RUBIN CARTER THOUGHT he could fly. Standing on the balcony of the Canadians’ apartment in Rahway, he looked into the distance and saw row after row of other residential balconies, their waist-high metal railings adorned with hanging plants. He thought he could leap off the edge and float above the rooftops to another balcony, rest a spell in a padded chair, then soar once again to another balcony on another street, in another town, in another galaxy. No metal rails could contain him anymore. Carter could see something else from the balcony. He saw the yellowish dome of the prison where he had awakened that morning. There was nothing imaginary about that. He felt an unspeakable sadness for the anonymous men who lived there, hidden from the world beyond. He felt a chill and went inside.
On his first night of freedom, Carter and the Canadians hugged and laughed and cried. Their victory had been forged through cooperation, sacrifice, love—and secrecy. The Canadians had worked on the case for three years without anyone knowing, save Carter’s lawyers, and their silence gave the triumph an added mystique, as if an invisible force had broken down the prison walls. The celebration reflected the commune’s idiosyncrasies. There were no celebratory toasts because there was no liquor, Lisa having banned alcohol long ago. Carter’s prodigious thirst for booze had not been satisfied since he had been free nine years earlier, but he did not resent his temperance. He saw it, at least for this night, as part of his own transformation. Ordinary people drink to celebrate, but he was not among ordinary people. To be sober was to be awake, to be conscious—as he was. The celebration did not include music. The Canadians simply didn’t need it. Their voices were music, conversation their song. It was Carter’s first time outside the prison with the commune, and it was unlike any experience he had ever had. The festivities culminated with a big dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, carrots, and chocolate cake.
But at dinner Carter discovered that even though he was out of prison, he had not escaped its long shadow. His eyes began secreting a thick fluid, sealing them shut. He tried washing away the sticky substance, but it continued to flow. His right eye had been lost since his first year in prison, but now the left eye was closed. Rubin Carter, on his first night of freedom, was blind.
The buildup of stress had apparently caused these secretions, and it took days for the problem to ease. In addition to being sightless, Carter was also stuck in America. Contrary to his expectations of going to Toronto—the commune had already found a seven-bedroom mansion there, including a pool—he was ordered to stay in the United States pending a possible appeal or the dismissal of the original indictment against him. After his left eye sealed, Carter’s lawyers returned to Sarokin’s court and asked that the “order of release” be modified so that Carter could seek medical treatment in Canada. Sarokin denied the request, noting that Carter could surely find a good doctor “in these vast United States.” Fortunately, Paulene McLean, Lesra’s girlfriend and a nurse, was in Rahway at the time and tended to Carter until his left eye opened and his vision returned.
Carter’s relationship with Lisa also entered a new phase. In prison he had had conflicting feelings for her. Some days he saw her as his lifetime partner; at other times he assumed their differences—she ran a commune, he was a loner—made any such union impractical. After he won his freedom and moved in with the group, his feelings came into sharper focus. He decided he would not become Lisa’s lover. He knew that her partners had to undergo vasectomies, and that he too would have to, in his words, “come under compliance.” That had broken them up once before and was still unacceptable to Carter.
In addition, he had never been sexually attracted to white women before Lisa. While that had changed in prison, he resumed his original romantic preferences in freedom. Finally, his last prison relationship, with Carolyn Kelley, had led to disaster after he was released, and until he had won complete vindication—namely, when the charges against him were dropped—he wanted to avoid any missteps. If a romance with Lisa ended badly, he feared he would be abandoned by the entire group or even, as with Kelley, face public attacks by erstwhile allies. Carter believed his let’s-be-friends approach with Lisa was his best guarantee that the Canadians would remain his energetic supporters. In matters of the heart, it was another cold calculation, but Carter knew the commune had the time, money, and intelligence to help him battle future appeals.
According to Carter, Lisa was unhappy that the relationship did not reach its logical conclusion, but the disappointment did not cause a split between them. Rubin continued to live with the commune, and Lisa apparently hoped that over time he would reconsider his platonic ground rules.
Until the prosecutors made their next move, Carter intended to lie low. He had learned his lesson from the last time his conviction had been overturned. Then he had basked in his martyrdom, holding press conferences, giving speeches, and condemning the authorities at every turn. His scorn may have won applause and fueled speculation that he would run for public office, but it deepened the enmity between him and the prosecutor’s office, which repaid him with a second conviction. Now he was determined not to antagonize his zealous adversaries further.
Weeks passed, and Carter’s hopes began to rise that the prosecutors would let this case die. But the confrontation had now become a blood feud—as Bruce Rosen, Sarokin’s clerk, was about to learn. After Sarokin released Carter, Rosen was at law school and saw the Passaic County prosecutor, Joseph Falcone, in the hall. Falcone had been first assistant prosecutor during the second trial, and he now ran the office. He walked up to Rosen, stood nose to nose with him, and, according to Rosen, began yelling, “You helped a murderer go free! You helped a murderer go free!”
The week before Christmas 1985, Carter received notice that the prosecutor’s office had submitted a motion and supporting briefs to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals requesting that he either be reincarcerated or undergo a psychiatric examination. The submission was more than three hundred pages. The Memorandum in Support of Motion, signed by John Goceljak and Ronald Marmo, rehashed Marmo’s contentions that Carter was a “substantial threat to the community.” It even noted that, as a child, Rubin’s school records showed he was “very wild” and had a “bullying attitude.” Carter was now forty eight years old.
Panic swept Carter’s camp. If Marmo succeeded, Carter would be tossed back in prison pending the outcome of the state’s appeal. And unless they moved quickly, he would be spending another Christmas behind bars. The prosecutor’s motion revealed once again the visceral hatred that Marmo and the others in his office had for Carter. That his conviction was unlawful—that he did not, in the eyes of the law, commit murder—was immaterial to their argument. They wrote: “The appellants are concerned that Rubin Carter’s liberty, in all likelihood, will cause great harm to the community … There is very good cause for this Court to believe that Rubin Carter will act out violence while outside the environment of a correctional institution.”
