Short speeches linger a long time in some memories, and Judge Larner’s final speech will remain with me forever. He banged his gavel on the desk for order, then turned to me with the cold dignity of a Caesar.
“Rubin Carter,” he announced with lordly grandeur, “although you still contend that you are not guilty of the crimes charged in the indictment against you, you were afforded a full and fair trial before a jury which was carefully selected by counsel in a long and tedious process. That jury found you guilty and the Court is duty bound to impose sentence on the basis of that finding by the jury, and not on the basis of your continued contention of non-guilt.
“I might say from my analysis of the evidence and the witnesses that I have no hesitation in stating that the jury’s verdict was fully warranted by the proofs submitted during the trial. The killings for which you were indicted and tried can only be described as the result of a cold-blooded massacre of innocent victims who were wholly unknown to you. There is not a single factor in these killings which can serve as mitigation of the heinousness of the offense. In fact, there is totally absent any understandable reason for motive which can be said to have compelled you for the moment to commit this horrible crime....
“There is no point in my going into it in detail. I am sure you are fully aware of your prior criminal record.... In addition, I am sure you are also aware of your antisocial behavior in the past years. Of course, as your counsel has said, not in recent years, but in past years....
“The evidence here reflects a clear-cut intent to kill every person in the tavern at the time. Under the law as I see it, where you have separate victims of a killing with an incident applicable to each individual victim, the killing of each presents a separate murder.
“It is therefore the Court’s sentence as to the first count involving the murder of James Oliver that you be imprisoned in the New Jersey State’s Prison for the remainder of your natural life....
“As to the second count involving the murder of Fred Nauyaks, it is the sentence of this Court that you be imprisoned in the New Jersey State’s Prison for the remainder of your natural life, and this sentence shall be consecutive to the sentence on the first count.
“As to the third count involving the murder of Hazel Tanis, it is the sentence of this Court that you be imprisoned in the New Jersey State’s Prison for the remainder of your natural life, and this sentence shall be concurrent with the sentence imposed on the second count.”
John’s clear record got him three concurrent life sentences, and the fraud was completed, adjudicated, and closed. Judge Larner was transferred back to Essex County and shifted into civil law.
Back at Trenton State Prison that afternoon, I found it to be the same old obsolete hole of depravity and death that it was when I’d left it five years before. The little racist guards that I’d left behind were all big-shot guards now, working in the upper echelons of the administration. They controlled the jail with an iron fist of brutality, a minimum of compassion, and a maximum of security. The deliberate execution of each inmate’s personality seemed to be their favorite pastime. First they wiped out his mind, his name, and his manhood, and then they drew him into their subtle web of institutionalization. Everything about the place seemed geared to break the man and praise the homosexual, to kill the spirit and save the punk.
A generation of young kids now made up the prisori’s population. All the old-timers were gone, free, dead, or shipped out to the farms, while this new breed of whatchamacallits staggered around the jailhouse with nothing on their minds but finger-popping, watching TV, shooting dope, and sucking dicks. They cradled huge radios in their arms like they were babies, and told the “man” on each other for spite and favor. There were no clear lines of demarcation anymore between the men and the homosexuals in the joint, or between the stool pigeons and the jailhouse punks; Trenton State Prison now was just one great big happy family of fools.
My self-respect would not allow me to stoop to this prison’s ungodly level of nonexistence. I realized deep down in my gutworks that the twisted-tongued police who had sent me back here, the two convicts who testified against me, and even the prison authorities themselves expected—and hoped—I would go on a rampage and kill somebody in the jail, or be killed myself. I refused to let this happen, although just thinking about the treachery involved almost wiped my mind right out. Triple life? Goddamn! It was as if the cops were telling me, “Yeah, nigger, we fucked you! Now whatcha gonna do about it?”
For the entire month of July I stayed locked away in my cell in deep meditation, going into myself with silence, gathering up all three of my souls—Rubin, Hurricane, and Carter—and wondering what we should do. But as usual, we couldn’t seem to come to terms—although we all agreed, for the moment, to continue on with our fight to be free. Rubin, being the quick learner of the three, decided to study the law and get us back into court that way, if he could, while the Hurricane just said “Fuck it!” and was ready to demolish everything in the prison; but Carter, usually the most quiet and reserved of all, thought he ought to write a book and bring our case before the public. Because one thing was accepted by us all, and that was we would definitely not submit to this prison’s nastiness. We would study the law and write this book, and if that didn’t work, then let the Hurricane take over and do what must be done.
From that day to this, I have kept myself removed from the institution and its people. I have studied the law, beginning under the wizardly guidance of Bobby “Irish” Cullen, a little Irishman who was serving ninety-nine years at Trenton for armed robbery. (He ended up serving only seven of those years, due to his knowledge of the law, and he’s home at this time.)
Little Irish was one of the most fascinating people I have ever had the pleasure to meet, and the most jolly, by far. Each day at Trenton State, we met in the library and researched the dusty law books from cover to cover, backwards and forwards, reading, deciphering thousands of Supreme Court opinions to look for that legal loophole. We found many, but always reached the same conclusion: that I’d been given a royal judicial fucking—first class! —and was still getting fucked!
We had to do all the research for my case from memory, because my lawyer wouldn’t even answer my letters, much less send me a copy of the trial transcripts. I found many clear instances of legal impropriety and reversible errors, such as the illegal search and seizure of my car; the Miranda issue; the judge overstepping his bounds; the cops’ sloppy investigation. And then there was my contention that the police had offered those two convicts a deal to elicit their perjured testimony on the witness stand.
And then there was Ray Brown. On the surface of it, he did indeed fulfill his legal obligations to me. That is, whenever an eloquent argument was called for, or when his type of courtroom strategy managed to pry the truth from the sealed lips of the prosecution witnesses. But that’s not what I’m talking about at all. I have no quarrels with his oral presentations, because I was as intoxicated by his elegant language as was everyone else in the courtroom—with the exception of the jury, of course.
But John Artis and I should never have been brought to trial in Passaic County. The local press certainly saw to that. Their highly publicized accounts of a racially motivated triple murder of white citizens by two Negroes made it impossible for us to receive a fair trial in. Paterson, and Brown should have asked for an immediate change of venue. At least, I’m convinced of that.
Then there was this Martinez business: When Hector came to testify for the defense to refute Arthur Dexter Bradley’s vicious lies, Judge Lamer wouldn’t permit his testimony because, as he said, Raymond Brown simply had not laid the proper foundation for it when Bradley was up on the witness stand. So that left Bradley’s testimony standing virtually unimpeached.
And last, but perhaps grossest of all, was when my lawyer had not properly instructed my two alibi witnesses what to do in the event that the cops tried to intimidate them: Mrs. Mapes, and her daughter, Cathy McGuire, had been verbally abused, frightened, and confused by Lieutenant DeSimone some four or five months before my trial, and Brown knew it. I feel certain all of that could have been prevented. But it wasn’t, so the prosecutor was able to create a shred of doubt in the minds of the jury as to when it really was that I drove the two women home—Friday morning of the seventeenth, or Saturday morning of the eighteenth—a shred of doubt where none should have existed.
