Introduction:

In 1974, things were looking up for Rubin Carter after seven years in jail for triple murder. Two witnesses at the first trial, who had placed him at the murder scene, recanted (reversed) their testimony. They said that Carter had been framed, and claimed the Paterson police had pressured them to lie about seeing Rubin Carter and and his co-defendant John Artis leave the murder scene. The story was splashed on the first page of the New York Times. By a happy coincidence, Carter’s autobiography, The 16th Round, came out the next month and he became a cause célèbre. Bob Dylan penned a folk anthem about him. Muhammed Ali and many other celebrities marched to his defense. In fact, a lot of people couldn’t understand why Carter wasn’t released automatically -- hadn’t the chief witnesses against him confessed that they lied? Isn’t this the part in the movie where the judge bangs his gavel down and releases the prisoner?

Muhammed Ali leads a rally for "Hurricane" Carter, 1976

But things were not as cut-and-dried as they seemed. For one thing, Carter and Artis were not sent to jail solely on the testimony of Al Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley, the two now semi-immortal punks in the Dylan ballad. Bello took back his recantation by the time of the second trial. He admitted he was angry with the prosecutors because he hadn’t received any of the reward money. He had met two wanna-be publicists who persuaded him that if he came up with a more sensational version of what happened that night, he could make money on a book and movie deal. So he invented the tale that he was INSIDE the Lafayette bar that night, hiding behind victim Hazel Tanis as bullets whizzed around him. Testimony at the second trial also showed that Bello was willing to testify for Carter in exchange for a sizeable bribe.

Bradley, his credibility further weakened because of drug addiction problems, did not testify for either the defense or the prosecution at the second trial. See this excerpt from the prosecutor’s brief for the whole, convoluted saga.

The Penthouse interview (below) was published before the second trial. It's been posted elsewhere on the Internet, but the final portion was missing. Here, it's presented with explanatory notes and links to evidence pertaining to the case. Carter says quite a few misleading and downright inacccurate things in this interview. There's no evidence that Gerard Colby Zilg, the interviewer, fact-checked any of his assertions before publishing -- even though Carter makes allegations of corruption and criminal behavior on the part of New Jersey policemen, prosecutors and corrections officials. On a careful re-reading, it's also clear that Zilg's questions are not spontaneous. Someone supplied Zilg with information on what questions should be asked. This is not an interview so much as a performance.

LM

PENTHOUSE INTERVIEW
RUBIN HURRICANE CARTER
(1975)

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 tomorrow for me: no more freedom, no more injustice, no more State Prison; no more Mae Thelma, no more Theodora [wife and daughter], no more Rubin...no more Carter. Only the Hurricane. "and after him, there is no more."

-From The Sixteenth Round by Rubin Carter.

It's rare for the world heavyweight 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 Muhammed 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 sixties, 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 célèbre 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. [Carter was not the number-one contender in 1966. He couldn’t have been “about to take on Dick Tiger” at the time of his arrest because Tiger was not middleweight champion at that point. Carter’s boxing career was in decline -- partly as a result of his drinking problem.] 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, [says who? There is not a single quote in any of the four books written by or about Carter that demonstrate that he was a civil rights activist] was swept up in the dragnet thrown over his hometown that night after the murder of three white patrons of the Lafayette Bar & Grill. [Zilg has his facts wrong here. The bartender and one patron died at the scene, another patron died later, another patron survived.] The police had already chased and lost a white car similar to the one driven by the murderers as they fled the city, [no one saw a white car flee 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 [because it matched the description given by eyewitnesses -- a shiny new white car with out-of-state plates] to confront the lynch-mob hysteria of white neighbors and witnesses. [only Carter says there was a hysterical lynch mob at the scene].

