By the spring of 1964 I had become the number one middleweight challenger. My success aside, I now accepted as a foregone conclusion that nobody really cared about us prize fighters; and that we were looked upon with favor only as somebody else’s fighting machines—or, rather, as his meal tickets. When we finally grew old and tired, or maybe got hurt while fighting and the machine just didn’t work as well as it had in the past, we were simply scrapped and sent to the junkyard to rot, to lay in waste upon the heaps of other discarded prize fighters who were already decomposing in the bin—just like any other machine rusts without the proper care.
While earlier in my career my concern was for the welfare of all prize fighters, it later narrowed down only to black fighters, and then came to be for black people in general. I had no religious convictions to define my position, no moral feelings to explain away my attitude. I only knew that white people always stuck together, no matter what the cause, in order to break the independent black man. This discovery had worked itself into a deeply grooved furrow of my mind, and I began to resent what was happening to me in public. The newspapers were out to destroy me because Tedeschi had said that I was hooked up with the Mafia, managed by a member of the family of “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli, and while I could forgive very easily, it was impossible for me to forget.
I considered myself a fairly quiet person. Others may have thought me flamboyant and not overly bright (I sometimes questioned the matter myself), but I had my own ideas about the people around me. I believed that, basically, they were all full of shit. So I began to refuse all interviews. I declined to attend any more banquets. Even after a fight sometimes, when the dressing room was crowded with newspapermen, sportswriters, and commentators all spouting their praise of—or disappointment in—what they had just seen, I would be appreciative and sort of humble, but never open and aboveboard with my thoughts.
I discovered how viciously the press could affect my life in April 1964, when an incident now known as the Harlem Fruit Riot jumped off.
No one (especially not me) seems to know what actually touched off the terrible violence that swept through the streets of Harlem the afternoon of April 17, indiscriminately striking down little kids who were not yet even of high-school age. Some said it was because several of the children had overturned a fruit stand while coming home from school; the police have since lodged other accusations to justify their brutality—mainly that six teenagers had robbed and killed a Harlem shopkeeper. The man who owned the fruit stand, however, claimed that the kids who had overturned his stand were not from the neighborhood.
I won’t go into any aspects of innocence or guilt in the situation, because I really don’t know. But there seems to be general agreement with the point to which I eventually addressed myself: that hundreds of sadistic policemen arrived on the scene with their pistols drawn, and started kicking and cuffing and beating those little children over the head with their billy clubs until they were lying out in the streets, torn and bleeding like the abused lumps of helpless humanity they were.
This fiendish display of brutality compelled me to disregard my prior cool and voice my outrage against the trouncing those little children—and grownups as well—received. In anger, I told a supposedly friendly reporter that the black public ought to protect its own against this type of tyrannical invasion by white cops into black neighborhoods. Anyone else in the world would have fought back: a little cockroach, an ant, or even a bedbug; everything, from the smallest creature to the very largest, would have fought back in self-defense, everything but a goddamn nigger!
But I went further with this reporter and said that during the riot, when scores of children were being trampled, stomped, and mutilated by a legion of club-wielding police—while other cops held their guns to the children’s heads—the black community should have arisen right then and fought to their death in the streets, if it was necessary. Because self-protection is the absolute right of every living being on the face of the earth. No matter who he is, what color he is, a person has a right to live, and to do so without always being dangled over the political edge of genocide every day of his life.
I told the man that dreams do not make reality, and reality for black people may not be all that ideal, but that it’s the only real thing we’ve got. A black preacher who because of his beliefs remains passive while a nigger-hating cop holds a gun barrel to his head may close his eyes, if he chooses to, and imagine himself being a million miles away praying humbly to his God, but when that cop pulls that trigger and the hammer falls, it’s going to blow his goddamn brains out just the same! That’s reality.
Some trigger-happy cops would kill a black man with icy calm as long as they had the law backing them up, I said. But let that same man face death unarmed, like the people he was killing had to do, and that icy calm would evaporate like dewdrops hitting the first rays of the morning sun. Without that gun, without the official backing of that little tin shield, every man in the world was equal in one very important way: we all had to pull our pants down and shit between two legs. All of us.
This reporter promised to keep most of the things that I told him off the record and confidential—and he did, too—everything I’ve noted above. Nonetheless, he did print, in an article published in The Saturday Evening Post, one statement that spelled my doom: “During last summer’s Harlem riots [that followed the Fruit Riot] for instance,” he wrote, “[Carter] suggested, in jest, to Elwood Tuck, his closest friend, ‘Let’s get our guns and go up there and get us some of those cops. I know I can get four or five before they get me. How many can you get?’ ”
Although the article more or less indicated that I’d meant it as a joke—and I really did, then—the police didn’t see it that way. Thus, its appearance in print accomplished something that all my years of being in and out of jail could never do: it brought the entire country’s law enforcement agencies crashing down on my head with blood in their eyes. I’ll explain about that in a minute.
At first it surprised me that what I’d said had such an impact upon the police. Because—Good Lord!—three short years before, the cops couldn’t have cared less what Rubin Carter had to say. But now they were all in an uproar. The Harlem Fruit Riot, as we’ll soon see, only foreshadowed the first political repercussions of trying to keep the niggers in their places, President Johnson’s civil rights bills notwithstanding.
The first I became aware that this article had been published at all was when I received a call from Sugar Ray Robinson, who told me about it. There were then two men in the world whom I respected more than anybody else: Miles Davis was one, Sugar Ray was the other.
“Hurricane? This is Ray,” he said, as soon as I picked up the telephone. “Man, what are you trying to do, get yourself killed or something? Have you got any idea what this article is saying?” he asked. But I had no idea what he was even talking about.
“What article?” I asked. “What the hell are you talking about, Ray?”
“The magazine article!” he said, exasperated.‘ “The Post!, What the hell did you think I was talking about!” Then: “Do you mean to tell me that you haven’t even read this thing, yet?” He was incredulous.
“No,” I answered. “Why? Should I have read it?”
“You damn right you should have read it!” Sugar Ray. snapped right back. He’d been this route himself, before. “But even more, you shouldn’t have even said it,” he went on, “because your ass is in the fire now! So you better read it. No! Wait!” he said, changing his mind. “I’ll read it to you!” And as he read it word by word, line by line, I realized to what depths an eager reporter would stoop to sell his story.