Myron Beldock requested and received a ten-day extension from the Third Circuit Court. Then Carter, the Canadians, and the lawyers mounted a vigorous counterattack. In addition to disputing the “facts” of his record and of the Lafayette bar murders as laid out by the prosecution, the defense had to rehabilitate Carter from character attacks. Carter included a letter from the former New Jersey governor William T. Cahill, a Republican, who commended him for helping to bring about a “peaceful settlement” to the Thanksgiving prison riot at Rahway in 1971. Included in the reply brief were previously written comments about Carter’s prison record from federal district judges Clarkson Fisher and Dickinson Debevoise. Both men had praised his record when they ruled in his favor over his illegal transfer to the Vroom Readjustment Unit. Carter’s brief even included a comment from Frank X. Graves, Paterson’s law-and-order mayor, who had contributed to the pressure-cooker environment surrounding the murders. Graves had left office in 1966, but by 1985 he was once again mayor of Paterson as well as a New Jersey state senator. The day Sarokin released Carter, Graves was quoted in a newspaper, saying of him: “I don’t consider him any threat. He came out once before [in 1976] and he lived in peace in the community.”
On January 17, 1986, a three-member panel of the Third Circuit Court released its decision, summarizing the prosecutors’ argument in this fashion: “Documents submitted in support of the State’s application are intended to show that Carter is a dangerous sociopath and a human ‘time bomb.’”
Ticking or otherwise, the court ruled unanimously against the prosecution. The Third Circuit could only order Carter’s reincarceration or a psychiatric exam if it had reason to believe that Carter would not appear in subsequent court proceedings. The state, the court said, “concedes Carter is not concerned with flight.”
In other words, prosecutors believed that Carter would commit dreadful violence, but at least he’d show up in court to defend himself.
Carter had won another round in federal court, but the assault on his name reminded him of the danger he was in nevertheless. How much provocation would the police need to throw him back in jail on a trumped-up charge? The decision was made: Carter and the Canadians would go underground—but in high style. They sublet an apartment in the swank Delmonico building, above Regine’s disco, on Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street in Manhattan. The owners of the building were technically not allowed to sublet, but everyone did, the doorman being rewarded handsomely for turning a blind eye.
The apartment had only four rooms, including a tiny four by four foot kitchen with an eighteen-inch long counter. But the monthly rent, according to Carter, was a staggering $8,000, more than twice the rent for the commune’s mansion in Toronto. Living at the Delmonico, surrounded by elegant sidewalk awnings and double-parked limousines, served a purpose. With one black man living with a white woman and several white men, they believed they needed the accouterments of wealth to inoculate them from harassment.
The apartment was conveniently located between Beldock’s Midtown office and Leon Friedman’s place on the Upper East Side, and it was only two blocks from Central Park. One day Carter and Terry Swinton were walking through the park and came across a groundhog whom park vendors called Fifth Avenue Phil or Broadway Ed. Swinton, who had diabetes, carried chocolate to treat any episodes of low blood sugar, and Carter borrowed a piece and offered it to the groundhog. To the surprise of onlookers, the animal took the chocolate right out of his hand. Carter began feeding Phil—or Ed—on a regular basis, petting him and chatting with children, assuring them that the critter meant no harm. Parents sometimes took pictures of their children, the groundhog, and the strange black man whose name no one knew.
During this period, Carter did not contact his two children, his mother, his siblings, or his former wife, who still lived in their Paterson home, an oil painting of Rubin on the wall. His family had always stood by him and defended him, but his feelings of shame and mortification caused him to break away from them. Prison had estranged him physically and emotionally. Now the conviction had been overturned, but the wounds were too deep to repair. He had only seen his son, Raheem, now nine, twice in the boy’s life. He had not seen his daughter, Theodora, in nine years. Carter could reach out to a groundhog, but he could not reconnect with his own children. Lisa and the Canadians had brought him out of his shell, but he would retain a wall of detachment from outsiders. In freedom as in prison, seclusion provided sanctuary.
Freedom did allow Carter to reconnect with one of his passions—horses. He had begun riding as a child, and he admired mares that were ornery but in full stride blended power, speed, and grace. When he was arrested, he owned such a mare, named Bitch, who was so surly that only Rubin could ride her. After he went to prison, she was abandoned and eventually put to sleep. Now free, Carter was eager to get back on a horse. One Sunday he and Swinton drove out to the stables at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, where there were hundreds of acres of trails.
“We’d like to rent some animals with a little spirit in them,” Carter told a heavyset woman who ran the stables.
“Hey, Joe!” she yelled. “We’ve got some John Waynes here. Get Mighty Mite and Apples.”
Mighty Mite was a balky, dirt-encrusted quarterhorse who badly jounced Carter along the trails. Afterward, Carter brushed down the animal and walked him in the park, but the horse didn’t eat grass. Carter ripped out a few blades and tried to feed the animal by hand. Several days later he returned and asked for Mighty Mite. After another rough ride he groomed the animal’s reddish coat, combed out its neglected mane and tail, and tried to feed him, but now he brought sugar cubes. In time, Carter learned that Mighty Mite had been abused by his previous owners and that his penchant for hurling riders scared off most customers. The stable had considered destroying him. Carter continued to comb the horse, revealing a beautiful flaxen mane and golden tail; he smoothed out Mighty Mite’s trot and trained him to obey commands and make jumps. The rides were exhilarating; moreover, he now felt responsible for the horse.
“It would be wrong for us to introduce a horse to kindness and sweetness and just leave it there,” he told Lisa. “Once you do that, you’re obligated.”
She agreed. The Canadians bought Mighty Mite and Apples, the spotted appaloosa, for $1,200 apiece. The horses were rechristened with Native American names, Indians occupying a special place in the Canadians’ pantheon of victims. Mighty Mite became Red Cloud, after the brave Sioux warrior (or Rubin), while Apples became Lakota, which means “the people” (or perhaps, in this context, the Canadians). For many years Carter meticulously cared for Red Cloud, seeing himself in a horse apparently headed for the glue factory but rescued by strangers.
In July, Bob Dylan came to New York for a concert at Madison Square Garden, and Carter and several of the Canadians went to hear him. While Dylan had avoided Carter’s efforts to reach him after the second trial, Carter held no grudges. He knew that Dylan, more than anyone else, had made his case a national and international cause, and he wanted to thank him.
By now Dylan had had his own taste of courtroom battles related to Carter’s case. In “Hurricane,” Patricia Graham Valentine enters the barroom, cries out, calls the cops, and—after the suspects are identified by witnesses as “middleweights”—nods her head. Valentine was displeased by her role, so she sued Dylan, alleging that by nodding her head, Dylan implied that Valentine acquiesced in the lie of the other witnesses. A federal judge in the Southern District of Florida ruled against Valentine. So did the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, noting that Valentine’s “interpretation [of the song] does not construe the words as the common mind would understand them but is tortured and extreme.” Carter, who believed that “tortured and extreme” summarized the case against him, had his own theory about Valentine’s suit. He believed that the Passaic County authorities had put her up to it as retribution against Dylan. Dylan escaped any damage from the suit, but he had a new appreciation for Carter’s endless legal woes.