Even so, no one - neither witnesses or the only surviving victim - identified Carter or his young companion in the car, John Artis, as the murderers. [the survivors were horribly wounded, and the only eyewitness who got a look at their faces, Al Bello, wasn’t talking]. After seventeen hours of grilling by police [where it was clear their alibis for the evening conflicted] and after Carter passed a lie-detector test, [he and Artis failed the 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 was other evidence -- the eyewitness description of the car, the bullets found in the car, the movements of Carter and Artis on the night in question]. 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. [see introduction, above]

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, [his biography, Hurricane, indicates that when he was released from prison, awaiting the second trial, he ignored his family and he had an affair] struggling for prison reform at Rahway State Prison, [he was charged with attempting to incite a riot] 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 also because the recantations of Bello and Bradley “lacked the ring of truth”] 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 exclusive 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. [Elsewhere in this website you can see for yourself that Carter’s “evidence” of both his civil rights "activities" and harassment by police are thoroughly bogus. Shame on Zilg for printing this before checking it out.] They also include Carter's fight against the boxing establishment; his association with Martin Luther King [again, zilch evidence of this] 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.

Penthouse: For eight years you have been imprisoned for murder. What do you believe is the real reason you're in jail?

Carter: I'm not in jail for committing murder. I'm in jail partly because I'm a black man in America, where the powers that be will only allow a black man to be an entertainer or a criminal. While I was free on the streets - with whatever limited freedom I had on the streets - as a prizefighter, I was characterized as an entertainer. As long as I stayed within that role, within that prizefighting ring, as long as that was my Mecca and I didn't step out into the civic affairs of this country, I was acceptable. But when I didn't want to see people brutalized any longer - and when I'd speak out against that brutality, no matter who committed the brutality, black people or white people - I was harassed for my beliefs. I committed no crime; actually the crime was committed against me. All the evidence today shows that the crime was committed against me...and still is being committed against me. What has happened in the past and what's happening right now make it a very good bet that it may happen to you tomorrow. [This, in a nutshell, is Carter’s “I was framed” theory.]

Penthouse: When did the harassment begin?

Carter: As far as I can recall, it began in January, February, and March of 1964. Before that time, I was Rubin Carter that everybody loved, a good guy. Muhammed Ali and I once had to appear in front of the New York Boxing Commission up in Albany when some people were asking for the abolishment of boxing. Muhammed was the good guy who showed what boxing was doing for him. Then I was put on display as the former bad guy who had come out of prison, and I explained what boxing had done for me. I was the black American pie at that time.

But the moment that I got rid of my manager, Carmen Tedeschi, because he had beaten me out of all this money, [again, we have only Carter’s word for this] then the news media came down on me. They started saying I had left the man who made me - even though each time the bell rang, he grabbed the stool and went and sat down outside the ring.

Penthouse: In other words, you were challenging the boxing establishment?

Carter: Yes. Before that, I would never say much. My manager would do all the talking. He was a publicity hound, and he would always bring up my past - that "my man was in prison" stuff. I let it go, and that I believe now, was a mistake on my part. [Actually, if you check out the Sports Illustrated ‘63 article, you’ll see that Carter does a lot of talking and he's the one who plays up his violent side, and Tedeschi who downplays it. Tedeschi says, “he’s a kitten with a heart of gold.”] Because the moment I got rid of him and started speaking for myself, that's when people started saying, "He's challenging boxing." From that time on, everybody really started coming down on me. [Perhaps Carter was criticized by the sports writers of the day, but what does that have to do with being framed for murder?]

But my real problems began when the Saturday Evening Post printed what I said about the Harlem [little] fruit [stand] riot that took place in April 1964. I said that black people ought to protect themselves against the invasions of white cops in black neighborhoods - cops who were beating little children down in the streets - and that black people ought to have died in the streets right there if it was necessary to protect their children. [Wrong. No. Not true. He did not say this in the Saturday Evening Post, or in print anywhere else, for that matter. See the article for yourself. He was quoted as saying, “let’s get our guns and get us some of those cops.”] When a reporter - and a very good friend of mine, or so I thought - asked me about this Harlem fruit riot, I told him how I felt about it. None of this was supposed to be printed, but he saw a story in it and had it printed in the Saturday Evening Post. Well, when that came out the police throughout the world thought I had declared war on them...and when war is declared, truth is always the first casualty. It was at that point that police throughout the country came down on me. There were times when I was arrested three or four times just to put the headline RUBIN CARTER AGAINST THE POLICE in the papers. [This is the second part of the “I was framed” theory. Carter is saying that his arrests during this period were as a direct result of the Saturday Evening Post article and were frame ups and harassment. Is it true? Read on]. This is a very skillful maneuver to turn the victim into the criminal and the criminals into the victims. Because not only did it alienate me from white people - the papers said I was a racist bent on killing all blue-eyed devils - [no quotes. Which papers? When?] but it made black people scared of me too. So I was isolated, hung out there. Meanwhile, I'm trying to fight, trying to go on with my career, and I'm catching pure hell from everybody.

