RUBIN CARTER typically ignored fan mail or letters with unknown addresses, but the white envelope with a strange Canadian postmark that was dropped in his cell in September of 1980 intrigued him. The blocky printed letters seemed to have been made by a child—fan letters typically came from adults who remembered Carter from his boxing days—and when he opened the envelope, Lesra Martin’s note barely filled a page. But Carter was touched by its gentle tone: “The thought of writing you scared me, but not because of your reputation—I know you wouldn’t hurt a flea (unless it bit you).”
Carter mulled over the letter for several weeks while Lesra and his guardians anxiously awaited a reply. Finally, they were rewarded. Carter thanked the youngster for his concern and inquired why he was in Canada and who exactly was caring for him. The response thrilled the commune. Lesra promptly wrote back, but this time Lisa and several others included their own notes as well. They plied Carter with questions: What was the status of his legal case? Who was handling the appeal? Was he still forswearing prison food? Was he writing another book? What did he think about the recent election of Ronald Reagan? Carter tried to answer the questions, but he wrote that he considered politics transitory, that most of his energies were now devoted to per sonal growth, and that he was “tabernacling” with the likes of Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, and Krishnamurti.
As Christmas approached, the Canadians mailed Carter a package of gifts, including a velour jogging suit in dark earth tones, a hat, socks, and a hand-drawn card of Carter in a jogging suit with a caption that read: “Keep On Keepin’ On.” Other letters kept him up to date on happenings around the house and on a home renovation business now bringing money into the commune. Lesra, encouraged by Lisa, asked Carter if he could visit the prison over Christmas, when he would be visiting his family in Brooklyn. Lisa believed the trip would be part of Lesra’s continuing education, and Lesra, although nervous at the prospect, believed that he and Carter, as blacks, had a special bond that the Canadians could not share.
Carter was wary of any visit or, indeed, of any interaction with this group. He didn’t know who these people were or what they wanted from him. Just as he felt he didn’t have time for prison activities, he believed he didn’t have time for friendships or pen pals. In return letters, he thanked the Canadians for the gifts but was vague about Lesra’s offer to visit him. “All power to him if he can make it to the prison,” he wrote, “and I wish not to disappoint him, but I may not be able to see him for reasons I can’t talk about.” He did not tell Lesra that he had not had any visitors in four years, save his lawyers, Kidrin, and one or two other friends, and he did not reveal that contact visits took place in the Death House.
Still, Lesra was determined to see Carter. He had never been on a train before. But on the last Sunday of 1980, his father dropped him off at Penn Station in Manhattan, and he rode Amtrak to Trenton. Several women on the train seemed like old friends, and they did share a common bond. Trenton State had contact visits on Sundays, and these women knew one another from their weekly trips. A nervous black woman noticed Lesra sitting by himself holding a package—Christmas cards from the Canadians. The woman saw the fear in the young man’s eyes.
“How long has your father been in jail?” she asked.
Lesra was pleased at the thought of Rubin Carter as his father “Awhile,” he said. He noticed that the woman was also carrying a package, and he could smell the sweet potato pie inside, a treat for her son.
Once in Trenton, the woman invited Lesra to share a taxi with her and several others. Going in one cab, Lesra realized, was not simply a way for the women to split the fare; rather, their fears of the looming stone walls were more easily subdued by traveling as a group.
Entering the prison, Lesra saw a mail counter in a waiting room, where he tried to leave his package; the woman on the train had told him he could not take his bundle into the Visiting Center. But a prison mail clerk rejected the item, saying that all such parcels, excluding food, had to be delivered to the prison by the postal service. Crestfallen, Lesra stood at the counter for a long moment, then heard a familiar voice behind him.
“Don’t let that stuff get to you,” said the woman from the train. “It’s more important that you see your father.”
When a guard finally yelled out Carter’s number, indicating he was in the VC, Lesra initially felt relief, but it quickly gave way to fear as he saw the taut expressions of those who were about to enter the holding bay. By the time he passed through the bay, trapped momentarily by the closed doors, he realized that prison was about control and humiliation—even for visitors. He felt safe once he and Carter, the last two standing without partners, met and hugged, and he knew Carter’s presence in the VC was special. “Good gracious, Mr. Carter,” someone said, “we haven’t seen you here in a long time.”
Carter immediately liked Lesra, a good-looking youngster, well mannered and brave. By now he had received many cards and several gifts from Toronto, but he had doubts about the living arrangements, particularly for Lesra. He asked him what books he was reading, what subjects he was learning, and how he liked the other members of the house.
Carter was privately suspicious of communes—he remembered the macabre end of Jim Jones and his followers—and he didn’t see how a bunch of Canadians could teach Lesra about his roots, about black history and African culture. Carter believed that black Americans who never learned about their background were often shills for white authority. He placed the heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, who had been embraced by mainstream America for his temperate social views and gentlemanly behavior, in that category. Only later did Carter realize that Lesra was in one of the most African-centered homes imaginable, where blacks were not only respected but idolized.
Lesra told Carter that the Canadians were more like a family than a commune, that he was reading Frederick Douglass, was learning about the contributions of black men in history, and he was working hard. Carter explained that he usually refused contact visits because he found the body searches humiliating, and Lesra felt responsible for subjecting him to such treatment for this visit. Returning to the holding bay, he felt anger more than fear, thinking about the body search Carter had to suffer before he could return to his cell. Carter himself, lying on his cot with the Polaroid photo of himself and Lesra, was pleased that he had seen his visitor.
