THE NEW JERSEY SUPREME COURT’S DECISION put Rubin Carter’s name, briefly, back in the news. Since the second conviction, he had, for the most part, stopped giving interviews or making public statements. His supporters in the press, the advertising world, Hollywood, and the black community had long moved on to more promising issues. The state supreme court’s contentious decision didn’t reenergize the publicity machine that once supported Carter, but it did signal that the convictions of Carter and John Artis were not as clean as most observers assumed. The court’s blistering dissent made it clear that there was at least a possibility that overzealous if not dishonest prosecutors had victimized the defendants.
The dissenting opinion, if adopted by a federal judge, could pave the way for a successful appeal. Unfortunately, Carter’s battles in state court had effectively made such an appeal more difficult. To overturn the convictions, a federal judge would have to repudiate a jury verdict; a trial judge’s rulings against the defense in two different hearings after the trial; the state Appellate Division, which affirmed the convictions; and now the well respected state supreme court.
The prospect was daunting. What’s more, Carter’s lawyers were wearing down. Myron Beldock and others in his firm had been defending Carter for eight years and had nothing to show for it: little in legal fees, less in public acclaim, no courtroom victories. The same was true for Lewis Steel, whose client, John Artis, was on parole. But Artis also wanted the convictions overturned and his name cleared of any wrongdoing. Leon Friedman, who joined the team after the second conviction, now had a taste of defeat, and a clutch of New Jersey lawyers who were involved were also demoralized. The attorneys for Carter and Artis still believed in their clients’ innocence, but after years of frustration, how much more could they give?
A blast of new energy was about to arrive.
By the time Carter returned to Trenton State from the Vroom building in 1982, the criminal proceedings against him had covered sixteen years, and he became increasingly despondent that the sheer size of the record had become too large for any appellate judge to comprehend. Testimony from many witnesses had evolved over the years—almost always to Carter’s detriment—and he doubted that any judge would evaluate the original testimony, starting from the night of the murders. When he expressed these fears to Lisa Peters, she encouraged him to talk more openly about the case. Just as she craved every detail of his prison life, she wanted to know everything about the Lafayette bar murders and their aftermath. As she probed for more information, it was soon apparent that even Carter could not remember every detail. The only way Lisa—and, by extension, the entire commune—could understand the case would be by reading the actual court documents. For years Rubin had been dragging around a dozen or so boxes with thousands of pages of trial transcripts, court opinions, briefs, motions, exhibits, and newspaper articles. He believed this record would ultimately vindicate him, and he guarded it with his life. Now Lisa wanted pieces of it. Initially, her requests were small.
“Do you have a copy of that testimony?” Lisa asked.
“I’ve got it,” Rubin said.
“Could you send it out to us?”
Carter refused to send any document through the mail but agreed to let Lisa or other commune members pick up documents at the prison. Giving them up, Carter knew, represented an important personal step. He viewed all of his dealings with the commune in the context of his ongoing studies. By now, he viewed the Canadians as part of “the inner circle of humanity,” but he did not fully trust them. Surrendering his court documents—first piecemeal, then in large chunks—was a milestone in his willingness to rely on others. The transfer took months because the prison imposed weight limits on packages leaving the institution. Carter itemized each document that left his cell, and when the Canadians returned to Toronto, he called to confirm that the papers arrived safely. Finally, he and Lisa were literally on the same page.
As the commune delved into the case, its members also began to study Paterson and the taint of corruption that hung over the city. They read about the parallels between the Kavanaugh DeFranco murders and the Lafayette bar shootings in a city reeling from Mafia infiltration, economic blight, racketeering, and vice. No wonder Carter got caught in Paterson’s maw. What outspoken black man wouldn’t?
The commune thrived on its us-against-them attitude, where enemies were clearly identified. This attitude, as former members describe it, often spilled over into ugly smugness. The house criticized other ethnic groups, nationalities, religions, and cultures. The French were arrogant; the Scottish, dour; the Irish, wild; Poles, stupid; Italians, violent; Americans, racist and jingoistic. The commune, despite its early acceptance of homosexuality, also ridiculed gays. Only heterosexuality was permitted in the house; homosexuality was a condition to be cured. Jews too were mocked: they refused to assimilate, they controlled all the media, and they had no respect for anyone but themselves. To remain in the commune, members who were gay or Jewish were forced to ignore or repudiate their identities.
Carter, in later years, complained to the Canadians about their haughty derision of others. But for now their felt superiority and their adversarial attitudes made them perfect allies in Carter’s fight for freedom. He had few resources, but now he had new troops with money, intelligence, and passion. The enemy didn’t have a chance. As Gus Sinclair put it, “The State of New Jersey was an ant to be stepped on.”
The first contribution to Carter’s case occurred after his loss in the state supreme court. As Rubin again bemoaned the complexity of his case, Lisa had an idea. The commune, working with Carter, should create a massive chart tracking the evolution of witnesses’ testimony, a chart that could be used in building a federal appeal. Carter thought the idea was crazy. The record was splayed across thousands of pages of documents, and no one could possibly sift through all of it. But Lisa and her crew could. Over a six-week period, they reconstructed the case on a nine-by-three-foot chart. They placed key witnesses’ names down the left side of the chart. Across the top, they identified fourteen separate occasions on which witnesses testified—to police, grand juries, special hearings, two trials, and, finally, at Alfred Bello’s polygraph hearing in 1981. Every day, Carter searched through his own remaining records and read information over the telephone, which was taped by a member of the commune. The tapes were transcribed, and slowly the chart took form. Testimony was summarized, typed up, and pasted inside one of the boxes. Bello was the only witness to fill each of the fourteen horizontal boxes, with a different account each time.
The chart indicated that some witnesses became more hostile to Carter as the state’s key witness—Bello—became less believable. Thus, Patricia Graham Valentine, according to the chart, originally told police in June of 1966 that Carter’s car was “similar” to the getaway car. At the first trial the following year, she said Carter’s car had “the same kind of taillights” as the getaway car, but she was not “specifically identifying it” as such. At the second trial, in 1976, Valentine testified that Carter’s car was the “same” vehicle as the getaway car. She also testified at the second trial, for the first time, that she was in the police garage when Carter’s car was searched and the police showed her the cartridge and the shotgun shell they allegedly found in Carter’s car. In addition, the chart showed that the initial descriptions of the gunmen from two of the victims, William Marins and Hazel Tanis, as well as a description to police by Bello, were all contrary to the physical appearance of Carter and Artis. Vincent DeSimone, the chief investigator, also appeared to have cleared the two men of suspicion before the June 29, 1966, grand jury, when he said: “The physical description of the two holdup men is not even close” to that of Carter and Artis.