Penthouse: Were you arrested outside of your hometown, Paterson? [another spontaneous, unscripted question from the Zilgster].

Carter: Yes, in Hackensack, New Jersey. I was riding down the highway and my car broke down. I pushed it off the road and walked on down the highway hoping to find someone to help me get it fixed.So when this police car came up on the other side of the highway, I jumped over the viaduct and said, "Man, am I glad to see you. Would you take me to a service station?" He said, "Sure, come on with me, get in the car." So I got in the car and he said, "Let's stop by your car to see if we can start it." He had jumper cables in the back. We pulled up to my car and on the side it had my name in silver letters, Rubin Hurricane Carter. Well, when we couldn't start the car, he said, "I'll take you down to a telephone booth." But he took me straight to the police station and got me in there with all his buddies. And he said, "You know who this is? This is Rubin Hurricane Carter," and all of them pulled guns on me. Then they locked me up and charged me with breaking into a meat-packing place somewhere in the city. [The Hackensack arrest happened EIGHT MONTHS BEFORE the Saturday Evening Post article came out, so there can be no connection between Carter's threat to shoot cops and being harassed in Hackensack. In his autobiography, as in this interview, Carter implies that the Hacksensack incident happened after the SEP article]. I stayed there about seven or eight hours, knowing that I was going to prison if I couldn't get a message out to anybody. They wouldn't let me make any telephone calls, but that morning a black police officer came into the station, saw me sitting in that cell, and he said, "What the hell are you doing here?" I explained to him and he was angry. He began cussing and finally nobody knew who put me in jail or anything, and they let me go. [The actual charge was for "disorderly conduct" and "failure to give good account," not for break and enter.] But that was the type of thing that I was running into constantly.

Penthouse: When you were in Los Angeles for a fight, you were required to report to the L.A. Police Department. You wrote in your book that the police chief, William Parker, told you that the FBI had kept close tabs on you. [This story is bogus, Parker didn't work with the FBI.] What about other examples of harassment by the FBI or other federal agents?

Carter: I had a few friends who were Secret Service men and federal marshals, and they told me about the file they had on me. They were following me around. [Peter Rush, a Secret Service Agent who was friends with Carter, told me in July 2001, that he "had no knowledge of any conspiracy" against Carter. Carter named Rush in this autobiography as someone who had warned him in advance about the plot to crush Carter.] Each state that I went in to fight, the moment I got into town the police rode down on me, fingerprinted me and mugged me, and I would have to carry this card attesting to the fact that I was an ex-convict. The harassment was steady...constant.

Penthouse: When you arrived in various towns, did the authorities come and get you?

Carter: Yes. They knew I was coming, and someone had to contact them that I was coming. [At this point in time, Carter had several outstanding charges against him for assault and disorderly conduct. It may have been a condition of his bail that he report to the authorities wherever he went.]

Penthouse: Do you believe the FBI has a file on you?

Carter: Absolutely. There is no doubt about it. I remember when I was in Los Angeles and got off the plane that day, I saw this beautiful woman...I just happened to look at her and then kept on going. But in the air terminal I saw the same woman again. She was always behind me. And when I got to the motel on Olympic Boulevard in L.A., she was at the motel. I didn't connect it with anything, but I kept seeing this same woman. And then, when Chief Parker called me up at the motel and told me I'd better come down to the police station to register as an ex-convict, there she was - trying to hide in his office. [If female operatives were as inept as this one, no wonder J. Edgar Hoover didn’t hire female agents for the FBI. Or -- here’s a thought -- maybe the story is nonsense. ] That's when he told me that the FBI had been following me every step that I had taken in Los Angeles.

Penthouse: You participated in Martin Luther King's March on Washington in 1963. [So he says.] Yet in 1965, when Reverend King asked you to participate in the march in Selma, Alabama, you didn't. Why was that?