When Lesra returned to Toronto, he told everyone about the woman on the train, the terror of the prison, the Polaroid photo—and the extraordinary man that was Rubin Carter. There was a sense of high excitement in the house, and all conversation revolved around what could be done for Carter. Everyone participated, but it was Lisa who made Carter her project. This was not Nate Shaw, the wrongfully convicted but now deceased cotton farmer in All God’s Dangers, and this was not Lesra, whose prisons of poverty and illiteracy could be overcome with money, hard work, and education. Carter was locked away in a real prison right now, and he needed help. In the early months of 1981, Lisa told the other members of the commune, “I think we can get him out on a technicality.” It was unclear if Lisa, schooled in conspiracy theories but not the law, knew what that actually meant. But it was obvious that Carter’s freedom was foremost in her mind. Rubin Carter, she would say, “is my life’s work.”
Three weeks after Lesra’s visit, Carter wrote a lengthy letter to the commune (Dear Fightin’ Canadians). He thanked them for the sweatsuit, socks, and hat (The colors were my colors!), praised Lesra (In my opinion, he is a very handsome little rascal), and explained why he was loath to visit people in the Death House (where lost souls … are still flittering hopelessly about the place trying to find their way home). For Carter, writing a letter was easy; he had written hundreds. Talking on the telephone was different. Carter rarely called anyone on the inmate phone because he did not want to depend on the prison for anything. He also believed that the conversations were taped. But his “work,” or reading, had forced him to question his old assumptions, to find new avenues for personal growth. Using the phone, he decided, would test his progress.
When the first call came, Gus Sinclair picked it up. “Will you take a collect call,” the operator asked, “from Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter?”
“I’d be happy to take a call from Rubin ‘Hurricane’—”
Lisa bounded off the sofa and grabbed the phone. Carter again thanked her for the letters and Christmas gifts and inquired about Lesra. He spoke a bit about the prison. It was small talk. But it was also a watershed. Rubin Carter had reached outside the prison walls to share a few moments with someone.
The phone calls continued, but for Lisa they were not enough. She needed to see Carter herself. In late February, Lesra, Lisa, Terry Swinton, and Sam Chaiton flew to Philadelphia, rented a car, and drove to Trenton State Prison. They parked across the street from the hulking penitentiary, and as they walked outside the prison wall, beneath the guard towers, Lisa bent over and retched. The foursome went through the same check-in process that Lesra had encountered two months earlier: the registering, the hand stamping, the frisking, the scanning by metal detectors. They thought it fitting that they visited Carter in the Death House where Richard Bruno Hauptmann had been executed forty-five years earlier for murdering the Lindbergh baby. Hauptmann, in their view, had also been wrongfully convicted.
Inside the visiting cell, Carter sat with his back to the wall. The Canadians were surprised at how emaciated he looked. He had lost twenty pounds since his days as a prizefighter, when his body had little fat to spare. He told the group that he heated canned soup in his cell with an electric coil or munched on nuts or the odd egg or onion or slice of bacon that an inmate would bring from the kitchen. But immersed in his studies, he told them, he would sometimes go two or three days without eating. He described the loss of his right eye and the absence of medical treatment in general. He was wearing a long-sleeve black shirt and sharply creased blue jeans, but the shirt cuffs were frayed, and his leather boots, while polished, were worn. Lisa asked if they could send him food and inquired about other needs, such as clothing.
While Carter greeted Lesra warmly at their first meeting, he was cooler to the Canadians. He privately considered their communal living arrangement odd and thought they were hippies. They weren’t a family, they weren’t a business, and they weren’t a cult. It wasn’t clear what they were, he thought, but why would anyone choose to live in a house with a bunch of other adults unless they were in prison? Carter also had painful memories of the many celebrity supporters who had pledged their help in the seventies, only to abandon him. Would these foreigners do the same?
The end of the visit brought a pleasant surprise. As his four guests prepared to leave, Lisa kissed Rubin, her lips soft against his face. He had not felt that in years.
The encounter sealed the Canadians’ commitment to Carter. They joked that his ego was probably large enough for him to believe that most people on the planet discussed him at least once a day. But even Carter at his most egotistical could not contemplate how his case, his history, his family, his friends, his daily mood swings, monopolized the thoughts of this group. “He was a mythological creature to us,” Mary Newberry recalled. “He was not real to us in a way. He was someone we were working for.” Added Sean Cunningham: “He was bigger than life, a force that took over the house. He was wrongfully convicted. He was a celebrity. He was untouchable, and he was a beautiful, gentle man.”
But Carter also took pride in his self-imposed deprivation. Everything inside his cell was hard or damaged or both: the walls, the floor, the bed, the toilet. He did not have a television or a radio or rugs or throw pillows or pornographic materials or any of the other paraphernalia that most inmates used to make their imprisonment more bearable. The absence of these items denied the warden the opportunity to take anything away; and in Carter’s own mind, his asceticism made imprisonment more tolerable, not less. As he wrote in a journal: “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more, than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.”
Lisa, however, challenged him on these bedrock principles. In telephone conversations and in future contact visits, she told Carter that he was simply locking himself deeper into prison and negating his own humanity. She chastised him for being too serious and studious while denying himself laughter, comfort, and pleasure. He had to open his heart as well as his mind. His fears, she said, were controlling his life.
But fear, Carter said, was how one survived in prison. As he wrote to her:
This place is built for destruction. It is designed to destroy any and everything that comes into contact with it, for it is unnatural, it is anti-human, and it must destroy! It has no other choice. So being frightened is not being afraid; it is being smart! … Being frightened means not helping your keepers keep you kept, and handling this place and its people as one would handle a poisonous rattlesnake: always being completely respectful of its nature and what it is designed to do, and making damn sure that you always stay away from the business end of it!