Lisa hoped the chart would be used as an exhibit in Carter’s federal appeal. That never happened. But the chart buoyed him at a time when he was despairing from the loss in the state supreme court. It showed no new information, but it confirmed and bolstered, in a clean and graphic presentation, his belief that the witness statements against him had become progressively more damaging. More important, the chart proved that the commune was willing to fight for his freedom, to sacrifice all it had to destroy the enemy. His lawyers, he believed, needed more manpower, and now they would get it.
Carter’s rejuvenation was obvious to his visitors. Harold Cassidy, the lawyer who delivered the news about the state supreme court decision, happened to return to the prison not long after Carter received the Canadians’ chart. Cassidy was stunned. He had left Carter in a state of silent gloom. Now Rubin had a bounce in his step and could barely contain his enthusiasm for the next legal round. He took Cassidy into a room where the chart hung on a wall. Step by step, he pointed to the manifold inconsistencies in statements detail by detail and expressed utter confidence that any judge familiar with this record would see the injustice of his conviction. Bello, Bradley, Valentine, DeSimone—the whole sorry lot could not stand up to chronological scrutiny. Carter was ecstatic, and Cassidy, mesmerized, realized he was seeing Carter at his competitive best: the boxer who had been pummeled to the canvas was now back on his feet, dancing, jabbing, looking for an opening.
Carter typed up examples of what he considered prosecutorial misconduct dating from the first trial. The list included falsifying evidence, witness tampering, suppressing exculpatory evidence, and unlawfully appealing to racial prejudice. He sent the five-page list to Beldock with the note, “The Hurricane is on the move again.”
The Canadians sent Beldock a second copy of the chart in October of 1982. At first he thought Carter alone had created it—he later learned about the Canadians—and thought it was an amazing distillation of a complex case. It had little bearing on the rest of the criminal proceedings, but it energized his flagging spirits. Many years after the case was over, the chart could still be found in his office.
Carter’s upbeat spirits surfaced in a matter completely unrelated to his case. His interest in boxing had waned over the years; he had ugly memories of its financial corruption and the exploitation of young fighters. But he had a soft spot for the boxers themselves. Despite the game’s brutality, he believed that boxers were the sweetest men he had ever met, a class of noble warriors who respected one another outside the ring and embraced one another after the final bell of a match.
So he was understandably concerned after the light heavyweight championship bout on November 13, 1982, between Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini and Duk Koo-Kim. Mancini battered Duk, knocking him out in the fourteenth round and sending him into a coma. As the South Korean struggled to survive, Carter watched replays of the fight on the black-and-white TV in his cell. He noticed how Duk, after the final blow, crashed toward the canvas, his head snapping on the lowest rope of the ring. One of Carter’s sparring partners had once suffered whiplash by hitting his head on the lowest rope, and Carter had suspected that the velocity of a boxer’s fall, combined with the tension of that bottom rope, created a mortal threat to prizefighters. Now, after watching replays of Duk’s fall, Carter thought such tragedies could be averted, not by adopting other safety measures, such as mandatory standing eight counts or fewer rounds, but by simply loosening the turnbuckle and lowering the bottom rope.
Carter began writing letters about this to newspapers, a neurologist, boxing officials, fight fans, and various power brokers. He contacted the Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, who in the early sixties had offered Carter a contract to play football for the Washington Redskins. (Carter declined, saying the sport was too dangerous.) Carter became obsessed with this lower rope—not only because he believed his idea could spare human tragedy but also because he saw it as a metaphor for society’s misperceptions of truth. The rope was designed to protect boxers, to cushion their falls, but it could also savage them—the opposite of its intended purpose. In an impassioned letter he wrote to Angelo Dundee, the one time boxing trainer for Muhammad Ali, Carter spelled out his idea:
Given, even hypothetically, that this suggestion could be a viable solution, then the following question begs to be asked and answered: Throughout the long history of boxing, why, then, has this proposal never been put forward? Because it’s too simple? Well, we have all, from time to time, been prisoners of one kind or another; we have all, at times, been prisoners to our own assumptions. Because we assume a thing is so, it must be so. And the assumption has always been that the ropes provide a safety factor and serve as a margin of protection for the boxer. But there may be a tragic irony here in that what is perceived primarily as a “protective device,” may in reality be itself the cause of serious injury.
Duk Koo-Kim died on the day Carter wrote that letter, four days after his bout. His death was indeed attributed not to the force of the blows but to the position of the lower rope and the hardness of the canvas. The tragedy led to the development of a softer canvas; Carter’s rope suggestion, however, was never adopted.
By Christmas of 1982, the Canadians had shown their commitment to Carter, and he was grateful that he now had a team of new recruits who would help him and his lawyers prepare for the next round of appeals. But his push-and-pull relationship with Lisa had reached a breaking point. As the two became more intertwined emotionally, confrontations became more frequent. He continued to share private thoughts with her, but he chafed at Lisa’s penchant for passing those intimacies along to other members of the house or even coopting his experiences as her own. Once Carter told her about an unsettling episode just after he had completed an intense three-day period of study in his cell without food or sleep. He then took a walk around the prison yard and had a dreamlike sensation that he was falling into a hole.
“It felt as if I was underground and everybody was above me,” he told her. “I was walking underground, and I began questioning myself, ‘What the hell are you doing? Is this shit real?’” He told Lisa he began doubting the merit of his studies, and that frightened him. “What am I looking for?” he asked. He explained that he returned to his cell, closed his eyes, went into a deep sleep. When he awoke, he still felt those doubts, but he returned to his studies, and slowly, those fears, those uncertainties, began to fade. “I knew I was still on the right track,” he told Lisa.
A few days later, Carter heard from one of the other Canadians that Lisa had had the most remarkable experience. She felt as if she had fallen into a hole! Carter simmered. She was getting too close to him now. He also felt that Lisa twisted some of his stories, particularly those about his days as a Paterson renegade, to make him look like more of a threat or a bully than he ever had been. Her confrontational style wore thin, and their arguments became more intense.
At the same time, they talked more seriously about their life together after Carter was freed—of which, despite his many setbacks, they were still confident. Rubin had never been physically attracted to white women, and he did not envision that changing with Lisa. But over time, his attitude did change as the intensity of the relationship increased. He had expressed his love for her and could foresee himself as her husband, lover, and partner. He wanted to be with her—but the commune was another matter. Each member excelled in something—cooking, gardening, writing, carpentry—and together they were a perfect whole. Carter believed they were a special class of individuals who saw truth, corrected wrongs, and transcended the unconscious world. But he also realized that they had developed “a learned helplessness,” a dependence on Lisa to survive. That may have been fine for the others, but Carter was a solitary spirit who could never conform to a group or attach his star to another person. That conviction crystallized during a telephone conversation in which Lisa and Rubin, expressing their love for each other, began discussing marriage and a family. Lisa said that having children was not an option for them because mixed-race children were social outcasts. She also stated that she did not use birth control because she smoked. She suggested that Rubin get a vasectomy.