“That’s a goddamn lie!” I told Ray heatedly after he had finished. “I didn’t mean—”
“You mean to tell me that you didn’t say that?” he interrupted me, swiftly, knowing that some of it was my philosophy: “It sounds like you, Rubin!”
“Sure,” I admitted. “I said some of it. And meant it, too! But it’s not in its proper context. A lot of what I said was left out—all the qualifying parts. I was talking about defense! Not attacking those goddamn people,” I told him bitterly. “That man just used what he wanted; and disregarded the rest! But thanks, Sugar, I’ll get back to you later, man. I’ve got to try to stop this thing before it goes too far.”
But the pendulum had swung too far already.
Even at that moment I was hog-tied and branded as a mad-dog, cop-killing nigger who was hell-bent on wiping out the law—singlehandedly, no less. I’d never claimed to be a pulpit angel, and I don’t intend to claim it now, but I didn’t deserve that. Quite a few people who I could call my friends were lawmen—black and white. In fact, all of my brothers-in-law in Washington are cops. There was also Peter Rush, a Secret Service man, who always did his roadwork with me whenever he wasn’t out guarding some president, and who told me what the law people around the country were saying about me after that article was published. (He later came to testify for me at my trial.) There was Billy Kilroy, a U.S. marshal and an old friend, whose wife and mine always exchanged dinner engagements; Ray Sadowski, a state trooper, who actually got me started in boxing while I was still in prison; Bobby Ward, the detective who had sent me to Trenton State Prison, but who turned out to be a helluva friend later on; Fred Hogan, an Atlantic Highlands cop who always stayed up in training camp with me; Ronald Lipton, a Jersey City detective who was one of my sparring partners; Howard Kline, a Paterson detective, and probably one of my friendliest of friends; Ernie Hutcherson, Melvin Jenkins, Moody—all Paterson cops—men I had grown up with. All of them were telling me the same story: “The Law was out to pin the Hurricane’s black ass to the wall!”
I began to feel the heat almost immediately. Early one morning, shortly after the Fruit Riot, my car broke down on the highway near Hackensack, New Jersey. The voltage regulator had suddenly gone dead. The road was deserted. It was almost three o’clock the morning, and cold, and what few cars did pass me wouldn’t stop. So I pushed my monster off to the side and started hoofing it down the highway to find some help.
It was dark, and lonely, and the wind whipped right through my clothes. My feet were cold. Then I saw a black and white patrol car heading down the highway in the opposite direction. I ran across the divider and flagged it down, and asked the officer to help me find an open service station, or take me to a telephone booth, whichever was easiest.
“Why, certainly,” the young white cop smiled. “Get in, man! It’s cold out there, isn’t it? I’ve got some jumper cables in my trunk. Maybe they’ll start your car without you having to pay some tow truck to do it.” It was nice and warm inside his car, and on the way back to mine, we got into a hip conversation about nothing in particular.
But the moment the man laid eyes on my black custom Eldorado, with “Rubin Hurricane Carter” engraved in small silver letters on each side of the headlights, his entire attitude changed. He didn’t say anything about it though. When we couldn’t get the car started, he pretended to take me to a telephone downtown, but he was really bringing me to headquarters, to get me in there with the rest of his boys. And that’s exactly what he did—locked my dumb ass up! Now he claimed that a meat-packing factory, right across the highway from where my car had broken down, had been burglarized during the night. I was now the prime suspect. Sonofabitch!
Had the man just reached over in the car and smacked me dead in the mouth, I would have been less surprised—and much less angry too. But when I found out how he had tricked me into this den of iniquity just to set me up, I felt something ugly rise up inside of me. Headquarters was manned by a totally white crew of cops, and they reveled in the pleasure of having me in their jail, of being able to lock up this loudmouthed nigger who talked too goddamned much!
When I asked if I could use the telephone to call my wife or my lawyer, they sneeringly refused, and then drew their pistols on me when I became insistent about it. Just standing there facing all of that saintly hatred oozing from the pores of all those big brave “servants of the people” with their weapons already drawn, I experienced a feeling that I hadn’t felt to the same degree since that fat cop in Paterson had smacked me when I was nine years old, and this incident reminded me of it for the first time in years. I was furious, and humiliated too, because I felt helpless. They locked me up in a stinking cage as if I were a mad gorilla, while a steady flow of their giggling brethren trickled passed the cell door to taunt me, laughing like the scared fools they were.
Four hours later I was still locked up, pacing the cell in a cold fury and wondering how could I get a message out to somebody. I knew that if I didn’t, I was going back to prison—and for nothing —because this was the way the police operated when they wanted to get rid of somebody; putting that person in jail was the easiest thing they could do. Finally, a big black patrolman coming in for his tour of duty passed by cell and recognized me.
“Hurricane?” He stopped suddenly and peered into the cell, looking at my bald head and beard. Not too many people had the nerve to wear such a style at that time. “Is that you in there, Carter? What the hell did you get busted for, man?” he asked, and for the first time since being locked up in that nasty cage, I dared let my hopes fly. I told him exactly what I had been busted for—for nothing—and I didn’t mince my words, either.
The other cops in the squad room quietly started to disappear, one by one, because when I got through rapping, that brother was smoking, cussing out everybody in sight and talking about their knock-kneed mammys, their flat-footed daddys, and their snuff-dipping daughters, too. Everyone now asserted his ignorance. No one had any idea what I was locked up for. In fact, now they even pretended not to know who I was, or who it was that locked me up.
But if that righteous brother hadn’t shown up on the scene when he did, those cops would probably have gone right back down to that meat-packing factory—if there ever was one—and really torn the door off the hinges, loading my Eldorado up with hamhocks, pigs’ feet, hog maws, and chitterlings, and then charged me with breaking into the place, while their families ate the T-bone steaks, prime ribs, and the other choice cuts of meat that they would have kept for themselves. As it was though, because of that brother, they had to let me go.
Not to be outdone by the Hackensack police, however, my home town of Paterson started right in on their own campaign to “get Carter.” Only their first attempt was made simpler one night when one of my sparring partners, whom I had thought to be my friend, asked me to drive him to a bar where he thought he could find his girlfriend. He went inside while I stayed out in the car. It was the first time that I had ever been near this particular place.
Five minutes passed, then ten, so I went inside to see what was holding him up. I found him hemmed into a corner by three white men crowding around him threateningly, and a black bartender climbing over the bar with a blackjack in his hand. I intervened and got him out of there before anything else could happen. But ten minutes later, Frank X. Graves, the mayor of Paterson, and ninety of his goon-squad policemen were out looking for me.
