A real activist by
the name of Bill Epton was actually at the 1964 Harlem riots and urged
the crowd to kill policemen. Unlike Carter, he wasn't joking. Find
out what happened to him.
A
1975 interview with Carter, in Penthouse magazine, in which
he blames his managers for his tough guy image and misrepresents the Saturday
Evening Post article.
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Saturday Evening
Post, October 24, 1964
Article by Milton
Gross
[Excerpt]
Carter repeatedly
spits out words like “kill” in conversation. They reflect an
easily
triggered violence that lies barely restrained beneath his malevolent-looking
exterior. In
the boxing ring it is a violence that excites fans and is calculated to
terrify opponents. It is scheduled to be unleashed again this Friday when
Carter meets champion Joey Giardello for the middleweight title in Las
Vegas. [the match was postponed from October and held in Philadelphia
on December 14].
Carter has not always used his fists in what can only be called his private
war against
society. Sometimes it has been knives, sometimes guns, sometimes cobblestones.
He has hit back with whatever was at hand.
During last summer’s Harlem riots, for instances, he suggested,
in jest, to Elwood Tuck, his closest friend, “Let’s get guns
and go up there and get us some of those police. I know I can get four
or five before they get me. How many can you get?”
“People say he’s mean,” said Tuck. “They ask how I
can get along with him. Well, if he
puts his faith in you, and you don’t cross him, he’s like everybody
else, but if you mistreat him, he’ll hurt you.”
“I don’t enjoy hitting or hurting people,” said Carter,
“not unless they mess with me. Then
I enjoy it. I’ve never been one that could take anything from other
people. If you mess
with me I’m going to try to kill you. When I get angry I don’t
fight by any rules and I
don’t shake hands when it’s over.”
Records in disciplinary schools, juvenile courts, two reformatories and
one state prison
confirm Carter’s personal vendetta. Society has confined him for
a total of 10 years for
crimes of violence.
Thus, this week’s title fight will have the questionable distinction
of matching in the ring
two men who have, at one time or another in their stormy careers, seen
the inside of a jail cell. And outside the ring, a cast of supporting
characters representing the two fighters has already concluded an agreement
which gives Giardello’s lawyers the promotion rights to Carter’s
next three fights should the challenger win.
==========
Despite the dubious
atmosphere surrounding the match, it is a natural for fight fans.
Carter, though relatively inexperienced, is rated No. 1 among the middleweight
challengers by the World Boxing Association. He is certainly the most
exciting contender, partly because of his explosive background, partly
because of his powerful punch, partly because of his bizarre appearance.
His bullet head is shaved and his beard and moustache look sinister. He
wears white,
violet, green and blue berets (pulled at a rakish angle over the right
ear), iridescent suits
and pointed Italian shoes. In the ring, glaring from under a monk-cowled
robe as he listens to instructions from the referee, Carter hopes to terrify
his opponent before the fight. Using the stare and his fists, he has knocked
out 13 men in 24 fights since turning
professional in September, 1961. He has lost four times, the last to Joey
Archer, a fancy- Dan fighter. Carter’s reaction to that defeat: “I’d
like to meet him in an alley where he can’t run.”
This is the way Carter has lived and fought since his family moved from
Clifton, N.J.
(where he was born on May 6, 1937), to Paterson, N.J., where he roamed
the streets
looking for trouble and usually finding it.
He was the middle child of seven and the only one of Lloyd Carter’s
kids to get into
trouble. Poverty was not the cause of Rubin’s belligerence. His father
had a steady job. “I
never wanted for anything,” says Carter. “We had good food and
clothes. We were the
first in our neighborhood to have a television set.”
Rubin was a kind of schoolboy Mount Vesuvius -- his early history is dotted
with minor
thefts, street fighting and school incorrigibility -- before he erupted
with a vengeance at
the age of 11 and was sent to Jamesburg reformatory for atrocious assault.
“That’s right,” he says, “atrocious assault at age
eleven. I stuck a man with my knife. I
stabbed him everywhere but the bottom of his feet.” [Carter was
in fact fourteen when he
was arrested and sentenced for assaulting a man with a bottle and robbing
him.]
Rubin’s sentence was indeterminate. “I was contumacious,”
he said and grinned over the
surprise produced by his use of the word. “I just kept getting into
more trouble at
Jamesburg and they just kept adding time. I was past sixteen when I began
realizing about girls, clothes and music. I said, “What am I doing
here?”
He tried to stay out of trouble. “I was good for a whole six months,”
he says. “I had thirty
days to go when I got a disciplinary report, and I appeared before the
board. They were
talking about sending me to Annandale reformatory. I said, ‘Man,
I’ll go home before I go
up there.’ That night the watchman fell asleep about eleven o’clock.
I knocked out a
window and went home.” [In his autobiography, Carter dramatized
this mundane escape
by adding swamps, bloodhounds, and bullets whistling ‘round his head.]
Carter’s mother fed him, gave him clean clothes and shipped him to
Philadelphia to live
with an aunt. A month later he joined the Army. It was while serving in
Germany that he
first boxed with gloves on. After his discharge in June, 1956, he went
to work in a plastics
plant. That’s where the cops came and collected him as a reformatory
escapee. He served nine months of an additional 13-month sentence at Annandale.
“When I got out I didn’t care for nothing or nobody,” he
says. “I lost my car, lost my job,
lost my GI bill. I was just mad at life and mad at the world. I wanted
to hit out at anything.
Before I got home I stopped in a store and got me a bottle and started
drinking, and I
didn’t stop for three, four weeks until I got picked up again.”
Carter recalls those weeks with suprising clarity. “My partner and
me,” he says, "a fellow I knew in Jamesburg [Alfred Little
“A” Harris], we used to get up and put our guns in our
pockets like you put your wallet in your pocket. Then we go out in the
streets and start
fighting -- anybody, everybody. We used to shoot at folks.”
“Shoot at folks?” Carter was asked, because this seemed too
much to believe and too
much for Carter to confess even years later.
“Just what I said,” he repeated. “Shoot at people. Sometimes
just to shoot at ‘em,
sometimes to hit ‘em, sometimes to kill ‘em. My family was saying
I’m still a bum. If I got
the name, I play the game.”
Here Carter chuckles, as though the recollection tickles him. “We’d
get into lots of fights,
my partner and me, to see who would hit the man first. It was nothing
planned. We’d get a whim and do it. I couldn’t begin to tell
you how many hits, muggings and stickups. No use even trying to count
them. We’d just use the guns like we had a license to carry them.”
Eventually the law brought an end to Carter’s rampage [He was
convicted of mugging
three people -- in those incidents he apparently used his fists, not a
gun]. He drew six
years on two counts of robbery and one of assault with intent to commit
robbery. He
served four years and three months in the New Jersey State Prison and
finds reason to
consider the time well spent.
“If I didn’t go to prison I’d be dead,” he says. “Somebody
would have killed me or I’d
have killed somebody the way I was living.”
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