Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (12 page)

You could bear in mind, of course, that he had never ceased to be a political being. The refusal of a spokesman’s role, the rejection of ideological conscription by ’60s types who wanted only slogans and anthems, was not the same as refusing to think politically. As a performer who owed everything to black music, and as a human being, Dylan had never ceased to despise racism. Nor had he ever lost his non-theoretical aversion to injustice generally. Like Woody Guthrie, his first and last hero, Dylan’s instinct was always to back the individual against anyone’s version of the system. Numerous songs written after he ‘quit politics’ – from ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ to ‘I Shall Be Released’ to ‘Idiot Wind’, to name only three – could be set on repeat play to prove it.

‘Hurricane’ was explicit, however. The song was rooted in reality and in recent history. Its only precedent in Dylan’s post-’60s career was ‘George Jackson’, and ‘Hurricane’ was better, melodically if not lyrically, than the 1971 song. Until certain doubts began to creep in, ‘the story of the Hurricane’ sounded like a flawless, righteous indictment of racist policing and a corrupt legal system. The important fact, the fact that unites the songs written for Jackson and Carter, was that racial bigotry had not evaporated from American life with the civil-rights movement. By the mid-1970s, too many had chosen to overlook this truth. The artist and his co-writer had not.

Dylan and Levy had both taken an interest in Rubin Carter and his campaign against conviction. Dylan, like a number of people in the public eye, had been sent a copy of the boxer’s book
The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472
(1973). The very subtitle would be disputed by those who pointed out that when Carter was arrested he was in no sense first in contention for ‘the middleweight crown’. Where a bloody triple homicide was concerned, the detail was trivial. In the ‘acknowledgements’ to his book, the fighter had written from the notorious Rahway State Prison in east New Jersey of ‘the corrupt and vindictive officials who played their roles to a T in this tightly woven drama to bury me alive’. He had Dylan’s attention, you must suspect, from page one.

The story goes like this. In the early hours of 17 June 1966 two armed men entered the nondescript Lafayette Bar and Grill on East 18th Street in Paterson, New Jersey, Rubin Carter’s home town. Without ceremony, the pair opened fire. A bartender and a 60-year-old male customer died instantly; a female customer would die of an embolism four weeks later thanks to multiple wounds. A second male customer, Willie Marins, 42, survived the attack, despite being shot in the head while standing by the pool table. He and the 51-year-old female witness Hazel Tanis would tell the police that the gunmen were black. Neither witness would identify Rubin Carter or his co-accused, John Artis.

On the night of the killings, the intimidating, shaven-headed boxer, nicknamed ‘Hurricane’ thanks to his ferocious fighting style, was 29 years old. His once-promising career, encompassing 27 wins in 40 fights, 19 by knockout, was fading. He had gained his shot at that middleweight crown at the end of 1964 and had lost in Philadelphia on a unanimous decision. In May of 1965, he had endured the hiding of his life at the hands of the Nigerian Dick Tiger, as Carter himself confessed, in the smoky haze of New York’s Madison Square Garden. In five fights before the shootings in 1966, the Hurricane had lost twice, won twice (against lowly opponents), and registered a draw. When the murders happened, his title hopes were gone.

It is also fair to say that Rubin Carter had not been a model citizen. Dylan-Levy would overlook the fact in their song, just as Dylan had failed to mention the six hostages who died during George Jackson’s attempt to escape from San Quentin Prison in California in 1971. As with the dead radical, however, it was always possible to argue that Rubin Carter had been the victim of hellish circumstances, and that every circumstance had been a consequence likely to befall any black man in a white world. Such was the consistent view of the author of
The Sixteenth Round
. ‘In Paterson,’ as Dylan would sing, ‘that’s just the way things go.’

In his later career, Carter would emerge as an eloquent campaigner for penal reform and human rights. In Canada, for a dozen years after 1993, he was executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, given credit for addressing several miscarriages of justice. On the occasion of his second autobiography, Nelson Mandela would contribute a foreword testifying that the former boxer’s ‘rich heart is now alive in love, compassion and understanding’.
¹⁴
So who could truly say which was the real Hurricane, or decide which parts of the biographical record were relevant to the paramount claim that he was ‘falsely tried’ and wrongly convicted in a ‘pig-circus’?

Still, facts are facts. Carter was in a reformatory for assault and robbery by the time he was 14. He was kicked out of the army in 1956, marked down as ‘undesirable’ after four court-martial proceedings. He was afterwards a mugger capable of serious black-on-black violence and the owner, it is alleged, of a fearsome temper. Before the Lafayette killings, he had spent 11 of his 29 years in confinement. The suggestion that before the slaughter he was militant for civil rights, ‘a revolutionary bum’ in the words of the song, is also disputed. There is nothing in Carter’s books, nor in the annals of civil rights, to support the claim that in 1966 he had a functioning political bone in his body. Nevertheless, interviewed by
Penthouse
magazine for the edition of September 1975, the Hurricane would assert:

I’m not in jail for committing murder. I’m in jail partly because I’m a black man in America, where the powers that be will only allow a black
man to be an entertainer or a criminal. While I was free on the streets – with whatever limited freedom I had on the streets – as a prizefighter, I was characterised as an entertainer. As long as I stayed within that role, within that prizefighting ring, as long as that was my Mecca and I didn’t step out into the civic affairs of this country, I was acceptable. But when I didn’t want to see people brutalized any longer – and when I’d speak out against that brutality, no matter who committed the brutality, black people or white people – I was harassed for my beliefs. I committed no crime; actually the crime was committed against me.