During the concert, Dylan dedicated a song to Carter, and afterward Carter went to his dressing room. Standing unnoticed in the doorway, he watched the singer sip Jack Daniel’s and hold court for a group of admirers. Dylan suddenly turned, looked up, and met Carter’s eyes. His enthusiasts in the room followed him, and Carter felt as if all the respect that had been flowing to Dylan had been redirected toward him. The two men embraced. Dylan asked Carter if he wanted to join him on his current tour, but Carter explained that he was still fighting the prosecutors, still defending himself on appeals. After about a half hour, Dylan asked him to stop by his hotel room the next day. He had something to show Rubin.
Dylan was staying in a plush hotel suite overlooking Central Park. When Carter arrived, he pulled out two pairs of boxing gloves that Carter had given him. Dylan wanted to shadowbox, so they put the gloves on and bobbed and weaved like two kids on a playground. When Carter unleashed a left-right combination, Dylan let out a scream—then realized the gloves never touched him. Both men laughed and touched gloves. “You’re safe with me, brother,” Carter told him.
After the prosecutors lost their bid to send Carter back to prison, they turned their attention to their principal appeal of Sarokin’s decision. However, owing to a rather embarrassing oversight, they could no longer pursue Carter’s co-defendant, John Artis. Sarokin had issued writs of habeas corpus for both Carter and Artis, who was under parole supervision. But in filing a notice of appeal to the Third Circuit, the prosecutors wrote only Carter’s name on the notice. The result: even if the Third Circuit overturned Sarokin’s decision, the ruling would apply only to Carter. The prosecutors’ lapse was a fitting conclusion to Artis’s involvement with the Lafayette bar murders. Rubin Carter was always the man the authorities wanted. Even those who believed he was guilty could not easily explain Artis’s role. Why would a nineteen-year old kid, with no police record and sterling character references, walk into a bar one night, shoot two men, then train his pistol on a middle-age waitress and pump four bullets into her midsection at point-blank range? No explanation, save the discredited racial revenge theory, was given to explain Artis’s sudden descent into madness. Nevertheless, he spent fifteen years in confinement. He could have copped a plea and fingered Carter for the murders. He would have then been freed and hailed as a hero in some quarters for ensuring that Carter would be locked up for the rest of his life. But Artis refused, saying he would not falsely accuse any man to save his own hide. Instead, he survived as the forgotten man—forgotten by the public, by the media, and ultimately even by the prosecutors.
In late January 1986, Carter learned that Marmo’s proposed appendix to his Third Circuit appeal included material that was “outside the record”; that is, information that had not been presented to Sarokin, which violated rules of federal procedure. Carter vehemently protested to his lawyers, demanding that a motion be filed to strike the offending submission. Initially, Friedman resisted Carter. He explained that given the expected size of the appendix, at least twenty thousand pages, the information Marmo wanted to include would not hurt them. Marmo, for example, wanted to add Carter’s boxing record (to refute Sarokin’s erroneous claim that his career was “peaking” when he was arrested), and he wanted to include an outline of the script for The Lafayette Bar Massacre (allegedly to show that Bello recanted his first testimony for commercial purposes). He also wanted to submit a picture of Carter’s actual car to the Third Circuit, even though it had not been submitted to Sarokin.
Carter had bent the rules of federal procedure himself in the appendix he filed with Sarokin. He included the photographs of the Dodge Polara and Dodge Monaco, even though those pictures had never been submitted to a state court. The pictures showed that Valentine’s taillight description did not match the Polara’s. Carter literally sneaked the photographs into the appendix—Friedman would have objected had he known—but he rationalized that they truthfully showed the discrepancies between the two cars. The prosecutors, probably caught unaware, never objected.
Now Friedman argued with Carter, insisting that the few new documents in the prosecutors’ appendix had nothing to do with the two matters on which Sarokin had overturned the conviction. Friedman also understood that his profession involved a continuous series of compromises: you give a little on one issue today, and opposing counsel will give a little on another tomorrow.
“This is petty stuff,” Friedman told Carter. “If we try to keep this material out, the court might think we have something to hide.”
“I don’t care,” Carter said. “If they’re going to make us play by the rules, we’re going to make them play by the rules.”
Friedman realized that this was the difference between being a lawyer and being a boxer. Boxers don’t compromise. They go for the knockout. Friedman filed a “notice of motion” to strike new material from the appendix.
The Third Circuit agreed, ordering in late March of 1986 that the appendix not include material that had not been before the district court. But by now the materials included in the appendices had been assembled, reproduced to form seven sets, collated, and bound into 89 volumes per set, amounting to 623 volumes. They were boxed and delivered by station wagon to the federal courthouse in Philadelphia. A local newspaper, presumably alerted by Marmo’s office, sent a photographer to cover the grand event. It published a picture of men using dollies to cart away the towering boxes, as if an overwhelming paper trail—140,000 pages!—was proof of overwhelming guilt.
But the 623 volumes violated the court order. As the prosecutor later said in court filings, he believed any disagreement over nonrecord items could “probably be rectified” with Carter. After all, Carter only disputed eighteen documents in an appendix of 20,000 pages. What’s eighteen documents among old friends? If Carter refused to permit the improper material, then Marmo’s office would have to retrieve all 140,000 pages, withdraw the nonrecord material, rebind the 623 volumes, and ship them back to Philadelphia—at the expense of Passaic County’s taxpayers.
After two decades of being on the defensive in court, Carter finally had the upper hand. His nemesis was in a vise, and he was going to squeeze. “The idea,” said a defense lawyer, Ed Graves, “was to wear them out and crush them to the earth.”
The Third Circuit sent the matter back to Sarokin for him to determine what was or wasn’t in the record. Just as Carter spent years going up and down the state ladder on appeals and hearings, constantly finding himself before a trial judge who had already ruled against him, now Marmo was in a similar position at the federal level. Sarokin, holding hearings in July and August, requested that opposing counsel sit down and determine for themselves the straightforward question of what was in the record. But the hostility on both sides was too great for any kind of agreement. It fell to Sarokin to make the decision—and he ruled against Marmo, finding that the state included fourteen items in its appeal papers that were not of record. The judge was particularly irked at Marmo’s contention that he did not submit the entire record to Sarokin on the habeas petition because the state did not anticipate an unfavorable ruling. That position, Sarokin said, was “ludicrous.”