Carter: Because of threats on my life. I was catching pure hell in the North and the West and all the other places I was going, and I knew that if I ever went to Alabama nobody was going to protect me down there. Dr. King was talking about nonviolence, about being peaceful - laying down on the street while police dogs were biting you and horses were stomping on you and cops were beating you over the head. Well, I knew that I could never be nonviolent. I'm a peaceful man, but that doesn't mean I'm nonviolent. If you will be nonviolent with me, then I will be nonviolent with you. But if you are going to put some violence on me, I'm going to whip it right back on you. [Carter was in Europe at the time he claimed to have received the phone call from Dr. King.]

Penthouse: Do you believe that agents provocateurs were involved?

Carter: Well, I really didn't know then. But, yes, I believe it now. [Notice Zilg doesn’t say, “what threats on your life. From whom?" or even, "do you know what 'agents provocateurs' means?"]

Penthouse: With your beliefs about self-defense, how did you handle all the harassment from the police and the FBI?

Carter: I had to hire an adviser to handle the police. This adviser went with me everywhere, but I stayed out of the country and up in my training camp so much that he got tired. He was married and had children, and his wife got tired of him staying away nine months out of the year. So ultimately he left me too. [Strangely, the man who Carter hired as his advisor -- Elwood Tuck -- was the same man who provided the incendiary quote about shooting cops to the Saturday Evening Post. Tuck was actually the source of the problem. Carter also said of Tuck in The 16th Round, that he was so fearful of the police that he wouldn’t stand up for Carter at the first trial. So why was Tuck the police advisor?]

They were isolating me. And this was before black people were proud to be black, you know. There was no "Black Power" then, so I was hung out there by myself, and people would say, "Well, that crazy nigger is in the papers again - messing with some cops again." I was seen as messing with all the police forces in the country. During all that time I had to go to other countries to fight because the cops were really coming down hard on me at home.

Penthouse: So you were actually forced into exile in sense?

Carter: Yes. I had to go to Africa to fight. [By the time of his biography, Carter came up
with a whole different reason for why he had to go to Africa. He was smuggling guns!] I had to go to London, to Paris, to South America - just to stay away from here. It was brutalizing me, mentally, because in fighting if you aren't in shape, both mentally and physically, you're no good. [Carter blames his declining boxing career on police harassment. An alternate explanation is that he was drinking, carousing in bars and neglecting his training. For example, he was arrested in an illegal after-hours nightclub at five in the morning, four days before a scheduled fight -- not exactly the breakfast of champions. He was arrested at least twice for barroom brawling.]

Penthouse: What were the circumstances of your arrest for the Lafayette Bar & Grill murders?

Carter: It was about one o'clock in the morning and I was riding down the street - I'm a night man, you know. When you train in the day, you sleep all night; and when you come out of training, your body clock gets all messed up. So I was riding down the street one night....Now, just that afternoon I had seen in the papers that they had police on rooftops allegedly guarding some witness to these murders (that was Bello, I found out later), and everybody knew it - so if I had committed that crime I would have been long gone. Well, that night I went to turn a corner, and the next thing I knew there must have been 20,000 police shotguns in my face. Just that quick. Wow! "Keep your hands on the wheel," someone said, so I kept my hands on the wheel until they handcuffed me behind my back and put me in a car.

Now, the police station was only a block away, but they didn't take me there. They took me up into Paterson mountains - about ten cars of detectives, all with unmarked cars. And I was sitting handcuffed in the back - with two detectives up front and two detectives in the back. They took me up into those mountains, and they parked. Nobody said anything to me. We just sat there. I could hear these loudspeakers...these microphones, going back and forth, chattering angrily...very angrily. You could see policemen walking around out there with shotguns. No light anywhere, just a dark road. And I thought, "My God, these people are going to kill me!" We stayed there about an hour - just sitting there, nobody saying anything to me. Then, all of a sudden somebody on the car radio said, "Okay, bring him in." It seemed like they were very disappointed, as if somebody had talked them out of killing me - that there would be a big investigation or something if they killed me - which wouldn't have meant shit to me. I would've been dead! [Interesting story. Don’t know if it’s true that he was held up on a mountain, but it’s doubtful that he was going to be murdered. More likely the detectives were worried that news of Carter's arrest would stir up trouble in the black community. But it didn't].

Penthouse: After you were picked up on the night of the murder, and none of the witnesses were able to identify you and John Artis, you took a lie-detector test that proved your innocence. Why wasn't that used as evidence in your trial? [Artis and Carter failed the lie detector test.]