“Hell no, I’m not getting a vasectomy!” Carter fumed. “You can’t ask a black man to do that!” He equated vasectomies with punishments meted out against slaves, who were cut for attempted escapes, insubordination, or other infractions. He also did not survive all these years in prison to be greeted, on his release, by an unpleasant and unnecessary surgical procedure. Lisa assured Rubin that other men in the commune had submitted to the operation, a fact later confirmed by those men.
Carter had had enough. He felt suffocated by all the attention, and he was afraid. Lisa and her mates were simply getting too close. As he later recalled, “When I was in prison, I could handle them on the phone for eight or nine hours a day, but now the talk of my living with them had occurred, and I began to say, ‘Wait a minute.’ It seemed like I was losing some of me.”
He phoned Lisa and told her not to come for Christmas. Everyone in the commune had been trying to spruce up a 1970 Mercedes-Benz by scraping off the rust and preparing it for a new coat of paint; the car would be used to drive Lisa in style to Trenton, and she had her heart set on the trip. But now Carter, on the phone, was cold, unemotional, and abrupt. “I’m not calling anymore,” he said, without giving a reason. “Good … bye … Lisa.” Click.
This was not the first time Carter had been ruthless in severing ties with his supporters. Richard Solomon and George Lois had met the same fate. In Carter’s mind, he did not have the luxury of treating his admirers with the respect they deserved. His only goal was to clear the murder tag from his name, and if you couldn’t help him, you were gone. Despite the commune’s unparalleled demonstration of support, he concluded that its infiltration of his life and Lisa’s unpleasant demand—diverted his concentration from his case.
Now they were gone. But unlike his summary dismissals of other supporters, he could not brush off his loss. This time he got sick. He had plenty of food in his cell, but he couldn’t eat. He only drank coffee and smoked some borrowed cigarettes. He looked haggard and exhausted and did not go out in the yard for several days. Sam Leslie worried about his health.
Lisa took the breakup even worse. Her housemates knew that Carter could be stubborn, gruff, and wary, but she had assured everyone that the Rubin she was drawing out—cooperative, forthcoming, and tender—was the real Rubin. Now she was hurt, betrayed, and angry. While she tried to appear calm, she tore up his photographs and said it was his own stupidity and fear that caused him to turn his back on her. He would regret his mistake, she said, but she too was paying a price. She became listless, querulous, and morose. She began to experience severe back pain, the result, evidently, of a deteriorating disc in her spine, but the others assumed it was worsened by her depression. Sometimes she had to be carried up to her bed in the evening. She had difficulty sleeping, and she spent her days in front of the television, eyes glazed. She made intermittent forays into the daily life of the commune. Sometimes she gave advice on teaching for Lesra, sometimes she organized work details, and sometimes she sorted out the menu for the day. Mainly, she mourned the loss of her soulmate.
Carter did not have time to remain lethargic. He was thinking about the Caruso file.
At the 1981 remand hearing on Bello’s polygraph test, an important new character joined the familiar cast. In the summer of 1977, Richard Caruso had worked as an investigator on the Carter-Artis Task Force in the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office. He quit his job right before the trial began to join the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office in Newark. After the trial, Carter’s lawyers learned that Caruso might be willing to discuss how the investigation had been conducted—specifically, what the prosecutors knew about Bello’s polygraph. Harold Cassidy called Caruso and asked if he could stop by to talk.
During the meeting, Caruso was clearly distressed about the Carter-Artis investigation. On the one hand, he was reluctant to betray his former employer by talking to a member of Carter’s team. He was about thirty years old and studying to be a lawyer, and turning his back on his former employer could jeopardize his career. On the other hand, the clean-cut investigator believed that the justice system should be just, and he was bothered that justice was not evident in the Carter case. He began talking, in generalities, in several conversations with Cassidy over the following few months. Caruso believed there were two investigations of the murders. One, the public investigation, was simply a charade; the other was a clandestine inquiry, directed by Vincent DeSimone, that withheld evidence and manipulated witnesses. Caruso told Cassidy that he believed Patricia Graham Valentine’s description of the getaway car, focusing on the butterfly taillights, was suggested to her by a Paterson police officer on the night of the murders. He said investigators had been under instructions not to take notes, and that his own efforts to interview witnesses had been thwarted by those running the task force.
These were tantalizing disclosures, but the details were often vague, and the most damaging information, such as that surrounding Valentine, was hearsay. Caruso hadn’t been at the scene of the crime; he was just passing along information he had heard from others. Cassidy, for his part, was interested in what the prosecutor’s office knew about the Bello polygraph and whether it had failed to disclose the true results of the exam. Judicial appeals are not about guilt or innocence but about whether defendants were deprived of their constitutional right to a fair trial. In Cassidy’s view, the mishandling of Bello’s polygraph represented the strongest ground on which Carter and Artis could claim they received an unfair trial.
Caruso did have some firsthand information about the polygraph. He said he had heard in the office that Bello initially had “flunked” the lie detector test. Thereafter he heard that the results were inconclusive and finally that Bello had “passed” the test. That sequence echoed what the defense lawyers had already learned in their interviews with Leonard Harrelson, the polygraph examiner; namely, that Harrelson had told the prosecution that Bello was telling the truth when he said he was in the bar (which exonerated Carter), but then indicated the exact opposite in the written report. Caruso’s description that Bello “flunked” and then “passed” the test—undermined the pretense that the prosecutor’s office was impartial in its search for the truth.
Cassidy noticed something else in his first meeting with Caruso—a thick folder of notes Caruso had brought with him. He had ignored the prohibition against taking notes, and now he held them close to his vest, like a poker player hiding a straight flush. But he was not ready to show his hand.
Beldock and Steel knew that the notes, if detailed and thorough, would be their first glimpse behind enemy lines, substantiating defense claims of prosecutorial misconduct and withholding exculpatory evidence. Beldock drove out to Lakewood, New Jersey, to meet with Caruso. Caruso brought his file but was still reluctant to turn it over. He told Beldock that he was studying for the New Jersey bar exam and didn’t want to do anything that would hurt his career.
“I won’t do anything that will harm you, but it’s important that I know this stuff,” Beldock pleaded.
The meeting lasted about an hour, and in the end Caruso did turn over the file. It was at least a hundred pages, with scribbled and typewritten notes. Beldock read through it quickly and became convinced that the “Caruso file,” as it came to be known, was the most damaging proof yet that Carter and Artis had been railroaded. He took no notes, he took nothing out of the file, and he gave it back to Caruso to keep. Beldock didn’t want to raise any suspicions that he had tampered with evidence.