It was increasingly clear that the prosecutors were adrift in the less familiar waters of federal court. In September they filed a motion with the Third Circuit to “supplement the record” of the appendix. That motion was denied, forcing them finally to retrieve their inadmissible documents. Then, in October, prosecutors filed a 191-page brief. The page limit was 50, and the clerk of court refused to accept it. The prosecutors appealed that decision to a circuit judge, who denied the appeal. That decision was appealed to the circuit court panel, which likewise denied it. In a last-gasp and highly unusual effort, prosecutors then appealed a procedural matter to the court en banc, meaning all nine judges. That appeal, in January 1987, was also denied.
Marmo’s attitude toward Carter explained this mad but useless flurry of maneuvers. Carter “is a dangerous and violent assassin,” Marmo told the Chicago Tribune in a story on February 8, 1987. “He always has been and always will be.” The import was clear: murder was his crime, but barbarism is his nature. Of Sarokin, Marmo said: “Here comes one judge who says a lot of sensational things to get attention, who makes numerous errors and misstatements about the case and turns the case upside down. We cannot let it stand.” The article also noted Marmo’s singular fixation with the case. According to some, the article said, Marmo “is so obsessed with the case that he pursues it almost alone without the support of his office.”
In their own way, the Canadians were as obsessed as Marmo. By the summer of 1986, Gus Sinclair was called down from Toronto to provide additional manpower. In the minds of Carter and the Canadians, they were engaged in the legal equivalent of guerrilla warfare, fighting a reckless and relentless enemy that needed to be confronted at every turn. That meant researching, writing, and delivering numerous briefs and motions in response to maneuvers by the prosecutors. Carter’s lawyers continued to handle the legal issues, but they were happy to cede the grunt work to Carter and his friends, who kept digging for further evidence of Carter’s innocence. At one point, Sinclair enlarged a map of downtown Paterson and brought together copies of all the police reports from the night of the murders. Using different color markers, he traced the movements of each police car on duty that night. He went over the reports again and identified where individual officers claimed to be at specific times. Multicolored lines careened around the city amid the fateful landmarks—the Nite Spot, St. Joseph’s Hospital, police headquarters. By the end of the exercise, the Canadians concluded that the original police documents could not support the story that was later told to convict Carter. The map, of course, was not admissible on appeal—only material in the record could be submitted—but in theory Carter could use the map if the state tried him a third time. Every scrap of evidence that proved his innocence, regardless of its provenance or reliability, was to be harvested and preserved.
By October of ’86, Carter and the Canadians wanted to be closer to their horses and craved more breathing room for themselves. So they moved forty four miles north to Mount Kisco, although they told people they lived in the tonier town of Bedford. (Mount Kisco had seceded from Bedford in 1978.) This was horse country, where clock towers were wound by hand each week, shiny Bentleys slowly cruised along dirt roads, and waist-high stone walls circled eighteenth century homes. For $3,000 a month, the group rented a quaint three-story home with a curving driveway, a crooked fence post, a ramshackle red barn, and a small pasture. They remodeled the barn for Red Cloud and Lakota, spruced up the house with plants and paintings, started a vegetable garden, and settled into their secluded world.
Anonymity remained a priority—with good reason. Carter had told the courts that he was living with a cousin, Harriet, in South Jersey, and that mail should be sent to him there. That summer Harriet called Rubin to report that several white men had showed up at her house. They claimed to be friends of Rubin’s and asked to see him. When Harriet, suspicious, asked to see identification, the men acknowledged that they were investigators from the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office. They asked Harriet if Rubin lived there, and she confirmed that he did. When they returned several days later, they questioned an old man concerning Carter’s whereabouts, and they followed, stopped, and questioned Harriet’s fifteen-year-old son. What the investigators didn’t appreciate was that they were in Carter country—an enclave where his grandfather once farmed and where dozens of Carters now lived. The investigators were repeatedly told that Rubin was indeed in their midst. When one investigator asked a woman if she was aware that Carter was a triple murderer, she firmly reminded him that he had been cleared of that crime.
Even in Mount Kisco, Carter and the Canadians were not taking any chances. At the time, Carter had no checking account, driver’s license, or credit card. But he was mingling with neighbors and supervising stable men, and he needed a name. Hurricane Carter was too recognizable, so finding a pseudonym—one that did not evoke locker rooms and boxing rings but a name with class and distinction—became a house project.
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, ferocious boxer, insolent prisoner, and alleged assassin, was ultimately dubbed Robin Wellington.
He gradually became another cog in the communal wheel. He awoke between five and six in the morning and headed for the barn, where he fed and groomed the horses and raked out their stalls. He cut the grass, repaired the fence, and was generally responsible for outdoor maintenance. The slower pace of Mount Kisco, combined with the commune’s easy camaraderie, suited him. Swinton tended the garden. Sinclair cooked the meals. Lisa read and watched television. Chaiton read the astrology charts and worked on the computer, often on Carter’s case. Meals, always simply prepared, were an important part of the day. A typical dinner consisted of meatloaf or roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and homemade bread. Homemade was always important. Even the cat food was prepared at home (cheap liver with rice and vegetables). The group ate off their laps in the TV room, watching the news or a movie and talking about the day’s events.
The relaxing atmosphere made the house an ideal spot for Carter’s cousin, Ed, when he fell ill. Now in his fifties, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Rubin invited him to stay with them for a few weeks, hoping he could repay his cousin’s years of support with the fresh air of the countryside. His body frail but his spirit strong, Ed told stories about Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife and his children and his harrowing experiences on the front lines of the civil rights movement. The Canadians cooked him egg sandwiches and comforted him, and Rubin and Ed commiserated with each other over the years they had lost because of Rubin’s imprisonment. One night, toward the end of his stay, Ed rocked in his chair and considered the peculiar group around him. “I’ve been here with white folks and with black folks, and I haven’t heard a word of racism,” he said. “I just feel like I’ve come up here and found a little piece of heaven.” At the end of Ed Carter’s stay, Rubin took him to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan to see a specialist who was running an experimental program for terminally ill patients. But it was too late, and Ed died a couple of weeks later.
Meanwhile, Rubin and Lisa continued their uneasy dance. They still had long conversations and took walks together, but Carter recognized that the unique dynamic they had while he was behind bars—a blend of mutual belligerence, succor, and love—could not be easily replicated outside. Lisa’s temper had served a purpose for Carter while he was incarcerated. It forced him to confront his past mistakes—his womanizing, his drinking, his penchant for fighting—and facilitated his own search for meaning in his life. Her outbursts had jolted him out of complacency. But now her ridicule was not redeemed by a higher purpose, it was simply petty. One morning Carter was about to leave the house with Sinclair for a day of riding; Red Cloud and Lakota were already saddled and waiting. As Carter reached the door, Lisa stopped him.