Carter: At that time, in 1966, the lie-detector test wasn't admissible in court.

Penthouse: Weren't there other white cars that were stopped by the police? Carter: Yes. In the court records cops said, "I stopped this car here, I stopped this car there," but mine was the only car that they stopped and brought to the scene of the crime. [Again, because it matched the description given by the eyewitnesses.]

Penthouse: During the trial, were any of the defense witnesses threatened?

Carter: Yes. My God, yes!

Penthouse: Who were they? Can you give us any specific names?

Carter: John "Bucks" Royster. He was the third person in the car with me on the murder
night when the police stopped us.

Penthouse: He was threatened? By whom?

Carter: By the police. [You can read what actually happened when Royster testified
here.]

Penthouse: And who else?

Carter: My sparring partner, Wild Bill Hardney. He was run out of town. He lived in
Newark at the time; and when the Paterson police knew that he was coming as a witness,
they got in touch with the Newark police and the Newark police ran him out of town.
[Hardney says he left town because he was wanted on child support charges. At the
second trial, Hardney did testify. He testified that Carter had been pressuring him to lie and provide a false alibi. He said that he was not with Carter that night. Read what happened when Carter was out of jail, awaiting his second trial and he and Hardney met, in this article by journalist Paul Mulshine.]

Penthouse: Is it true that of 400 potential jurors, only eight were black? And that the only
selected juror who was black - a West Indian - was the only one dismissed?

Carter: Yes, that's right. Ain't that something? You know, those are astronomical odds -
that out of fourteen people on the jury the only black man would be taken off! [Carter is
suggesting that the draw was fixed. Another allegation that would be tough to prove or disprove. ]

Penthouse: With the recantations of the prosecution's key witnesses, Bello and Bradley,
and all the other facts that have come to light about the suppression of evidence by the
police - for instance, discrepancies concerning the time the police turned in the bullet they
claimed to have found in your car - [this is the defense version of events. You don’t get a
chance to hear the prosecution side in this article] and with so much more new evidence
crying for a new trial, why do you think Judge Larner turned down your appeal?

Carter: Well, of course, Judge Larner turned down the appeal because he secured the
conviction - and Larner wasn't even a judge before he tried my case.

Penthouse: You mean that was his first case as a judge.

Carter: That was his first and he wasn't even from the same county as I was. You see, in
1966 I was the number-one middleweight contender and an international figure, and
everybody in Passaic County - well, everybody in New Jersey - knew that this was a
frame-up. None of the judges in Passaic County would touch this case because they knew
it was a farce. [Carter’s opinion only, of course. He can make any aspect of the case
look like part of the "conspiracy." If the judge had been from Passaic County that would
have looked just as sinister to Carter.] But they still had to try me, so the governor of
New Jersey at that time, Hughes, appointed Larner, at that time a lawyer from Essex
County, on September 21, 1966 to go into Passaic County and try my case as his first
criminal trial. Now Hughes did this for various reasons, but specially because he knew that
Raymond Brown was my attorney. [Another reason, perhaps the only reason, that a judge was brought in from another county was because of a severe shortages of judges at the time in Passaic County, caused by a political feud between the Republicans and the Democrats.] Well, Brown was the best criminal lawyer in the state and a black man. And Larner and Ray Brown were bitter enemies - they had been in cases together before. So they sent Larner in there to hold Brown down and get me convicted. Larner acted like a prosecutor from the bench, and the moment he got me convicted they shipped him back to Essex County. They put him into civil law because he didn't have enough criminal trial experience.

Penthouse: You mean they let him try your case, then they said he didn't have enough
experience and sent him back to civil court? [Another allegation this writer doesn’t check
out before publishing].

Carter: Yes, civil court in another county. So therein lie our political implications: Hughes, who was governor of the state of New Jersey at the time and who is now the chief justice of the State Supreme Court. We also have Brendan Byrne, who is the governor of New Jersey now; he was in cahoots with Larner at that time. When these two criminals testified for the state in 1966, they had nine or ten armed robberies throughout New Jersey to answer for. Well, Brendan Byrne, who was then the Essex County prosecutor, went around to all the judges in his county and had them quash all those indictments because they testified against me. [Bello and Bradley did receive some leniency and special consideration as to which prison they went to, etc. Bradley, for example wasn't sent to Trenton State, where Carter was.] So there you see the political ramifications.

