The Hurricane is having lunch at a Sichuan place on 3rd Avenue. His search for a meal began at an upscale Park Avenue eatery called An American Place, which features $17 salmon and a host of other fancy fare but nothing to Rubin ”Hurricane” Carter`s liking. So the former boxer and two film producers accompanying him have wandered over to this Chinese joint.
One of the producers, a young man from Vancouver, jokes that Carter couldn`t eat at An American Place because the mere mention of the word
”American” is too painful for him. ”I think you find things associated with the States generally distasteful,” the producer suggests.
”You got that right,” Carter says with a smile.
For almost four years, the man who Bob Dylan said ”could`ve been the champion of the world” has lived in and around Toronto, and when he does venture to the States, he admits, he feels a bit uneasy.
”I try to keep a low profile when I`m down here,” Carter says as he goes to work on a plate of shrimp fried rice. ”They snatched me up once. Who`s to say they won`t snatch me up again?”
Asked if he has ever returned to Patterson, N.J., site of the 1966 triple murder for which he served close to 20 years before his conviction was overturned, Carter laughs.
”Oh, no!” he answers emphatically. ”When the big bad wolf accosts you in the woods, you tend to stay away from those woods.”
In his prime and at the time the No. 1 contender for the world middleweight boxing championship, Carter was arrested in 1966 in the killings of three white men in a Patterson bar. The case immediately assumed racial overtones, and its legal progress became increasingly murky-and celebrated.
Carter was convicted in 1967 and given a triple life sentence. He was imprisoned until 1975, when he was let out on bail until a retrial in 1976, when he was reconvicted.
Disputed and recanted evidence in the case made it a cause celebre, and the visibility grew with Dylan`s hit song and a benefit concert in 1976.
Even so, Carter remained in prison from 1976 to 1985, when his state conviction was finally overturned in federal court and he was set free, though he had to remain in the area 2 1/2 more years while New Jersey appealed unsuccessfully.
Amazingly, Carter seems anything but bitter. He is thriving among close and supportive friends in his new country. The Hurricane has a new family. And a new life.
The letter
In fall 1980, Carter was residing in Trenton State Prison. It had been nearly four years since his reconviction. He says he returned to prison devastated. The Hurricane was not receiving visitors.
”I had closed down emotionally,” he says. ”I had closed down to anything from the outside.”
But then came a letter from Lazarus Martin, a black 16-year-old from New York. Practically illiterate, Martin had been taken off the city`s streets by an unconventional white Canadian family and transported to Toronto into a nice middle-class home and education. The kid had read Carter`s autobiography,
”The Sixteenth Round,” and was so inspired by it that he began corresponding with prisoner No. 45472.
Martin`s letter, the first he had written to anyone, praised Carter for his courage and ended with the plea: ”Hey, Brother. Please write back. It would mean a lot.”
Carter, touched by the letter, did respond. One thing led to another and, before long, Martin journeyed to New Jersey for a visit with Carter in what was once the prison`s death house.
The couple who adopted Martin are part of a Canadian group that avoids using the word ”commune” to describe its alternative lifestyle. The members met 20 years ago while they were attending the University of Toronto, and they`ve lived and worked together ever since. At one point they were batik merchants, importing the Malaysian fabric for Bloomingdale`s and their own boutiques in Toronto; Southampton, N.Y.; and Palm Beach.
”We were successful,” says group member Sam Chaiton of the business operation. They were apparently successful enough to afford monthly phone bills of $4,000 and more to cover long-distance calls to Carter and his legal team while he was still in prison.
Drawn into Carter`s orbit by Martin, the Canadians played a key role in the legal crusade to free him, going so far as to establish a satellite household in a town near the prison for a time.
When Carter walked out of prison a free man in November 1985, he lived with some of the Canadians in and around New York until February 1988. By then, his legal team had successfully fought the district attorney`s appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court, and the state attorney general had convinced the district attorney that a third trial would not work. With his freedom assured, Carter went to Toronto with his new family.