“Where are you going? Riding again? Jesus, you never think of me, do you?” Lisa, who had a bad back and couldn’t ride, accused Carter of selfishness.
Carter knew that if he had a falling out with the empress, he could lose the support of the entire empire. He still needed the Canadians to help him in his legal battles. He also had no money and no place to go. So he went to the barn, unsaddled Red Cloud, and returned to the house, where he plunked himself in front of the television for the rest of the day, simmering in silence.
More serious problems had developed between Lesra Martin and the Canadians. Lesra was now a student at the University of Toronto, majoring in anthropology. He still lived with the commune but was spending less time at home. Over the years, the group had lavished gifts and clothing on him, tutored him, given him proper medical care, and ensured his successful escape from Brooklyn. He had grown from a scrawny, illiterate fifteen-year-old street kid to a physically fit, well-spoken young man. Living with the Canadians, however, was never easy. He and Lisa’s son, Marty, were friendly rivals for the attention of Lisa. He faced the same restrictions, no matter how nonsensical, that everyone faced in the commune. Pizza, for whatever reason, was discouraged, so he, Marty, and their friend Sean Cunningham would sneak out of the house to get a few slices.
Lesra continued to look at Carter as a father figure, and the quest to free him gave Lesra and his guardians a common agenda. But Lesra was now a twenty-two-year-old college student, and he needed his independence. While Rubin, Lisa, and the others were living in Manhattan, they got word from Toronto that Lesra was spending less time at home and, when he was home, he was unpleasant and aloof. The break finally came when Lesra became involved with a woman at school. Serious dating outside the commune was not allowed, and Lesra was still partnered with Paulene, who had joined the commune because of him. According to Carter, Paulene called Lisa in Manhattan. Lisa told her to put Lesra on the phone and told him to pack his bags and leave. Several months later, Lesra called the house in Mount Kisco. He spoke to Sinclair for a while and then talked to Carter. “Lez, my brother! Talk to me!” Rubin boomed. There was a long silence. Lesra expressed remorse for his departure, but Carter could do nothing for him. He ended the conversation by telling Lesra to call him anytime he felt like talking. It was, however, several years before they reconnected.
On January 20, 1987, the prosecutors finally filed an appeal that com plied with the rules of federal procedure and was accepted by the Third Circuit Court. In his opening, Marmo complained bitterly that the court had refused his noncompliant briefs, and those briefs would have shown that Sarokin’s ruling presented “slanted and distorted views … Because of the exceptional circumstances of this case (twenty-year, eventful history, two lengthy trials, approximately twenty thousand pages of appendix, etc.) we cannot make this same case in a brief of fifty pages.” To rehabilitate their case, to try to convince the three-judge panel that Carter was the murderer, Marmo reintroduced the trial cast of George Lois, Selwyn Raab, Harold Levinson, Fred Hogan, literary agents, publishing executives, and celebrities; he mentioned fund-raising concerts for Carter at Madison Square Garden and the Astro dome, and he declaimed: “The strength and majesty of our judicial system is founded on the exposition of the truth through a process of submission of evidence and argument to a body of neutral citizens and not through a process of imagery conjured by Madison Avenue public relations and the collection of uninformed celebrities.”
But Marmo was like a general fighting his last battle. The “Madison Avenue hucksters”—or, as Burrell Ives Humphreys called them in his summation, “perverters of justice”—may have resonated with the jurors in Passaic County but not with the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Its responsibility was to evaluate Sarokin’s decision to throw out the convictions on the Brady violation and on the appeal to racial prejudice.
If Marmo had been angry at Carter’s previous tactics, the defendant’s next trick infuriated him further.
Carter felt he needed more than fifty pages for his reply brief in order to refute point by point Marmo’s assertions that the evidence pointed to his guilt and to prove that the prosecutors had violated his constitutional rights. While the rules limited the size of the brief, there were no limitations on the size of the type. So instead of using their lawyers’ printer, Gus Sinclair found a small family print shop in Port Chester, New York, that used a thinner font, which shoehorned more letters on each line and more lines on each page. Carter also packed the brief with footnotes, printed in a smaller point size, thus squeezing in even more detail. Carter also used boldface type for the first time as well.
The same division of labor continued—the Canadians and Carter wrote the facts, the lawyers wrote the law—and the two sides continued to clash over the tone of the brief. In an early draft, a sentence in the Preliminary Statement referred to the prosecutors as “strident.” Beldock objected that it was too, well, strident. It was certainly not standard usage for a legal brief. Lisa, however, was adamant that “strident” stay. So was Carter, who believed this was not a standard case and therefore deserved nonstandard language. Standard language had kept him in prison for nineteen years. “Strident” survived.
The Third Circuit brief—slim letters, long footnotes, brazen boldface—was bound in the mandatory red cover and dubbed the Red Zinger.
Marmo filed a reply to Carter’s brief. In the Introduction, he wrote: “It should be noted that the brief which [Carter] had a year to prepare would, according to our calculations, amount to a hundred pages if it were typed employing the format, margins and size of type utilized in the brief of the [prosecutors].” Marmo had been outfoxed, and he knew it.
On August 21, 1987, the Third Circuit affirmed Sarokin’s ruling in a unanimous 3–0 decision. Written by Judge Ruggero Aldisert, the opinion concluded that the prosecutors had indeed withheld critical evidence in failing to disclose the true results of Bello’s polygraph, violating Carter’s due process rights to a fair trial. The court, however, did not dissect the entire case, as Sarokin had, and apparently saw little reason to delve too deeply into the much disputed twenty thousand pages of appendix. Instead, the court concluded that Bello, as the state’s only eyewitness identifying the defendants at the scene of the crime, was obviously crucial to the state’s case. The opinion quoted the New Jersey Supreme Court’s dissent in ‘82, noting that if the defendants had known the true state of affairs, they could have argued persuasively “that Bello was in all respects a complete, unvarnished liar, utterly incapable of speaking the truth.”
This decision was a major victory not only for Carter but also for Sarokin. Carter’s adversaries would not be able to attribute the over turned convictions to a bleeding-heart liberal outlier, and Sarokin himself felt enormous relief that his legal reasoning had been supported. The prosecutors, of course, had lost another round in federal court, and by now their blatantly dishonest handling of Bello could not have been more thoroughly dissected. Since the polygraph fact finding hearing in 1981, seven out of eleven reviewing judges at the state and federal level had concluded that the prosecutors withheld evidence, committed a Brady violation, and deprived Carter of a fair trial. For all the hard legal work by the Canadians and Carter, it was Myron Beldock who deserved the victory toast, for it was he who, after the trial, playing a hunch, called the polygraph examiner in Chicago and discovered that the defense had been misled by the prosecutors. This was a winning issue, Beldock had reasoned, if the justice system works. Ultimately, it did.
