Muhammad Ali's Dedication to Rubin Carter
It's rare for the world heavy-weight-boxing champion to dedicate a fight to another boxer, but it's even rarer when that boxer is a prisoner. Yet that's just what Muhammad Ali did on the May morning before his bout with Ron Lyle, when he told startled reporters in Las Vegas, "I'm dedicating this fight to Rubin Carter."
For those few boxing fans who hadn't heard of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, or didn't remember his furious devastation of opponents in the ring during Friday-night fights in the sixites, Ali's decision to become co-chairman of the Hurricane Fund came as a surprising introduction to a man who has become a living symbol of courage and a cause celebre for fighters against injustice.
In 1966 Hurricane Carter was the number-one contender for the middle-weight crown. With twenty-one knockouts under his belt and about to take on Dick Tiger for the title, Carter was near the peak of his career. And then, suddenly one night in June, shotgun blasts in a dingy Paterson, New Jersey, tavern shattered his hopes forever. There would be no title bout - in fact, no more fights at all for Rubin Carter - just years wasted behind bars.
Rubin Carter, known to the Paterson police for his civil rights activities, was swept up in the dragnet thrown over his hometown that night after the murder of three white patrons of the Lafayette Bar & Grill. The police had already chased and lost a white car similar to the one driven by the murderers as they fled the city, and many other white cars driven by blacks were stopped and searched that night; but only one - Rubin Carter's - was brought to the scene of the crime to confront the lynch-mob hysteria of white neighbors and witnesses. Even so, no one - either witnesses or the only surviving victim - identified Carter or his young companion in the car, John Artis, as the murderers. After seventeen hours of grilling by police and after Carter passed a lie-detector test, the two men were released.
Five months later, on October 14, 1966, Carter and Artis were arrested and charged with the murders. On the testimony of two white ex-convicts, Alfred Bello and Arthur Bradley, Carter and Artis were imprisoned, and in May 1967 they were brought to trial. There followed two weeks of courtroom drama packed with racial tension: black defendants confronted by white judge, a white prosecutor waving the blood-soaked clothes of the white victims, and an all-white jury chosen from a community informed by a racially inflamed local press. The result was that both defendants received triple-life sentences, with Carter's set to run consecutively - or, in other words, forever.
But then, in September 1974, the prosecution's key witnesses, Bello and Bradley, recanted their testimony. They explained that they had lied in exchange for rewards of $10,500 offered by the police and promises of leniency for robbery charges. "There's no doubt Carter was framed," Bradley admitted to the New York Times.
So seven years have been cut out of Rubin Carter's life. He has spent those years studying every law book he could lay his hands on, attempting to nurse the emotional wounds of his wife and daughter, struggling for prison reform at Rahway State Prison, and using his boxing ability to ward off attacks by sadistic guards and homosexual assailants. It seemed - at last - in the early fall of 1974 that this longest and most difficult fight of his life was nearly over. Using the recantations of Bello and Bradley, lawyers from the State Public Defender's Office asked for a new trial in a hearing before Samuel Larner, the same judge who had originally sentenced Cater and Artis to life while expressing his full agreement with the jury's verdict of guilty.
But Judge Larner denied Carter's right to a new trial, allegedly to "preserve our jury system," and Carter is now awaiting the outcome of an appeal that may take years before it even reaches the federal courts. Only there, beyond the power of the New Jersey political machine, Hurricane Carter told Penthouse interviewer Gerard Colby Zilg, does he expect any chance of "a fair shake." recently, in late May, Judge Larner refused to free Carter and Artis on bail while they appeal. He described the bail application as "frivolous." Why has Rubin Carter been denied justice in New Jersey? The answers given here in this exclusvie Penthouse interview reveal for the first time the politics behind Carter's case. These include a two-year history (from 1964 to 1966) of constant harassment by the FBI and a nationwide police campaign to "get" Carter because of his civil rights activities and his outspoken support of self-defense against police brutality. They also include Carter's fight against the boxing establishment; his association with Martin Luther King and the Rev. C. L. Franklin; the role of New Jersey's present governor, Brendan Byrne, in the original trial and imprisonment of Carter; and the real reason Judge Larner was able to turn down Carter's appeal for a new trial.
To obtain this interview, Zilg traveled to Trenton State Prison, which he describes as "a decaying monument to 126 years of collective misery," and talked with Carter for six hours. "He was smaller in size than his name had led me to expect," Zilg says, "but Rubin Carter has a dynamism and strength of character that immediately fill any room. He sports the same Fu Manchu beard and shaven black head that intrigued me on TV years before, but the fierce image I had of him faded before the genuine warmth of his greeting and his broad, generous smile. The buoyancy in his step and his youthful optimism almost make you forget all that this thirty-eight-year-old man has been through. He speaks in a low cadence dramatized by gestures, and only the unseeing gray cloud of his right eye reveals the hidden pain behind the gold-framed glasses. His meticulous attire - clean khaki slacks, an immaculate white turtleneck shirt, and a black turban adorned with a pearl pin - clearly testifies to his determination to preserve identity and self-respect in the face of the conformity of prison life."