But I couldn’t find any way to bring out all the underlying pressures in my case in the law library. I did find out through my research, however, that the question of my innocence or guilt was no longer of any real significance in a court of law, and that was the hardest thing for me to accept. The only issues that I could deal with concretely were those pertaining to whether nor not I had received a fair trial, free from constitutional error or racial prejudice, or whether the conviction was obtained through underhanded methods. That was the big question: did the state know of the witnesses’ perjured testimony, and induce it, and had they knowingly suppressed exculpatory evidence?
Yeah! Hell, yeah! I knew it was so. But how could I prove it?
During the two and a half years before my appeal was heard by the New Jersey State Supreme Court, which time I spent conscientiously studying the law, I noted the changes taking place on the outside: the Newark riots of 1967 that had killed 26 people; the Detroit uprising that gobbled up 43 lives; the people in the streets who believed that all brothers were valiant and all sisters fair, and were hollering, “Black is beautiful,” and “Right on, brother!” The walls of this medieval prison were high, but not high enough to keep out the sounds of violence and racism. The cries of unity and of getting it together fairly thundered in over the walls. Huh! That’s funny, I thought to myself one day; that’s what I had been trying to tell the people all along.
Via the newspapers and various other media, I learned of some other starting events taking place in my absence. I learned that Alfred Bello—that pillar of society, the state’s star witness, who had denied that his mangled testimony was prefabricated to keep his nasty ass out of jail or for personal gain—had appeared before the Paterson City Council to lay claim to the $12,500 reward—except that by this time it had been reduced to only $10,500. (I wonder what happened to the other $2,000?) He even brought some lawyer along, threatening the city fathers with a lawsuit if they didn’t come up with the bounty bread. But the city told him he would have to wait until my final appeal was decided before he could get paid for his lies.
At about the same time, Arthur Dexter Bradley, our other paragon of virtue, was being sentenced in Union County for armed robbery. The Passaic County prosecutor appeared in his behalf, however, asking the court for leniency in recognition for his aid in getting me convicted for triple murder, and explaining further that sending him to prison would be putting his life in danger. The judge didn’t agree. He felt that Bradley was a criminal of the worst sort and said that if ever a man belonged in prison, Bradley surely did. The judge sentenced him to from three to five years to be served at Trenton State Prison; and, in all honesty, the Hurricane’s lips started drooling in joyful anticipation. The prison authorities refused to accept him, however, and so he was shipped off to Bordentown instead.
All of these things I brought to the attention of the State Supreme Court in the form of writs, briefs, and coram nobises, offering up the above allegations as new evidence. Any one of them, I felt, should have been adequate grounds to order me a new trial free from perjured testimony, but on July 15, 1969, an opinion written by Chief Justice Joseph Weintraub stated in part:
At about 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1966, two men entered the Lafayette Bar and Grill in the City of Paterson. One man held a .32-caliber revolver, the other a 12-gauge shotgun. Their motive was obscure, no doubt because events moved so rapidly. We gather from the testimony of the sole surviving victim that the bartender saw the armed men as they entered and threw a bottle at them, precipitating the shooting before a word was said. The bartender was killed instantly, as was also one of the patrons. Another patron, Mrs. Tanis, who suffered multiple wounds, died four weeks later. The lone survivor, also a patron, was shot in the head. His ability to tell what happened was obviously impaired; he could contribute little more than that the armed men were Negroes. The State failed in its effort to prove a dying.declaration by Mrs. Tanis. We know only that she and also the surviving patron were unable to identijy either defendant, but the testimony does not suggest that either patron was able to say affirmatively that the defendants were not theoffenders [my italics].
Both Carter and Artis testified. They produced a number of witnesses in an effort to place themselves at a bar at the time of the murders. It, however, was virtually impossible. to establish an alibi, for at all times defendants were concededly within minutes of the murder scene and the moment of the killings could not be established precisely. It is fair to say that the case had to turn upon the State’s proof and the defendants’ denial of guilt, unaided by the testimony which sought to establish an incompatible presence elsewhere....
The judgements are therefore amrmed.
I could have cried.
The State of New Jersey was pulling its old set of double standards on me again, and the Chief Justice had put the cap on it. He claimed that Marins, the sole survivor, was coherent enough to be believable when he said that it was two Negroes who walked into the tavern and was hit with a bottle. But as soon as the lone survivor described the killers as someone different than John Artis and myself, the man’s testimony suddenly became “obviously impaired.”
Not once did Weintraub even mention anything concerning Bello and Bradley’s credibility as key witnesses on the stand, except for when he said later on in his deceitful opinion, “The sight of money was too much for Bello who, explaining he was a thief, admitted he scooped some bills from the register.” With that one insipid statement Chief Justice Weintraub legally sanctioned not only a lie but the easiest robbery in the State of New Jersey as well. The two “bounty hunters” had only to testimony-capture any two Negroes in the state to go for the $10,500 reward. But Weintraub didn’t say a goddamn thing about that!
For all the shit that a black man goes through in his life, perhaps the most significant thing he learns is that his life is capricious at best. He’s always subjected to someone else’s whim. Anybody who claims that a man is the master of his own fate should jump ass-first off the tallest building, and then try to master getting his black ass back up on that bad motherfucker. It was this way for me with the courts and with this prison, both of which were designed to defeat the human spirit. The judges, lawyers, and educators of the world all spoke reverently of honor, justice, and truth, but these were merely glib words spewed out of plastic pigs, and the people didn’t really believe that shit themselves.
But I knew what the truth was—it was death! Because I would rather be dead than alive in this prison. Now that’s the truth.
The Saturday following the denial of my appeal, my wife and daughter came down to visit me at the prison. As I looked through the thick bulletproof, bubble-stained glass at the two people I loved the most in the world, I knew right then that my string of patience had played out. I couldn’t take this anymore. The news of my denial had been blasting over the radio for a solid week, and the emotions that swam in their eyes were overpowering, to say the least. Too goddamn much for me to take: love, pity, loss, anguish, pain, heartache. I wanted to break down and cry. Mae Thelma was still young and beautiful, only two years my junior, and the world should have been her oyster. She ought not to have had to go husbandless because her man was locked up in jail on a trumped-up charge. Just by being alive, I was limiting her life.
For a brief moment I sat there seriously contemplating suicide. Then I thought of Mr. Summers, the old man who had gotten tired twelve years earlier and not only thought about it but went ahead and committed suicide in this hellhole because of this same deadly feeling of hopelessness. Just remembering the sight of his grotesque face as the crew of apathic guards carried what remained of him from the tier made me shiver where I sat. My God! No way. I wouldn’t let that happen to me. Still, I couldn’t stomach the thought of my wife and daughter traveling 140 miles once a month,. year in and year out, just to watch me turn into a useless old man, withering away on a rotten vine that promised me no life, until finally I would just up and die dead of loneliness in this scum-infested puspit, either.
I thought of hurling curses at Mae Thelma and screaming at Theodora, of shouting harsh invectives at them to drive them away from me in hatred. Then they could have just walked out of my life and been glad to have seen the last of me. I really cried then—because I was much too weak to do it. My heart wept for them, for everything they meant to me, for loving the grouchy old Rube and sticking in my corner when everybody else had already packed in their tents and bailed. out on me. But mostly I cried because I had reduced their state of living into a financial mess by trying to defend myself against the treachery that had put me in jail. Now I had become an anchor around their beautiful necks, choking them, trying to pull them down even further. No, motherfuckers, no! I wasn’t going for that.