Beldock wanted to introduce the file as part of his questioning of Caruso at the 1981 remand hearing. There Caruso repeated what he had previously told Beldock and Cassidy: that he had heard Bello had initially flunked the polygraph only to pass it later. Richard Thayer, a former prosecutor in the government corruption unit of the prosecutor’s office, also testified that he had heard similar comments.* Judge Bruno Leopizzi ruled against the defense, and he also blocked the defense’s efforts to open the Caruso file. He ruled that it did not relate specifically to the lie detector issue. At the insistence of the defense, he sealed and impounded Caruso’s notes, but then denied a subsequent application to have the file unsealed, inspected, and copied. The defense appealed that decision to the state supreme court, but the court, in affirming the convictions, did not address the Caruso matter.
After the court’s decision for the prosecution in August of 1982, the defense was faced with a strategic dilemma. Should it take the appeal to federal court in a habeas corpus petition, or should it seek a state order to open the Caruso file and hope its contents outlined prosecutorial misconduct, which could then be used to overturn the conviction. The defense could not do both simultaneously, because a habeas corpus petition can only be reviewed if all state remedies have been exhausted.
Leon Friedman had joined the defense team in 1978 specifically for his expertise in federal appeals. A balding, professorial man who evoked gentle authority, he relished good publicity. In later years, he hid a porno magazine in his law office that had a favorable article about the legal work on Carter’s case. Friedman was also cut from the same liberal cloth as Beldock and Steel. He was driven by ideals of racial justice, and he had battle scars from the civil rights movement. Friedman had been a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union and had represented civil rights activists in the South during the sixties. He wrote a book called Southern Justice and was a co author of a definitive five-volume history of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. He recognized the historical importance of the Carter case—the nexus of race, law, and celebrity—and he happily joined the team when Beldock asked him. Lew Steel, on meeting Friedman, said, “Well, you have a great reputation. Let’s see how good you are.”
After losing in the state supreme court, Friedman argued that they should “go federal.” He felt the prosecutors’ misconduct was so clear cut, especially regarding the Bello polygraph and the motive of racial revenge, they could win on the existing record. Pursuing the Caruso matter through state court, he feared, would be taking another swim through the swamp: an ugly, protracted journey that would once again end in defeat. But both Beldock and Steel, who knew the facts of the case better, did not want to give up the Caruso file. If they lost the federal appeal, they would have no more remedies in state court, and the case would be over. They believed the Caruso information would offer conclusive evidence of official misconduct. How could they leave that on the table? The decision was made, with Carter’s consent, to try to open the file and use it for further state appeals. They would take one more swim through the swamp.
The many years Carter had spent immersed in his case had made him something of a jailhouse lawyer. When Sam Leslie wanted to appeal his murder conviction, he asked Carter for help. Carter knew the format that an appeal had to take: a procedural history of the case, a statement of facts, and then the legal arguments, citing precedents. He wanted to appeal Leslie’s conviction on the grounds of “ineffective assistance of counsel”—fancy talk for “he had a rotten lawyer”—and he planned to file a motion for either a new trial or at least an evidentiary hearing. The latter could be used to place in the record evidence that his lawyer had not used in the trial. Carter typed up the brief but, like any writer, knew he needed another set of eyes to check the spelling, the grammar, and the logic. He needed someone who would not charge a fee, would be sympathetic to the case, and would be totally committed to helping them.
He called Lisa.
Carter considered Terry Swinton a brilliant thinker and a literary “nitpicker.” Sam Chaiton had been an English major and was a fluid writer. They had done the most research into Carter’s case, and with lines of communication once again open with Lisa, they were willing to edit Sam Leslie’s brief. By the time everyone finished, Leslie was able to file a sixty-five-page brief in a state court in Monmouth County.* Initially, Rubin told Lisa that his call was “strictly business.” But clearly it was more than that. They had met on a higher spiritual plane while discussing human nature and the universe. But what Rubin really missed were Lisa’s vivid accounts of the changing seasons, the sublunary evidence of life at the commune: the pageant of flowers blooming in the garden, the freshly cut grass along the lower meadow, the first snow dusting the branches of an oak tree. All along, Lisa wanted Rubin to crave physical freedom, not just spiritual freedom, and she had succeeded. Instead of fearing the outside world, he now ached for it. But he remained behind bars, where he—in his own words—had been “subdued, canned, and warehoused.” Since cutting off ties with Lisa, he felt all his conversations had been at a “lower level,” and he had to reconnect with his source of energy and love.
“I got to get out of here,” Rubin told Lisa on the phone. “You made it so I can’t stay here any longer.”
In the latter months of 1983, Carter showed his love in a memorable way. When he entered prison in 1967, he refused to give the authorities his ring, which had a gold band and diamond. He also refused to surrender his watch or shave his goatee. He had shaved it when he let his hair grow and had stopped wearing his watch. But he continued to wear the ring as a symbol of his independence. Lisa questioned his fixation on the jewelry, stressing that he should not be identified with his own physical possessions. This “state of identification” was contrary to his own goals of finding a higher plane of consciousness. If he wore the ring to snub the prison, wasn’t that allowing the prison to dictate his behavior?
Carter realized that, in one stroke, he could sever his ties with this problematic symbol and powerfully reconnect with Lisa. He took off the ring, put it in a heart-shape cloth with white trim, and sent it to her for Christmas. Arriving a year after Rubin had stopped talking to Lisa, the ring was a glorious emblem of his love. From the beginning of their relationship, Lisa had been seeking that type of expression of commitment. He had always withheld it until now. She had a jeweler cut the diamond as well as the band in two; she wore her half and sent the other half to Rubin, who tucked it away.
There was no more discussion of biracial children, vasectomies, or other sensitive topics. With the love between Rubin and Lisa firmly reestablished, only one thing mattered: his freedom. And just as he had made a commitment to Lisa, she was now ready to make an equally dramatic commitment to him. She decided to move to Trenton with several members of the commune. “We are in for the duration,” she told him. “We will be with you, and we will be free.” Carter was stunned but grateful.
The commune’s belief that it could help free Carter was buttressed by another remarkable achievement. Lesra, illiterate three years earlier, had been accepted by the University of Toronto. Now twenty years old, he had undergone two years of home schooling and one year of public schooling in Toronto. He had also begun to date a young woman named Paulene McLean. Born in Jamaica, she had been a nurse in England, had only recently moved to Toronto, and was trying to find her way. Her romance with Lesra blossomed, and she ended up joining the commune. She was, in a sense, a double bonus, adding to the mix another black face as well as her nursing skills.