Despite these fears, Lisa and her housemates were determined to subdue the rattler and bring joy into Carter’s life. On one level, their beneficence was humanitarian. They saw a man starving, so they began sending monthly food packages via UPS. There was an elaborate roast, capped with a spiked crown and wreathed in red roses. There were deliveries of salmon, tuna, chocolate cakes with thick icing, sponge cakes, pastries, fruits, and nuts. These provisions roused Carter’s long-dormant olfactory senses and satisfied a long-forgotten hunger. The moist meats and feathery cakes also had a powerful tactile dimension. Just holding a piece of roast or a slice of sponge cake, for Carter, was a balm on callous fingers.
The Canadians also hoped to prepare him for life outside prison by bringing radiant images of their own world into his cell. They began sending him photographs, rolls at a time, of their home and their city. They photographed their neatly trimmed lawn at dusk to capture the dramatic shadows cast by giant oak trees. They shot red Japanese maples, pink flowering honeysuckles and French hybrid lilacs in full bloom, low stone walls draped with perennials, and a pagoda overlooking a rock garden. They photographed the shoreline of Lake Ontario and the Royal Bank Building, its faceted mirror glass dusted with gold. Sunsets, snowfalls, and thunderstorms were all captured on film. Even a playful raccoon in the backyard merited several profiles. Carter noticed that the Canadians themselves were never in the pictures; that was not their style. In all, the commune sent close to five hundred pictures—what Carter described as a bit of “paradise in prison.”
If the snapshots created a visual escape, other gifts appealed to different senses. Following Lisa’s instructions, Mary Newberry made Carter a brown velvet robe with a boxer’s hood. It was lined with chocolate-brown silk and edged in gold thread, every row of stitches straight, all seams properly hidden. With it was a pair of fluffy sheepskin slippers. Carter loved the robe. It caressed his back, and he proudly strolled through his wing to display it. The strolls, however, did not comply with prison regulations. In one instance, corrections officer F. Melicharek filed the following disciplinary charge: “While this officer was working on 2L on the above indicated time and date, I noticed inmate Carter, #45472, stepping out of his cell wearing only a bathrobe 10 minutes after the mess movement had been called out. I questioned inmate Carter where he was going and he walked past me without responding. I ordered Carter twice to stop and reply and both times he did not comply with my order. I informed Carter that he had a charge.”
The prison survived Carter’s runway modeling, and he did not lose his robe.
The Canadians lived frugally and rarely bought designer clothes or fancy home accessories. The clothing they got for Lesra, while well made, was often secondhand. But they believed Carter deserved the best. As his forty-fourth birthday approached, the Canadians examined fabrics, colors, and styles to ensure that everything he had was first class, that his new shirts and socks and slacks would all fit. They wrapped their gifts in fancy paper with garish ribbons and bows.
Carter increasingly warmed up to his benefactors. As he wrote to them:
You literally overwhelm a man! Letters and goodies are coming so fast, in so many different directions, penetrating, perforating, softening up this old toughened hide, until it’s hard to know which direction is up, or which letter I’m answering. (Smile) Talk, without a directed purpose, has never come easy to me—that is, just talking to be talking and I do very little of it here. But now I know that more is needed, because it’s necessary. It’s to be loose. To be fluid. Not to be rigid. But it also embarrasses me. It makes me blush (Smile). Can you believe that. The Hurricane is really warm and cuddly and nothing but a gentle breeze.
But he did not want to give in completely to a life of comfort. This tension came to a head over Lisa’s efforts to send him a television. By now, TVs were common in prison cells, but Carter didn’t want one. It would be too easy for the warden to take it away. Lisa, in phone calls and letters, urged him to reconsider. She had given Lesra a new television in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and she thought Carter should have one too. A TV would not compromise his principles, she said. So what if the warden took it away? Even if Carter watched it for only one day, that was one day more of pleasure than he would otherwise have. By denying himself, he was effectively giving the warden more power than he already had.
Carter, conceding that he loved luxury, explained his ambivalence in one of his letters:
Luxury is one thing and stupidity is another. To own a twelve thousanddollar automobile while still living in a ten-dollar-a-week room … that’s stupid. Because it cannot last long. And to have such luxury in a place that is daily seeking to destroy you, by your own efforts, is the same kind of stupidity …
I know that I can have whatever I want in this place: it’s just that there is nothing in this place that I want. I could own this mammy-jammy lock, stock and barrel! I could very easily have the Warden’s job (in function, if not in title) if I will only sell myself and my ability and my self-respect and become a “good ole boy.” And why not? All they want me to do is run their prison, create phony programs, keep order among the prisoners, and make the administration look good so they can say: “I’ve got Rubin Hurricane Carter working for me.” And somebody else will say: “Oh, yeah, I thought he was a tough guy, what’s he like?” And the Warden will answer with a satisfied smirk on his face, “He’s a good ole boy, keeps those niggers right in line for me.”
So you see, as far as this prison is concerned I have nothing to do with it, and it has nothing to do with me! I only collect my mail here … So, yes, thank you: I would like very much to take you up on your most generous offer, for it has been a long time since I’ve watched any television, and perhaps now I might be able to handle it (Smile). Think so?
You people are a bad influence on me! You’re letting me get loose. (Good!)
The Canadians sent Carter a thirteen-inch color television, the largest the prison would allow. Carter told Lisa to send it to another inmate, Mr. Mobutu, a seventy-nine-year-old who locked on the same tier as Carter. No one in the mailroom would tamper with his stuff, Carter said. The television arrived in good shape.
“Rubin, Rubin, look at this, someone sent me a new TV,” Mobutu told Carter.
“Yeah, I know,” Carter said.
Unknown to Lisa, Mobutu took the shiny new TV to his own cell while Carter quietly carried Mobutu’s old black-and-white set back to his own unit.