The state gave me the name of murderer, I thought then, so now I’m going to play the game of one. I decided that as soon as my family left this prison, and I left this visiting hall, I had me some fools who needed killing bad. There were too many gutless wonders working in that prison just standing in the way and stifling everything progressive like meaningful change. So, I thought, I’m just going to take some of these greasy motherfuckers with me. With that settled in my mind, I immediately felt better, and the Hurricane inside me started dancing around in his corner, putting on his ugly face and getting ready to sho ’nuff smoke.
Well, Mae Thelma, Theodora, and I sat there crying all through the visit. Loving one another something fierce. But we were hurting. The more they cried, I cried, and the more I cried, they cried. I cried because I wasn’t going see them anymore. I had made my decision and there wasn’t much else I could do: I was determine to free my two beautiful ladies, to give them back the chance in life they needed to live the rich and rewarding lives they so rightfully deserved.
When the visiting hour was over, I just sat there and sadly watched them walk out the door, out of my life, and even after they were out of my sight I remained rooted to the stool, unable to move. I must have sat there for an hour or more, before the shuffling sound of feet behind me brought my mind back into the prison.
“All right, Carter,” a guard’s harsh voice ordered from behind me. “Your visit’s over. Get back to your cell.”
“Ah-ha,” I thought. “Number one!” But I continued looking through the glass, not even caring who it was behind me. I must have trembled involuntarily in anticipation of his putting his slimy hands on my shoulder, because my brain coiled. I still couldn’t do anything to anybody unless they did something to me first. And perhaps there is something to this extrasensory perception theory, because I somehow got the feeling that he knew that if he touched me, he would have to gamble for his life. He must have relayed this same message to the center too, because I was still sitting there hours later when mess had started. The count was taken and cleared, but I still hadn’t seen a goddamn soul. I was desperate. And the administration must have known it, too, because they shipped me out to Rahway State Prison the very next morning.
Rahway State Prison is easily identifiable by its big green center dome sitting out in the middle of nowhere, and the cursed stench of pigeon shit polluting the air. If it weren’t for the high brick walls and the armed guards constantly patrolling the grounds around it, it might look almost innocent, like the rest of the industrial plants in that particular area. Only it wasn’t innocent, because this factory manufactured hardened criminals, and Rahway was the refinery where they gold-plated their product.
This subhuman outlet was rather new among New Jersey penitentiaries. It had been in use only since 1896, when it was a reformatory for juvenile delinquents. But in 1948 it was pressed into service as a full-fledged prison. It was more spacious and less confining than Trenton State Prison, and housed only half the population that Trenton did. It was also the only adult institution in the state which allowed contact visits.
There are five wings in the jail: One Wing was lock-up, Two Wing was a dormitory, Three Wing a unit of rooms without bars; Five Wing was the sex offenders’ quarters, and Four Wing was a vicious black ghetto that would have put the “Big Apple” to shame.
There was no brutality or racism when I got to Rahway in 1969—only apathy, in the form of overindulgence. Everything that the other institutions lacked, Rahway had: contact visits every Sunday, which was equal to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for us inmates; the Theater of the Forgotten came in on a weekly basis to perform their plays, and community volunteers came in each week to participate in various programs; the inmates put together a variety show each year, and their families were invited into the prison for a night of relaxation; Achievement Night was much the same, when the inmates “graduating” from school were allowed to invite their loved ones inside to watch the ceremonies.
Rahway, then, was a beehive of activity. There were so many places to go at once, and so many things to occupy one’s mind, that few people really .knew if they were coming or going. The only time a man was locked in his cell was when he got tired and locked his own self up, and that might not be until two or three o’clock in the morning. This was the administration’s way of mininiizing trouble just as surely as faggots were for Trenton. Only here they kept everyone so busy looking at movies, watching live shows, shooting pool, and drinking hooch that nobody seemed to remember that he was still in jail. This is what I called living in a “cinematic concept”—going to the movies each week to assume a new role: Superfly today, and Shaft tomorrow—but always shunning the reality of being in jail.
If ever a more subtle form of compliance has been employed to dehumanize a man than those techniques used at Rahway, I would surely like to see it. The inmates were allowed to run wild, and they thought they were hip and getting over. Meanwhile, the only person really getting over was Warren Pinto, the superintendent, who let the fools run themselves ragged and never had a day of trouble.
The inmates’ politics, though, were treacherous. The institution had given up so much over the years that some misguided individuals thought themselves to be cops, and not prisoners. Most of the old-timers I’d known from the past, those who would have snatched somebody’s head clean off their shoulders if anyone showed them disrespect, were now in control of all the graft-taking programs, and they maintained their precarious positions by turning stool pigeon for the administration. Most of these inmates were serving life sentences, but were so happy in this place that the mere thought of going home would have been a cruel shock to their senses. They’d found it much easier to get along in jail as punks than to survive it as men.
Pinto’s administration was certainly aware of why Trenton had suddenly elected to get rid of me at that particular time, and they didn’t want me, either. They were afraid that I would upset their delicate balance of control over these wild niggers. But they had naught to fear. The inmates had so whittled up their allegiances into such a multitude of polarized black groups and religious sects that they had completely deserted the strong body of blackness and rendered it weak and futile in its struggle for unity. There was simply too much division among us to give the prison authorities any cause for alarm, and as long as the inmates remained divided, they continued to fall, fall, fall right into the debilitating ways of this insane asylum’s custom.
So nobody wanted the Hurricane in his place of business, and, of course, I didn’t want to stay, either. But somebody had to keep me, since they wouldn’t let me go home, so Rahway thought it best to keep me in lock-up, rather than out in the population stirring up trouble. However, the administration had underestimated their own proficiency in dehumanizing their wards, because I had more contempt than comradeship for what I saw. Never in my life had I witnessed such a worthless breed of nothings. It was a goddamn shame! Most of the young people in Rahway thought that being a man was a simple matter of standing up to take a piss, hollering “Right on!”—and then dropping their pants to let somebody hump ’em in the ass for a bag of dope. “Doing their own thing,” they called it.
By 1970 I had reached my wits’ end. Black people had gotten so goddamn proud of themselves outside on the streets that they had completely forgotten about the poor brothers still in jail. So it was a white man again—and a cop at that—who came to my rescue. He was Frederick W. Hogan, the same police officer who had stayed with me up in my training camp. He had been overseas while I was on trial for my life. When he came back home, he quit the police force and joined the Public Defender’s Office as an investigator.
Fred was a squat, husky, good-looking kind of guy, with brownish-red hair and gray-green eyes flecked with a faint tinge of brown. He sported a thick handlebar mustache above his upper lip, and the firm, jutting chin below indicated a very purposeful nature. He was a “My Country ’Tis of Thee” Irish-American—what you could call a cop’s cop. To him, you were either right or wrong, it. was as simple as that. He had a young man’s stubborn philosophy about where the world was heading, but not too much taste for the likelihood. His reason for leaving the police department, he told me, was to get into a field that somehow prevented crime rather than just solved it after it had been committed.
