” He always cherished that moment, and he would not give up until his name was again hailed in triumph.
Carter befriended an inmate named Lester Riley, known as Moko. Convicted of rape, Moko had a blend of African and Indian features and spoke with a slight stutter. He retained, somehow, a sunny disposition in prison and was able to make Carter smile by telling him stories and jokes, and he occasionally joined Carter on walks around the prison yard.
On one sweltering day in June 1978, the two men were walking laps around the shadeless yard amid a noisy swirl of activity. While guards stood sentinel in their towers, inmates clanked weight machines, hit speed bags, and pounded handballs. The hot sun baked the loose red dirt, and waves of heat rose from the patches of pavement. Carter was sweating. He told Moko he needed to stop, and he crouched down for a breather. When he looked up, he found himself staring directly at the cement and brick fortress wall on the other side of the yard. As prisoners moved about and the sun beamed down and beads of sweat rolled off Carter’s bright dome, he continued looking at this wall with razor-wire ribbon wrapped around the top. Suddenly, he saw a pinprick of light in the wall. It was a powerful, blinding spotlight, and it was growing bigger. He continued to stare as the crimson dust thickened and the heat rose from the ground, and he saw the light burn a hole through the wall. Now he could see the other side of the barricade. He noticed cars driving down the street, children walking to school. An odd calm came over his damp body. Carter was riveted. Freedom was within his grasp! He reached out, and just as quickly as the hole had appeared, it vanished. He looked around to see if anyone else had seen what he saw. Apparently not. He was confused, but he now had a new thought: perhaps the prison walls were not real. Perhaps he could walk right through that wall. All of a sudden, he had a new mission. As he later wrote:
I resolved myself to find that “hole” in the wall again—only this time I was going to walk right through it! I had no doubt about that whatsoever. Even if the “hole” should sear the flesh from my bones as I passed through it, or if it should deposit me somewhere in the middle of infinity, or even if it meant my death, it had to be better than what was happening to me now. What did I have to lose but the nauseating stench of captured souls rotting away in pain, confusion and misery all around me?
Carter returned to his cell and wept. He looked at a handful of law books on his bookshelf, including his battered Black’s Dictionary, and began carrying them out of his cell. This stunned the other inmates, who knew he had spent years studying those books.
“What are you doing, Mr. Carter?” an inmate asked him.
“Take them,” Carter said, handing the books over. “I don’t need them anymore. They didn’t do me any good. I know that’s not the way for me out of here now.”
Besides Carter’s lawyers, Thom Kidrin was about the only other person who visited Carter regularly in the immediate years after the second conviction. As a kid in the early sixties, Kidrin had watched Carter box on black-and-white television on the Friday-night fights. An intense, spiritual sort, he also grew up listening to Bob Dylan’s music, and, inspired by the themes of racial justice and civil rights, he wrote his own song about Martin Luther King, Jr. In the early seventies, Kidrin was working for a film production studio in Manhattan when he joined Carter’s defense committee, and few worked as hard as he. He always believed Carter’s struggle was a historic event and that he could play a supporting role in this drama. He drove to Muhammad Ali’s training camp in Deerlake, Pennsylvania, and, hoping to secure the heavyweight’s support, sang a song he had written about Carter. In the summer of 1976, during the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden, Kidrin somehow got into a press conference with Jimmy Carter and asked the nominee if he supported Rubin Carter and his struggle for social justice. Jimmy Carter said he didn’t know much about the case but that Kidrin should give the information to one of his aides. After the second conviction, Kidrin rode on Amtrak from Manhattan to Trenton and, weighed down by large sacks of canned food, he walked for fifteen minutes along the train track to the prison, sometimes in rain or snow. During one visit, he showed Carter his vacation pictures from Jamaica and insisted that someday they too would smoke cigars on a beach dock, their feet dangling in the ocean.
