About the Canadians

More twisted alibis

More things Norman Jewison got wrong

Norman Jewison felt if he’d left the scene in, it would have shut the movie’s critics up, because the cabby was such a good alibi: “This scene, if it had been left in the film, probably would have stopped a lot of the controversy that arose around this film.”

The Cabdriver Alibi

The Canadians thought they'd found proof that Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was at the Nite Spot when the murders occurred -- but the cab driver's story contradicts Carter's court testimony. If you believe the cab driver, then Carter perjured himself in court about his alibi.

• Carter says he never gave his car keys to anyone, but the cabby says Carter left them out in the street in his Dodge Polara.

• At the time the cabby supposedly saw Carter in the nightclub, Carter testified that he was giving two women a ride home.

In the book Lazarus and the Hurricane, a mysterious cabdriver approaches Rubin Carter’s cousin Ed some eighteen years after the Lafayette Grill murders and says that he knows that Carter is wrongfully imprisoned, because he, the cabdriver, was at the Nite Spot nightclub on the early morning of June 17th, 1966 and he saw Carter there -- right before he heard the police bulletin about the murders on his police scanner.

The Canadians [a group of people who dedicated themselves to freeing Carter) were very excited because this fit their theory that the police lied about the time of the murders -- the Canadians think the murders must have happened around 2:15 and the racist police said the murders happened at 2:30, just to mess up Carter's alibi.

Even though nearly two decades have gone by since the murders, they manage to find two more witnesses who back up the cabby’s story, who can remember the incident exactly and even remember, word for word, what someone said to the cabby on the sidewalk and what the cabby said in the nightclub.

Unfortunately, the cabby wouldn’t file an affidavit, and his story couldn’t be used in court. He was afraid of coming forward, say the Canadians, because the authorities might make trouble for him and he'd lose his job (keeping his incredibly rare and valuable job driving a cab was worth two innocent men going to prison for life). The Canadians do not name this sterling citizen. They never give us the names of the two witnesses, either.

Is there anything to this tale?

Norman Jewison, the director of The Hurricane, thought so. He filmed a scene with one of the Canadians hearing this exciting information from a cabdriver -- that Carter was in the Nite Spot at the time of the murders. But the cabdriver's big scene was cut from the final version of the movie because Jewison felt it “proved” Carter’s innocence, and thus destroyed the dramatic tension. The only remnant of this part of the story in the movie is that a cab driver comes in during the nightclub scene, and asks if anyone ordered a cab.

In Lazarus and the Hurricane, the cabdriver says that he was driving by the Nite Spot late on the night of the murders but couldn’t get around a white Dodge that was double parked and blocking the street. The keys were in the ignition but bystanders warned him not to touch the car, because it belonged to the fearsome “Hurricane” Carter, who was inside the club. As the Canadians explained:

The cabby then went inside the Nite Spot, which was busy. He found Carter and asked him to move his car.... When the cabby got back into his cab, he heard over a police band on his radio that there was “trouble” at the Lafayette Bar. After driving on with his fare, he heard sirens.

This, the Canadians exulted, “was the alibi of iron-clad alibis... the only troubling point was why Rubin hadn’t remembered the incident himself.”

It sure is troubling, because right after the murders, Carter was specifically asked by Lt. Det. Vince DeSimone, if anyone but he could have used that white Dodge. Carter’s car matched the description of the killers’ getaway car. DeSimone asked Carter, had he lent his car to anyone that night? Had he given anyone the keys? No, answered Carter. He'd had the keys in his possession all evening.

A memo prepared before the second trial points out that "Carter in his Grand Jury testimony given two weeks after the event was exhaustively questioned concerning his control of the 1966 white Dodge during all times that evening, and persistently insisted that no one else could have utilized it."

If in fact he had left it double parked in the street with the keys in the ignition, this would have been the perfect “out” for him, throwing suspicion off of him and onto some unknown assailant. The Lafayette Bar is only five short blocks from the Nite Spot where Carter was. If he had left his keys in the car, even briefly, it seems certain that Carter would have remembered this fact before the Grand Jury hearings and played it up for all it was worth.

The Canadians manage to ignore this contradictory piece of testimony from Carter himself, which pretty well puts the kibosh on the cab driver’s whole story.

The deleted scene from the movie

In the book Lazarus and the Hurricane, the mysterious cab driver is “a white man originally from the South,” but he’s transformed into a black man for the movie. Director Jewison doesn’t seem to even be aware that the Canadians’ unnamed cabdriver was white. Since Jewison's cabby is black, he can patronizingly make excuses for the driver's craven moral cowardice in not coming forward:

“(the cabdriver) never gave any testimony, he had disappeared, he was frightened, he indicates there was certain pressures, you gotta remember this case was taking place in the sixties in the civil rights revolution in America where there was tremendous fear and pressure between black and white communities and between law enforcement officials and the media and ordinary African Americans in the street.....”

Actually, the Canadians' cabdriver never “disappeared” -- no one was looking for him because no one knew this potential witness existed. He only came forward years after the murders.

Here’s the deleted scene, complete with the corn pone dialogue and accent the enlightened, sensitive movie makers stuck on the poor actor (Gary DeWitt Marshall) playing the frightened cabdriver.

He’s talking with Sam (or is it Terry? Whatever.) one of the Canadians:

“No, don’t drive cabs no mo.’ Can’t take them freaks like I used to. Too many crazies out there, you know.”

“You remember seeing him that night?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“But you knew who he was, right?”

“Sure I did, ev’ybody did. Now, I was a big Hurricane Carter fan. Saw him fight Johnny Torres the year before. Man, what a puncher, what a left he had.”

“That time you say you saw him, it was 2:30 in the morning?”

“Man, I don’t know what time it was.”

“But didn’t you tell the --”

“Heard a call come over the police radio talkin’ about three people got killed over on Lafayette street.”

“And then...”

“Look it man, I don’t want no trouble, this here’s a small town.”

“I’m not trying to make trouble for you, Mr. Gardner, it’s just that Rubin Carter’s been in prison for nineteen years for --”

“I’m going to tell you this one time and then I’m never going to tell you again. and if you tell anyone, I’ll say you wuz lying... I heard about the killing, got out of my cab, walked into the Nite Spot, and I’m looking right at Hurricane Carter standing there in the crowd.”

“Mr. Gardner, what are you so afraid of?”

“Man, I already done told you.”

Twisted alibis

The Canadians have simply succeeded in putting Carter in two places at once. The time that he was supposedly talking to the cabby, (around 2:20 a.m.) was the same time he was giving two ladies a ride home, according to their sworn court testimony. Either the exact times matter or they don't. He either was with Mrs. McGuire and Mrs. Mapes at that time, or he wasn't. And if he wasn't, why did he testify he was?

Interesting note: a cabdriver did come forward to the police in the early days of the investigation. He claimed he had given a woman a ride that night and she had been muttering suspicious things. This woman was identified as Annie Ruth Haggins, a woman with mental problems who soon had the police searching all the nearby rivers because she said she’d been given the murder weapon and had thrown it off a bridge. She kept changing her story, however, and the police finally decided she wasn’t believable.

Finally, I’m informed that New Jersey cab drivers weren’t allowed to have police scanners in their cabs. If that’s the case, how did the mysterious cab driver hear the call about the Lafayette Grill murders?