What was absent from the Third Circuit’s opinion was also note worthy. There was no ruling or even discussion of the racial revenge motive, even though Chief Judge John Gibbons asked Marmo about the motive during oral arguments. The court ruled that its Brady decision made it unnecessary for it to also rule on the racial revenge violation. Similarly, the dissenting judges in the state supreme court decision had been silent on the racial revenge question. The message: judges who could avoid the subject of race but still rule in favor of Carter—did just that.
Carter did not learn about the court opinion from his lawyers. Rather, in the weeks leading up to the decision, the commune repeatedly called the court clerk to find out when the opinion would be released. When the date was announced, Swinton and Chaiton drove to Philadelphia to pick it up. While the outcome was a huge win, Carter and the Canadians didn’t throw a party or celebrate in any traditional way. For one thing, they had few if any friends outside the group, besides the lawyers. Moreover, parties drew attention. They were déclassé and boisterous and showy, and merely suggesting one would have been in poor taste. As Carter recalled, “Our celebration would be someone saying, ‘Let’s go out to lunch,’ or, ‘Let’s go out for coffee.’ So we’d all get ready to go out, then get in two cars and go to a café somewhere. It was a quieter, gentler celebration, but far more intense.”
Marmo continued his push through the courts. In November he filed a Petition for Certiorari, to have the appeal heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court only accepts appeals that it believes involve important constitutional questions. According to Friedman, Marmo’s petition cited seven or eight habeas corpus cases that the Supreme Court had ruled on in recent years and argued that Carter’s case would represent another important component in this evolving area of the law. Friedman, however, stood that argument on its head, arguing that the Supreme Court in fact had ruled on about a dozen habeas cases in recent years and that Carter’s case would be redundant. The brief, bound in an orange cover, was designated the Orange Squasher. Carter spent another Christmas with his fate still uncertain. Then, on January 11, 1988, the Supreme Court declined to hear the prosecution’s appeal. There were no more appeals. Sarokin’s decision would stand. “We whupped their constitutional asses,” Carter said, “all the way to the Supreme Court.”
The final victory was still not at hand. Carter and his lawyers were confident that Passaic County prosecutors would not retry him. How could they? In the years since the murders, their case had been shredded. Bello, at the ’81 hearing, testified that he had no memory of what happened on the night of the crime. Sarokin had taken the racial revenge motive off the table. DeSimone was dead. The Caruso file gave the defense ammunition to undermine Patricia Graham Valentine’s car testimony. The murder weapons had never been found. There were no eyewitnesses placing Carter and Artis at the scene of the crime.
Nonetheless, a battle raged inside the prosecutor’s office over whether to try Carter and Artis a third time. By now John Goceljak was acting Passaic County prosecutor, and he sought out Donald Belsole, director of the division of criminal justice for the state Attorney General’s Office, which had supervisory control over the county prosecutor’s offices. Goceljak himself was on the fence about bringing Carter back to court, but he explained to Belsole that different factions in his office were fighting over the issue. He asked Belsole for advice, and Belsole understood that Goceljak would follow his recommendation.
The case fascinated Belsole. He had been a habitué of Greenwich Village in the sixties and a Bob Dylan devotee who initially learned about the case through “Hurricane.” Belsole could still recite the lyrics by heart. He knew that Sarokin’s opinion had soiled many reputations in the Passaic office and that the faction who wanted a retrial, which he assumed was led by Marmo, did not want to see Carter walk away in triumph.
But during this period Belsole met with Beldock and Friedman, who asked that Carter not be retried. According to Friedman, Belsole said that the prosecutors believed Carter was going to sue the state for civil damages, so if they had to go back to court, they may as well retry the case. Beldock and Friedman knew that Carter had no interest in filing a civil action. To do so, he would have to present himself as a victim, claiming injury from his imprisonment. To plead for compensation would give the State of New Jersey the opportunity to deny him something he wanted, and Carter would not put himself in that position. Furthermore, he never wanted to walk inside a New Jersey courtroom again.
As a result, Beldock and Friedman struck a compromise with Belsole. According to Friedman, Belsole said: “Do I have your word as lawyers that you are not planning to bring a civil rights action for damages against anyone in New Jersey associated with this case?”
“On our word as gentlemen and lawyers,” Friedman said, “you have our representation that we’re not going to sue.”
Belsole categorically denies that any such deal was made. But he did recommend to Goceljak that Passaic County not take Carter back to court. His recommendation, he said, reflected what he thought was in the best interests of Paterson, the practical problems in retrying the case after so many years, the negative publicity that it would engender, and the fact that Carter and Artis had already spent, collectively, thirty-four years in prison. Justice, he decided, was best served by moving on.
On February 19, 1988, Goceljak filed a four page application in the Passaic County Court in Paterson to dismiss all charges against Rubin Carter and John Artis. The application noted that the case had “received the attention of more courts and proceedings than probably any case in the history of this state and possibly any other state.”
Eight days later, State Superior Court Judge Ralph Martin had fifty-two indictments to dismiss. The first one was No. 167–66, entitled “The State of New Jersey versus Rubin Carter and John Artis, defendants.” In a near-empty courtroom, Martin intoned, “Motion by the prosecutor’s office to dismiss the indictment is hereby granted. Next case.” The final act in a twenty-two-year ordeal took two minutes.
“It’s good to finally win one in the Passaic County Court,” Lewis Steel told a reporter afterward.
This time Beldock threw a dinner party at his Greenwich Village apartment for everyone associated with the case. Toasts were made by several lawyers, by Sinclair, and finally by Carter, who stood up and quietly thanked everyone. He also acknowledged Lisa. When he finished, he sat down, leaned over, and touched her hand.
Beldock, in an interview years later, said that despite the insuperable odds and countless setbacks, they won through the sacrifices of so many and the teamwork of all involved. “The real story,” he said in barely a whisper, “is the fact that good triumphs over evil, and how hard it is to get there.” Tears began to well in his eyes, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. “I’m also a sentimentalist,” he said, almost in disgust. “Now you know that about me.”