Penthouse: Larner was from the same county as Byrne?

Carter: Yes. So when you ask why did Larner deny that appeal, well, he's the guardian of
that conviction. He said right from the start of the hearing, "Why should the State be
deprived of this conviction?" Those were his exact words - not why two human beings
should be deprived of their lives because of vicious and prefabricated lies. Because I will not say that I'm guilty, or act like I'm guilty, I am a threat to the administration, to the politicians. You know, there are brutal people in control of these prisons. There is no accountability all the way up the ladder. We are just left here with these people, and they are vicious. There have been several instances in the last four or five months of people being brutalized to death right here in Trenton State Prison. [Carter attacked a mentally challenged inmate named Wallace and threatened to kill him in 1970.] This is the snake pit of the politicians. This is the place where they kill you, and that's why they moved me here after the Rahway rebellion. I have as many problems with the inmates as I do with the guards and the administration. I'm like a man sitting on a high fence at noon. This place is very dangerous for me, from both sides of the fence. If for a moment either the administration or the inmates here felt as though Rubin Carter was weakening in his fight to any degree, they would pounce on me and wipe me out. It's very dangerous for me here.

I'm blind in one eye because of a lack of proper medical attention in this Trenton State
Prison, and I know that if I get sick in here I'm going to die. I know that because it's what
the administration wants. They showed me that very clearly when they blinded me in my
eye.

Penthouse: What did happen to your eye?

Carter: I don't know. When I came into this jail, I had perfect vision - no problems ever
with my eyes even when I was a prize-fighter going through all that rugged stuff. I never
had problems with my eyes. But then I came to this jail, and when I was here about three
weeks I had an examination - at that time they gave every person an examination; now
they don't give you anything - and the man who gave me the examination said I had a
detached retina and that if he didn't reattach it, I would slowly lose my sight in my right
eye. [Just pause a moment here and notice that Carter does not mention the dramatic
story about “going in the Hole” and living on bread and water, in the dark, for three
months upon entry to prison, as portrayed in the movie. It is not mentioned anywhere in this interview. He doesn't mention it in his 1975 autobiography, either. The “in the hole” story makes its first appearance in a 1992 interview. The eye operation story has also changed over the years.] The doctor who operated wanted to take me out to his hospital - St. Francis Hospital here in Trenton, where other prisoners go for major operations - but the administration wouldn’t allow me to go. Everybody else could go but not Rubin Carter. They made that doctor bring his tools and his nurses into this slaughterhouse here and operate on me in this butcher shop. After the operation he prescribed different medications that I should take to help heal this eye. But the prison wouldn’t give them to me.

Penthouse: You were denied your medication?

Carter: I was denied my medication, and therefore I ultimately went blind in that eye.
[After all this time, difficult to check out the truth of this allegation.] Every month after
that I used to go to the eye doctor to have him examine my eye to make sure that my bad
eye could never damage my good eye - because all I had now was one eye. When I went
to this doctor in February 1974 he looked in my eye and jumped back, flabbergasted. “My
God,” he said, “you’ve got stitches in your eye!” All these years my eye used to secrete a
lot of mucus, and every time I’d go to sleep and wake up in the morning I’d have to pry
my eye open. I thought it was mucus escaping from my eye, but actually it was stitches
that they had neglected to take out after seven years.

Right away, I wrote my lawyer. Then the prison administration told me that they were
going to take me out to the hospital at Rahway to remove the sutures. They wanted to
get me out of the prison quick to get rid of that evidence. So I said, “No, I’m not going
for that.” But all I really wanted was to be able to see, so when they said they’d reattach
my retina, I said okay.

I went to New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and they took me into the
operating room, put me under as if they were going to reattach my retina, removed the
sutures, and then sent me back. They didn’t even attempt to reattach my retina. [Carter
is accusing the prison system of deliberating blinding him. Why did it take two operations
and refusal of medicine to do it?]

At that point, I saw that if something isn’t done here about the constant lack of medical attention, the brutality, the maiming and mutilating of people - then everybody’s going to die...... [Discusses prison conditions]

.......Penthouse: During the Rahway rebellion, you stated in your book that “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.” Do you still believe that?

