New York Daily News – by LARRY MCSHANE
Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the middleweight contender-turned-murder suspect-turned-cause célèbre when his triple homicide conviction was exposed as a sham, died Sunday. He was 76.
Carter — wrongly jailed for nearly two decades — lost a battle with prostate cancer that dropped the former fighter’s weight to a mere 90 pounds.
He died early Sunday morning in Toronto, according to his longtime friend John Artis, who had been caring for him and was wrongly convicted of the same crime.
The indefatigable Carter was twice wrongfully convicted in the 1966 killings of two customers and a bartender inside the Lafayette Bar & Grill in Paterson, N.J.
It wasn’t until 19 years later that a federal judge overturned his second conviction, ruling the prosecution’s behavior was “as heinous as the crimes for which (Carter was) tried and convicted.”
Carter’s struggle for justice inspired Bob Dylan’s hit single “Hurricane” and a movie of the same name with Denzel Washington, earning him an Oscar nomination in the title role.
Prior to his arrest for the slayings, the New Jersey-born fighter appeared poised for a shot at the middleweight championship.
He was given a title belt by the World Boxing Commission in 1993, acknowledging his lost opportunity and longshot legal triumph.
Carter’s world went topsy-turvy at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1966, when two gun-toting black men burst into the Paterson tavern and killed three white victims.
A fourth could not identify Carter and his pal Artis as the shooters after cops stopped the two men inside the boxer’s white Cadillac within hours of the shooting.
Carter maintained that racist local cops, jealous of his high-rolling lifestyle and exasperated by his arrogance, wrongly targeted him for the killings.
He and Artis were arrested for triple homicide five months later based on the sketchy testimony of two petty crooks — one named Arthur Bello.
Both were sentenced to life in prison.
In 1974, Carter’s autobiography “The Sixteenth Round” — written in prison on an old typewriter — was published. The tale attracted the attention and support of Dylan, Muhammad Ali and Coretta Scott King.
Dylan’s lyrics summed up the case:
“Here comes the story of the Hurricane/The man the authorities came to blame/for something that he never done/Put in a prison cell but one time he coulda been/The champion of the world.”
The prosecution witnesses recanted and the convictions were overturned in 1976, with a new trial ordered. And then, incredibly, a second jury convicted Carter and Artis of the killings.
Bello recanted his previous recanting, with cops pressuring him to testify the killings were racially motivated — revenge for the slaying of a black bar owner earlier the same night.
A broken Carter returned to his cell, resigned to his death behind bars. It wasn’t until reading a 1980 letter from a Toronto teen that Carter decided to climb back into the legal ring.
The second wave of support produced new proof of coerced witnesses, forged documents and suppressed evidence. Canadian supporters of Carter spent nearly $1 million on his appeal.
In November 1985, the convictions were overturned by a judge who ruled Carter and Artis were found guilty based on “racism rather than reason.”
Carter’s life was difficult almost from birth. The Clifton, N.J., dropped out of school after the eighth grade. He wound up in reform school at age 11 after stabbing a would-be pedophile trying to molest him.
Carter managed to escape and join the Army, but was arrested after returning to Paterson from Europe. After three years in prison, he fought his first professional bout in 1961.
His nom de ring came from Carter’s relentless style, a full-on assault right from the opening bell.
Carter became an advocate for the wrongly incarcerated and wrote a February column for the Daily News urging a new hearing for Brooklynite David McCallum — jailed for the last 28 years.
While Carter was fighting his last battle with cancer, among those coming to visit was his old co-defendant Artis.
With Erin Durkin
Good post Angel 😉
I just listened to Dylan’s song yesterday driving back here. Probably the first time in a couple of years that I have.
Spooky.