Carter had always played an active role in Lesra’s education. While the young man’s guardians taught him the basics, Carter pushed him to strive for perfection. Once, Lesra mailed him an assignment for which he received a grade of 98. Carter sent it back, asking, “What happened to the other two points?” He instructed Lesra to read great black authors, such as Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois, emphasizing the richness of the black heritage. He also told him to read books that had influenced his own thinking, including Plato and Ouspensky (the latter proved to be a bit too dense).
Despite his progress, Lesra faced a considerable obstacle before he could qualify for admission to the University of Toronto. Incoming students had to be proficient in a second language, and Lesra knew only English. But Sinclair, who had worked in a registrar’s office at the university in the late sixties and still knew a few officials, asked that the school accept Lesra’s fluency in black English as his foreign language. It was a bizarre appeal, but it worked. The commune always seemed to find a way.
When Lesra received his letter of acceptance, he achieved what he thought had been an impossible dream. He was so excited, he could barely get the words out when he spoke to Carter on the phone. Said Rubin: “I expected nothing less from you.” If the commune could get a once illiterate ghetto kid into college, why couldn’t it get an innocent man out of prison?
By the end of 1983, Lisa, Terry Swinton, and Sam Chaiton had moved into a low-rise apartment building in Ewing Township, about a twenty-minute drive north of the Trenton prison. To finance two domiciles, the commune had to sell their cherished English manor in Toronto. While the group had purchased the house in 1976 for its generous size and spacious grounds, the city’s booming real estate market had turned it into a brilliant investment as well. According to Sinclair, the house they bought for C$190,000 was sold seven years later for C$540,000. In addition, the commune wanted to sell off the property’s back two lots separately, generating storms of protest from neighbors and various local officials who wanted to protect a deep ravine. The commune members themselves had once seen property development as a poisonous outgrowth of free enterprise, but a potential windfall of real estate profits had softened their hostility toward capitalism. They severed the lots, sold them off, and pocketed another C$300,000.
The Canadians now had money to direct toward Carter’s freedom. The commune members who remained in Toronto, including Sinclair, had to find new but inexpensive digs. One day they were living in a 6,000-square-foot home; the next day they moved into a 2,000-square-foot house in another part of downtown Toronto. They had to renovate the place, and they felt cramped and abandoned, sleeping in rooms with peeling plaster and sawdust everywhere. But the complaints were few. A little discomfort was a small price to pay for helping Rubin Carter. Besides, it could have been worse. They could have been living in New Jersey.
By the time the Canadians had settled in Trenton, Carter was frustrated with the progress of his case and with his lawyers. In pursuing the Caruso file in state court, the defense finally got access to his notes in December 1982. Beldock and Steel believed they did indeed offer fresh evidence of prosecutorial misconduct.
According to the notes, as later summarized in a brief to the U.S. District Court of Newark:
• Patricia Graham Valentine, at the scene of the crime, identified the taillights of the getaway car as being “long and narrow—rectangular,” and it was Officer Greenough who told Valentine that the car had “butterfly” or “triangular” taillights. Valentine’s car description, of course, had been critical testimony at both trials.
• Valentine did not cry when Carter’s car was brought to the scene after the shooting, directly contradicting trial testimony and casting doubt on the allegation that Carter’s car and the getaway car were the same.
• Before the second trial, Valentine conferred with Vincent DeSimone in Florida, where she was living, and in Paterson, contradicting trial testimony.
• Sometime after the first trial, Valentine—who always denied receiving any reward—was able to purchase a home, although she was understood to have had no assets previously.
• Caruso had spoken to a witness who placed the skid marks made by the getaway car farther up the street and out of sight from Valentine’s window.
• The victim William Marins, who failed to identify Carter in the hospital emergency room, was in fact familiar with Carter’s face and appearance before the shooting, making his omission all the more significant.
• Avery Cockersham, who lived next to the Lafayette bar, had told police in 1966 that he had seen the gunmen making their getaway and that they were not Carter and Artis. Cockersham had died by the time the defense learned about him from Caruso’s notes.
• Contrary to prosecutors’ representations, Vincent DeSimone was actively involved in the reinvestigation of the murders in 1976, attending meetings, preparing witnesses, and controlling the flow of information to investigators. Caruso had been told there was a special file containing evidence and information referred to as the “Chief’s file.” The owner of the Lafayette bar at the time of the shooting told Caruso, “Vince told me not to say certain things.”
It took a year to sort through the information and file a motion seeking a new trial or dismissing the conviction. Once again, Judge Leopizzi would be ruling on the matter, and once again the case was bogged down in state court.
As Carter chafed at the delays, he did get one piece of good news in 1983. Nine years earlier, he and four other inmates had filed a civil suit against the New Jersey prison authorities regarding their illegal transfer from Trenton State; Carter and one other inmate had been sent to the Vroom Readjustment Unit. With the exception of Carter, all the transferred inmates settled their civil suits in exchange for placement in a minimum-security prison or some other benefit. Carter didn’t settle, and now he won.
U.S. District Judge Dickinson Debevoise, agreeing with Carter that his rights had been violated, wrote that the prisoner was motivated by the belief that if “inmates treated each other with kindness and concern regardless of race or creed and took responsibility for their own lives, the atmosphere of the prison would be transformed … I have no doubt of Mr. Carter’s sincerity and dedication to [the] peaceful resolution of prison problems.” The judge determined that Carter’s unconstitutional confinement in the VRU entitled him to compensatory damages of $30 a day, or—at ninety-two days of confinement—a total of $2,760. It was a relatively modest sum, but after years of legal setbacks, Carter felt good that he finally had won something. The victory also marked the second consecutive time that a federal judge saw a legal dispute his way, not the State of New Jersey’s way. Carter knew that the federal courts had long been more sympathetic to civil rights issues and to blacks in general, and he began to feel that only in a federal court did he stand a chance for justice.
With Lisa, Swinton, and Chaiton now in Trenton, Carter had more contact visits than ever before. He found his own way of repelling the invasive body searches. On one occasion, when a guard ordered him, “Spread your cheeks,” Carter passed some gas in the guard’s face. The next time he appeared, the guard said, “Go ahead, Rube.”
In conversations, Lisa tried to get Carter to talk about his case, not in tirades but through reasoned analysis. To this end, she did not accept his position that he was blameless for his imprisonment. His threatening comments in the Saturday Evening Post and his denunciation of the police invited suspicion and made him a target.
“You are the master of your own fate,” she said.