Carter: Absolutely! It is still so, right here in this prison, in the whole state of New
Jersey, Rubin Carter’s name is at the top. [Both Carter’s friends and critics concede
that he has a king-sized ego.] So if anything happens here, they are going to kill me - and
they will be justified in the public mind, because all they have to say is, “He is here for
murder.” That’s all they have to do. It’s like the time they came down on me at Rahway
at twelve o’clock midnight with shotguns and machine guns and movie cameras. They
brought those movie cameras there just to show that if I had balked for a second, they
would have shot me down and said, “See this is why we shot him down, because he is a
murderer.” And people would have believed that. [You’d think he would have wanted
the movie cameras there. Imagine if the guards didn’t have them.]

Penthouse: You have studied law while in prison. Based on this, what would you have
done differently in handling your defense? For example, at your first hearing for a new
trial, what did you actually ask your former lawyers from the State Public Defender’s
Office to do that they refused to do? [Another "spontaneous" question.]

Carter: I asked them to bring in Governor Byrne and the five judges in five different
counties who sentenced Bello and Bradley for those other crimes. I wanted to bring in the
five prosecutors of these countries because we have evidence - hard evidence - that letters
had been sent out by the Passaic Country prosecutor to the prosecutors of those five
counties saying, “Go to court for Bello and Bradley because they got Rubin Carter.”

Penthouse: Was one of those Brendan Byrne?

Carter: One of those was Byrne and Byrne did go. We have evidence that says that
Byrne went, and we have transcripts in which Judge Camarado from Essex County says,
“The prosecutor called me up this morning, Prosecutor Byrne, and told me to dispense
with this case.”

Now, at the hearing, Judge Larner had to decide whether to believe Bello and Bradley, as
opposed to the prosecutor. Naturally he was going to believe the prosecutor. So I told
the lawyers, "If you bring in Governor Byrne, if you bring in the five judges, if you bring in
the five prosecutors, then who is Larner going to believe in terms of credibility? Is he
going to believe the governor, the five judges, the five prosecutors, or is he going to
believe this prosecutor over there? Make him make a decision - make him make a
determination on the credibility of the governor.”

But these lawyers (from the State Public Defender’s Office) had entered into a stipulation,
without either my knowledge or consent, that they would not call in my witnesses - the
governor, the five judges or the five prosecutors.

Penthouse: Who did they make that deal with?

Carter: With Larner and the Passaic County prosecutor. Now I know about stipulations,
so when I found out I told them, “I want you to go back to the court and tell Larner I
want that stipulation withdrawn immediately.”

Penthouse: Was that stipulation removed?

Carter: No.

Penthouse: Judge Larner refused to remove the stipulation?

Carter. Yes. So they did not put Fred Hogan on the stand - Hogan was their man who
had investigated the case. They did not put Selwyn Raab (of the New York Times) on the
stand. They did not put Hal Levinson (of WNEW-TV) on the stand. All those men had
made independent investigations of the case. They did not put anybody else on the stand -
just Bello and Bradley. Just so the judge would only have Bello and Bradley’s credibility
to deal with. They made it easy for him. [I don’t have any details about these allegations
against his lawyers, but Cal Deal's website shows that Hogan, Raab and Levinson did take the stand at Carter's second trial -- to face the allegation that they bribed Bello to recant his testimony.]

Penthouse: Now that your case is beyond Judge Larner, do you think there’s a better
chance for a retrial?

Carter: No, because the case is still sitting right here in New Jersey. The New Jersey
judicial system is part and parcel of the thinking of Larner. I don’t believe that I will ever
get a fair shake in New Jersey - unless the people demand it. The case must go to higher
courts and ultimately to the federal circuit in Philadelphia, and then I think I might get a
fair shot. But that will probably take years. [Prophetic! It did take years and Carter's second trial verdict was overturned by a federal judge.]

Penthouse: What can people outside do for your case?

Carter: Well, if the people aren’t from New Jersey, the political system here in this state
isn’t going to worry - unless everybody gets together and says, “We demand justice - not
because of Rubin Carter but because there is a right and a wrong here.” Open the book - let us all see them. If people would say that about this case too, they would have to do it, and that is all I want. I don’t want them to just let me out free and pat me on the back. No, I don’t want that. I want to prove that I am not guilty. [In the end, of course, Carter was let out without proving he was not guilty.]