While the criminal justice system eventually corrected itself, Carter’s case was a reminder of how costly such battles are. Beldock’s firm alone put in more than an estimated eleven thousand hours of work and incurred $100,000 in expenses. The fees for all of Carter’s lawyers would have totaled between $4 million and $5 million. The lawyers’ pro bono contributions were immense, but as Beldock liked to say, “Money is not the only currency.” The commune also racked up huge expenses, including their pricey sojourns in Manhattan and Mount Kisco. Lisa would tell Carter, “It took us more than a million dollars to get you out of prison.” The commune’s accountant, Michael Murnaghan, said it was more like $400,000. Regardless, Carter was lucky to have wealthy lawyers and supporters who could underwrite his fight for freedom; few prisoners have that luxury. But it was Carter’s own belief in his cause, his refusal to surrender, and his personal charisma that motivated so many to give so much.
His ultimate legal triumph, however, was tempered by the personal price he paid. He lost nineteen years of his life to prison and almost three more years of unimpeded freedom. He lost an eye. He lost his boxing career, and he lost the prime earning years of his life. He lost his marriage, and he lost time with his children, family, and friends. But neither the State of New Jersey nor Passaic County offered any compensation or apology. Belsole, of the state Attorney General’s Office, believed that amends or apologies would have mocked the criminal justice system. Carter’s case—the convictions and their aftermath—was the result of an adversarial process. Everyone was doing his job, according to Belsole. The prosecutors believed Carter was guilty, and they did everything they could to convict him. Carter and his lawyers did everything they could to exonerate him. The battle continued for more than two decades. That is how the system works, and no one, particularly on the state level, owed Carter anything.
If anything, hostile feelings for Carter simply intensified with his vindication. When the charges were dropped, Adele, the daughter of the victim Fred Nauyoks, said: “It’s just unbelievable. [Carter] is just a bad person. I just hope he doesn’t hurt somebody else. It just seems that our courts and judges help the people who do the things, and the victims get the short end of the stick.”
Law enforcement officials in Paterson have also not changed their views. Edwin Englehardt was the police commissioner when the murders occurred and was at the scene of the crime. Thirty two years later, Englehardt, now the Passaic County sheriff, was asked by a reporter if Carter was owed an apology. “Apology for what?” Englehardt said. “He should have apologized to the State of New Jersey for all the free room and board he got [in prison]. I would have liked to have pulled the [execution] switch on him myself.” The sheriff helpfully indicated that Carter’s room and board came out to $77 a day. Carter, understandably, does not feel safe in Passaic County.
Englehardt also repeated a claim often heard among Carter’s enemies: he was set free because of a “technicality.” As Leon Friedman likes to respond: “It was a technicality—it’s called the U.S. Constitution.”
Over the years, various jurors from both trials have been interviewed, and none has ever publicly expressed doubt about Carter’s guilt. Carl Matonak, a juror at the first trial, told a reporter thirty-one years later that he had not changed his mind. “In my opinion, this guy’s lucky to be around, breathing air,” he said. “Based upon everything that I know, this guy is guilty.”
Carter’s years of isolation had frozen his image in time. For many, he will always be seen as a brew of turbulent forces that stalked across TV screens in the early sixties, when Friday night fights were grand theater and Carter a mesmerizing villain. At the time, Carter’s defiant words, hard face, and grim persona conjured up dark fears in white America. Carter burnished this militant image with angry prison interviews, shrill speeches, and The Sixteenth Round, which glorified bloody combat and dripped rage like sweat from a towel.
Carter had traveled from imprisonment to freedom, but few knew about his other journey. He had disappeared inside a medieval prison, had turned his cell into “an unnatural laboratory of the human spirit,” and was shown the light of civilization by the “inner circle of humanity.” As Carter said, “When you can’t look out, you look in”—and he looked within himself for many years. Fighting for his innocence was easy. Fighting for his dignity against the strictures of prison was more difficult. But fighting for his heart’s ease, for peace of mind, for some meaning to his life—that fight had been the hardest yet. He was forced to go the distance, and doing so brought him both victory and redemption.
After more than two years of seclusion and eleven years since he had held a press conference, Carter was prepared to face the public again. On a pleasant, sunny day—a rare February 29—he held a midday press conference at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. It was his coming-out party, and it was held in inimitable style. His lawyers rented the pink Baroque Room, lit by crystal chandeliers, overlooking Central Park. Waiters dressed in formal attire served croissants, danish, coffee, and tea. At a small table by the door, several of the Canadians checked in reporters and handed out information about the case. Selwyn Raab of the New York Times tried to interview one of the Canadians, who declined to give his name, identifying himself only as a businessman. He told Raab that he and his “wife” and other Canadian friends became intrigued with Carter’s plight, had sent him delicacies like chateaubriand in prison, and helped him financially. At the elevated front table sat a carefully selected white-and-black mix of Carter’s lawyers and supporters. Dylan’s “Hurricane” wafted through the room as about eighty people, half of them journalists, took their seats. Most of the reporters represented publications from New York and New Jersey; several TV cameras were also set up. Even Lisa, who typically shunned public events, attended. Carter rose from the front table to cheers from his supporters. As always, he had a great sense of theatrics, but this time he also had a surprise.
At the age of fifty, he looked remarkably fit. His well-groomed Afro and mustache had not a speck of gray. His face was smooth and seemingly without a mark, a boxing scar over his right eye blending indistinguishably into his ebony skin. He lacked the bulky musculature of his prizefighting days, but he also did not have an ounce of fat. He was dressed in a tan suede jacket, white shirt, dark tie, and navy trousers. For reporters who had not seen him since the seventies, it was as if Carter had been given a makeover ten years earlier, then preserved in formaldehyde. Carter remembered his press conference after his release from prison in 1976, when he claimed he had been “raped of his freedom for nine and a half years.” He assumed that the reporters, particularly those from New Jersey, expected to hear the same denunciations today.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the press,” he began in a carefully scripted and memorized speech.
“On June 16, 1966, twenty-two years ago, I left my home in Paterson, New Jersey, for a meeting with my business manager to discuss an upcoming prizefight. But little did I know that the events of that evening would sound the bell ending my career as a professional boxer and mark the beginning of quite a different kind of fight, a fight in which the prize was life itself—and freedom. Well, we have just won that fight. The sixteenth round is finally over. It is over! Yes!
“The State of New Jersey has just now seen fit to dismiss the charges and the indictment—the same indictment that they used twenty-two years ago to try to take my life by seeking the death penalty. But they failed to get the death penalty, I am delighted to report. Instead, they sentenced me to a life of living death—and there is no other way to describe the nature of prison. Prison destroys everything that is valuable in a human being. It destroys families—it destroyed mine. It destroys one’s dignity and self-respect in too many ways to even mention here. It got to me, and I knew I was innocent. It gets to everybody.