In letters to his fellow inmate Sam Leslie, Carter described Lisa and the commune as “the family,” and he chastised Leslie for not also accepting “the family’s” offer of support. “You were afraid of what someone else would see in you, weren’t you? … You were scared of being opened up. And yet that’s your salvation; to open up; to not be so serious about things which are not serious, and to be more humorous.”
To Carter, accepting the commune as part of his life was a step on his own journey of self-discovery. He felt proud that he was willing to trust people again. Moreover, the Canadians seemed to prove that his readings were leading him in the right direction. They appeared to have walked right out of Ouspensky’s “inner circle of humanity,” a group whose detachment from society had placed it on a higher plane than everyone else. Each member of the commune was like a piece of a puzzle: separate, they were nothing; together, they were invincible. The commune’s secrecy echoed the very words that Ouspensky used to describe “conscious” beings: “The inner … circle forms, as it were, a life within a life, a mystery, a secret in the life of humanity.”
While everyone else slept, the Canadians saw the truth. They saw that the State of New Jersey had framed an innocent man. They saw racism and prejudice. And when they saw people in need, like himself and Lesra, they were willing to help. Ouspensky wrote that for a man to escape from prison—the prison of unconsciousness—he “must have help from the outside [and] he must work to dig his tunnel.” Carter realized that the Canadians, by embracing him, by softening his environment, could help him escape his prison of bitterness and isolation. In due course they would help him escape his prison of brick and steel.
While everyone in the commune helped Carter, most of its members were peripheral figures in his life. He continued to talk to Lesra about his schoolwork, but he communicated principally with Lisa, and their relationship dominated their lives. Despite their disparate backgrounds, Rubin and Lisa saw themselves in each other. They were both estranged from their homes and families. They both lived in close-knit, rigid subcultures that distrusted outsiders. They were leaders within their own groups, and they were tough, stubborn, and fearless. They shared beliefs about the ubiquity of racism, the corruption of the American legal system, and the injurious effects of large institutions on human nature. They believed that people are inherently good but have been conditioned to act otherwise. Rubin and Lisa had little doubt that they were among the chosen few who understood these truths.
During the first two years, their relationship evolved over the telephone. At one point, a speakerphone was set up in the commune so that everyone could listen to Rubin, but Lisa mothballed the device. She wanted to talk to him exclusively and privately. She was possessive—“like a woman who had a baby and didn’t want to cut the umbilical cord,” according to Sam Leslie, who also communicated with her from prison. She believed that she could best empathize with Carter, hear his concerns, break down his shell. She tucked herself away in the commune’s library and carried on conversations that would last up to eight hours as her housemates kept her stocked in cigarettes, coffee, and sandwiches. Kathy Swinton shooed away eavesdroppers.
The conversations were in part an extension of the gifts, an effort to expose Rubin to a world beyond the prison. Rubin, on the phone, held the photographs that had been sent to him. As Lisa described what the others were doing in different parts of the house or on the grounds, he would sift through the pictures and find the corresponding image so he could feel as if he were there. “You are here with us, and we are there with you,” Lisa told him.
At the same time, Rubin brought Lisa into the penitentiary, describing to her the minutiae of imprisonment. The riot of noises that echoed through the tiers—cell doors slamming open and shut, the squeals of ancient radiators and water pipes, the rattling pushcarts carrying laundry, the constant movement of men, the ritual counts of prisoners—all could be heard through the telephone receiver in Toronto, and all provided a backdrop for Carter’s recreation of prison life. This new guy was mopping the floor, that graybeard was taking a shower, these guards were coming on duty.
The telephone enabled the pair not only to enter each other’s lives but to travel together on fairy tale adventures. They went to Paris, to Pakistan, to Africa, and described the people they saw, the music they heard. As Rubin later recalled, the idea was “to create so much fire within yourself, such tension, a crystallization takes place within your being. Personalities become scorched, and you merge into one. We were traveling by the inner body.”
As these conversations deepened, it became clear in Toronto that Lisa was falling in love with Rubin. This surprised Sinclair and Newberry at first. For years, Lisa had been Terry Swinton’s partner and lover. Swinton was like a father to Lisa’s son, and she and Martin used Swinton’s last name. But in the loose and rather peculiar dynamic of the commune, Lisa had actually changed partners, to Sam Chaiton, before her long-distance love interest in Carter. Regardless, there was no doubt where Lisa’s passions now lay. Her endless phone calls merged with more frequent trips to Trenton, and a rhythm of travel developed. According to Sinclair, when Lisa returned from a prison trip, she would find herself exhausted but content. The following week she would be more energetic and antsy, and by the third week she would be in a state of nervous excitement. During that period she would say such things as, “he needs me down there,” “he doesn’t have the benefit of constant contact,” “he needs extra guidance to get over” a particular problem.
“Nearly every four weeks,” Sinclair later wrote in his own journal, “no matter what was going on at home, no matter the weather or what our financial situation might have been, Lisa left for Trenton, usually with Sam and sometimes with Terry, for a four-day visit.”
The emerging romance showed itself in other ways. Lisa had always taken pride that she never dressed up for any man and that she never wore makeup. But she changed for Rubin. He told Lisa that he liked feminine women who dressed sharply. When he said that he wanted to see her wearing a chiffon dress so he could feel the softness of the fabric, she obliged. She bought other dresses and skirts and also wore makeup on her prison sojourns. Most surprising of all, perhaps, were the portrait photographs.