The cracker who owned the nigger ginmill had called the police and charged me with assault and battery to himself and one of his flunky Negroes—the bartender who had the billy club in his hand. But neither one had to be rushed to the hospital in dire straits, so that proved it couldn’t have been me put my hands on them. Because if I had, they would have been ruint! Forever!
But the thing that really stroked my anger was the stridency with which the black community of Paterson assumed its position: they resented me for statements which I had made in private but which had come out in the press about protecting those little children in Harlem. Or any children. Anywhere. And I just couldn’t grasp that type of logic. But I did understand black people’s phobia concerning the law. They didn’t resent me, actually; they were only disliking themselves. Desperate and afraid, they hated me because I was not afraid, and their fear had driven them to surrender.
Like Malcolm X, whom they hated for his tolerance and feared for his wisdom, my willingness to fight their battles to protect their own children only threw their shame right back into their faces. When they looked at themselves through the mirror of somebody else’s eyes, they just didn’t like what they saw. So instead of hating themselves for their own human frailties, they started hating me for my strength. And in their inability to fight back, they hated me all the more.
Meanwhile, the police escalated their guerrilla warfare.
The month of July that year was a very important month in the lives of every black person living in America. That was the month the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. For me it brought the signing for the championship fight, and the coming-to-life of my predictions concerning the political fate of my people. For the many black people who felt no pressing need to protect themselves from becoming mutilated under the Jim Crow-foot of their ungodly albino God, there would be death in abundance. Innocent blood would flow in the streets of nearly every major black community in the United States.
Almost from the moment President Johnson stepped in front of the television cameras and signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the disorders began. Policemen throughout the country began using lethal persuasion to contain the now supposedly emancipated niggers. Check it out! Look into your history books. See how many black men, women, and children died, and countless numbers of others lost all their worldly possessions—reducing their hard years of labor into nothing more than a fast-burning fire—just because they wouldn’t fight to protect themselves.
And civil rights? Bullshit!
That was just another straw on the camel’s back. Isn’t it strange that if a black man kills a white man, no matter what the circumstances, that ultimately, if he isn’t killed on the spot, he’s charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment or death? Meanwhile, the same white man could massacre ten black men, five women, and three little children, but he would only be charged with violating the dead nigger’s civil rights. A penalty which would net him only three years in prison, if anything. Where’s the equality of that? In the White House?
That place in Washington, D.C., ought to be revealed to all black and poor people as the little swamp that it is. Though geographically small, to my mind that White House controls the entire world and every living thing within it, bending everybody to suit its own capricious needs. Each hallowed hall, each green, pink, blue, or whatever color room, only survives at the inhuman expense of many tortured souls forced to live under its demagogic domain.
The black plague of death began just two weeks after President Johnson signed the Proclamation. In New York City—the very same place of the Harlem Fruit Riot in April. This time an off-duty police lieutenant killed a kid. To my mind, he shot the kid down for absolutely nothing. And that started five years of open hunting season on blacks. Nineteen people were shot that time, a hundred and sixteen injured.
During the second day of the rioting, after the funeral services for little Jimmy Powell (the fifteen-year-old who was killed by the cop), James Farmer, then national director of CORE, went to Harlem and checked out the destruction for himself—and was shocked. As he looked about, he saw only havoc, the results of an orgy of death and destruction. Later that day, at a news conference, he said:
“I saw a bloodbath. I saw with my own eyes violence, a bloody orgy of police ... a woman climbing into a taxi and indiscriminately shot in the groin ... police charging into a grocery store and indiscriminately swinging clubs ... police shooting into tenement windows and into the Theresa Hotel. I entered the hotel and saw bullet holes in the walls....
“I saw bloodshed as never before.... people threw bottles and bricks. I’m not saying they were not partly to blame. But it is the duty of the police to arrest, not indiscriminately shoot and beat.”
Other similarly barbaric shootings and killings were taking place up and down Lenox Avenue between 125th and 130th streets, as wave after wave of riot-gear-armed cops were rushed to the scene, accompanied by carloads of cartridges to replenish the fast-dwindling, supply at the riot site. Before daybreak on that bullet-ridden morning, after cruising the area in an unmarked car, Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy countered James Farmer’s charges with the asinine observation, “Some persons have used this unfortunate incident [the Powell shooting] as an excuse for looting and vicious, unprovoked attacks against police. In our estimation this is a crime problem and not a social problem.”
What has always escaped me is why couldn’t it have been a civil problem rather than a criminal one? After all, Civil Rights did start it! Commissioner Murphy had definitely missed his calling in life: he should have been a chemist instead of a cop, because this man was a genius at changing hard facts into soft shit. What he was really saying was that any civil rights movement that lacked the clear power and purpose to affect the controlling majority was nothing more than a deep bowel movement that should be confined to the bathroom and not be littering up the streets.
John Brown clearly had the right idea a hundred and fifteen years earlier after the Harper’s Ferry Raid. He declared to the court in his last written statement, given to one of the guards on the morning of his execution, December 2, 1859:
That this Court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that man should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them....
So I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.
This had been the astute ideology, I thought, that had influenced the black leaders of the sixties, and especially Martin Luther King. But after the riots, they began to change their views. The deep shock of that first flash of indiscriminate brutality hit them like a thunderbolt, and the quick succession of similar outbursts in Rochester, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, and Chicago likewise dealt them a savage blow where they lived.
Shortly after these major disturbances were fascistically quelled by the police, whose actions officially announced the beginning of their long hot summer’s hunting season, many of the more prominent black leaders came to see me in Las Vegas, where I was training for an October championship fight with Joey Giardello. They admitted that maybe I had been right all along—even though I didn’t know it myself—and now they wanted to know how I thought this sudden brush fire of violence could be extinguished—to give them a chance to validate the ballot, rather than the bullet. I couldn’t even begin to answer their questions. My life had been predicated more or less upon a Machiavellian concept: that once you harmed a man, you must either reconcile that person completely or destroy him utterly. I didn’t know a damn thing about politics.
But ignorance is no excuse. Our history has proved, down through the years of legalized slavery, that the real danger lies not in the possession of power, but in the abuse of it. On August 4, 1964, the mutilated bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—three young civil rights workers missing since June of that year—were unearthed by the F.B.I. from under a farm pond dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where they had been buried. The sheriff of Neshoba County, Lawrence Rainey, and his deputy, Cecil Price, were among nineteen of those indicted for violating the civil rights of the three murdered victims. Price and six others were convicted in October 1967 and sentenced to three years in prison. Rainey and seven others were acquitted. The Federal Government dropped the charges on the remaining eight.