Fred was full of vim ‘n’ vigor for life. Though hard and service-worn beyond belief, he was still capable of showing compassion for a man in trouble. But it took him nearly six months just to get me to talk about my case. Every Saturday morning like clockwork; he would travel more than seventy miles to visit me at Rahway. Sometimes he stayed more than ten hours at a clip, interrogating me, continuously questioning certain aspects of my case, trying to break through the barrier of resistance that I had built up around me—that citadel of distrust which had kept me silent for the past three years. I dared not let my hopes fly in the face of the seething corruption, deceit, and fraud that Passaic County had draped on my back.
But the pigheaded Irish in Hogan’s makeup made him a hard man to dissuade. No matter how unresponsive I was to his relentless probing into matters I dared not even think about too long-—for fear of losing what little control I had—the next week he would be back again, prying up my buried past. Never once did he ask me if I was guilty or not. Each night in my cell I asked myself why was he doing all of this for me, or who might have sent him, and where he was really coming from. I mean, I didn’t have one thin dime, and no way of getting a fat quarter, either. So what was he trying to prove? That was my main concern. Who was he working for?—especially since he had me drawing up legal briefs of my case.
During one of our many rap sessions he brought a tape recorder with him, and, although I was skeptical about talking into a microphone at first, we finally went over the entire case piece by piece. Beginning with the initial arrest and the trial itself, and going finally to the awful verdict, we ripped it apart and put it back together again. The verdict was the dickhead that really seemed to blow Hogan’s mind the most. It was then that anger, candid and unmistakable, always flared up in his voice.
“That’s bullshit!” he would snort every time. “If any one of those twelve lily-white middle-class American citizens sitting on that jury even thought that you two niggers had killed those white people,” he would say, “they would have burnt your black asses to bacon-rinds! And rightly so.” This cat has a helluva sense of humor.
But little did I know that Frederick W. Hogan, a real true-to-life Dick Tracy, had also been doing some pretty thorough investigative work on my case on his own. He did this to dispel any doubts of my innocence from his own mind, but he did it in his own way, without leaning on our personal relationship.
He showed me a package of photographs that he had taken of the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, to prove to me that he had indeed been out on the case. Then, beaming confidently, he began telling me about all the midnight hours he had spent tracking down, through some uncanny method of his own, several people who had been incarcerated with Arthur Dexter Bradley while he was waiting to get his charges dropped in four different counties. Bello never had gone to jail again, it turned out.
Hogan also uncovered a police captain in Bergen County and a correctional officer in Morris County who both claimed to know for a fact that Bradley had been continuously telling inmates in their jails that he had indeed lied in court. But the captain and the correctional officer wouldn’t give Fred a deposition because they were afraid of being fired from their jobs.
Nonetheless, this was the best news that I had heard in a month of Sundays. Great googamoogoa! I shouted to myself, things just might be looking up for me.
But then a sober thought crossed my mind. “What good is this information going to do me, Fred?” I said. “I have no more money to retain a lawyer.”
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with it,” Hogan said, grinning like a mischievous imp. “With those legal briefs that I’ve had you draw up, along with this other information, I’m going to submit it all to the Appellate Section of my office and request that we take your case into the Federal District Court.
“I realize that this is an unusual procedure for us to undertake,” he said, “because our office just doesn’t have the budget to handle cases in the Federal Court. But with this new evidence that I’ve uncovered, which only substantiates your original claim of deceit all along, I have a feeling they might just surprise us this one time.
“But even if they don’t,” Fred said, “we still, haven’t lost anything, because I’m going to find us some. lawyers somewhere, somehow.”
Then he showed me a letter he was about to send to a Mr. Gerald Foley, the man in charge of the Appellate Section in the Public Defender’s Office. Fred was enclosing with it the briefs I’d drawn up dealing with the search and seizure of my car and the Miranda warnings that Lieutenant DeSimone allegedly gave me, along with a list of the “startling facts” he’d uncovered during his investigation. He hoped that the package would move the Appellate Section to accept my case for appeal.
The letter was out of sight! In fact, it kind of touched me that someone still believed in me, when it was so easy to doubt. But what really threw me for a loop was the list of “new evidence” that Fred had enclosed with the letter. It proved that he had sho ’nuff been digging in somebody else’s ass besides my own these past few months, like he said. It was a refreshing change, I kid you not—yeah, yeah, yeah-somebody still dug the Rube! And Fred Hogan wasn’t bullshitting, either. The new evidence spoke for itself. (I’ve changed the names on the affidavits here to protect the people out there, so that the prosecutor can’t get to them before I do. The following is only a brief summary of what was recorded.) .
1. Thomas Janssen: While incarcerated at Bordentown Reformatory, he spoke with Arthur Dexter Bradley, and ;now states that Bradley was angry because Bello was trying to cut him out of his share of the reward money, and the prosecutor hadn’t kept Bradley out of jail as he had promised. Bradley threatened to blow the Carter case wide open and tell everything, if he didn’t receive his share of the money. He said that he would reveal that he had lied, that the prosecutor told him what to say, and promised to pay him if he testified in court against Carter and Artis. Bradley had all but one of the criminal charges pending against him dropped.
2. Chuck Norman: Norman was incarcerated at the Bergen County Jail with Arthur Dexter Bradley in September of 1967. Chuck was from New York City and didn’t know anyone in New Jersey. He was .locked in the same cell with Bradley. Bradley told Norman how the prosecutor took him and Bello before the grand jury to testify against Carter arid Artis, and that the grand jury didn’t believe them, returning a no bill. Bradley stated that Lieutenant DeSimone then had him change his story and say that he did see Carter and Artis in the area of the shooting. Bradley went on to say that Lieutenant DeSimone took him back before another grand jury, alone, this time, with only a statement from Bello, and he got Carter and Artis indicted with this new story. He was promised half of the reward money if he would testify to this in court.
3. Bartram Nathan: Nathan was incarcerated with Arthur Dexter Bradley in the Union County Jail, and Bradley told him that he saw a white Cadillac at the scene of the crime and had assumed it to be Carter’s. He knew that Carter had a white Cadillac. But he did not see anyone at the scene of the shooting. Bradley stated that the prosecutor of Passaic County paid him to testify in court that he saw Carter commit the crime of murder, and in return Bradley received monies well over $10,000.
4. Jim Driscoll; James Peters; and William Charles: These three individuals were together with Arthur Dexter Bradley in the Morris County Jail, when Bradley was bragging to them about all the armed robbery charges that he had pending against him, and how he wasn’t worried about going to jail because he had made a deal with the Passaic County Prosecutor to testify in court against Rubin Hurricane Carter. Bradley said that he didn’t know a damn thing about Carter, but if Carter was convicted he would have nothing to worry about. Bradley said that he also qualified for the $10,500 reward being offered. Bradley spoke many times of killing Carter and Artis if they were not convicted. Bradley did not care what anybody else thought about him, he was still going to turn state’s evidence, even though he did not know anything about what happened.
That was the new evidence that Fred had uncovered.
While I anxiously awaited a reply from the Appellate Section, a rumor started floating around the jail that Rahway State Prison was getting a new superintendent. Warren Pinto had decided to retire. In prison an isolated guess rapidly becomes cause for immediate speculation among the inmates, but a rumor twice repeated becomes a fact. We did indeed get a new superintendent, and everything started going downhill from there.