Carter still saw himself as a victim, but he came to recognize how his words had stirred up fear and hostility against him and contributed to his plight. That recognition enabled him to talk about the case objectively and to give the Canadians guidance. Carter was desperate to find evidence to prove his innocence, and there was nothing his soldiers wouldn’t do. Carter wanted to review the original police reports, so he sent Swinton and Chaiton to Beldock’s office. They spent an entire afternoon photocopying reports, exhibits, photographs, and other material that had been turned over in discovery before both trials. Swinton and Chaiton, trying to confirm the time of the Lafayette bar murders, tracked down the telephone operator who took the emergency call to the Paterson police reporting the crime. They suspected that her initials on a telephone company document attesting to the time of the call had been forged by DeSimone. The operator herself, who was in her seventies, wouldn’t talk to the Canadians, but Carter hatched a scheme to get her initials. He hired a private investigator, who delivered flowers to the woman. To receive them, she simply had to initial the receipt, which she did happily. The Canadians took her initials and the original document to a handwriting examiner, who, using spectrograms and enlarged photographs, concluded that the initials on the original document were forged.
Meanwhile, Carter’s cousin Ed told him about a surprising encounter he had had with a cabby. The driver, a white man, knew his passenger was related to Rubin. He told Ed Carter that he knew Rubin was innocent because he had seen him at the Nite Spot when the murders occurred, but he would not testify for fear of police reprisals. But the prospect of an alibi witness, a white alibi witness, was too much for Rubin Carter to let go. One afternoon in the spring Ed Carter staked out the cab company, watched for the driver to come on duty, then got in his cab. They drove to East Eighteenth and Governor Streets, where the Nite Spot had been. There, Beldock also jumped in the cab. They pleaded with the driver to come forward. He confirmed his original story but still refused to testify.
The investigation continued in the junkyards of Canada, where Sinclair and Lesra searched for 1966 models of a Dodge Monaco and Dodge Polara. Valentine told the 1966 grand jury that the getaway car was a Dodge Monaco; Carter’s white rental car was a Polara. Valentine described the getaway car as having taillights that “lit up like butterflies,” wide on the outside, then tapered toward the center. That description, as was brought out at the second trial, fit the taillights of a Dodge Monaco, not the Polara. Unfortunately, there were no photographs of the Polara with the taillights turned on. Chaiton and Swinton called junkyards in New Jersey but couldn’t find the models they wanted. So Sinclair, in Toronto, began calling junkyards around Canada. He found the cars in two different places—one near Kingston, 160 miles east of Toronto, and one at Archie’s Wrecking, about 200 miles away in northern Ontario. Sinclair and Lesra drove out to the junkyards and photographed both cars. The pictures showed that the Monaco, but not the Polara, had triangular taillights that extended across the back as described by Valentine.
Months passed, and the sleuthing, the stakeouts, and the search for witnesses continued. Ultimately, most of the evidence accumulated was not used in court, but for Carter the process was still valuable. For years he had lived in a kind of timeless prison void, immersed in his books, his writing, and his legal studies. He had, more recently, spent hours in conversation with Lisa, creating their own private world of fantasy trips and philosophical connections. But now he was on the phone coordinating his troops, assembling information, barking strategy. It felt good.
On May 6, 1984, Carter’s cell door on the fourth tier mysteriously slid open, and Sam Leslie entered. “Hey, man, I want to see you about something,” he said. Leslie locked on the first floor, called the flats, and the two men walked to his cell. When they arrived, Carter stopped in his tracks. A group of inmates were jammed in and around the cell.
“Surprise!”
It was Carter’s forty-seventh birthday. Lisa had put money in Leslie’s account to buy ice cream at the commissary. She also sent in a huge blue and white birthday cake, shaped like a boxer’s glove, with pineapple on top. The cake was so big, it had to be cut in four pieces to pass through the prison mailroom. There was soda as well. “Man, we got you!” Leslie cried.
Carter was speechless. Even before prison, he never cared much for celebrating birthdays or holidays of any kind. Inside prison, such occasions were depressing reminders that another year of misery had passed. Lisa decided that this year would be different. During her many visits to the prison, she’d gotten to know other inmates as well as Rubin, including Leslie, and she enlisted their help. Even the guards were in on the plan, opening Carter’s cell and allowing the party to take place. Rubin called Lisa and thanked her profusely, then carefully described the proceedings: the cake was cut up, a slice was placed on each paper plate, a scoop of vanilla ice cream was dropped on the side of the plate and softly merged into the icing, and the plates were taken to each cell on the tier. Even the guards got plates. Lisa hung on every word, and Rubin had to admit it was a right fine birthday.
The party was a small but meaningful step in Carter’s reintegration into the prison and, indirectly, the outside world. But Lisa wanted Rubin to do something far more dramatic.
“It’s time for you to move out of Trenton,” she told him one day.
“Move where?” Carter asked.
“Back to Rahway State Prison.”
“Say what?” Carter asked incredulously. “I know Trenton better, and the last time I was in Rahway, they sent me to the Vroom.”
But Lisa insisted. She emphasized the practical advantages of the move. It was closer to his New York lawyers, and the environment was also less restrictive. Inmates and their visitors could sit outdoors, drink coffee together, and more easily relax. Telephone privileges were also greater. Moreover, Lisa believed the move would be part of Carter’s “deinstitutionalization.” She was certain that Rubin would be released—she regularly checked the astrology charts to predict just when but she worried, not without reason, that freedom would be a difficult adjustment. Trenton State Prison had put him in a bleak but predictable groove. A new environment would force him to break that pattern.
Carter adamantly resisted the idea. He knew every creaking pipe in Trenton State—he had spent seventeen years of his life there, dating back to the late fifties—and it was, well, home. But as he and Lisa continued the debate, tensions were rising in the prison. A new guard was harassing Carter for his lengthy use of the telephone, claiming he was taking more time than the rules permitted. Then, one night when the lights failed to go off at the usual time, Carter suspected something was amiss. The following day, he heard through the prison grapevine that fifteen young prisoners had been shipped to Trenton for refusing to eat their liver dinner at the Southern State Correctional Facility in Cumberland County. When they arrived, Carter was told, they were beaten, kicked, and brutalized. Carter sent word that the new prisoners should describe what happened in signed statements. He sent their statements, which described an orgy of violence against them, to the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Several guards were ultimately suspended—but Carter had seen enough. He applied for a transfer to Rahway.
As he was waiting for a response, Lisa came for a contact visit. The Death House had been retired as the Visiting Center; now an open room served instead. During a contact visit, prison rules allowed for touching—a kiss, a handshake, or a hug—when a visitor arrived and departed. Otherwise, no contact was allowed; even touching the other person’s chair was prohibited. On this day, Rubin and Lisa sat in folding metal chairs, and Rubin had his arm around the back of hers. When a new guard walked by, he told Carter to get the arm down. Carter ignored him. When the guard came by again, he yelled, “Get your arm down,” then pushed it down himself.