So where was the justice? In a ballot, or a bullet?
It was December when I finally got the chance to fight Giardello for the middleweight title. The bout had been postponed in Vegas and moved to Philly, the champ’s home town—he wouldn’t fight me anywhere else. I lost a controversial fifteen-round decision.
By then I had acquired another manager, a new trainer, and a black personal advisor who functioned as a buffer between the police and myself, because I was catching pure hell from cops all over the country. Every state that I visited—for pleasure or for business—the local authorities would come and get me immediately upon reaching a town, take me down to headquarters, mug me, fingerprint me, and then make me carry an I.D. card attesting to the fact that I was a registered exconvict. Later even England got in on the deal. On one occasion they refused to let me into the country for three solid hours until I had received a special work permit from their Minister of Commerce.
It was my advisor’s job to be with me at all times and to eliminate this constant harassment as quickly as possible. Quite frankly, I was worried that the police would soon get tired of this game they were playing and find some reason to kill me anyhow. So company was my only protection. My advisor’s name was Elwood. Tuck. Patty Amato, the assistant warden of Hudson County Jail, was my manager. And Jimmy Wilde, a former trainer of five world champions, was my cornerman, the best I ever had.
The following year, 1965, really kept me busy. But it was necessary. It was my way of trying to avoid the inevitable, but it also caused me to criminally neglect the two most important people in my life—Mae Thelma and little Theodora. On the twelfth of February, I fought Luis Rodriguez in New York City; then it was Paris on the twenty-second, and London on the ninth of March. Only one time during this period did my wife ever interfere with anything that I was doing.
It happened a month after Malcolm X was assassinated. I had just returned home from a successful tour of Europe, the highlight of which had been my nine-round knockout of the British middleweight champ in London. The telephone rang early one morning. Mae Thelma answered it. It was from Dr. Martin Luther King. He wanted to know if I would consider coming down to Selma, Alabama, to march in his demonstration to dramatize the voting discrimination. I had made the March on Washington with him in 1963.
“Alabama!”. I exclaimed aloud, and saw the fright in my wife’s face. She emphatically shook her head from side to side, telling me, “No! Hell, no!” Her grandparents lived in the South, and she went to see them quite often, but would never let me go with her. She was scared that them honkies would get me down there and kill me because of my arrogant attitude toward tobacco-chewing crackers. But she really had no cause to worry, because I was thinking about the same damn thing myself.
“No, I can’t go down there,” I told the good Reverend. “That would be foolishness at the risk of suicide. Those people would kill me dead! I wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.” And it’s a good thing I didn’t go, too, because the march was brought to a swift and violent conclusion by Alabama dogs and law enforcement officers—which I would say are synonymous.
After I’d been home with my family for just a few days, I had to fly to Kansas City, and then back to London for a fight on April 20. Ten days later I returned to Paterson to fight Johnny Torres, knocked him out, and got locked up again right after the fight. But let me explain that to you.
I was, by nature, a devoted night owl whenever I wasn’t in training—would much rather sleep all day and stay up all night. (I’m still the same way now.) So early one morning I went to see a friend named Edgar “Slam” Shewmaker, who was a member of a small group of interior decorators just going into business—called the Hurricane Painters—of which I was the sponsor.
As I pulled up in front of his house that morning, I noticed a white guy standing back in the shadows against the building. His name was Thomas Cappucio—although I didn’t know it at the time—so I just dismissed him from my mind.
Upstairs, inside the house, there were five other people sitting around with Slam listening to tapes and talking. I must have been sitting down for less than two minutes when there was a loud knock on the front door.
“Who is it?” Slam called, getting up to answer it.
“The police!” came the barked reply as the door was flung open and a white patrolman walked in with the fellow who had been standing downstairs, Cappucio.
“Awright, give it up!” the cop started right in without saying another word. “Who’s got this man’s money? He claims that you guys cheated him at craps. So just give him back the bread that he’s lost, and everything’ll be cool,” the cop said, trying to talk hip.
I was sitting way back in a corner of the room, where the lights were dim, and was hoping that the man wouldn’t recognize me. I didn’t gamble, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. There had been no crap game in progress when I arrived, so I just sat back and listened to what was being said.
“Ain’t nobody beat that man out of his money,” Slam told the cop. “In fact, there hasn’t even been a game here tonight.” But the cop didn’t want to hear that. He was a nasty bastard.
“Don’t hand me that fuckin’ shit!” he spat. “Or why would this poor sucker flag us down outside and tell us that, if you fuckin’ people didn’t beat him out of his bread? So cough the man’s dough up! That’s all, so I can get the hell outta here! Or do you want me to lock all of your black asses up?”
“But we ain’t got his money,” Slam said. “The man’s just bullshitting you!”
“Awwww, fuck it!” the cop snorted, disgustedly. “I tried to give you fuckin’ jokers a break. But now I’m locking all of your dumb asses up!” And he started for the door.
Oooooh, shit! I said to myself. Let me get out of here. Getting locked up right then would have been all I needed to have my forthcoming May 20 bout with Dick Tiger in Madison Square Garden canceled out permanently. That was my only chance of getting another shot at the title. Whoever won that bout was guaranteed the championship fight a few months later. So, as the cop walked over to the door and called down for his buddy to send for the paddy wagon, I stood up to identify myself.
I didn’t know the cop, had never seen him before in my life, to my knowledge, and I was sure that the man who had gotten beat for the money would tell him that I wasn’t there when it had happened—if it had happened.
“Er—officer?” I addressed the man, in a carefully modulated tone of voice. I wanted to let him know, in case he did recognize me, that I wanted to be conciliatory. “I just got here a few minutes before you did,” I tried to explain. “So I would like to be able to leave now before the wagon gets here, if it’s all right with you, because this man will tell you that I had nothing to do with whatever happened here.”
“That’s right, officer,” the victim spoke right up without my asking him to. “He wasn’t here when—” But the cop had already recognized me.
“Shut up!” he ordered Cappucio, and then turned to me. “And you, Mister Bigshot, sit your fuckin’ ass down! I’m especially locking you up!”