A year after his arrival in Canada, Carter married a woman in the group named Lisa. His application for Canadian citizenship is pending.
Lazarus Martin, recipient of bachelor`s and master`s degrees in anthropology from Canadian universities, now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with his Canadian wife. The former street kid from New York plans to enroll in law school.
This saga, dubbed ”the feelgood story of the year” by one Canadian newspaper, is recounted in the book ”Lazarus and the Hurricane,” a best seller in Canada but a story that has yet to be published in the U.S.
The book was so well-received in Canada that Carter and his friends have been deluged with movie offers. Thus, his luncheon date with the film producers.
Gone now are the glower, the goatee and the shaved head. Today, Carter, 54, sports a full head of hair, a neat mustache and a warm smile. He looks downright dapper in a sport jacket, shirt and tie. The state may have taken 20 of his prime years, but Carter appears to have refrained from aging for the same period. He is 5 feet 6 inches tall and 153 pounds, the same weight at which he fought 25 years ago.
Shake his hand or stand close to him and you quickly conclude this is not a man with whom you`d want to go a few rounds in the ring. He keeps in shape at home by riding his horse, Red Cloud, every day.
”For a long time, I was angry at being placed in prison,” Carter says.
”Not because I missed my chance to become the middleweight champion of the world . . . but because I was placed in prison illegally. I was placed there falsely, wrongly, and there was a concerted effort to do that. I`ve come to realize that I can`t live my life thinking about what would have, what could have, what should have happened.”
Now a carpenter
These days, Carter`s life is rather spontaneous. He and his Canadian compatriots are doing house renovations, and the former boxer says he`s a pretty good carpenter. No one in the seven-member adult household, he says, has a 9-to-5 job.
”We don`t get up and plan our day,” he explains. ”Whatever`s necessary to do at the moment, we do it. And let me tell you something, there`s nothing we can`t do.”
While in prison in 1977, Carter was divorced from his first wife, Mae Thelma. His daughter by that marriage, who was 3 when Carter went to prison, is now living in Hawaii with three children of her own.
Lisa, his present wife, is in her 40s and has a son in his late 20s who was schooled at home with Lazarus Martin. Carter says that when he was still in prison and was on the phone to Toronto for as long as eight hours without interruption, he spoke to Lisa more than to anyone else.
And not always with happy results.
”She would rile me up and I`d slam the phone down,” Carter recalls.
Lisa was among the first three of Carter`s Canadian friends to move to New Jersey to set up Carter & Partners, a lay legal defense team that assisted the small group of criminal-defense and constitutional lawyers who worked for free for the Carter cause.
Besides her contributions to what was eventually a successful appeals effort, Lisa assisted in Carter`s emotional re-education.
”She came down to soften me up,” Carter says.
Carter recently spent time shuttling between Toronto and southern New Jersey to visit his mother and his older brother, who died of liver cancer in December.
Carter`s father died in 1981, about an hour after the imprisoned fighter was permitted a hospital bedside visit. The elder Carter last saw his son in chains and shackles. The son wasn`t allowed to attend his father`s funeral, prison regulations forcing him to choose between a deathbed visit and an appearance at the funeral.
Don`t count him out
These days, when he isn`t engaged in carpentry with his Canadian cohorts, Carter lectures at schools and colleges on his experiences and the lessons of his life. He urges children to stay in school, pointing out how Martin flourished once he was given access to a good education.
”He is not one in a million,” Carter declares. ”He is one of millions of African-American children who can thrive in a healthy, nurturing environment.”
And while he takes great pleasure in recounting the successes of Lazarus Martin, Rubin Carter, too, is doing fine. For exercise and relaxation, he rides his horse, sometimes for as long as four hours a day.
He says the only time he spends thinking about his incarceration is when he`s writing ”The Door in the Wall,” his account of his two decades behind bars. It`s a story that begins: ”I disappeared from prison even before anyone knew I was gone.”
Asked what he plans to do with the rest of his life, Carter pauses a moment and replies: ”I`m planning to stay on this planet Earth as long as I can.”