Lisa, self-conscious about her nose, avoided pictures of herself. But she had numerous pictures of Rubin in prison, most of which had been taken by other inmates, and she wanted Rubin to have a nice photograph of her. The picture was taken in the commune’s home. The day before the shoot, Lisa went to a beauty shop, where her straight hair was given soft waves and ringlets. The next day, there was a buzz of anticipation at the house. Everyone was involved. Lisa spent several hours on her makeup, and she put on an off-white double-knit blouse with puffy sleeves that came to a tight wrist. Eitel Renbaum took the picture. Sitting in a hoop-backed Windsor chair in the living room, Lisa held a rose and smiled winsomely at the camera. She was also photographed outside under a tree. Renbaum shot an entire roll. After the pictures were developed, everyone in the house studied the results to determine which portrait was best. They then wrote lighthearted essays explaining why they chose a particular shot. Lisa sent the four top-rated pictures to Carter with all the essays.
Carter continued this selection game in prison, passing around the pictures to Robert Sigler and Leslie, who appreciated the gesture. “At first sight, all the pictures were equally beautiful,” Leslie wrote to Carter. “In fact, looking at Lisa I said to myself, damn! She does not look white or black. She is just a beautiful woman.” Rubin agreed. He gazed at all four for many hours and kept them safe in a folder in his cell. He later asked an inmate who was a skilled artist to draw Lisa’s portrait in chalky pastels, and he gave it to Lisa.
Indeed, his feelings for Lisa grew in response to the attention she gave him. Conversations unfolded over the telephone and in visits while they sat together in former Death Row cells on the weekend or with a bulletproof glass between them on weekdays. He began speaking candidly about his troubled relationship with his father and the hurt he still felt from the time his father struck him as a young boy after he bought ice cream from a white man. He shared intimacies that he had never disclosed before. He talked about his “sportin’ life,” or his years as a boxer, when he womanized, drank, and ran people out of bars like a bully.
Lisa even infiltrated his dreams. In one, a government bureaucrat was interrogating him, asking for his “registration number.” Even in his dream Rubin wouldn’t cooperate, but he suddenly told the bureaucrat: “You should ask her, she’ll know what my number is.” The person to ask was Lisa. In letters to Sam Leslie, Rubin described her as “my girl.” In September 1981, Lisa visited the prison for two weeks. Afterward, Rubin fired off a letter to Leslie that explored a whole new subject. “Love is the key,” he wrote.
[But] self-love for our purposes is completely and utterly useless, and there is no sense in even wasting time on it … We are seeking Heaven; seeking pure bliss, and therefore Conscious Love is our ship! It is our salvation! It is Love that is Whole; a love that cannot change to hate … Love for one’s fellow-creatures; love for the birds and flowers and all the wise and wondrous workings of Nature … The mind is for thinking what is true, and the heart for perceiving what is good. But the heart can learn only from another heart what the printed word cannot teach! So I am teaching you how to love first yourself, and then to love everything else!
Said Leslie: Lisa “was the only one who really touched Rubin. If you were a cold person, she could get it out from you. If you had a secret, you could share it with her. She could emotionalize you. She had entered into a world where he had entered. It was spiritual.”
But Rubin felt Lisa’s withering rebukes as well as her tenderness. In his letters to Leslie, he called her either “Sharp Tongue” or “Ms. S. Heart” (for Sweetheart). She wanted to put his past behavior in the worst possible light. She was trying to do what the New Jersey prison system could not do: to break Carter down, to get him to admit—not murder—but past misdeeds. Naturally, he resisted with all his force and refused to express contrition for his mistakes.
“You’re a vicious motherfucker!” she yelled during one visit. “You’re a liar, you’re a drunk, and you steal. You’re no good, and you run with whores. Rubin, you ain’t shit!”
“I’m a player!” Carter retorted.
“You’re a whoremonger!”
“Hey, I’m cool. I’m trying to get what I can get.”
When Carter returned to his cell, he was fuming. “Who does she think she is,” he told Leslie. “I don’t want to see her nowhere, no more.”
One telephone conversation ended with Lisa in tears and Carter, handing the phone to Leslie, saying, “I don’t want to talk to that bitch.”
Leslie recalled: “Here were two people struggling. Both wanted to love, but they wanted to love on their own terms.”
Lisa’s tenacity jarred Carter because no woman had ever stood up to him before. His relations with women had always been patriarchal, if not sexist. He used to tell his girlfriends or his wife to get his shoes, cook his dinner, iron his clothes. Lisa, of course, brooked none of that. In her house she gave the orders, and her minions followed. She expected Rubin to be equally attentive. When he sent her a mere unadorned note for her birthday, she was furious. “Seared me almost to death,” Rubin wrote of her tongue-lashing. But he realized it was not the gift itself that angered Lisa but the spirit in which it was given. He had made no effort to make it special.
For all of the changes in Carter’s life, he still dealt with the prison in his old, unyielding fashion, and the prison, like the “rattlesnake” he compared it to, sometimes bit back, as it did in December 1981.
Prison counts, in which inmates “count off” from their cells, were a timeless ritual at Trenton. They occurred every few hours and ensured that no inmate was missing. Typically inmates could count off from anywhere in their cell, but on the evening of December 5, 1981, a special “head count” was demanded. That meant inmates, when counting off, had to stand up and put their hands on their cell bars. Trenton was “declared in an emergency situation due to the possibility of an escape,” according to prison records. “The institution was in an extremely stressful state.” Carter, however, was not particularly stressed. He was sitting on his bed quietly reading and writing. He had not been subject to a “head count” in years, and he ignored the order. A guard named Phillips stood outside his cell.
“Stand up and count, Carter!”
Carter continued his reading.
“Stand up and put your hands on the bars!”
Still no response.
“Are you not going to stand up?”
Carter didn’t even look at him.