I don’t know why I was surprised, but I was. I couldn’t help but grit my teeth and growl at this nasty bastard. The law! That pop-eyed sonofabitch. He stood there with his fist wrapped around his pistol, laughing mirthlessly—priming himself up for the kill, allowing his hatred of me to reach full flood. His face ran the gamut of expressions from ice-cold dispassion to boiling virulence. If there had been no one else there but me, he would have snaked his gun out and shot me down. In self-defense, he would have claimed! The nasty scum-sucking sonofabitch.
So I went to jail again, and the next day the local papers read, in tall print:
RUBIN “HURRICANE” CARTER’S IN AGAIN—FOR CRAP-SHOOTING, ABUSE
Middleweight boxer Rubin (Hurricane) Carter found himself in another brush with the law early Saturday morning. He faces two charges of disorderly conduct as well....
Carter and eight others, also charged with disorderly conduct, were found in what in what police described as a “disorderly house” at 5:15 a.m. Saturday....
Patrolmen Joseph Guidice and Joseph LaBark were responding to a noise complaint. At the apartment of ... Edgar L. Shewmaker, they found what appeared to be an illegal night club....
Carter was released in $100 bail. Four others were committed to the county jail in default of bail $100 each. Released on $50 bail were Gene Tierno, a technician, and Thomas Cappucio, a truck driver. The second charge against Carter was made by Patrolman Guidice for allegedly becoming abusive when arrested....
Magistrate Charles J. Alfano Saturday set May 4 for a hearing on the charge....
Carter faces court hearings on two assault charges. Last year he was charged by George Shaw, owner of the Kit Kat Club, with assaulting him during a fracas in the saloon....
Also on last July 2, Carter is alleged to have assaulted another man in a tavern fight. He’s been out on $5,000 bail on those charges.
The Paterson press, especially the Evening News, had consistently shown itself to be a racist arm of the law. The only time that a black resident of the community would get sufficient news coverage in Paterson was when the police had killed or arrested him, and then finally when they framed his ass and sent him away to prison for the rest of his life—with the help of the paper’s vicious lies.
But the real cleverness of the whole scheme came out later when Elwood Tuck was approached by some cop who offered to accept a bribe to have the charges withdrawn. We had to pay out five hundred dollars of my hard-earned money, which would be split between the two arresting officers.
Elwood had to accept the deal. The court hearing had been set for sixteen days before my scheduled bout with Dick Tiger, and I couldn’t fight in New York with these charges pending against me. If I happened to be convicted on any one of them, the boxing commissioner would snatch my license away immediately. That was a sure-pop! Risking twenty thousand dollars for the five hundred it would cost me to have the charges withdrawn just wasn’t worth it to my way of thinking. No way! Besides, I had no choice in the matter.
Thus, with the help of the bribe, I beat all of those trumped-up charges in court and was able to go on with my career. But Dick Tiger beat the shit out of me in the ring! Knocked me down three times for the worst whupping I ever had in my life, but in my heart it hurt me even more—because I felt that he couldn’t really beat me. The constant police and press harassment was slowly taking its toll on me. The cops were killing me without even pulling the triggers on their guns, destroying the one thing I loved to do best—fight—and therefore destroying me. Killing me softly. Just because I had happened to stumble upon their plan of black mass murder.
Not long after the Tiger fight I flew up to Akron, Ohio, and knocked out Fate Davis in the first round. Then I went out to California to fight Luis Rodriguez again, and got hung up in the Watts Riot. And that’s when I found out that the F.B.I. had been following me all the while.
As soon as I’d checked into a motel on Olympia Boulevard in L.A., I received a phone call from Chief William T. Parker of the Los Angeles Police, telling me that I’d better get my ass down to headquarters to register my exconvict title before he sent some of his boys over to get me.
“So you thought you were sneaking into town on me, huh, Carter?” Chief Parker asked smugly, when I finally got down to his office. He sounded very satisfied with himself. “But we knew you were coming, boy; the F.B.I. had you pegged every foot of the way,” he said. “You couldn’t have gotten into this city—no way!” He was actually gloating.
But he hadn’t fooled me at all. I had a feeling for this sort of thing. From the moment I stepped off the plane, walked through the air terminal, caught a cab, checked into the motel, and grabbed a quick bite to eat in the dining room, and even down at the police headquarters, I had noticed the same person tailing behind me, trying to look inconspicuous—which was a laugh in itself.
“No, I wasn’t trying to sneak into your town,” I told him quite candidly. “I just came a little earlier than expected, that’s all. But you should get somebody else to follow me around the next time.” I nodded toward the woman who was trying—and failing miserably—to hide in his office. “My, God!” I marveled, just to make him mad, “she’s got a beautiful ass on her, ain’t she?”
And Chief Parker burned.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only thing that burned in Los Angeles that week. Just as I had predicted to the Saturday Evening Post reporter eighteen months earlier—but what he didn’t print—every time that President Johnson signed some kind of legislation that would benefit the black masses, black people died in the streets. It was Harlem after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and now it was the Voting Rights Bill of ’65, signed only five days before the Watts Riot jumped off. Goddamn! It’s a good thing that black folks weren’t asking to get civil wrongs passed in Congress, or the cops would have massacred all of us like the United States Army did the Indians, I’m sure.
For the next five days in Watts, the rioting raged and destroyed forty million dollars’ worth of the community’s property; thirty-four people died, and there were 1032 reported injuries.4 The entire black community was destroyed. There were fifteen thousand National Guardsmen and a thousand policemen occupying the neighborhood, killing off black folks in a turkey-shoot, and they still didn’t dig it. Goddamn! Black people just refused to defend themselves, unless it was against another black.
After that, I needed a rest, so I went to Africa. South Africa, no less. The black people got together and invited me. And there I found the most beautiful brothers and sisters I have ever known—oppressed, but together! In a little Bantu village right outside of Johannesburg, after my fight with their welterweight and middleweight champ, Joe “Ax-killer” Ngidi, who I knocked out in the second round, I was named a Chief of the Zulu Tribe. “Nigi” they christened me—the man with the beautiful beard.
The first part of 1966 started off for me at the same furious pace as the previous year had: on January 8 I was in Chicago to fight Skeeter McClure; then Johnny Morris in Pittsburgh on the eighteenth, and Stan Harrington on the twenty-fifth in Honolulu. In February I went back to South Africa to fight Ernie Burford. Then, back home, I fought a return bout with Skeeter McClure in March. By then I was sick of airplanes and traveling, tired of living out of suitcases, and stone cold weary to the bone of readjusting to the different time zones around the world. I wanted to spend more time at home with my family before I started collecting social security, so I decided to take a much needed vacation.