Carter told Kidrin about his hole-in-the-wall experience. He explained how he had discarded his law books and that he was now looking for a new kind of reading. He had reached his lowest point ever, and he was searching for something that would help him make sense out of his life, a road map out of the wilderness. His depression and anger were debilitating, and he knew that if he was going to survive, in prison or outside, something would have to change. That put Carter on the right foot. He was always at his best when he had a goal, then pursued it with single-minded intensity. As a boxer, he trained his body. As a prisoner, he trained his mind to study law. Now, as an inmate again, he wanted to train his spirit. He wasn’t sure where that would lead him, but he wanted Kidrin to bring him books about psychology, religion, philosophy, history—anything that might shed light on his interior being.
Kidrin was up to the task. He had long been fascinated by spirituality and metaphysics, and he believed that Carter needed to extricate himself from the science of the legal world. Carter wanted new books? Kidrin would find them. His friends, aware that he was now playing librarian, gave him texts about boxing or detective stories.
“This is horseshit,” Kidrin told them. “I’m looking for books that will bend his mind in a different way.”
It was the beginning of Carter’s numinous retreat. His goal was to disappear inside the prison, to embark on a silent, anonymous journey. He would stay awake for two days straight, lay four or five books across his cot, and, with his one good eye, study them in the prison’s gray light, his lips moving as he read. He shut out the rattling echoes around him and tried to tease meaning from the layered and sometimes abstruse lessons of his literary guides. Many books came his way by happenstance; but if he liked a book, he would ask to read others by the same author. This gave his reading some direction; otherwise it was a random exploration of his inner self.
One of the first books he liked was Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist’s personal account of his survival at Auschwitz. Carter was struck by the parallels between the con centration camp and prison: each institution literally sought to strip away the individual identities of its inmates. Prisoners in both places were forced to give up their clothes, their documents, and their belongings, and they were identified only by a series of numerals. Both institutions operated through the mass movements of crowded men, prompted by daily whistles or bells and commanded by surly captors. Prison labor, regular beatings, and rote schedules shaped each place. New Jersey prisoners, of course, were convicted in courtrooms before judges and jurors; but in Carter’s mind, the state had illegally incarcerated him in the same fashion that the Nazis had held Frankl. Their respective crimes were their race and their religion.
Yet Frankl’s slim volume, written in clean, powerful prose, raised the possibility not only of survival in such extreme conditions, but salvation. The path lay through “the intensification of the inner life, [which] helped the prisoner find refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence … For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in the perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’” For Frankl, the infinite glory was contemplation of his wife’s image, loving and beautiful. Working in a trench one day, enveloped by gray snow in the pale light of dawn, he experienced a surge of rejuvenation. He wrote:
In the last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria … For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong; she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.
Frankl wrote that concentration camp prisoners may be hemmed in physically, but not spiritually. They can choose whether to submit to their captors or to retain their dignity, and their objective is to be worthy of their suffering. Suffering, in fact, provides an opportunity to add deeper meaning to life, and man must accept his suffering as his single and unique task: “An exceptionally difficult external situation … gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond oneself … One could make a victory of those experiences turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did the majority of prisoners.”
Carter’s spirits rose at Frankl’s words, which he read over and over. He had always seen prison as a scourge on his spirit, not as an opportunity for growth. Frankl confirmed that true freedom could be realized not by digging through a prison barrier but by excavating one’s inner life. He distilled other important thoughts for Carter, for example, quoting Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Carter had his why to live for. If he died in prison, he would have died a racist triple murderer. Just as Jews had to survive concentration camps so that they would not be forgotten by history, Carter had to survive prison so he would not be condemned by history. He had to live to protect his innocence, to clear his name, and he could bear almost any how—any punishment or pain—to realize that goal.
Carter also read Siddhartha, the most famous novel by the German Hermann Hesse. The story, written in 1922, tells of one man’s search for self-knowledge. Siddhartha leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, pursues more hedonistic pleasures. He attains wealth as a merchant, finds a lover, and fathers a child. But bored and sickened by his lust and greed, he continues his journey and finally arrives at a river. There, the sound and sweep of the water seem to symbolize the unity of all people and all existence. It signals the beginning of his new life—the beginning of suffering, peace, and finally wisdom, the moment from which “Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny.” It was this journey, this restless search for meaning, that resonated with Carter. As Hesse wrote:
[Siddhartha] had been full of arrogance; he had always been the cleverest, the most eager—always a step ahead of the others, always the learned and intellectual one, always the priest or the sage. His self had crawled into this priesthood, into this arrogance … Now he understood it and realized that the inward voice had been right, that no teacher could have brought him salvation. That was why he had to go into the world, to lose himself in power, women and money; that was why he had to be a merchant, a dice player, a drinker and a man of property … That was why he had to undergo these horrible years, suffer nausea, learn the lesson of the madness of an empty, futile life till the end, till he reached bitter despair, so that Siddhartha the pleasure-monger and Siddhartha the man of property could die.
