Carter now makes his living as a motivational speaker, talking about his "wrongful conviction" for triple murder

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and his supporters have flung a lot of accusations at the prosecution in the Lafayette Grill murder case, which have been taken at face value.  Do the accusations check out?  
The answer is: No.

"Our information about Carter's boxing record and civil rights record is not there to disparage; it is there because we want to show you why we believe you can't take the man at his word. If he will distort his importance as a boxer, what do you think he will do about murder?" -- Cal Deal

Carter's alibi

• Carter's alibi and John Artis' alibi, given on the night of the murders, contradicted each other

• Carter's alibis in his autobiography and his official biography, contradict one another and contradict his alibi testimony at his first trial.

• For more, see The cabdriver alibi

Carter's explanations about the night of the murder

• He says he was pulled over just because he was a black man. Not true.

• He says that one of the survivors said he wasn't
  the killer. Not true.

Carter says he was deliberately framed for triple murder because he was a black activist and the police wanted to shut him up.

Check out Carter's falsehoods about :

speaking out against police brutality

the Selma March

the Watts Riots

gun smuggling

The examples that Carter gives of how the police harassed him, are false and bogus

Carter blames most of his troubles on a quote about shooting cops in the Saturday Evening Post.  The quote probably did upset a lot of cops.  Elsewhere, Carter's tried to spin the quote as saying that he, like Malcolm X, spoke out for the right of blacks to defend themselves.  Read the actual article and decide for yourself if Carter was another Malcolm X.

In his biography, Carter changed the dates of the occasions he was arrested to "prove" that the police harassed him as a result of the Saturday Evening Post article. His legal troubles (arrests of assault and disorderly conduct) arose long before the Post article was printed.

In The 16th Round, Carter claims the police framed him for illegal gambling.  But he changed the wording of the newspaper article in his book, to hide the fact that he was just one of several patrons picked up in an illegal nightclub, and changed the date of the arrest to hide the fact that he was out drinking a few days before an important fight.

Carter claims that he was tailled by the FBI and harassed wherever he went. Like the time he went to Los Angeles. Find out why his story doesn't hold up.

Carter's accusations against the police, like Al Sharpton's in the Tawana Brawley case, are a hoax.

Penthouse Interview

In this lengthy Penthouse interview, Carter lays out the "I was framed" story, and the interviewer falls for it, hook, line and sinker.  This article is full of misleading and false remarks.

Carter's Tall Tales

Carter claims that he smuggled guns to South Africa to help activist Steve Biko fight apartheid.  Baloney.

Visit the Carter quote gallery for more tall tales.  Like how he escaped from juvenile detention in a hail of bullets.

More tall tales in the 16th Round, Carter's autobiography.

Coulda been the champion of the world? Check out his boxing record.

Tales of Horror
from Prison  

Ten years in solitary!  Fed only bread and water! This is what Carter tells impressionable students whenever he gives a talk at a university.  Is it true?  No.

he says he was framed when he was an eleven-year-old kid by a molester who attacked him -- in fact, he was 14 years old when he and some other boys were convicted of assaulting and robbing a man.

In The 16th Round, he says was framed by a prison guard. But he gave different versions of his escape from juvenvile detention in other interviews.

he says he was framed for playing craps

he says he was framed for triple murder

he says he was framed for beating a woman while out on bail:

"Carter has given several versions of what happened that night in his motel room. Here's a surprise: He was framed! (Carolyn) Kelley faked the beating because they were having an affair -- if you believe Carter's version in his authorized biography "The Hurricane." Or maybe they weren't having an affair, if you believe what he told WNEW-TV's Marvin Scott in June 1976. Or she made it up because she wanted to blackmail Carter out of $250,000 (Scott interview) or $100,000 ("Hurricane" book)." -- Paul Mulshine

In the 16th Round, Carter complains that the newspaper coverage against him was biassed and that he was portrayed as a homicidal racist. Visit Cal Deal's site for 50 original news clippings from the first trial and judge for yourself if this is true.

As the next section will show, the only person who portrayed Carter as a gun-happy, sadistic maniac, was -- Carter himself.

Meet young Rubin Carter in this 1963 Sports Illustrated interview -- it starts with him blowing a robin apart with his shotgun. Carter says his managers emphasized his criminal past for publicity purposes, in effect blaming them for sticking him with a "mad dog" image that made it easier for the police to frame him for murder: In the Penthouse interview he said:

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.

Selwyn Raab repeated this claim in his influential 1974 New York Times article, saying that Carter's criminal "background had been frequently publicized by ring promoters to enhance his fierce reputation as a fighter." But compare the Carter you meet in the Sports Illustrated article with the peaceful, horse-ridin' Carter in the Dylan lyric (above).

Clearly, in both this article and especially in the 1964 Saturday Evening Post article (quoted at left), it's Carter who talks trash, not his handlers.

Carter writes in his autobiography, The 16th Round, that while he was in jail awaiting trial for triple murder, "One morning about three days after my arrest... a trusty in charge of the sandwiches for the day slipped a sealed envelope into my cell and hurried away before I could stop him. The note related the how, what and why of my being in jail, and also reported the method that the State intended to use to make sure I never got out again... the message had been sent to me by Arthur Dexter Bradley.... he wrote me that the conspiracy to charge me with murder had materialized in August...."

It's incredible to suppose that Carter never used this letter in either of the trials against him. Did he lose it? Did it ever exist? There is no record that any journalist, including his biographer, James S. Hirsch, ever asked him what became of this vitally important letter. Click here.

In The 16th Round, Carter names the policemen and law enforcement officers who warned him in advance that he was a target.

You'd think that the journalists and supporters anxious to prove Carter's innocence would have tracked down each of these men and asked them if they knew about a plot to frame Carter. But some of the people on the list weren't policemen at the time of the crime. Others hadn't yet met Carter at the time of the crime. They couldn't have been aware of any conspiracy.

We have yet to see any evidence that any of the others on the list did in fact warn Carter of a supposed conspiracy, or that any journalists have checked it out. Click here.

Carter's "I was framed for being an activist" claims didn't even emerge until seven years after he was convicted in the first trial

According to his biography, going in to his first trial, Carter supposedly had:

• half-a-dozen policemen friends who knew he was going to be framed;
• a letter, confessing to the frame-up, from one of the witnesses against him;
• the Saturday Evening Post article in which he talks about shooting cops, which would have backed up his story that the police were angry with him.

But:

• no policeman came forward, then or to this day, to admit to a conspiracy;
• no mention was made at the first trial of the Bradley letter;
• Carter's lawyer successfully appealed to the judge to keep all mention of the violent Saturday Evening Post article out of the trial, so the jury wouldn't hear about it. His lawyer felt that the revelation that Carter boasted about how he enjoyed hurting people, would hurt Carter in the eyes of the jury.

Instead, for his first trial, Carter relied for his defense on constructing a false alibi. Two women testified that he gave them a ride home at the time of the murders. The jury didn't believe them. Were the jurors racists, or did they correctly evaluate the credibility of the witnesses? Nine years later, the women both admitted that Carter had asked them to lie.