I was still lazying around on the night of June 16, 1966, just sitting at home watching James Brown on TV with my wife and daughter, when I got a phone call from my new personal advisor, Nathan Sermond. (Elwood Tuck and I had had a slight falling-out over the police pressure and the fact that we stayed away from home so much.) He had received an offer for me to fight Rocky Rivero in South America and Sermond wanted me to meet him at his Club La Petite to discuss money matters. I had been out of action long enough to be jubilant at just the thought of a canvas beneath my feet. So I called my chief sparring partner, Wild Bill Hardney, and told him to get his shaggy butt ready for camp. He told me that he was coming into Paterson that night anyway, so we agreed to meet at the Nite Spot, one of the few places I frequented whenever I was in town—mostly because Elwood Tuck was the manager there.
I didn’t get out of the house until late that night, and before I turned into downtown Bridge Street near midnight, I had.picked up a passenger, John “Bucks” Royster, the friendly neighborhood alcoholic—though damn good people. When I slowed down to make the left-hand turn to the Club La Petite, somebody else called to me and I pulled over to the curb and waited. A minute later, a young fellow named John Artis sprinted up to the car.
John was a tall and rangy light-skinned boy whom, I had met twice since I’d been home. He was a whiz at most sports, but had turned down several athletic scholarships to college, deciding instead to enlist in the Army. He leaned in the window past Bucks. They didn’t know each other. John was too young (only twenty).
“You going up to the Nite Spot, Hurricane?” he asked me. “And if so, would you drop me off?”
“Okay,” I told him. “But I have some business to take care of down here first. But if you want to wait, I’ll take you up there when I go.”
So John climbed in.
Nathan Sermond was all business at the Club La Petite. He was quiet, smooth, and self-controlled—there was no play in him. He came right to the point and told me that the promoter in South America was willing to pay for only two air fares, which meant that I would have to travel without a sparring partner, and I didn’t like that at all. Too many times in the past I had been made to fight with that same disadvantage, and I knew the severe handicap it placed on a fighter. I simply couldn’t get any boxing if I didn’t bring my own. Other managers wouldn’t let their fighters spar with me—even though I used special twenty-four-ounce gloves—and this promoter wanted me to arrive in Buenos Aires a month before the fight for publicity’s sake.
I was rusty already from laying off for so long, and without any boxing—other than what I would be getting up in camp—I would have to go into the ring stale, and I wasn’t going for that. That’s how people get hurt. So I told Nate to call the promoter back and get him to guarantee me some sparring in South America, or I wasn’t going to accept the fight. Nate promised to call and told me to drop back by the club later on that night to find out what was happening. Then I drove John Artis up to the Nite Spot, dropped him off, and Bucks and I went to another club called Richie’s Hideaway. That was where the best band in town was playing that night.
It wasn‘t’til around 2:00 a.m. that we wound up back at the Nite Spot to meet up with Wild Bill Hardney, who was already there. He had brought two other people with him. Big John and Norris were their names. While I was standing there talking to them, a woman that I knew named Cathy McGuire came over with her mother and asked if I would drive them home. Both mother and daughter, Mrs. Mapes and Mrs. McGuire, lived in the same building. It was only a few blocks away, but it was on a long dark street without many lights—Governor Street—and violent death was not taken very seriously in that area by the Paterson police. This was only June, and already there were eleven unsolved murders on the books.
At about 2:15 I drove the two women home, gladly, though I was beginning to feel like the ever-ready neighborhood taxicab company. But a long time before, I had decided that no matter how high I flew in my career, or to what heights I scaled, I would never get too big to remember my people—or forget that I was still one of them. Too many times in the past, and even right then with some of my friends, I had seen black men and women make their mark in theaters and nightclubs, and then sit back on their rusty-dusty little pedestals, squinting down their long noses at the ghetto folks who were no longer their cup of tea. I promised myself that I would never let that happen to me. Besides, it was only a five-minute ride to Cathy McGuire’s, and ten minutes later I was back inside the Nite Spot.
But that’s when my money got funny. With my pocketbook lying on “E,” I asked Wild Bill to come home with me while I picked up some more bread: It wasn’t that I thought my wife would actually try to stop me from going back out, but knowing that woman, she might have just worked it. So I figured it would be best to bring along some support. Mae Thelma knew Wild Bill, and liked him, which was why I asked him to come with me But Wild Bill was wrapped up with his girlfriend, so he told me that he’d wait there for me to return.
On the way out of the club to my car, I saw John Artis again. He was standing by the door with Bucks, and I invited them along for the ride. What the hell, I thought. If my wife tried to put the slammers on me for the night, I could always tell her that I had to take them home.
They both agreed to come, and John wanted to drive. Since this wasn’t my Eldorado but my expense car—a 1966 white Dodge—I tossed him the keys, gave him the directions, and settled down in the back seat. I lived about three miles away. The shit started four blocks from my home, when a police car rolled up alongside of us and motioned us over to the side. When we had pulled over, a uniformed officer approached John and asked for his license and registration. John gave the cop his license but didn’t know where I kept the registration.
“It’s on the steering post, John,” I spoke up from the rear. The cop flashed his light in my face and I saw that it was Sergeant Theodore Capter. This area was his regular patrol.
“How you doing, Hurricane?” Sergeant Capter asked: He had always been a friendly type, and I had never had any trouble with him.
“I’m okay,” I replied. “But what’s wrong? Why did you stop us?” There was another cop out there looking at the license plates. This car had New York tags on it.
“Oh, nothing really,” Capter said, offhandedly. “We’re just looking for a white car with two Negroes in it.” He handed John back his license. “But you’re okay,” he said: “Take care of yourself.” Then he walked away.
But little did I know what was really jumping off. While I had been in the Nite Spot talking to Wild Bill about making this trip home, the shooting at the Lafayette Bar and Grill that I mentioned at the beginning of this book had occurred, and an alarm was out for two Negroes in a white car. Sergeant Capter and his sidekick, Officer DeChellis, armed with this description, had spotted a white car with out-of-state plates speeding toward the highway and New York. They picked up the chase, but lost the car miles away on the highway. Then, while coming back into the city, up over a hill of the dividing line, they looked down and saw my white Dodge crossing the main drag at a normal rate of speed and flagged us down. This was at 2:40 a.m., by the cop’s report, and being familiar with the constant harassment tactics employed by the Paterson Police Department in stopping my car whenever they had nothing else better to do, I just forgot about it.