The new man’s name was Ulysses Samuel Vukcevich, or, Smilin’ Sam Buck Savage, as the inmates soon renamed him. He was muscular, slim, dark, and inordinately good-looking, with a slight lisp in his speech. He smiled continuously, but that was only a front. Because he used his smile as a smoke screen to cover up his true feelings. If you talked with this man for many hours, you still wouldn’t learn anything more about him that you didn’t know at first glance. Whatever lay inside this man’s heart was effectively concealed. He was thirty-nine years old and a past master in the art of psychological manipulation, for deep down inside of him lurked a sleeping monster, which he kept immaculately dressed at all times. He appeared to be much more a Hollywood personality than a serious-minded penologist.
As I understand it, Vukcevich had moved up the ladder of success from a schoolteacher in the reformatory to the administrator of this penitentiary, and at Rahway he found the same old jitterbugs doing the same old stupid shit that they had done in the other joints with him. So he had nothing but contempt for them, and this attitude caused him to make his first mistake in the performance of his duties: he slumped every inmate into this sorry bag and considered himself the big tough in a jail full of punks. He may have had, as I’ve heard, a Ph.D. in every imaginable science in the books, but one thing became obvious as soon as he took over the reins of the prison: he didn’t know a damn thing. about handling men—juveniles and jitterbugs, maybe—but men? Forget it!
This colony of lepers called Rahway had been standing here, as is, for seventy-five excruciating years, .surviving. only at the cost of human adaptability, and even the former leader of its wild bunch had been smart enough to let the inmates defeat their own purposes by running amuck and keeping their minds off where they really were. (In Hell!) But the new superintendent wasn’t geared for it, and.that was his second mistake. He chose instead to put up iron gates inside the jail’s halls, which slowed the. inmates down. This gave them time to think. At, the same time, he began arbitrarily to disband .many of the programs that the inmates had fought so hard with the previous administration to get. He tried to take away their ’ hooch, too, and sober inmates are always unpredictable, without their means to mentally escape.
Before Smilin’ Sam Buck Savage had been in office. even for six months, Rahway- State Prison had definitely undergone a terrible change. Two murders were committed, and there were ten escapes; three inmates died for lack of proper medical attention; an officer was stabbed; another’ was hospitalized by a poolstick, and a costly strike was called by the prison guards. The previous administration had had none of these problems, so something had to be wrong here. The prison became an armed camp, and it got worse and worse. The formerly carefree and happy-go-lucky inmates were cold sober and disgruntled now, and everybody was walking around the joint all shanked down with knives, clubs, and sharpened steel. They were just waiting for somebody to say something wrong, and on the day before Thanksgiving of 1971, somebody did say something, and the inmates rose—or maybe I should say, staggered—to the occasion.
Somebody had said that the little old winemaker in Four-Wing had done this thing again and now had some baaaaad hooch to sell, and soon everybody in the jail was on the move‘to cop some of his dynamite wine. I even went over there myself and bought a couple of quarts. And while I was standing there still drinking my wine, another inmate, whom I’ll call Slick Joe, came over from One Wing, paid his money for a thermos jug full of the powerful brew, and hid it in his cell until after he came back from the movies. This was just so he could drink it later on by himself without sharing it with his partner. The moonshine was potent! But the wing officer had seen him when he left the bottle in his cell, and rolled down on him after he was gone and busted him for the wine—which meant that old Slick Joe’would have to go to court-line the next day and get fifteen days in the hole. That was mandatory.
But Slick Joe wasn’t going for that shit! Even though he had been busted fair and square, he wasn’t man enough to take his own weight by himself, so he decided to get eleven hundred men involved in his own petty problems: He went and got his little partner, whom I’ll call Righteous Pete (the same person Slick Joe was trying to hide the wine from), and told him that the wing officer had planted the wine in his cell to set him up for the bust.
Now Righteous Pete was an ornery little bastard who could fight as well as he wanted to, but nobody in his right mind would follow either one of these guys as far as the mess hall, even on the days they had chicken. So, together now, they went and got another wild nigger, whom I’ll call Big Tom for this,‘and convinced him of the same lie that Slick Joe had conned Righteous Pete with. Now Big Tom was cool as long as he was sober, but they took him over to Four Wing to visit the little winemaker, and drunk he was a motherfucker!
I was up in the movies by this time watching the sex picture like everybody else was, with my eyes glued to the screen, trying to implant the vision of naked women in my mind until I could get back to my cell. Then I planned on making some passionate love to somebody’s make-believe daughter. Suddenly, the auditorium doors new open and in walked the. ungodly three: Slick Joe, Righteous Pete, and Big Tom, all hooched up and drunker than hoot owls. Big Tom bent down and almost fell, but managed to pick up a chair and throw it point-blank through the movie screen.
“I’m tired of all you motherfucking cops always taking advantage of us!” he shouted in drunken defiance, as a ragged hole appeared where the chair had gone through the screen. The house lights came on. “And I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to let you fuckin’ rollers get away with it tonight!” he yelled.
“Right on, Lord!” Righteous Pete pushed Big Tom on. Tom turned to the audience.
“These goddamn crackers are trying to set this brother up,” he shouted, pointing to Slick Joe—who was standing off to the side trying to melt inconspicuously into the floor.
The deadly silence that followed was frightening. A poignant hunger for violence hung heavily in the air. I, could feel the tension that had lain dormant for all these months spring to life and begin to wiggle. Sparked into flame by the lethal fuel of an inebriated fool. My God! Eleven hundred men cramped up into close quarters. This is what I had been waiting for—a riot! It would begin just as it was doing now, with fear that slowly built up into a frenzy, which would inevitably breed savage courage where none had previously existed. I felt the Hurricane beating on my chest, chafing at his chains to be set free.
Big Tom jumped up on the piano and reams of revolutionary toilet paper that he wouldn’t have wiped his own ass with, had he been sober, began to spill from his mouth. If this thing wasn’t so goddamn serious, I would gladly have stepped into my hip boots just to keep the dukey out of my pockets. The shit was really getting deep! Cops were all over the joint, but the inmates were now openly brandishing their shanks, daring the guards to move, and those who hadn’t brought their knives to the movies were easing out of the auditorium to go and get them. A blanket of fear had settled in, the frenzy would be next, and then the mob courage.
I don’t know what made me do what I did next. Maybe it was only because Attica had just jumped off three months earlier and I knew that if the State Police of New Jersey were to come into Rahway with their guns, they would make the New York police look like juvenile delinquents and the forty-three deaths in Attica like a window-smashing spree. Maybe it was because I was scared. Maybe it was because Fred Hogan’s shadow had influenced my life and pumped a little hope back into it again. Maybe I didn’t like the reason this thing was being started in the first place. Or maybe I had just been an undercover punk all along, and it took this to bring out the sissy in me. However it was, I decided to get the drunken nigger out of the auditorium, hoping to slow this thing down.