Penthouse: What has Governor Byrne’s attitude been so far towards a new trial?

Carter: When this case was first publicized a year ago, there were several articles in the
paper, and one quoted Governor Byrne. Someone asked him why he wouldn’t appoint an
investigative body to look into Passaic County. And he said, “Well, nobody ever got a
retrial in New Jersey on recanted testimony.” And that’s true, because that’s what the law
is in New Jersey; nobody has ever got it because all the recanted testimony in New Jersey
has always been codefendants recanting on other codefendants. [Carter got an gubernatorial investigation. The investigator, Congressman Eldridge Hawkins, concluded that Carter and Artis had been involved in the murders].

But this case is vastly different. First of all Bello and Bradley were state witnesses, not
codefendants. I had never seen Bello or Bradley in my life, other than when they brought
me to trial. And they had never seen me before, other than when the police brought me to
the scene of the crime on the night of the murders. On that night, they told the police that
they could not recognize the people even if they had seen them. From the night of the
crime up until five months afterwards, the police kept Bello and Bradley locked away in
protective custody, [not true, this even contradicts what Carter says in his book] grilling them and coercing them, and promising them rewards and leniency on their armed robbery charges — until finally they said, “Okay, it was Rubin Carter and John Artis.” [you can read the police report here] So what we have now are not recanted statements. What they are doing today is actually going back to their original statements.

Penthouse: Does Byrne know this?

Carter: Of course Byrne knows this! His pet phrase is, “It’s in the courts; let the courts
decide it.” But the courts take years.

Recantation was the very thing that exposed Watergate. Recantation and plea bargaining.
That was the only thing that uncovered Watergate — so you see exactly what recantations
and plea bargaining really are. First, each of those people, Magruder and all the rest of
them, said, “No, we didn’t do that,” but then they started saying, “Yes, we did do it.”
That is a recanted statement. And all the federal judges — Sirica and all the rest of them
— believed the recanted statements. So why can’t they believe the recanted statements
here? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. And that’s all I ask. I ask for a
new trial. I never had a trial, because all I had was a kangaroo court, with none of my
peers on the jury, with a misinformed, all-white jury that was in the heat of passion at the
time. I just want a trial that is free from perjured testimony and manufactured evidence.
That’s all. Give me a trial and I’m willing to accept that. I don’t want anything else. END

Afterword: Uncritical coverage like this, along with sympathetic New York Times articles and Carter's own autobiography, helped make Carter a cause célèbre. But even before the second trial, Carter's publicity machine sputtered and failed.

According to his biography, the money raised by Bob Dylan and other celebrities "evaporated thanks to poor financial controls. While the [Night of the Hurricane] Madison Square Garden concert generated $217,000 in revenue and the performers donated their time, only $104,000 remained after paying for hotel bills, a cast party, and promotions. A month later, a second fund-raising concert at the Astrodome in Houston generated $397,787 in ticket sales -- but lost money due to unaccounted for expenses."

Rubin Carter got his second trial in 1976, but he decided not to take the stand and testify on his own behalf. His alibi witnesses from the first trial testified that they had lied when they said Carter was with them at the time of the murders. Bello returned, albeit somewhat tarnished, as a prosecution witness. The prosecutors introduced motive: they theorized that Carter and Artis had killed the Lafayette Grill victims as revenge for the slaying of a black bartender by a white man, earlier that evening. Carter and Artis were re-convicted and sent back to jail, where Carter continued to appeal his conviction.

Another thought on FBI harassment: Anybody who was anybody had an FBI file on them during the 60's. But I don't think Carter was political enough for the FBI to have been interested in him. His biographer, James Hirsch, says the FBI had a file on him "at least by 1967" which is a vague way of disguising the fact that there's no record of a file BEFORE 1967. By 1967 he was in jail. And from the details Hirsch provides, it appears that the FBI file was really a discussion of whether Carter's trial could spark civil unrest in the black community, not a file investigating Carter.

Thanks to Cal Deal for the photos and permission to link to his website. Cal also interviewed Carter in 1975, but unlike so many journalists who have covered this story, Cal went on to fact-check what Carter said about his case, against the actual record.

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