Carter knew that he too had been arrogant and had pursued self-indulgent pleasures, and now he was suffering for his vanity and excesses. He did not know whether he, like Siddhartha, would reach some flash of self-discovery, but he felt he was making progress. He read books by J. Krishnamurti, the Indian guru born in 1895, who wrote about truth and freedom and urged followers to find their original mind, which alone is free, and books by Immanuel Velikovsky, a controversial Russian astronomer who posited theories about world history. Carter read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, then instructed Kidrin to bring him the same books that Malcolm X read when he was in prison that were cited in the autobiography: Will Durant’s Story of Civilization, H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History, and J. A. Rogers’s three volumes of Sex and Race.
Over the months and years, Carter read about Plato and Aristotle and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi and Jesus. He passed time by “tabernacling” with these men, rocking gently in his cell, eyes closed, talking to them about what he was learning. (He had never been deeply religious, and that didn’t change in prison. As he wrote in a journal, “I’ve got no problems with God, and He’s got none with me.”) He felt he could reach beyond the prison walls and see political heroes like Nelson Mandela on the rock in South Africa or martyrs like George Jackson, the revolutionary prisoner who wrote Soledad Brother. He began reconsidering the precepts that had always governed his life. As he wrote in one of his journals: “A real revelation is not ‘an eye for an eye’ or ‘do as others do, but just do it first,’ but a revelation is to change worse to better; hate to love; war to peace; it means turning things around; a total change from the opposite of what it is now.”
As Thom Kidrin made his monthly treks to the prison, he noticed subtle changes in Carter. His rapid-fire strident speech soaked with profanities was giving way to a more measured tone. He paused between sentences. He was philosophical. The tone of his letters also changed from that of impassioned victim to giddy graduate student. He wrote to Kidrin: “We seek the heights of Truth and Knowledge in all things around us, when it is really within ourselves … [The universe] is not an imperfect sphere on the road to perfection. It is perfect now. We are perfect now!”
Carter was even reappraising the prosecutors and judges who had put him away. “Maybe they aren’t evil,” Carter told Kidrin. “Maybe they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing so I can meet my own destiny, so I can become what I’m supposed to become.” Like metal tempered by fire, Carter thought he might emerge stronger, more durable. As Frankl quoted Nietzsche, “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger,” and Rubin Carter felt he was getting stronger.
He reached a point in his studies where he believed he could read the first couple of pages in a book and determine whether the author had anything of value to say. One day he opened an obscure paperback by a writer whose name he could not pronounce. He read the first page and, like a prospector panning for gold, realized he had found something of amazing value:
I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used by us. But where this new or forgotten road began I was unable to say. I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond this thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The “miraculous” was a penetration into this unknown reality.
The book, a favorite of Kidrin’s, was Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, and it began Carter’s immersion into a densely written, complex universe of ideas. Ouspensky, born in Moscow in 1878, was a noted mathematician and journalist when he became a pupil of the Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff in St. Petersburg in 1915. Gurdjieff, who was believed to have been born in the 1870s, promoted occult notions of the universe, which he claimed had been taught to him by wise men in Central Asia. Ouspensky took Gurdjieff’s recondite teachings and made them somewhat more intelligible in such books as A New Model of the Universe, The Fourth Way, and In Search of the Miraculous. These works lay out elaborate theories and formulas explaining the mathematical structure of the universe, planetary influences, and the evolution of human development. Over the years, critics have derided these works as murky, New Age hokum, citing some of Gurdjieff’s more ridiculous claims, such as, “All evil deeds, all crimes, all self-sacrificing actions, all heroic exploits, as well as the actions of all ordinary life, are controlled by the moon.” But devotees believe that Gurdjieff and Ouspensky had powerful insights into the human condition. To Rubin Carter, who viewed his own life as a “thin film of false reality,” these Russian gurus spoke the truth.