Tom was a big, black, husky rascal, perhaps twice my size, but I had pulled him out of a few tight corners a time or two, and he usually listened to me whenever I had something to say. Just the Sunday before I had stopped him from whupping a worthless cop’s ass, although I should have let him kill the punk. But Big Tom had just won a reversal of his ten-year conviction in federal court, and this prejudiced bastard just wasn’t worth the extra time. So I had talked Big Tom out of it, and this time was no different. After I rapped with him for two or three minutes, he climbed down from the piano and started walking out of the auditorium with me. But then the unexpected happened. Smilin’ Sam Buck Savage arrived on the scene, and that was the catalyst which tipped the delicate balance in the room.
“Awright! Awright,” he said, pushing his way through the crowd like gangbusters, his shirt sleeves rolled up as though he was going to whup somebody’s ass or something. “Let’s break this shit up, men! You can’t win!”
Those words were his third mistake. Three strikes and out.
Oooooh, man! I thought, what’s wrong with this motherfucker? —telling a prison full of born losers that they couldn’t win. Jesus fucking Christ! That was like waving a red flag in the face of a charging bull. Even Big Tom, drunk as he was, wheeled around on him after that brainy salvo.
“Yeah, we can win, motherfucker!” Big Tom spat at Buck Savage, ignoring me completely. “Because we got you, and you’re the one who started all this shit in the first place! And we’re gonna tear this goddamn place down, now, sho’nuff!” he said.
“Why don’t you wise up, Tom?” The superintendent was pursuing his stupidity ruthlessly. “You know that you guys can’t win! All I have to do is to push a button, and the state police will be here in two minutes.”
“Why don’t you button up your motherfucking lip!” I snapped at Buck Savage myself, now, and tried to get Tom’s attention again. Things here were getting out of control.
“Don’t even listen to him, Tom. Talk to me,” I said. “Rubin. I’m talking to you!”
But it was already too late. Tom had broken away from me and jumped up on the stage. The inmates crowded around at the bottom of the platform, and the cops eased over to the doors, getting ready to get out of there. Just like any sensible person would have done. But the superintendent, either too brave or too goddamn stupid to know what he was getting into, followed the crowd to the foot of the stage. He was surrounded by a sea of shanks, clubs, baseball bats and iron pipes, and his life was hanging there by a little thread—but he had too much contempt for these guys to know it. I went up on the stage with Tom. I wasn’t about to get shanked in that crowd.
“We gonna tear this motherfucker down!” Big Tom shouted.
And the inmates agreed: “Right on, brother!”
“We gonna stop these creeps from fuckin’ with us!” he said.
And the crowd cheered again: “That’s right, Lord!”
But I couldn’t agree. I was torn between four different kinds of allegiances: to the inmates, because I had to continue living with them; to Fred Hogan, because he believed in me when no one else would; to my wife and daughter, for sticking with me for so long, and now I might have a shot to be back with them again; and to myself, for knowing the difference between right and wrong. Had this been for any one of the million-and-one valid instances of racism and brutality that normally pollute the insides of any jail, this would have been my Mecca here tonight—I would have gotten to them all! But it wasn’t; it was about some goddamn wine. So I decided to make one more effort at this peacemaking shit, and then I was getting the fuck out of there—if I could. The superintendent’s attitude seemed to be a growing cancer in the inmates’ bloodstreams.
Big Tom was the only strong man who was doing any talking, but he was no leader, just a roughneck, and I felt certain that if I could somehow get rid of him, it might give somebody else a chance to take over and ask why. Because the other strong men in the jail, those who pulled some kind of weight with the inmates, were just laying back in the bin to see what would happen. So I challenged Big Tom; he was the leader for the moment.
“Tom,” I said, and the auditorium got quiet, “if you just want to fight somebody tonight, then I’ll fight you. Up here on the stage. Just me and you. There’s no sense getting everybody involved in this stupid shit.”
“No! No! No!” the crowd chanted, shouting me down. “We ain’t going for that!”
“Then I can’t help you,” I told them, “because this is wrong. But I won’t hurt you either,” I said, “because if I stayed, that’s exactly what I would do. So I’m leaving.”
And half the auditorium walked out with me.
The moment I left the stage, Big Tom grabbed Smilin’ Sam Buck Savage and the revolution was on. The rest of the inmates vamped down on him and lit his stupid ass up. He was stabbed, kicked, beat over the back with a fire extinguisher, had a chair broke over his head, and ended up as the first superintendent in New Jersey prison history to be taken hostage in a riot. Six guards were also beaten and seized.
At the initial outburst, most of the inmates in the auditorium who hadn’t left when I did now broke for the exits. The wing cops thought it was a full-scale assault and got in the wind with their shirttails smoking, leaving the doors wide open. When the would-be revolutionaries realized that the jail was theirs for the taking, they immediately began tearing ass. One guard found himself trapped up on the top floor in Four Wing, and when he was confronted with a bunch of inmates with shanks in their hands, had no other recourse but to give up his keys. The keys fit the locked boxes of the whole wing. So all the doors were swung open, and the bewildered inmates stuck their heads out. When they saw that the prison was being controlled by other prisoners, tired war cries began ringing out from tier to tier.
“Right on, baby!” “Let’s tear this rotten motherfucker down!” “Kill the pigs, and power to the gorilla!”
But Big Tom, the gorilla, was stretched out in a cell, drunk.
The inmates tore the prison down, too! Then they turned their energies against one another, burning up people’s cells, drinking up all the homemade brew they could find, robbing each other’s personal belongings, jumping guys, looking for the stool pigeons, fucking them in the ass, degrading young boys, old men, anybody who didn’t run with a pack. This was the mob courage that I was talking about.
The isolation: unit on the top floor of One Wing was the last stronghold to be conquered. A band of staggering marauders, armed with sledgehammers and damn near drowned in tomato wine, ripped out a five-hundred-pound steel door, took another guard hostage, and released the prisoners held in solitary confinement. Among them was Alfred (Qayyum) Ravenal—a bad motherfucker! They released him for need of a leader.
This brother was a born warrior, known for his honesty and lack of jive. He was cunning as a fox, deadly as a coiled pit viper, and a man who didn’t play the radio, didn’t drink, didn’t cuss, and didn’t smoke. It took him only five minutes to see what was going down; that is, the condition of the “revolutionaries.” So he backed off, sat down in a corner of the auditorium, and called anyone who approached him about taking over a goddamn fool. After this the rebelling inmates split up into little groups, each faction with their own thoughts on how to handle the situation.
Once the authorities accepted the rebellion as a legitimate riot, they turned off the heat and water—which left the prison cold and dry in the winter. The entrance door to Three Wing was a self-locking affair, and one of the guards had the foresight to slam it after I had gotten in. But he trapped the wing officer in there too. The same situation prevailed in Two Wing. Thus, the only two wings involved were One Wing and Four Wing, and they were connected by the auditorium, so the traffic between the two cell blocks was left unhampered. On a number of occasions, a band of drunken inmates tried to break down the Three Wing door to add the wing officer to their growing list of hostages, but the beginning of the wing was located only a few feet away from the rotunda, which is the Center, and a steady barrage of tear gas drove them scurrying back to Four Wing time and time again.