According to the disciplinary report, “Inmate would not respond to any questions asked of him—also threw his copy of charges out of the cell. [He] would not answer when asked if he understood his rights.” Carter was charged with “conduct which disrupts or interferes with the orderly running of the institution.” He was shackled and taken down the tier to sounds of whispers from other prisoners: “They’re taking Rubin out, they’re taking Rubin out.” He was put in a van with two other inmates who had also refused the head count, and the three were driven to the Vroom Readjustment Unit, behind the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, where Carter had been in 1974. Then, a federal judge ruled that the New Jersey Department of Corrections had violated his due process rights and ordered him released after ninety-two days. His civil suit against the state was still pending.
Now Carter was back in the VRU. He was strip-searched three times before entering a dark row of cells, the Vroom’s “hole.” When he reached his cell, he was staggered by a horrific stench.
“Clean out that fucking cell before I go in there,” Carter told one of the guards.
“That’s not your cell,” the guard said. “That’s the guy next to you. He hasn’t showered in months.”
Carter was in the “hole” for fifteen days, where he watched (as he later wrote) “people being knocked in the head with sticks, their heads bursting open before my very eyes, their blood gushing out everywhere; guards in flak jackets, helmets, and shields, twenty and thirty of them, coming in droves, rushing in on some poor soul and then beating him down to the ground and into submission.” Carter, by now, was so familiar with the brutal violence that he viewed it like “a horror movie that I just happened to stumble on to but not become part of.”
He pled not guilty to the three charges that had sent him to the Vroom building: disruptive conduct, refusing to obey a charge, and group demonstration. His defense was that he never participated in prison activities and the administration knew that. Carter was found guilty on the disruptive conduct charge; the other two were dismissed. The penalty was to be in the Vroom building for one year and, for good measure, the loss of 365 days in “commutation time.”
Prisoners typically reduced their sentences through commutation time. A ten-year sentence could be cut to nine years, or eligibility for parole could be moved up by a year. Parole was a moot issue for Carter. His refusal to apologize for his putative crime or submit to any form of prison rehabilitation negated any appeal to the parole board. With his latest infraction, Carter now owed the State of New Jersey three lives, two consecutive and one concurrent, plus one year. This was an unusual achievement. The longer Carter stayed in prison, the more time he owed the state.
After he was removed from the “hole,” he was put into the building’s general population. Vroom’s accommodations were actually newer and bigger than his five-by-seven-foot cell in Trenton. His new cell had a stainless steel sink and a modern toilet. But the late-night beatings of inmates continued here as well. A prisoner who had killed a guard received nightly batterings. He managed to pry a brick loose from the cell wall, and Carter heard him using it to defend himself. The brick, however, did little damage to the guards’ riot gear.
Carter himself was never attacked, but the isolation was difficult. The guards ignored all the inmates, who seemed too shell-shocked to talk. But unlike the first time Carter was in the Vroom building, now he knew a guard, who gave him access to a telephone. Each day Carter spoke to the commune, mostly to Lisa, giving her a detailed tour of this obscure nook of the New Jersey prison system. He joked that his banishment to the Vroom was a blessing because now he didn’t have to send her a Christmas gift—better a lashing from guards than from her. In January of 1982, the Canadians racked up a long-distance bill of C$4,238.39.
By the middle of January, Carter’s sentence was reduced on appeal. He was removed from the Vroom building, returned to Trenton State Prison, and placed in the isolated Management Control Unit for another seven weeks. His loss of commutation time was also cut: he now owed New Jersey an extra 180 days—or, by Carter’s math, infinity plus six months. The MCU was known for years as Administrative Segregation; the prisoners called it “lockdown,” and it was its own special hell. The rest of the prison ran like a timepiece. Mess at seven, count, out to work, back to cell, count, mess, count, back to work, and so on. The dimming of the lights, the serving of meals, the changing of guards—all were routine and predictable. But change the routine, and prisoners become addled. That happened inside “lockdown.” Guards fed inmates at erratic times. Lights flickered on and off inexplicably. Some days prisoners got to leave their cells, go into the yard, and take showers; other days they didn’t.
Carter remained in “lockdown” for at least four weeks. When his time was up, guards returned his books, papers, and clothes from the Vroom building. Carter loaded it all on a dolly and pushed it to his new cell. Haggard and hungry, he was breathless by the time he got there. Then he got angry.
“I’m not going in there,” Carter told the guard accompanying him. “It’s a pigsty.” Pigeon excrement lay on the floor, the toilet was corroded, and there was no mattress. The guard ordered him into the cell, but Carter spun around and pushed the dolly back where he’d been. The prison was soon buzzing over his impudence. As a matter of principle, Carter had returned to a unit ordinary inmates would do anything to leave. This was, for Carter, not just another example of flouting the authorities. It also reflected his changing self-image. He had been wearing newer clothes, eating better food, and he didn’t want to have to tell Lisa, Lesra, or the other Canadians that the Hurricane lived in a cell that reeked. As he returned to “lockdown,” a guard asked, “Where you going? What’s wrong?”
“If you seen that cell,” Carter responded, “you wouldn’t be asking me that question. My name is Rubin, not Fido.”
Several days later Carter was assigned to another cell. He once again loaded the dolly with his possessions and pushed it through the prison hub, passing through various metal detectors along the way. When he reached his wing, a roar of applause went up from the other inmates; Carter smiled in satisfaction.
On a Sunday afternoon in early 1982, Carter walked into the prison yard, beaming, after a contact visit with Lisa. For many months they had comforted each other, yelled at each other, changed each other. She had become more feminine. He had become less bull-headed. As he walked in the yard, Leslie realized something had happened.
“I finally found my soulmate,” Carter told him. “I hugged her and I had a beautiful time.”
He described how he had finally learned how to talk to Lisa. “I was always talking to her like she was down when she was really up, and she kept telling me, ‘You can’t talk to me like that.’ I understand what she means, that the man ain’t got power over the woman, and the woman ain’t got power over the man. It’s just oneness.”