Carter flew to his feet and cocked his left fist. “He touched me, dammit! He touched me!” Since Carter’s first day in prison, his rule was ironclad and well known: no prison employee touched him, ever. Anyone broke that rule, he’d fight to the death. The visiting hall hushed. Suddenly Lisa leaned over and whispered, “Read my lips, Rubin. If you hit him, I’ll knock you out.”
“Say what?”
“I said if you hit him, I’ll knock you out.”
Carter remained in his crouch, his meaty fist prepared for launch. The rest of the room, prisoners and guards alike, stood frozen. But before anyone could make a move, before any shackles could be pulled or riot bells sounded or blood drawn, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter broke into a smile. Then he started laughing, deep howls that stunned the room. He wept with laughter and could hardly speak. He had indeed met his match in this fearless slip of a woman from the North. Carter sat back down, his arms nowhere near Lisa’s chair.
Carter’s transfer to Rahway was granted; he moved on June 29, 1984. While he was keeping a low profile in prison, he was still probably New Jersey’s most celebrated convict, and his transfer generated a spate of news articles. A spokesman for the state’s Department of Corrections was quoted saying that Carter was older now and no longer in need of a maximum-security environment. It had been ten years since he had left Rahway, and many of the same sergeants, lieutenants, and captains, as well as prisoners, were still there. Initially, no one recognized Carter with his full head of hair, but the Hurricane was soon connected with his former associates. Like the prisoners at Trenton, the inmates at Rahway treated him with considerable respect, the byproduct of both his reputation and, by now, his age. Carter feared that a young punk might try to make his name by challenging him, but it never happened. He was still, to most inmates, Mr. Carter. When he was waiting for his permanent cell assignment in a wing called the ghetto, the head of the “Lifers’ Club” sent a runner, a prison messenger, to give Carter a package of soap, toothpaste, deodorant, and cigarettes to tide him over until his personal belongings arrived. After three days in the ghetto, Carter was assigned to a cell on a kind of honor tier. It was relatively quiet, with about twenty men. Unlike Trenton, where he had to descend four flights of stairs to reach the phone, this tier had its own two phones.
Moving also to Rahway were Lisa, Swinton, and Chaiton. Even if they were still in New Jersey, they were glad at least to be heading a few miles north. In Rahway they were physically closer to Carter than they had been in Trenton. They rented a high-rise apartment close enough to the prison so that they could see its rotunda, and Carter continued to merge his own life into theirs.
At designated times in the evening, he went to the prison’s top-floor Drill Hall and looked out the window and over the prison wall. In the distance he could see candles flickering on the balcony of the Canadians’ apartment. In the quiet of the evening, Carter simply stood, arms folded, and watched the candlelight greeting. The Canadians also used more advanced communications technology, installing a three-way calling system on their phone so they could easily connect Carter with his lawyers. Sometimes, Carter would listen in as Swinton or Chaiton used the phone for such tasks as calling a nearby library to research his case. The phone also became a kind of kitchen accessory. Lisa would stand near the stove and offer Carter elaborate descriptions of the food being prepared. There were breakfasts of bacon and eggs, pancakes and maple syrup; lunches of fish and chips; elegant dinners of beef Wellington and crab with béchamel sauce; desserts of angel food cake, chocolate mousse pie, and homemade chocolate eclairs. Lisa stuck the phone next to the frying bacon, and Carter, listening, savored every sizzle. The Canadians were allowed to send two twenty-five-pound bags of food per month to Carter. Lisa described the laying out of dinners in plastic containers, sitting on beds of lettuce garnished with parsley and cherry tomatoes and baby carrots.
After a care package was prepared and described on the phone, Carter would look out the window of his wing. His tier was high enough so that he could glimpse part of the half-circle driveway leading to the prison as well as a pond and the mailroom. The Canadians parked their car so Carter could see them leave the vehicle with the carton of food and head toward the mailroom. It was not exactly room service, but by prison standards it was pretty close.
In Trenton, Carter had received pleasing essentials. But now, with a new wave of gifts, his cell took on the trappings of a princely pad. He could run his toes through a plush Persian area rug; gaze at Impressionist paintings by Gauguin, Monet, and Cézanne, or Rubens’s Head of a Negro; clutch thick navy blue Fieldcrest towels monogrammed “RHC”; or wrap himself in a brown satin sheet and rest his head on a brown satin pillowcase. These accessories brought color, texture, and spirit into the gray cubicle. The Canadians also sent a triple-decker black stereo system and a cache of tape cassettes: Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Merle Haggard, Sam and Dave, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Johnny Paycheck, Johnny Cash, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Bob Dylan, Elmore James, Gil Scott Heron, the Staple Singers, Percy Sledge, Memphis Minnie, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Willie Dixon, and the Rolling Stones.
Carter was mellowing, dismantling his defenses. He even involved himself in the prison laundry. Seven years earlier, he had sent the state’s attorney general a petulant four-page letter outlining why he refused to work in the laundry room. He would not produce any goods or services for the State of New Jersey, and he would not help the prison run its operations. But now a laundry crisis was brewing on 6 Wing. Inmates were sending their dirty clothes to the laundry, but items were missing when they returned. Accusations of theft were made, and tempers were rising. Some inmates were reluctant to send out the clothes they bought for themselves. Most of the clothes were issued by the prison; an inmate typically received two pairs of striped pants, several shirts, three or four pairs of underwear, and socks hardly an extravagant wardrobe. But clothes were among the few things that prisoners could call their own, so losing even a sock was significant.
In the middle of a heated discussion about the disappearing apparel, Carter stepped in. “I’ll take this chore,” he said. Heads turned in disbelief. Carter would be the laundry runner for 6 Wing. Each Wednesday, he would roll a pushcart through the tiers, stuff in all the dirty clothes, and take them to the laundry, where other inmates did the washing and pressing. Carter rationalized his willingness to take this job by saying it benefited the prisoners, not the prison. But it still marked, for him, an unprecedented integration into prison life. He tackled the job as he did every other important project—with relentless intensity and do-or-die focus. This was not about laundry. This was about order. This was about respect. This was about doing things the right way.
Carter vowed that every piece of clothing he received in 6 Wing would be returned. He went to each cell and, using a black Magic Marker, identified each garment. A shirt in Cell 30 on the fifth tier, for example, was marked “5–30.” Each laundry day, Carter got at least 170 pairs of pants, 200 shirts, and small mountains of underwear and socks. He recorded every item of clothing on a piece of paper. When he went to the laundry, he informed the man in charge that he wanted the exact same number of items returned and he wanted the pants perfectly pressed, seam to seam. When Carter picked up the clean clothes, he counted everything before he left, and if anything was missing, he demanded that it be replaced on the spot. The clothes washed and fully accounted for, Carter wheeled his pushcart back through the prison. When the inmates were in the yard or at their prison jobs, he stacked each man’s clothes in his empty cell. The laundry had never run so well.