But we happened to have a veteran of prison riots locked in Three Wing, and the moment that the action started, he went around telling the guys to fill up their buckets with water before it was cut off. There were those who disregarded his advice, nonetheless, and, of course, they suffered miserably for it later on. Tear gas and smoke repeatedly burned everybody’s eyes. There was no getting away from it. Gas hung in the air like smothering clouds of fog.
It was a time for sharing too: each inmate had to help the other, and there were many surprising examples of this concern for others shown. But we had a lot of creeps, too, so it was mostly an “Up your ass, buddy! I’m looking out for number one” action.
All night long the radios blared, and guys crowded around them hungry for news. Some goddamn revolution, I thought. No food. No water. No heat. And we had to get the latest from WCBS in New York to find out what was happening to us in New Jersey. Goddamn! No wonder the crackers had our black asses in slavery for so motherfuckin’ long. Niggers couldn’t even die right. A bunch of stupid sons of bitches!
I sat there in my cell all night just cussing the drunken niggers and Buck Savage out for having placed me in this unforgivable position. For five long years I’d been trying to avoid just this kind of situation, trying to fight my way back into court before the prison authorities could conjure up such an excuse as this to wipe me off the face of the planet. I hated this prison as much as it hated me for resisting to conform to its degenerate ways. I didn’t need this penitentiary’s kind of rehabilitation, which only meant giving up my manhood, anyhow. I had never been debilitated. I had never committed any crime. The crimes were committed against me. I was the victim of all the shit!
Yet, the fact remains that there are some things that one cannot allow to be done to himself, in or out of jail, regardless of the consequences—not without resistance or retaliation of some sort, anyway, not without losing part of his integrity, not without feeling ashamed and incomplete for the rest of his life. And being dehumanized, brutalized, and finally killed in snakepits like Rahway are just a few of those things, to my way of thinking. So I sat there all through the night lovingly caressing a twelve-inch shank.
Thanksgiving morning loomed dark and dreary with rain, startlingly reminiscent of the day back in September when Attica was stormed. At 7:45 a.m. the news came over the air that shotgun-bearing state troopers were massing outside of the prison, lining up four abreast at the front door and getting ready to come into Rahway to put down the rebellion by armed force. Vivid pictures of inmates being slaughtered like cattle flashed luridly in my mind. Anybody with any sense knew that once those trigger-happy law-and-order freaks crashed into the prison, a whole lot of black butts would be shitting for their last time.
One word from the governor, who, the radio said, was sitting 150 yards away in the Woodbridge State School, and the Grim Reaper would have swept through the hallways of Rahway State Prison like Teddy Roosevelt taking San Juan Hill. I was one steaming mad black motherfucker, because I knew that my life wasn’t worth a smell of rotten wolf pussy or two dead flies. If there was some kind of list being passed around of whom to get, of the inmates who were definitely slated for the graveyard, as there had been in other riots in New Jersey, I knew that my name would be at the very top. There was no doubt in my mind about that. When the state troopers rolled in here smoking, I’d be shot so full of lead that they wouldn’t even bother to bury me—just stake out a claim and sell my body for the mineral rights.
John Artis was in Four Wing, and he couldn’t help but be smack in the middle of all the shit. He was disturbed at what was going on though, and he came to the Three Wing door, through dense clouds of tear gas, to call for me. When I got there he told me about the condition of Buck Savage, saying that the man was hurt bad and in need of some medical attention—quick. But the revolutionaries would only give him an inmate nurse named James C. Garrett, who was already locked in Four Wing. Garrett was sewing up the warden’s wounds with cotton thread and a common sewing needle, all he had available. John wanted to know if he should try to get Buck Savage out of there, but I told him to cool it, and if it came to that I’d come out myself.
By this time all the tough guys had started to wake up cold sober. All the wine was gone, the peanut butter and jelly stashes were depleted, and the big-time Mao Tse-tungs were reduced to smoking cigarette butts. The dry peanut butter had made them thirsty, but there wasn’t any water to drink, and the freezing temperatures had long ago invaded their weary bones. Their hearts were Weary, too. One group of inmates found Big Tom laying in a cell, huddled under a pile of rags, sleeping off his tomato high. The whole cell stunk of mildewed fruit wine from where he had thrown up during the night.
“Wake up, Tom!” they called, shaking their leader up out of his drunken stupor. “Get yourself together, man! The state troopers are outside. They’re getting ready to come in here, and we want to know what to do with your hostages!”
Big Tom grunted, looked out from underneath the coats and rags he’d piled on top of himself during the night to keep warm, then sat up and wiped the sleep from his eyes. He was trembling from the cold and the after-effects of a terrible hangover. (Tomato wine was good going down, but the next day it was a motherfucker!) His lips were cracked from the lack of water, and his eyes were bloodshot from the hooch. He sat there so long with his eyes closed and his mouth shut that the inmates thought he had gone back to sleep. They shook him again.
“Wake up, Tom!”
“Huh?” he said, finally getting himself together. “Whose hostages? Whatcha talkin’ about, man?”
“We’re talking about hostages, motherfucker,” one inmate hissed. “The warden and them other six guards we got locked up on three tier—that’s what we’re talking about!”
“Oooh, Lord!” Tom exclaimed, definitely sober now. He was shaking like a leaf, and it wasn’t from the hooch or the cold, either. “What have ya’ll done did!” he moaned. “Ya’ll gonna take me hostage, too?”
Black people, as a rule, are fearless enough after a fashion, whenever they really have to be. But the terror of sure death always hangs over them, the reality of certain destruction, and not idle threats. It was this way with the majority of the inmates.
“Not ya’ll, you winehead nigger, you!” the inmate shouted in rage. “This is your revolution, motherfucker! And the cops are getting ready to kill us all. For you! So get your black ass out there and tell us what to do! We’re ready to go with it!”
“Oooooh, Lord, not me,” Big Tom moaned pathetically. “I don’t want to die!” he said. The only thing missing was the “Robert E. Lee” rolling around the bend of the Mississippi River, a bale of cotton for the tough nigger to sit on, and Old Black Joe would have been reborn. The group of inmates dug it, too, and just walked away shaking their heads, leaving their illustrious generalissimo pissing in his pants and scratching his nappy head. He had placed the lives of eleven hundred men in jeopardy for a quart of tomato wine. Goddamn!
So for all intents and purposes, the Rahway rebellion was now over. Fortunately, however, there were a few good dudes who managed to salvage a rosebud out of the pile of shit: they presented a hastily formed list of grievances to the authorities, which wasn’t hard to do, considering, and a short time later, Vukcevich and the six guards were released. It was kept comparatively quiet, but all this was due to a black guard named Mr. Eddie Mullins, who was held as a hostage at one point himself but was released on his word of honor to get the inmates’ side of the story out to the news media to prevent another Attica. This he did, and kept his word, but he lost his job because of it.
Shortly after seven o’clock that night, the blaring loudspeakers inside the prison politely asked the inmates to return to their cells, and a team of community people were allowed inside the jail to oversee this movement, guaranteeing no reprisals while makeshift repairs were performed on the broken locks. But let me tell you something: a whole lot of would-be bad motherfuckers in this prison sighed with ecstatic relief when they saw the state troopers appear at the end of the tiers, unarmed. It was a miracle that nobody had been killed—then.