In blending his book studies with his new social awareness, he described his experience as “the ecstasy of consciousness.” In a letter to Leslie, he recognized his shallow treatment of women in the past and explained that mending those errors was possible through selfrecognition.
I have always prided myself on being a womanizer … I have been under the same illusion that all of us are under. I am a sex machine … And that is where my manhood is … And then I find out I’ve never had a woman before in my life, never been satisfied, and all I’ve been doing is “jerking off” for 44 years. I know nothing about my body because I’ve never felt it before. Would you believe that I, the world traveller, the connoisseur of womanly flesh, have never really made love to a woman before? …
So you see why it takes a very courageous heart to look at oneself without being afraid … The beautiful thing is that we can be different; we can change. We can be more powerful, and more intelligent, and more trustworthy, and more respectful than anything we have ever known before or could have imagined.
By 1982 Carter could take some solace in at least one development. John Artis had been paroled from prison on December 22, 1981. Carter always felt responsible for Artis’s imprisonment. He knew that the authorities wanted him and that Artis was a regrettable but necessary expedient to realize that goal.
Indeed, from the beginning, investigators assumed that Carter was the ringleader, that he had somehow compelled Artis to walk into a bar and shoot a room full of strangers. There was, however, no evidence—certainly none introduced into the record—to suggest that Carter had such influence over Artis. What’s more, the prosecutors’ view that Artis was simply a misguided soul, the lesser of two evils on a warm night in New Jersey, was contradicted by the very evidence of the crime. According to the prosecutors: Carter carried the shotgun; Artis wielded the handgun. Carter killed the bartender, James Oliver, with one shot in the back, then wounded Hazel Tanis with a shot in the arm. Artis murdered Fred Nauyoks with a shot to the brain, blinded William Marins with a shot to the eye, then pumped four bullets into the body of Hazel Tanis. By the prosecutors’ own measure, John Artis was more destructive and sadistic than Rubin Carter, yet Artis was viewed benignly. By the second trial, the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office had privately decided that if Carter and Artis had demanded separate trials and if Carter were reconvicted, it would drop the charges against Artis. But Artis’s lawyer, Lewis Steel, decided that the two men should be tried jointly so that the two defense attorneys, badly outmanned by the prosecutors, could pool their resources and split the courtroom responsibilities in one trial. The decision, however, sealed the younger man’s doom.
After the second conviction, Artis was sent back to the minimum-security Leesburg Prison Farm, but his years of imprisonment were taking a terrible toll. He’d begun to feel pain in his feet and hands. His skin felt clammy, and he had a diminished sense of heat and cold. He was diagnosed with Buerger’s disease, a chronic inflammatory ailment that chiefly affects the arteries and veins of the extremities. Doctors told Artis that the prison’s chill, the hard steel against his feet and hands, contributed to the disease, as had the many cigarettes he smoked while incarcerated. Artis had four toes on his right foot amputated while still in prison. In later years, two fingers were amputated from the second joint.
By the time Artis was freed on parole, he had spent fifteen years in prison for the Lafayette bar murders, the minimum sentence from his first conviction. At a news conference, he reiterated the position from which he had never wavered. He and Rubin were innocent of all charges. Asked if prison had rehabilitated him, Artis responded, “From what?” He was thirty-five years old.
Carter’s spiritual growth and blossoming love for Lisa seemed to dovetail nicely with his legal progress. His case was once again under review by the New Jersev Supreme Court, and he was optimistic that he would again prevail. New Jersey’s highest court had overturned the first convictions in 1976 because prosecutors had withheld from the defense the promises of leniency given to the state’s two star witnesses, Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley. Then, four years later, the high court once again granted a petition for certification from Carter and Artis and listened to their lawyers’ oral arguments. This time the court sent the case back to the trial judge, Bruno Leopizzi, to make factual findings on whether evidence had been improperly withheld in connection with Bello’s polygraph exam and whether a new trial was warranted. Leopizzi ruled against the defense. But the New Jersey Supreme Court again held oral arguments on March 9, 1982.
Carter and his lawyers had reason to hope. New Jersey had a three-tier judicial system: trial courts, the Appellate Division, and the state supreme court. If Carter believed that the trial and appellate courts were infested by politics and corruption, no such claim could be made of the state’s highest court. It had a progressive tradition, long deciding on behalf of victims, tenants, and consumers. William Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court’s liberal avatar for thirty-four years, had served on the New Jersey Supreme Court in the fifties, and in the early eighties it was admired by the left. The prominent Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told the Bergen Record in 1984: “It might be the best Supreme Court in the country—state or federal.”
Leading the court was Chief Justice Robert Wilentz, a former state assemblyman known for his devotion to civil rights and individual liberties. He once blocked a bill in the state assembly that would have made it a crime to refuse to stand during the national anthem. As chief justice, a job he assumed in 1979, Wilentz wrote a controversial opinion known as Mount Laurel II, which prohibited communities from using zoning laws to exclude low- and moderate-income housing. His supporters said the decision allowed all residents, including blacks, to live where they wanted. His critics said the decision was legislation by judicial fiat.
It was clear, in Carter’s case, that the chief justice supported the defense. During the first set of oral arguments in 1980, he accused Passaic County prosecutors of assuming that all blacks think and act alike. According to an account in the Trenton Times, Wilentz scolded the Passaic County assistant prosecutor John Goceljak, saying he found “invidious and intolerable” that the prosecutors thought it fair to assume that Carter and Artis would have been angry enough to kill simply because they were black. The oral arguments in 1982 seemed to have gone equally well, with Wilentz asking one of the prosecutors at the end of his statement: “Is that it?”