Carter continued to recount his daily experiences to Lisa, either on the phone or during visits, and these experiences became part of the symbolism of Carter’s personal growth. There was, for example, an old onion that Carter first received from the Canadians in Trenton and had brought with him to Rahway. When he unpacked the onion, he discovered that it had grown green shoots. How could an onion grow anything in a prison cell? Terry Swinton, the gardener in the commune, explained to Carter that an onion is a bulb, and if properly tended and cared for, it would grow long stems and blossom with flowers. So Carter scooped some soil from the prison yard into a plastic bag, brought it to his cell, and planted the onion bulb. He watered it daily and gave Lisa updates each morning. If an onion can grow flowers in prison, then why couldn’t Carter blossom as well?
This sense of transformation was captured in a Native American folk tale that the Canadians gave Carter. Jumping Mouse was unhappy simply being a mouse. He wanted more. So he went on a search for the Sacred Mountains, but his journey was filled with peril. He was, after all, only a mouse, and he was easy prey for eagles. But Jumping Mouse had a generous heart and was willing to help others. On his journey, he gave up an eye to save a dying buffalo, and the buffalo, in turn, gave him protection for part of the journey. Then Jumping Mouse met a gray wolf who had lost his memory, so Jumping Mouse gave up his other eye to restore the wolf’s ability to recall. The wolf took Jumping Mouse to the Sacred Mountains, but, now blind, the mouse concluded his journey was fruitless. He couldn’t see and would be eaten by an eagle. Jumping Mouse fell asleep. But when he awoke, miraculously, he could see, and he looked upon the Sacred Mountains. Then he was told by a frog to leap in the air. He did—and he went higher and higher, soaring into the sky. “You have a New Name,” called the frog. “You are Eagle.”
Lisa and her housemates, who were captivated by Indian folklore in general, loved Jumping Mouse as a parable for Carter. Just as the mouse had to rid himself of his mouse ways, Rubin had to rid himself of his angry ways, his harsh ways, his secluded ways. Then, he too could soar like an eagle. But it was not enough for Carter to simply read “Jumping Mouse.” He called together other inmates and read the story aloud to them, complete with the imitations and mannerisms of mice, buffalo, frogs, and other animals. Carter taped these storybook hours on his new stereo and gave the tapes to the Canadians, who then listened to them, enraptured.
Carter had indeed come a long way from his morose and monastic ways of yore. He now ate well, he lived in relative comfort, he worked in the prison, and he was avoiding confrontations with the authorities. Yet this made his incarceration all the more intolerable. He was living a better life, both materially and spiritually, and that made him all the more desperate to start his life anew. He was innocent of the crimes for which he was serving, but he could no longer suffer and sacrifice for the sins of others. They were either going to let him go or he was going to leave on his own. Regardless, he had to leave.
Unfortunately, Carter’s legal battles were mired in the New Jersey court system. Beldock and Steel continued their efforts to bring the Caruso matter forward. Once again, they found themselves before Judge Bruno Leopizzi. In oral arguments on November 18, 1983, and January 20, 1984, they contended that the Caruso file showed that the prosecution had withheld and suppressed material evidence during the 1976 trial and the 1981 polygraph fact-finding hearing. But Leopizzi was now more frustrated with these lawyers than ever before. Their refusal to let the case die seemed to infuriate him, for he believed they were mocking the system with their endless appeals. At the second hearing, in January, he stormed off the bench at one point, yelling, “I am sick and tired of your nonsense. That’s it.” Leopizzi ruled against Carter and Artis, finding lack of due diligence on the defense’s part. He also ruled that the prosecutor’s office did not have knowledge of Caruso’s notes and that their content was immaterial.
Beldock and Steel appealed Leopizzi’s decision to the state Appellate Division on February 29, 1984. With that appeal still pending, they tried to have it heard directly by the state supreme court, but the request was denied by the court on September 6.
On the evening of November 14, a strategy meeting was held at Rahway State Prison with Carter, Beldock, Steel, and Friedman in a private room. Friedman was struck at how Carter walked around the prison as if he owned it. The question at hand was the same question they had had for two years: Do they continue to pursue the Caruso matter in state court or do they go federal with a habeas corpus petition? Beldock, of all the lawyers, had been most directly involved in the accumulation of new evidence and flushing out the Caruso file. He talked about the alibi cabdriver and the new photographs of the Dodge models’ taillights. No one disputed that both were powerful evidence of Carter’s innocence, but the lawyers were still deeply divided about what course to take. Beldock and Steel did not want to foreclose any opportunity to overturn the conviction, and filing a habeas corpus petition would probably force them to bury their “unexhausted claims” in state court: namely, the Caruso file and the evidence derived from it. They were inclined to continue the pursuit in state court. Friedman, however, believed the federal claims were strong enough on their own. “We can win on the issues we’ve already exhausted in state court,” he kept saying. But the risk was clear: if Carter lost in federal court, there was no second chance.
Despite his able counsel, Carter always kept his own, and he would make the final decision. He concluded that he had to get out of prison now; he had squandered enough years of his life in the quagmire of the New Jersey court system. Besides, there were no guarantees that the Caruso material would produce a favorable result in state court.
As the meeting dragged on, tempers flared, particularly between Carter and Steel, who had locked horns before on strategy.
“We can’t go back!” Carter said. “The problem we’ve always faced is that the state wants to keep a stranglehold on this thing and never let it go. No, we have to move ahead, and without further delay. Look, I’ll be frank with you. This place is intolerable. I won’t stay here, now that’s that!”
“But if you lose, you could rot in jail,” Steel said.
“Lou, don’t ever question my commitment to my freedom.”
Carter turned to Friedman. “Leon, how do we short-circuit the system?”
Friedman laid out the strategy. They would submit a petition now that still included claims in the state court. If a federal judge refused to review the petition because of those claims, Friedman could always withdraw them at that time.
“Leon, you’re a genius!” Carter said.
But it would take more than genius for Rubin Carter to win his freedom. It would also take luck.
* Thayer quit his job in part because he was disillusioned with the office’s handling of the case.
* In time, the Canadians hired a private investigator, Herbert Bell, to find new defense witnesses for Leslie, obtain affidavits, and submit exculpatory evidence into the record. A supplementary brief was filed on Leslie’s behalf. A new trial was ordered and he was eventually freed.