Theirs was a bleak view of human nature. They believed that people think they are “awake” as moral beings, but in fact they are “asleep,” oblivious of their own unconsciousness and unaware of the evil acts they commit. It is useless to blame them for their misdeeds because they are not even aware of what they are doing. The problem is not that the world is evil—if that were so, what value has life?—but that people do not realize that they are unconscious and that they are only a shell of what they could be. In The Fourth Way, Ouspensky described a man who attaches two horses to an airplane and uses it as a carriage. Then he learns how to use the engine and turns the plane into a motor car. But the plane never takes flight. “That is what we are doing with ourselves,” Ouspensky explained. “We use ourselves as a carriage when we could fly.”
One key to self-knowledge, Ouspensky wrote, was understanding the harmful effects of “personality,” or acquired behavior, on one’s “essence,” or innate character. A strong personality “means a strong influence of what is not your own, of what you have acquired—other people’s words, other people’s views and theories. They can form such a thick crust round the essence that nothing can penetrate it to reach you, to reach what you are.”
Carter pondered his own “personality” for a long time, his persona as the flamboyant, swaggering boxer who intimidated others in and out of the ring. But he was even more intrigued by Ouspensky’s conclusion that every man lives in a prison—of his own ignorance and illusions—and that he cannot escape this prison by himself. Ouspensky wrote: “If he decides to run away, he must be one of a number of people who wish to run away, for they have to dig a tunnel, for one man cannot do it alone; and they must have help from those who have run away before them.”
This idea bothered Carter, the chary loner who had sealed himself off from most of the outside world. He figured he had two prisons to escape a literal one and a metaphysical one—but he had no one to help him. Ouspensky, in A New Model of the Universe, introduced another notion that weighed heavily upon Carter. Self-knowledge and freedom were possible, Ouspensky wrote, but only for “an inner circle of humanity.”
Humanity is regarded as two concentric circles. All humanity which we know and to which we belong forms the outer circle. All the history of humanity that we know is the history of the outer circle. But within this circle there is another, of which men of the outer circle know nothing, and the existence of which they only sometimes dimly suspect … The inner … circle forms, as it were, a life within a life, a mystery, a secret in the life of humanity … the members of the inner circle are civilised men living in a country of barbarians among savages.
On one level, Ouspensky helped Carter to understand his adversaries. They were not wicked, they were simply unconscious. Society had conditioned them and most everyone else to commit or tolerate injustice. The truth was evident to the “inner circle of humanity,” but who exactly were its members and how could they help him?
Carter took these and other questions to some new inmates. When his friend Moko was released in 1979, he introduced Carter to two prison newcomers, Ulysses “Sam” Leslie, a lanky, light-skinned African American who had been convicted of homicide, and Robert Sigler, known as “Zig,” a heavyset dark-skinned son of a coal miner, who had been convicted of armed robbery. Carter began tutoring Sam and Zig, walking around the prison yard with the two younger inmates, giving them some of his books and engaging them in long discussions. He also typed dozens of letters and sent them through the prison equivalent of office mail. He urged them to “die to the world,” to surrender all that was false about themselves. As he wrote to Leslie on August 28, 1981:
We covered [ourselves] up with coldness, with intellectualism, with words, with excuses, with games, until we finally began to believe for ourselves that we could not feel or love! So now when we want to feel and love, we have to dig ourselves out from under all the shit that we have piled up on ourselves throughout our lives, and in many cases in order to do it—it takes a great deal of TNT to accomplish the job.
Carter still wrote tirades in his journals about racism in America and prison life, but he could now see his experiences as a painful but necessary crucible for his personal development. He wrote to Leslie on April 21, 1982:
Sometimes readiness and change come only because of all the heartache and pain and deep frustration that has gone on before. That is to say, every sin, every disease, every disappointment, every failure, every bit of difficulty that has ever touched our lives have all been a very necessary part of our entire experience without which we would not have been made ready or prepared to receive the unfoldment of a truly spiritual message. And I say this knowing, just as you know, that some of us have been down and are presently still down, into the very depths of human existence … And yet whatever the degree of difficulty each one of us has had, then it was perhaps that degree of difficulty that each one of us needed!