But just as surely as if the ungodly three had placed a gun to Qayyum Ravenal’s head and pulled the trigger themselves, they killed one of the best men in the state of New Jersey, maybe even the world. Once the disturbance was quelled, forty-one inmates were shipped out to the Vroom Building, to the Trenton State Hospital for the criminally insane. Alfred Ravenal was one of those to go, even though he had nothing to do with the riot (he had been the one who released the black officer to get to the press) and had been released from solitary confinement through no fault of his own. But the administration was afraid of him, so they sent him away. Months later he escaped with four others and was killed in a shoot-out with the state police in Pennsylvania. A state trooper was also killed.
On the morning following the Thanksgiving Day Rebellion, Fred Hogan rushed to the penitentiary to see me. With him was the Public Defender of New Jersey, a Mr. Stanley Van Ness, Arthur Penn, and many others from that office who were to assist the inmates who had any criminal charges lodged against them for their participation in the riot. Hogan and Van Ness had been waiting outside the prison all night long at the request of the governor.
When I was introduced to Stanley Van Ness that morning, I was surprised that he was so young, because I had heard so much about him. But what startled me the most was to find myself talking to another black man! Mr. Van Ness had accepted my case on the strength of Fred Hogan’s new “evidence.” And hope galore abounded within me.
From that day on, Fred Hogan was assigned to Rahway State Prison as the resident father-confessor for society’s forgotten other half and assumed the unpopular position as liaison between the frightened inmates and the still prickling administration. He brought in teams of lawyers every day, coordinated their workloads, and held his own interviews all day and far into the night, talking to anybody with a problem. His relentless driving energy soon freed many a poor prisoner who’d been abandoned by his shyster lawyer to languish in jail for the lack of hard cold cash, and at the same time he continued to work steadily on my own case.
The man was simply inexhaustible, and Rahway’s miserable administration was smarting under the weight of his tireless efforts. He was burdening them too quickly with meaningful change, and they despised him for that; the deep wounds from the riot were still festering. They considered him a poacher on their sacred territory, stealing their bread and butter, because the inmates respected Hogan more than anyone else in the jail. So the administration started throwing stumbling blocks in his path: two dirt-farming sergeants who had no business working around men in the first place, always made it their business to harass him unnecessarily, and finally Smilin’ Sam Buck Savage himself—still crippled and out on sick leave—banished Fred from the institution. He claimed that Hogan had carried a letter out of the institution from me to my manager’s wife (who was on my mailing list anyway), when in fact I had mailed the letter to Hogan from the prison as a letter of introduction to her.
Before Fred was exiled, however, and to the chagrin of my enemies, I know, he completed his job to perfection. He left behind a helluva footprint pointing in the right direction for penal reform in New Jersey. But that wasn’t all he did. He opened up several blocked avenues on which I could continue to work towards gaining my release. The publication of this book is just one of those avenues. Fred also encouraged an attorney, Michael B. Blacker—who played a major role in abolishing the death penalty in New Jersey before it had been decided by the United States Supreme Court—to help research my case and draw up the legal arguments to submit to a federal court.
But since the time of Fred’s ouster, Rahway State Prison has moved persistently backward rather than forward, in terms of what it was before the Thanksgiving Day Rebellion. It has deteriorated from being the most progressive penal institution in the state of New Jersey to the most repressive. There was no such thing as racism in Rahway before the riot, between the inmates or the cops, but it’s more deeply rooted here now than in any prison in the country. And it’s growing worse with every passing day, because now this racism is being directed against our minds as well as our physical selves. There was no brutality before, but now it’s a common sight, because cowards, when finally placed in a position of strength, bear the most malice toward the cowardice in others, feeding their own tired egos at the expense of those they’re suppose to be helping. Before the Thanksgiving Day orgy, there were men walking around inside of this institution, but there aren’t too many here now—only stool pigeons, punks, drug addicts, institutionalized freaks, religious cop-outs, and whatchamacallits running around with braided hair, tight pants, and high-heeled shoes hollering, “Right on, Brother! Power to the people!”
The riot did absolutely nothing to inform the community outside of the real horrors of this prison life. Regardless of how misdirected it was, it was valid, and what the administration here fails to understand is that it might not be the same way the next time—and there will be a next time. There always will be a next time, à la Attica, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Holmesburg, or Leavenworth. As long as there are frustrated men and women jammed into prisons like sardines in a can, with their backs pressed against the wall, there will definitely be a next time. But to satisfy the pigheaded demands of the people around us on the outside, reinforced concrete and steel are lavishly meted out around the world and transformed into high walls and modern cell blocks designed to meet the comfort of yet another generation of criminals. Maybe they will be some of your sons and daughters. Governments are willing to spend millions of their taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to rebuild or reinforce obsolete prisons, but they’re not willing to stop for a minute to listen to the simple problems that make the spending of all this money so goddamn necessary! And when they do spend, it’s seldom in the right places. Take, for example, our own Buck Savage building fences inside the jail instead of trying to improve the meals and the medical and educational facilities.
Since the Thanksgiving Day Rebellion at Rahway, inmates throughout New Jersey have been clamoring for some authentic rehabilitation, begging the public for their help, appealing to them to please listen to their troubles and pains, and still they’ve received nothing but false promises. Yet, at the same time, the public has given the prison authorities more money to buy more shotguns and more riot gear, and more electric eyes to sit out in the hallways of their cesspool penitentiaries on display, doing absolutely nothing.
Rahway, like most other prisons in this country, is once more teetering on the brink of a disaster similar to Thanksgiving Day’s—only ten times more deadly—because there are those of us still here who found ourselves trapped in the middle of that last joke, and we won’t be caught flatfooted again. Though our elected officials have loudly claimed to be more aware today than ever of what it means to a man and his family to be locked away for long periods of time in a debilitating jungle of concrete and steel bars, I have yet to hear anything from out there but apathetic silence. When some unfortunate mother’s sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers cried out in Attica for peace and understanding, the community around them bared their fangs and slaughtered every nigger in sight, even killed some of their own, and then turned to the rest of the world and lied in the name of law and order.
Now I’m coming to you. This book is my life’s blood spilled out on the fifteen rounds of these pages. The sixteenth round is still being fought, and there’s much more at stake here than a mere boxing title, or a big fat juicy purse.
This fight isn’t sanctioned by the World Boxing Association, nor is it governed by the Marquess of Queensberry’s fair rules. The weapons are not padded boxing gloves, left hooks, or knockout punches. This is a brand-new game, with one-sided rules to control the most important fight of my career. There won’t be any glaring lights, cheering crowds, or well-wishers awaiting me at the end of this final round, if I lose it; only steel bars, stone walls, mind-bending games, mental anguish, and near insanity. And you know I’m not exaggerating.
I come to you in the only manner left open to me. I’ve tried the courts, exhausted my life’s earnings, and tortured my two loved ones with little grains and tidbits of hope that may never materialize. Now the only chance I have is in appealing directly to you, the people, and showing you the wrongs that have yet to be righted—the injustice that has been done to me. For the first time in my entire existence I’m saying that I need some help. Otherwise, there will be no more tomorrow for me: no more freedom, no more injustice, no more State Prison; no more Mae Thelma, no more Theodora, no more Rubin—no more Carter. Only the Hurricane.
And after him, there is no more.