I encountered no problems at home and arrived back at the Nite Spot just as Wild Bill and his friends were leaving to go back to Newark. It was late now, and the bars were closing. Too late even to go back to see Nate at the Club La Petite. So I figured I might as well call it a night myself, and drove Bucks home. Then, as we were waiting at a stoplight for the signals to change, on the way to John Artis’s house, which was only a couple of blocks away from Bucks’s house, Sergeant Capter rolled up behind us again. All he saw this time were two Negroes in a white car. It was obvious that he didn’t know it was us again until after he had climbed out of his patrol car.
“Awwww, shit! Hurricane,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t realize it was—” But before he could say anything else, patrol cars had come from everywhere but out of the sky. I never saw so many shotguns and pistols in my life. For a long moment I just stared at Sergeant Capter. I was disgusted. I didn’t think he would do this to me. Although he did seem to be embarrassed about it, all it would have taken was for him to admit that he had made a mistake, that he had stopped us earlier with three people in the car, and miles away from where we were then. But, for some reason, he didn’t. Instead, he told us to fall in behind his car, and to follow it, while the other cop cars fell in behind us.
There isn’t much in the world that can scare me, but if you can imagine five police cars loaded down with shotgun-bearing cops leaning out their windows with their guns pointed in my direction, leading two Negroes off into the night to God knows where (and we dared not balk), then you can understand that this was one of those times in my life that justifiably made me scared.
We sped down the street at eighty or ninety miles an hour, past the Nite Spot to twelve blocks beyond, where we screeched to a halt in front of the Lafayette Bar and Grill. The crowd of white people in the street split out of the way of our cars like raindrops hitting on a rooftop. Some flew to the side of the squad cars, some to the front; others gathered around my Dodge.
This situation stunk! I could smell it. The people moved too quickly and wore very tense expressions. They whispered altogether too loudly, cussed too profusely, and appeared in my mind’s eye to be all on the verge of nervous hysteria. There were tears everywhere. Few people seemed to be actually aware of what they were doing.
Holding my breath, I looked around at the shotguns pointed at me and the angry faces pressing around my car. Suddenly I knew exactly how a black man in the South must feel when a white mob is about to lynch him and the law is going to turn its head. I sat there very quietly, trying to look noncommittal. I wanted to create no opportunity for anyone to interpret any of my expressions as aggressive or hateful. My self-preservation instinct did not allow for any foolishness.
What happened immediately after that, I’ve already written about at the beginning of this book—the confusion in the street, the trip to the hospital, the direct confrontation with a wounded man laying on a table, and the bull-faced cop almost begging him to identify us. But still, the one-eyed man just shook his head. No, we were not the people. There was disappointment in the cops’ eyes when they took us down to headquarters—where they should have brought us in the first place. Taking us instead to the scene of the crime had been—or could have been—a very costly, if not to say illegal, maneuver on the part of the overzealous police.
Back in the familiar little Detective Bureau interrogation room, everything seemed the same as it had when I’d been brought there at the age of nine for stealing clothes. It was still sparsely furnished, with the same battered table and one chair. The ceiling was still cracked and dirty, the walls still bore the pockmarks of the busted heads that had been slammed against it over the years. And just as had happened years before, I was not permitted to contact a lawyer at any time during my stay.
Sitting in that room alone for I don’t know how long, I began to worry about John Artis. The only reason he was in jail was because the police wanted me, and they didn’t care who they swept up in their quest to get me. So I felt sorry for him. I didn’t know if he could protect himself, or if he had ever been involved with the cops before. (I found out later he hadn’t.) But I knew how they operated. So there was no telling what that boy might be going through. These guys had a big bag of tricks. I didn’t know if they were whupping on him right now, trying to get him to sign a confession to something he didn’t know a damn thing about, or what was happening to him. Shit! He was still considered a minor, wasn’t twenty-one years old yet, and it had been done plenty of times before. The New Jersey prison system was full of people who could very easily attest to that fact.
But for the most part, after a Captain Gourly had brought me into his office and let me listen in on the telephone calls that he was getting from his nigger stool pigeons out on the street (it shocked me to hear so many voices that I recognized), the cops left me alone again. They did, that is, after they had paraded me in front of all the witnesses brought down there from the Lafayette Bar and Grill to make their statements about the crime. Not one of them could finger either Artis or myself.
It was close to 11:00 a.m. before I saw anyone else that day. The door opened and in walked a lieutenant. His face wore an expression at once stupid and cunning. An old-timer, he was pudgy, going to fat. He had a batch of yellow legal pads in his fist.
“I’m Lieutenant DeSimone, Rubin. You know me,” he said. “I’m from the Prosecutor’s Office.” He wanted to know how I could account for my whereabouts the previous night. “You can answer these questions or not,” he said. “That’s strictly up to you. But I’m going to record whatever you say, and it might be used against you in court, if it ever comes to that. But there’s a dark cloud hanging over your head, and I think that it would be wise for you to try to clear it up.”
Vincent DeSimone was his full name, a hard man. As far as I was concerned, he knew no half-rights or half-wrongs where black people were involved, for the deepest groove worn into that granite brain of his was saved for his own self-righteousness. Oh, yeahhhh, I knew him all right! I remembered him from waaaay back.
I sat there and told him everything that he wanted to know (not out of any rising fear of him, but because I had done nothing to make me fear), from the time I had eaten supper at home to the moment I left after the James Brown special had gone off the idiot-box. Then my meeting up first with John “Bucks” Royster and later John Artis. And talking to Nate Sermond about the fight in South America; then driving the two women home. I told him about the cops stopping me four blocks away from my home, first, and then finally when they locked me up.
All during the time I was talking to him, DeSimone was steadily writing, filling page after page of his legal pad, recording every little word that I said. Nothing was given in question and answer form, but he would interrupt me whenever he wanted certain definite times of places I’d been during the night, and how long it took to get from one place to another. The interview must have taken up a full hour and a half.
“Okay, Rubin,” he said finally, and stood up to gather in all of the loose papers. “That’s good enough for the time being. But there is one thing more that I must ask of you,” he said. “Would you be willing to submit to a lie detector test?”
“A paraffin test, too,” I told him without hesitation. “But not if any of these cops down here are going to give it to me. You get somebody else who knows what he’s doing, and you won’t have any problem with me. I’ll take it, because I ain’t got nothing to hide.” DeSimone raised his eyebrows.