Carter now looked with contempt on the very activities that he had once cherished. People who went to athletic events, discos, “pornoshops or houses of prostitution” were part of the benighted masses. He quoted Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann, which he culled from Ouspensky’s New Model of the Universe. Society was threatened not by subversive ideas or radical opinions but by consensus opinions, or what Ibsen called “ageing truths”: “All the truths belonging to the majority are like ancient rancid bacon or like rotten green ham; and from them comes all the moral scurvy which is eating itself into the life of the people around us.”
But Carter was still optimistic about man’s ability to rise above the morass. “So, yes, things can be changed,” he wrote on April 5, 1980, to Steve Slaby, a civil engineering professor at Princeton University who worked on Carter’s New Jersey Defense Committee, “but they cannot be changed by ordinary means. They can only be changed by an understanding of who and what we are … And therefore, the struggle must go on—but the battlefields need to be changed, because we are continuously seeking for happiness and joy outside of ourselves, when in actual fact they can only be within, and then we will be able to find them in other places.”
Several months later, Carter woke up one morning and looked at the mirror in his cell. He saw the bald head, the goatee, the glower, but the image didn’t register. He looked at himself for a long time, but it was as if he were looking at a different person. Carter’s head had been shaved since he enlisted in the Army. He had always liked his head burnished and bald. It was the Hurricane’s signature, a symbol of renegade power, virility, and defiance. It was intimidating, and, Carter now concluded, it was all fake. Pretense. Personality. Carter looked into the mirror and knew that he was no longer that person. The fulgent black dome, the chin beard and fearsome stare, were part of his Eldorado-driving, horseback-riding, vodka-swilling, priapic persona. They were not his essence. A new Hurricane was slowly emerging. For the first time in twenty-five years, he put away his Magic Shave. Carter, at forty-three, feared his hair would come in gray, but it came in thick and black. “I fooled my hair to think it was young,” he later joked. The Afro literally softened Carter’s edges. He also clipped his whiskers and, for the first time in years, his face was clean shaven. As Ouspensky wrote in The Fourth Way, “If personality becomes more transparent, impressions and external influences will penetrate through it and reach essence, and then essence will begin to grow.”
While Carter continued his self exploration, the outside world occasionally penetrated in remarkable ways. In December 1980, a guard went to his cell and told Carter that his father was in the hospital in Glassboro, New Jersey, and he had a pass to see him. Carter had not seen or spoken to his father in four years and did not know he was ill, but he assumed his condition was serious. It cost his family $500 for two off-duty guards to drive Carter to the hospital in a state vehicle. Lloyd Carter, the hard-working church deacon and switch-wielding disciplinarian, had had a stormy relationship with his youngest son. Rubin’s wayward behavior as a youth had earned him many beatings, but his father admired his son’s headstrong spirit. Lloyd also never doubted Rubin’s innocence. He knew that no child of his could walk into a bar and shoot a room full of strangers. He attended every day of both trials and was heartbroken by Rubin’s convictions. In his final years, Lloyd mellowed quite a bit, spending more time with his wife, Bertha, at a family farm in southern New Jersey. Lloyd’s hair turned a distinguished, courtly gray, but he retained his steely frame and unflinching faith—in God and in Rubin. He talked incessantly about his son’s freedom. It consumed his dreams and his passions. “I know someday Rubin will be free,” he often said. “I don’t know if I’ll be around to see it, but I know he will be free.”
When Rubin reached his father’s hospital room, his worst fears were confirmed. His father, now in his late sixties, had colon cancer. He lay, emaciated, with clear tubes running through his nose and a urine bag on the side of the bed. Lloyd was conscious and twitching and seemed uncomfortable. He couldn’t talk. As the prison guards stood outside the room, Rubin walked to his father’s bed. He wanted to touch his forehead, to hold him. The warmth of his hand, the safety of his arms would heal him, Rubin thought, and his father would rise from the bed and walk away. But standing before his father in shackles and handcuffs, Rubin could not reach out.