“I have seen people die in prison—needlessly—from the lack of medical attention and sheer neglect. And in that regard, I have always considered myself as being lucky because all I suffered was the loss of one eye, while John Artis, a mere teenager I barely knew in 1966, and who would not have gone to prison had he not asked for a ride home that night, was not so fortunate. He contracted, in prison, an incurable circulatory disease. To date, he’s had several fingers and toes amputated, and he can only expect more of the same in the future. Now, that’s horrible. I mean, for what? For simply asking for a ride home? It’s incredible.
“But you know I think what struck me most about being released from prison was that for twenty years, I was considered a danger to society. I was locked away in an iron cage for not one but three of my lifetimes. I was a prisoner, a number, a thing to be guarded with a maximum of security and a minimum of compassion. Not a person. Not a human being. But a body to be counted fifteen or twenty times a day. Even when I was brought to the federal district court to be released—and I think many of you were there to witness this—you saw me chained, you saw me shackled, and you saw me handcuffed. I had to be escorted by three carloads of heavily armed guards. Man! I frightened myself, I appeared to be so dangerous. But the very next moment, with the stroke of a judge’s pen, I’m free. Completely and utterly free, with all of the rights and protections that everyone here takes for granted. Suddenly, I can walk out of the door—as if the last twenty years had never happened. As if society was telling me, ‘Never mind.’ One moment I’m a championship prizefighter. The next moment—and for twenty years thereafter—I’m reviled as a triple murderer. Then the next moment, I’m an innocent man who’s been wrongfully imprisoned. Now, you try to make sense out of that, because I’ll be damned if I can. It is just too much!”
Carter continued, at times evoking the ministerial cadences once used by his father in church. He inveighed against the death penalty, noting that he was not the first and would not be the last innocent person whom the state would try to execute. He reiterated the horrors of prison and disabused reporters of the illusion that convicts are coddled. “Where is the proof of this?” he asked. “Just go sixty miles south of here to a place called Trenton, New Jersey, and you will find a unit there called the Vroom Readjustment Unit, and I challenge any reporter to go into that building, to see the devastation, come back and report that to the people, and I guarantee you that the building will be torn down brick by brick before the sun goes down that day.” Carter also complained about the “unchecked and unbalanced” power of the prosecutors and emphasized the importance of federal review of state court criminal proceedings. He then issued a proper thank you.
“The most powerful enemy of justice is inertia, maintaining the status quo, or, let’s not ruffle any feathers. And that’s why I want to acknowledge here today, and sing the praises of, Federal Court District Judge H. Lee Sarokin. His clarity, his wisdom, and depth of understanding [are] incomparable. For he alone had the courage to face squarely the issue that the state courts for nineteen years had sidestepped, and that is that the poison of racism had permeated the state’s entire case. To not throw out these convictions, so wrote Judge Sarokin, would be to commit a crime as heinous as those for which we were unjustly convicted. Now, ain’t that saying a mouthful?”
Carter geared up for his dramatic conclusion.
“The question invariably arises, it has before and it will again: ‘Rubin, are you bitter?’
“After all that’s been said and done—the fact that the most productive years of my life, between the ages of twenty-nine and fifty, have been stolen; the fact that I was deprived of seeing my children grow up—wouldn’t you think I have the right to be bitter? Wouldn’t anyone under those circumstances have a right to be bitter? In fact, it would be easy to be bitter. But it has never been my nature, or my lot, to do things the easy way. If I have learned nothing else in life, I’ve learned that bitterness only consumes the vessel that contains it. And for me to permit bitterness to control or infect my life in any way whatsoever, would be to allow those who imprisoned me to take even more than the twenty-two years they’ve already taken. Now, that would make me an accomplice to their crime—and if anyone believes that I’m going to fall for that … then they are green enough to stick in the ground and grow!
“Thank you.”
Applause rang out for this eloquent, magnanimous, and indeed surprising speech. When all was quiet Carter said, “I’ll be happy to answer your questions.” But there was silence, as if reporters were shocked by what they had seen and heard. Finally Carter said, “No questions? Great.” He took a step away from the microphone, feigning a quick exit. He chuckled. Then reporters laughed. A subtle prank from the Hurricane had loosened them up. About twenty minutes of questions followed.
“What are you going to do now?” one reporter asked.
“I’m going to cultivate my garden,” he said.
“Are you ever going back to Paterson?”
Another easy question. “No,” Carter said. “I will never step foot back in Paterson for any reason, at any time, forever.”
The next day Carter, Terry Swinton, and Sam Chaiton piled into their old blue Mercedes and headed toward Canada. When they reached the border in Buffalo, they paid the toll and crossed the bridge but were approached by an official from Canadian Customs. Fearing that the authorities would stop him, Carter had dressed like a dapper college professor in a tweed sport coat with suede elbow patches and a matching wool turtleneck sweater. It was a cold evening, and snow dusted the ground. The customs official asked for Carter’s residence and citizenship. Carter said he lived in New Jersey and was an American, explaining, hesitantly, that he was going on vacation.
The customs officer, suspicious, handed him a piece of yellow paper and directed him to the Manpower and Immigration office across the parking lot. Chaiton was nervous as they drove up to the building and stepped inside. In a quiet, fluorescent-lit room, Carter handed the piece of paper to a ruddy-faced official with gray hair.
“Why were you sent over here?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Carter said.
“What’s the purpose of your visit?”
“Visiting friends,” Carter said. “And traveling.”
Carter shifted his weight. He feared the next question.
“Have you ever been convicted of a crime?”
Carter hesitated. He didn’t know how he could possibly explain the past twenty-two years to a Canadian bureaucrat.
“Yes,” Carter said.
“You know, then, that you’re not eligible to enter Canada.”
“B-b-b-but …” Carter’s stuttering suddenly reappeared with the fears that he would be turned back.
The officer, not missing a beat, continued his questioning: “How long were you in jail?”
“Twenty years,” Carter said.
“What were you in for?”
“Triple homicide.”
“So you did your time, you’re out on parole, and barring any unforeseen circumstances, you’re free?”
“No.”
“Then how did you get free?”
“My conviction was overturned.”
“Where?”
“I was exonerated by the federal district court in New Jersey, I was exonerated by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Pennsylvania, and I was exonerated by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The official looked at him for a long moment, then raised his eyebrows. “Hey, Joe!” he yelled across the room. “This is the guy I was telling you about, the guy on TV who spent twenty years in prison for something he didn’t do.” He reached across the desk and extended his hand. “Welcome to Canada, Mr. Carter.”