This book is an authorized biography of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. He cooperated fully with the effort, but the interpretations and conclusions are my own. Over the course of a year, I interviewed Carter for hundreds of hours, either in person or on the phone, and he shared with me his many letters and personal journals from prison. He also encouraged his family, friends, and lawyers to cooperate with my requests for interviews, records, letters, or other helpful material.
I visited the three prisons that incarcerated Carter and further interviewed guards, administrators, and inmates who knew him. I also sought interviews with Carter’s adversaries—the trial judges and principal prosecutors, or their representatives, and various investigators. Many of these individuals declined to speak with me, but several did grant me interviews, including John Goceljak, who died in August 1999. In all, I interviewed close to 120 people for this book.
I also read thousands of pages from Carter’s voluminous court records, including transcripts from two trials, briefs submitted to federal court, and the reported decisions by the New Jersey Supreme Court and by two federal courts. In addition, I drew on Carter’s military, police, and prison records, as well as his FBI records, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
In reconstructing scenes for this book, I relied on these records, personal interviews, televison broadcasts of press conferences, interviews, and boxing matches, and newspapers and magazines, including the Trentonian, the Paterson Evening News, the Morning Call, the Newark Star-Ledger, the New York Times, the Bergen Record, the North Jersey Herald News, the Toronto Star, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated.
Both The Sixteenth Round, Carter’s autobiography published in 1974, and Lazarus and the Hurricane, written in 1991 by members of the Canadian commune, were rich sources of material. I corroborated most of the dialogue that first appeared in both of these books, as I did with quotations or dialogue that appeared in news accounts.
Sean Cunningham, Mary Newberry, and Gus Sinclair, former commune members, as well as Carter himself were interviewed at length about the group. Lisa and her current housemates declined my request for an interview until after the movie about Carter was released, which was long past my deadline. Lesra Martin talked to me about his relationship with Carter but would not discuss his experiences in the commune.
While many books contributed to my research, several volumes deserve special mention. On Paterson, by Christopher Norwood, provided a vibrant history of the city and the social pressures affecting Paterson in the 1960s. The Society of Captives, by Gresham Sykes, carefully examined the sociology of Trenton State Prison in the late 1950s, and With Liberty for Some, by Scott Christianson, placed imprisonment in a broader context spanning five hundred years. Larry Sloman’s On the Road with Bob Dylan documented the singer’s Rolling Thunder Revue and his encounters with Carter. Other helpful books included Joyce Carol Oates’s On Boxing, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, J. Palmer Murphy’s Paterson and Passaic County, Joseph Thomas Moore’s Pride Against Prejudice: The Biography of Larry Doby, David Remnick’s King of the World, F. Lee Bailey’s The Defense Never Rests, Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, Donald Woods’s Biko, Hermann Mannheim’s Pioneers in Criminology, and Hyemeyohsts Storm’s Seven Arrows (which includes the “Jumping Mouse” fable).
Demographic data about blacks in Paterson in the 1960s were derived from a 1990 article in The Statistical and Geographical Abstract of the Black Population in the United States, and information about urban riots in 1967 came from the Journal of Urban History, November 1, 1998.