“I’m here, Dad, and I love you,” he whispered. “It’s sad you have to see me still in chains, but that’s the way it is, that’s just the way it is.” Lloyd looked at his son and nodded.
An hour later, Carter was taken back to prison. That night he had a bizarre dream in which a blue and white “dog-horse” appeared before him and asked where his father was. In the dream Carter replied, “Paterson.” He then woke up, puzzled, because he had just seen his father in Glassboro. Carter rarely spoke to his mother from prison, but the following morning he called her at her home in Paterson. He needed to find out where his father was. Bertha said that Lloyd had died shortly after his visit the day before; Bragg Funeral Homes in Paterson had already retrieved the body. Lloyd Carter was indeed in Paterson when Rubin so informed the mysterious dog-horse.
Rubin, disinclined in general to attend burials, did not go to his father’s funeral. Over the years, he often wondered if he made the right decision in seeing his father on his deathbed—if he subconsciously wanted his father to see him in restraints. Rubin always resented that his father had told the Paterson police that his nine-year-old son stole clothes from an outdoor market. That led to Rubin’s first encounter with the law, and it seemed to set the tone for the rest of his life. His current imprisonment was the culmination of all his battles with the police, and he wondered if he stood before his dying father, his hands and legs cuffed and shackled, to settle past scores, to get even. The thought troubled Carter for many years.
In May 1981, Carter returned to the Passaic County Court for the first time since his sentencing. It was a kind of coming-out party for him, the first time that his lawyers or almost anyone else outside the prison had seen his new look. He received his first shock when he was placed in the holding cell with other prisoners in the jail. In the New Jersey prison system, Carter’s bare-knuckle reputation was legendary, his badboy image from his days in Paterson still the stuff of tall tales. Inmates respected someone with a “rep,” and in his presence they tended to suppress their own boasting about how “bad” they were, lest he challenge them. But now the other prisoners continued with their strutting and jive talk after a guard whispered excitedly that “Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter is coming today.” It dawned on Carter that no one recognized him. Wearing a red-and-white-check wool shirt and blue jeans and a full head of neatly cropped hair, he looked like anyone else, and he was ignored. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. He had disappeared without disappearing. This seemed proof that his studies were working. The guards and prisoners were searching for Hurricane Carter’s personality, but that was gone. What they saw was his essence.
He walked quietly into the courtroom through a side door, flanked by two prison guards, and smiled to a group of supporters. Sitting at his defense table was a new lawyer, Leon Friedman. A law professor at Hofstra University, Friedman had spoken to Carter on the phone a number of times but had never met him. “Who is this guy?” Friedman asked Myron Beldock as their client walked toward the table. Carter sat next to Beldock.
“Damn, Rubin, is that you?” Beldock asked.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
During a break, Carter also saw his son, Raheem, now four years old, for the first time since he was a newborn. They smiled, embraced, and were talking when a corpulent police officer intervened. “Okay, that’s it,” he said, separating them. As Carter took his seat, he thought about both his father and son: Lloyd’s final image of him was a man in shackles, and Raheem’s only image was of him in custody. It gave the boy a grievous connection with his deceased grandfather.
Carter was in court for a remand hearing, ordered by the New Jersey Supreme Court. It asked the trial court to determine possible prosecutorial misconduct related to a polygraph exam given to Alfred Bello three months before the 1976 trial. At the time, the prosecutors were supposedly trying to ascertain which of Bello’s many versions of the Lafayette bar shootings was accurate. The polygraph examiner, Leonard Harrelson, filed a report with Carter’s lawyers indicating that Bello’s 1967 version was truthful. Unlike his recanted accounts, the ‘67 version had Bello standing on the street, watching Carter and John Artis flee from the tavern with weapons. The prosecutors confronted Bello with the polygraph results, which caused Bello to return to his original—and incriminating—testimony.