The chief justice, of course, had only one of seven votes, but his court was known for delivering unanimous decisions. As Wilentz himself told the Record, “We take seriously the proposition that there is value in a unanimous opinion, and there is value in not dissenting unless a justice feels very strongly about it. There’s a desire on the part of the justices to understand the point of view of the majority and see if the minority can, in good conscience, join the majority or concur in a separate opinion.”
After oral arguments, Carter’s principal lawyer, Myron Beldock, thought that four of the seven justices—Wilentz and Mark Sullivan, Robert Clifford, and Morris Pashman—favored the defense. Beldock believed that the prosecutors’ concealment and misuse of Bello’s polygraph exam would be seen as a violation of Brady v. Maryland, which requires the prosecution to disclose evidence favorable to the accused.
By now Carter’s soulmate was Lisa, his de facto son was Lesra, and his new family was the commune, and he would join the Canadians if he was released. They followed the court proceedings from afar, regularly evaluating Carter’s chances for success by consulting his astrology chart. They had an almost fanatical attraction to astrology: they used the stars to invest in the stock market, in commodity futures, and in gold; most of the investments lost money. Sam Chaiton was the group’s chief astrologer, and as the spring and summer months wore on, he evaluated how the stars were aligned for Carter. At the same time, Lisa urged her mates to keep the house spotless so it would be perfect on his release.
But freedom never came. On August 17, 1982, the state supreme court affirmed the conviction by a 4–3 vote. Justice Pashman—who had once been mayor of Passaic and the assignment judge of Passaic County—ruled against Carter. (Wilentz sided with the minority.) His lawyers suspected that Pashman had somehow been swayed by local political considerations. In the majority’s opinion, Justice Sidney Schreiber addressed the tangled history of Bello’s lie detector exam, two months before the second trial. The examiner, Leonard Harrelson, told the prosecution that Bello was telling the truth when he said he was in the bar at the time of the murders. This account effectively exonerated Carter and Artis as the gunmen. Unfortunately, Harrelson’s written report of the exam stated the exact opposite. The written report said Bello was telling the truth when he gave his 1967 testimony, in which—unknown to Harrelson—Bello was on the street. Harrelson’s erroneous report was then used by prosecutors to induce Bello to retract his recantation and to return to his original incriminating testimony.
Schreiber said that the prosecutors did in fact err in not disclosing to the defense the true results of Bello’s polygraph. But he concluded that even if the undisclosed information had been turned over, it would not have changed the trial’s outcome. Schreiber based this conclusion in large part on Harrelson’s testimony from a fact-finding hearing the previous year. He wrote: “The Harrelson test results, if laid before the jury, would have established that an eminent polygrapher entertained ‘no doubt at all’ that Bello was truthful when he identified the defendants as the murderers.” Regrettably, the eminent polygrapher had botched this one as well. Bello had never identified the defendants, in any testimony, as “murderers.” Thus, the circle was complete. The prosecutors were allowed to conceal favorable polygraph information for the defense based on the false testimony of the polygrapher himself.
This convoluted logic prompted one of the most caustic dissents that observers of the New Jersey court had ever read. Written by Justice Clifford, it began:
A more egregious Brady violation than the one presented in this case is difficult to imagine. One need not go so far as to impugn the motives of the prosecution in order to reach that conclusion, for it can just as easily be attributed to an appalling lack of basic communicative skills on the part of the principal polygraphist and various members of the prosecution team. But whether the circumstances originate in unworthy motives, colossal bungling, or plain dullness of comprehension, the fact remains that the misunderstandings thus created have proven to be costly indeed: the State withheld from the defendants material evidence favorable to them in connection with the Harrelson polygraph and, unknown to defendants and their counsel, compounded the error by using the mistaken and erroneous polygraph report to get the prime witness against defendants to change his story again and go back to his original testimony given at the first trial. That all adds up to deprivation of due process and requires a reversal of defendants’ convictions.
Clifford wrote that had the truth been known—that Bello’s testimony stemmed from the misuse of key evidence by prosecutors—the testimony would have been rendered all but meaningless.
Never before could defendants argue so persuasively that Bello was in all respects a complete, unvarnished liar, utterly incapable of speaking the truth. When, as here, a key witness’s reliability might well have been determinative of guilt or innocence, nondisclosure of evidence affecting credibility falls within the general rule that suppression of material evidence justifies a new trial irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution.
One of Carter’s lawyers, Harold Cassidy of Red Bank, New Jersey, came to the prison with a copy of the opinion. He had been helping out on the case since 1977, two years after he graduated from law school. Like others working on the case, he believed that Carter was part of black Americans’ historic struggle for equality and justice in a system all too willing to compromise their rights if they stirred up too much controversy. Cassidy believed Carter’s only crime was his blackness, and his imprisonment sullied the entire New Jersey legal system. He had also been certain that the state supreme court was going to overturn the convictions. But now he and Carter sat, clouds of cigarette smoke about them, in a small private room in Trenton State in a kind of funereal numbness. There was no explanation for the loss. Cassidy tried to assure Carter that his lawyers would not abandon him.
“This is just one more step along the line,” Cassidy said. “You’re obviously right. You’re obviously innocent. We just have to go the next step.” Carter, devastated, said little.
When he called the commune that night, he tried to read Clifford’s dissent to them, but he spoke in an unusual monotone and kept stumbling over words. He had always ignored the prison noise but was now easily distracted. “Turn that tap off, brother,” he said softly, as the mere sound of a faucet ruined his concentration. Lisa and her housemates were equally dismayed and incredulous. Nevertheless, Carter did not lose his grace. The following week he sent notes to the three dissenting judges.
“The ancient philosopher Diogenes spent his whole life searching for one honest man,” Carter wrote. “I have found three. Thank you.”