“Oh, I wouldn’t think of letting these clowns down here give it to you,” he said, as if it was out of the question. “What I had in mind to do was to send down to the State Trooper’s Barracks for an expert, and let him give it to you. Would that be all right with you?”
I told him that it would.
At three o’clock that afternoon the state trooper arrived—a Sergeant McGuire, who didn’t pull any punches when we were in a room by ourselves and he was setting up his little machine. I could see the burning indignation in his face after he was briefed about the crime by Captain Gourly, the head man in charge of the investigation.
“Carter?” McGuire said in a tight voice, “let me tell you something before you sit down and take this test. If you have anything to hide that you don’t want me to know, then don’t take it, because this machine is going to tell me about it. And if I find anything indicating that you had anything to do with the killing of all those people, I’m going to try to put your ass underneath the electric chair!”
“Why don’t you quit running off at the mouth, and just give me the goddamn thing!” I told him. “You ain’t scaring me with all that funny shit.” I was bone-weary from sitting in that hard chair all night and day, and I didn’t feel like hearing any more of this gung-ho shit.
The test covered the better part of two hours, I would say, and when it was over I was again locked up in my little room until the good sergeant could sit down and study the results at his leisure. He said he had to gauge the graphs against some kind of technical slide rule. But he still hadn’t said a damn thing to me. I was anxious to find out what the machine had to say, not him, but it didn’t take as long as I had expected. The door suddenly flew open, and the room filled with cops—black and white, this time. Ooooh, shit! I thought. Here they come.
“Carter?” It was McGuire talking. “Come over here, I want to show you something,” he said, laying out several charts on the battered table. The other cops crowded around us.
“See this long line running straight through there?” the sergeant asked, talking to everybody in the room as much as he was to me. “It measures your respiratory reaction to questions given.” He was pointing to what looked to me like a whole bunch of scribbling. I still didn’t understand a damn thing about it.
“Well,” he said, “that indicates your answer to my question, ‘Have you ever been inside of the Lafayette Bar and Grill?’ Your answer was, ‘No.’ The line on the chart continued on uninterrupted, so that was the truth. All the answers for the questions on the lines are the same,” Sergeant McGuire announced to Captain Gourly standing at his side. “So you can turn him loose, Captain,” he said. “And Artis, too. Both of them are clean. They had nothing to do with the crime.”5
Seventeen hours after being locked up, John Artis and I were released. They returned the keys to my car, which was in the police garage downstairs. They had driven it there from the scene of the crime. Somebody had torn it up while searching it. All the paneling in the doors was ripped out. The dashboard, the seats were torn up. The radio was hanging loose. Goddamn! If I wasn’t so glad to be out of there, I would have gone back upstairs, and they would really have had a reason to lock me up then. Because I’d have whupped on somebody’s nasty ass! Goddamn his treacherous soul.
The next day the Paterson Evening News read:
POLICE DRAW BLANK IN DOUBLE MURDER
BOXER QUERIED, FREED
The intensive investigation of two cold-blooded murders at the Lafayette Grill at 2:30 A.M. yesterday apparently was at a dead end last night as more than 130 law enforcement officers were assigned to the bizarre killings.
The murders reportedly were committed suddenly and without warning. Two gunmen barged into the Lafayette Grill and fired at those at the bar. They killed the bartender and a patron and seriously wounded two other customers.
... An object of great speculation yesterday, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the flamboyant middleweight boxer, left police headquarters at 6 P.M. last night after being questioned throughout the day.
However, Vincent E. Hull, Assistant County Proescutor, emphasized that the 29-year-old fighter ... was never a suspect, nor at any time charged with the shooting....
Hull refused to answer any questions as to why the men were at the police station. He said there were no suspects, but that many people in the neighborhood were questioned as witnesses.
... Despite an intensive search for weapons, none was uncovered yesterday in the vicinity of the tavern. Police were looking for a shotgun and a revolver in the sewers on 18th Street and Lafayette and along the Susquehanna Railroad tracks near Graham Avenue and Lafayette Street.
... Many persons in the neighborhood told newsmen they heard gunshots. One woman said she saw two well-dressed Negro men leave the tavern....
Another man said he was en route to buy a pack of cigarettes in the tavern when he heard the shots. As he approached the door, he was confronted by two men. He turned and ran west on Lafayette Street, chased by the men. Evading them by ducking into a sideyard, he said, he returned to the tavern to call police.
It is important to remember that last statement.
Meanwhile, I was “an object of great speculation.” From the very first moment that the newspapers splashed the story and my picture across the country that Rubin “Hurricane” Carter—the cop-hating, cracker-hating, nigger-hating prize fighter, who hated everybody, including himself—had been somehow linked to the shooting of four white persons, the amateur criminologists and sociologists of the world started fitting the pegs of haphazard insight into the open holes of speculation. There were but a few good fits, in their immodest estimation: racism gone amuck; robbery; or that Carter was a “hit” man for the Mafia! Nobody ever thought to place the square block into the square hole that Carter didn’t have a damn thing to do with it! No! No! That would have been too easy. Too much like doing things right!
The public couldn’t see the forest for all the trees. They were simply too blinded by these periodical flashes to understand the Hurricane’s constant fight against a society that didn’t necessarily benefit poor people. They were brainwashed into thinking that he was just a crazy punch-drunk nigger. The cops didn’t want the public to listen to me, didn’t want the people to become aware of the genocide that was heading their way in the name of the law. Because—shit!—if the poor, black masses could be educated against the acceptance of violent death, that would mean self-protection—destroying their enemy. But destroying the poor people’s enemy would mean destroying the government—the cops! And they couldn’t go for that.
So the Hurricane had to go.
Unlike the time two years earlier in Hackensack when my car had broken down on the highway and those police officers were about to send me to prison for breaking into a meat-packing factory that I’d never seen, this time I had nobody to help me frustrate the elaborate plans that were slowly being hand-woven for me. This crime had been a godsend to the cops. And the circumstances surrounding it were like heaven. With just a little touch-touch of imagination, they were able to kill two birds with one stone: rid the books of the city’s most heinous crime, and send that troublesome nigger to the electric chair, too! A reward of $12,500 for information leading to the killers’ arrest was offered immediately.
I flew to Argentina and fought Rocky Rivero on the sixth of August, and when I got back, I signed for the championship fight with Dick Tiger. On October 14, 1966, four months after the crime had been committed, John Artis and I were arrested and charged with triple murder.