After the trial, however, Beldock was troubled by the lie detector report. He generally did not trust polygraph tests, and he did not see how a polygrapher could possibly extricate the truth from a congenital liar like Bello. This polygraph report in particular nettled Beldock because it had more questions—thirty—than he had seen on most other tests, and he could not figure out how Bello’s answers produced Harrelson’s conclusion. Harrelson himself was a highly regarded, seasoned examiner who was chief of the Keeler Polygraph Institute in Chicago, but at least one error in the report suggested he had been careless. Harrelson concluded that Bello was telling the truth when he testified at the “1966” trial. The trial occurred in 1967.
After the second trial, Beldock called Harrelson and asked him a simple question: Which of Bello’s versions did he find to be truthful? Initially Harrelson was fuzzy on the details, but he said that Bello’s polygrams showed that his in the bar account was truthful—the version that exonerated Carter and Artis. That directly contradicted his written report, which said Bello’s testimony at the first trial, the on the street account, was truthful. Beldock spoke with Harrelson on the phone several more times and flew to Chicago twice to interview him. It turned out that Harrelson had never read the transcripts from the first trial and had mistakenly assumed that the in the bar version was used in the first trial. Harrelson’s blunder might never have become important except for one fact: Harrelson had told members of the prosecution team, including Vincent DeSimone and Burrell Humphreys, the accurate results of the polygraph test in telephone conversations, but prosecutors never disclosed this evidence to the defense. In Beldock’s view, that represented withholding of evidence and was grounds for overturning the conviction. Assistant Prosecutor Ronald Marmo had already said that prosecutors used the lie detector test to bring Bello back to his original testimony. If prosecutors knew the results were false, Beldock believed that represented prosecutorial misconduct. It was again up to the trial court judge—Bruno Leopizzi—to sort out this mess in the remand hearing and issue an opinion.
While these revelations would ultimately prove enormously significant to Carter’s case, the defendant was much more focused on another, more personal sort of epiphany. From the moment he had been arrested, he always insisted that he be fully involved in the courtroom proceedings. At his trials and various hearings, he sat at the defense table, sizing up witnesses, concentrating on every word, scribbling notes on a legal pad, conferring with his lawyers on strategy, absorbing everything he could. Now here he was again, fifteen years later, still sitting in a courtroom with lawyers and witnesses and a judge and complete strangers who didn’t know anything about him. Once again he saw Alfred Bello on the stand and Judge Leopizzi on the bench and Marmo at the counsel table for the state.* There was talk about Rubin Carter the killer, the murderer, the gunman. Carter had heard it all before, and he was sick of it. He wrote on his yellow pad, “All these people who are seeking to protect this thing … It is very painful for me to sit here—the only African in the room—and watch as this poisonous system poisons …” At the end of the first day, Carter concluded he had had enough. These people were not talking about him; they were talking about themselves or about some other people. This proceeding was no longer relevant to him, and he would not dignify it with his presence. He had more important work to do. “I’m not going to listen to this anymore,” he told Beldock. “I’m going back to prison.”
The hearing continued for fifteen days. Bello, conceding that he had a serious drinking problem, testified that he had virtually no memory of any of the events in question—the trial, the polygraph test, or the night of the murder. Harrelson confirmed that, after Bello’s polygraph test, he notified the prosecutor’s office that Bello’s in the bar story the version that exonerated Carter—was true and that his written report was in error. Harrelson denied that he had colluded with the prosecutors to falsify the report. He also testified that he was convinced that Carter and Artis were the actual killers—a preposterous claim, given that the most he could do was evaluate the truthfulness of Bello’s statements, and Bello had never accused the defendants of committing the murder, just being at the scene of the crime.
In the end, Leopizzi wrote an eighty-page opinion in favor of the prosecutors. It was all too familiar for Carter. Just as his first trial judge, Samuel Larner, ruled that no prosecutorial errors had tainted those proceedings, Judge Leopizzi was certain that no misdeeds by the state had occurred on his watch either. Carter realized that no trial judge would ever impugn his own courtroom, and that justice was possible only in the state supreme court or in federal court. But he had no time to lament his latest setback. In his ongoing search for the miraculous, he was about to stumble on the inner circle of humanity.
* Absent was DeSimone, who had died in 1979. Humphreys was now a Superior Court judge in Passaic County, but he testified at the remand hearing.