Must reading for understanding the Bello and Bradley controversy: Judge Larner's 25 page brief outlines the case and Bello and Bradley's part in it. (pdf file)

Larner's report shows:

the prosecution tried to ask Bello and Bradley if they had been promised anything, anything at all to testify against Carter and Artis. But the defense kept jumping up and objecting and wouldn't let the testimony come out! Why?

Probably because the defense didn't want the jury to hear that Bello and Bradley had asked for protection from Carter.

Bradley did write a letter from prison -- but it was to the governor, asking for protection from Carter and his jailhouse friends.

More tall tales from
The 16th Round

Hung up in Watts?

Framed for playing craps?

Carter makes his case from prison, circa 1975

Cal Deal's Bello page

Bello & the New York Times

The mysterious Bradley letter:

"Still, I just could not believe that anyone
would go to such extremes to frame me."

Well, it's pretty unbelievable, all right. In his autobiography, Carter claims that Arthur Dexter Bradley, one of the witnesses against him, sent him a letter before the first trial, admitting the whole thing was a frame up.

Patty Valentine told the police the morning of the murders, in her first written statement, that she had seen Alfred Bello in the bar.

Click here for pdf file of her statement.
Page one (where she mentions Bello).
Page two

Bello also gave police a statement on the morning of the crimes.

Carter's claim that the police didn't know about Bello being in the bar until months after the murders, is false.

Bello wasn't arrested and there's no evidence the cops put the squeeze on him to frame Carter and Artis. Bello came forward to identify Carter four months after the murders.

"The man (Patty Valentine) saw was Alfred Bello, an ex-convict and a known thief. When Mrs. Valentine informed the police of this refreshed recollection, Bello was arrested....

Bello, Bradley and [Hector] Martinez were wanted in various parts of New Jersey for armed robbery, and had acquired quite a reputation as the "motel bandits" who ran up and down the Jersey Shore...

Bello and Bradley admitted to being at the scene of the Lafayette crime to break into a factory around the corner, and to driving a car that seemed to fit the description of the one that the police had been looking for."

Bello was not arrested. Police talked to him several times that summer, asking him to tell them what he knew, because he had been right there at the Grill at the time of the murders. Bello asked for protective custody in October, 1966. He was afraid of Carter.

August 3, 1966: Det. Sgt. Robert Mohl arrested Dexter Bradley for a series of motel stick-ups in four New Jersey counties. Bello and Martinez weren't involved in the motel robberies.

Bello and Bradley were driven to their burglary site by their friend Kent Kellogg. He drove a 1965 Ford Fairlane and he parked it on Franklin Street, a block away (and out of sight) from the Lafayette Grill. He drove away, nursing a flat tire, as soon as he heard the gunfire.

"[Bello] later gave the same description of the two killers that Mrs. Valentine had given, and again as she had, at first told the police that John Artis and I were not the men who had chased him...

Everyone else in the crowd with any knowledge of the crime had twice on that night also made statements to the same effect -- that John and I were not the men."

Bello refused to identify Carter on the night of the murders, because, as he later explained, he didn't want any trouble. He was also afraid for his brother, who was in prison and might be the target of revenge.

Patty Valentine has always said that she could not identify the two men she saw from her window, other than they were black men. She has never said that Carter and Artis were not the shooters. She identified the getaway car.

There were no other eyewitnesses "in the crowd."

The jury was told, very clearly, that Bello and Bradley were two-bit punks who had a motive to lie. Click here for a pdf file of newspaper coverage of the defense lawyer's summation to the jury. The jury looked at all the evidence and found Carter and Artis guilty anyway.

Outstanding charges against Bello and Bradley were not dismissed, but they may have gotten more lenient sentencing as a result of their cooperation. See the Larner decision.

Carter blows a lot of confusing smoke about Hector Martinez, who was in the police station with Arthur Dexter Bradley in August 1966.

Carter suggests Martinez was willing to testify that he'd been offered a bribe by the police in exchange for lying about seeing Carter at the scene of the murders.

"To offset [Bradley's] testimony we intended to bring from Bordentown Hector Martinez, Bradley's partner on all of his armed robberies, to testify that he too had been offered the same deal by DeSimone... The only trouble was, Brown hadn't asked Bradley the proper questions necessary to permit Martinez's rebuttal in court..."

Martinez was called to the stand. He testified that Bradley confided to him that he was planning to lie about Carter, in the hopes of getting good treatment. The newspaper reported:

"Earlier, the defense offered a Bordentown Reformatory inmate, Hector Martinez who said he knew Arthur Dexter Bradley, who has "fingered" Carter as being at the scene of the murders. Martinez said he occupied a cell adjacent to Bradley's at Paterson Police Station last Aug. 3 and quoted Bradley as saying he was going to play the Carter case off against charges against him so he would get the benefit of it."

August 3rd is the date that Bradley was arrested for a string of motel jobs. Shortly after his arrest, he escaped from jail. Quickly re-captured, he refused to talk to anyone about the Lafayette Grill murders. He didn't sign a statement about recognizing Carter until October 15th.

In Carter's version of events, Hector Martinez had knowledge about police attempts to bribe Arthur Dexter Bradley and himself into testifying falsely about seeing Carter at the scene of the murders. This would imply that there was a police conspiracy against Carter. But Martinez' actual testimony was an allegation that Arthur Dexter Bradley was the one who boasted about how he was going to lie about Carter.

Nothing would have prevented Carter's lawyer from asking Martinez if he had been offered a deal to lie about Carter, if such had been the case. Carter has misrepresented Martinez' testimony to make it look like there was a police conspiracy involved, and he even implies that Martinez couldn't be called to the stand to give this vital evidence. But Martinez clearly was called to stand, because it was reported in the newspapers.

Carter made these accusations after the first trial and before the second. But he refused to take the stand at the second trial and repeat any of these accusations under oath.

The juries did hear defense accusations that Bello and Bradley were lying. And the prosecution got all the information about their criminal records and the outstanding charges against them, on the table. But the juries, after hearing all the evidence on both sides, concluded Carter and Artis were guilty.