In
The Sixteenth Round
, Carter would admit, perhaps boast, that in childhood he had taken to fighting ‘like a duck takes to water’.
¹⁵
He would also confess to having knifed a man repeatedly – in self-defence against a predatory paedophile, he said – and to having been classified as a juvenile delinquent. Nevertheless, there was room enough in his text for accusations against cops and judges for fomenting ‘prefabricated lies to tear me down’. In Carter’s account of his early years, he had adhered only ‘to the first law of nature – self-preservation’.
¹⁶

It was a description of an unjust world that might have been made to appeal to Dylan’s quixotic faith in nature’s outlaws, those individuals forced to defend themselves against the real criminals, the ones who never get caught and never go to jail. A superstar’s reflexive romantic bias didn’t mean the boxer was guilty of a multiple killing staged – or so the cops quickly persuaded themselves – in instant revenge for the murder of a black bartender in a place called the Waltz Inn. It didn’t make Rubin Carter innocent, either.

A minor criminal called Alfred ‘Al’ Bello had been a couple of blocks away from the Lafayette Bar ‘prowlin’ around’ with burglary on his mind on the night of the shootings. Bello would later testify that as he drew near to the dive – supposedly in search of a pack of cigarettes – he almost ran into a pair of black males. One was armed with a shotgun, one with a pistol, and both were laughing. Bello said he took to his heels as the men got into a white car.

The petty crook was nevertheless one of the first to reach the murder scene, along with a woman named Patricia Graham (later Patricia ‘Patty’ Valentine) who lived above the bar and grill. She also told the cops she had seen a couple of black men climbing into a white car, a Dodge Polara, before driving north. A second neighbour, Ronald Ruggiero, heard the shots and later said that as he looked from his window he saw Al Bello running westwards on Paterson’s Lafayette
Street in the direction of 16th Street. The description of the car given by Bello and Valentine would change at Carter’s second trial.

Nevertheless, Carter’s car was, supposedly, a match for the getaway vehicle. Having been pulled over once that night and allowed to proceed because a third man, John ‘Bucks’ Royster, had been with them, Hurricane and Artis were stopped for a second time and taken to the murder scene. This took place within half an hour of the shootings. No fingerprints were taken; no tests were made for gunshot residue; no one who had witnessed the events surrounding the killings identified the pair. When Rubin Carter was hauled to Paterson’s St Joseph’s hospital, a horribly wounded Willie Marins, blinded in one eye, indicated that the boxer was not one of his assailants. A cop then found a shotgun shell and a .32 calibre round in Carter’s car. Both items were later declared, wrongly, to be compatible with the murder weapons. The officer who made the find waited the best part of a week before turning in his evidence. Artis and Rubin, having passed polygraph tests, had meanwhile been released.

Months later, Bello told the police – and why the delay? – that he had not been alone while sniffing around a sheet-metal works for a burglary opportunity. An individual named Arthur Dexter Bradley had acted as his accomplice. This pair then proceeded to identify Carter as one of the armed men they had seen outside the bar. Bello meanwhile identified 19-year-old Artis. Inevitably, Carter and his companion were arrested and indicted.

In May of 1967, what Dylan-Levy would describe, correctly, as ‘the all-white jury’ found the accused guilty, but declined to recommend the electric chair. In 1974, after Carter had sued his way out of a state psychiatric hospital thanks to ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, Bello and Bradley, located by the
New York Times
, suddenly claimed they had been cajoled and bribed into lying. This time they said they had
not
seen Carter and Artis near the Lafayette Bar. It was then that the Hurricane sent Dylan a copy of
The Sixteenth Round
. In May of 1975, the artist paid a visit to the fighter in prison. After taking notes and talking with Carter for hours, Dylan seems to have promised to write a song.

In late October of that year, just before ‘Hurricane’ was released as a single, he told the ever-attentive
Rolling Stone
of his conviction that Carter’s ‘philosophy’ and his ‘were running on the same road, and you don’t meet too many people like that, that you just kinda know are on the same path as you are, mentally’. The remark would be quoted for years to come in arguments over Dylan’s involvement in the case.
¹⁷
Of more interest, as a measure of his attitude and belief, were a couple of the things that Dylan said next. He made large claims.

I never doubted him for a moment. He’s just not a killer, not that kind of a man. You’re talking about a different type of person. I mean, he’s not gonna walk into a bar and start shooting. He’s not the guy. I don’t know how anybody in their right mind is gonna think he was guilty of something like that.

Then:

There’s an injustice that’s been done and you know that Rubin’s gonna get out. There’s no doubt about that, but the fact is that it can happen to anybody. We have to be confronted with that; people from the top to the bottom, they should be aware that it can happen to anybody, at any time.

Dylan and Levy were not the only ones to be moved and angered by Carter’s tale. In 1975, the fighters Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, no strangers to racism, would speak out fiercely in the Hurricane’s defence. Ali, in his second spell as heavyweight champion of the world, would dedicate his contest against Ron Lyle in May to the Hurricane. The champion thereafter became co-chairman of the Hurricane Defense Fund, established to aid Carter with his legal costs. In September of 1975, Ali led a march to City Hall in Newark, New Jersey, to publicise Rubin’s cause. Other prominent people – the writer Norman Mailer, the actor Burt Reynolds, the singers Harry Belafonte and Johnny Cash among them – signed up to the national committee of the Hurricane Trust Fund.
¹⁸
The veteran Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, the author of
The Man with the Golden Arm
(1949), had meanwhile begun to research the case after being commissioned in 1974 to write a magazine article.

In the summer of 1975, aged 66, failing in his powers but fascinated by the town, Algren would even move to Paterson in an attempt to understand the murders. As the poet and playwright Joe Pintauro would later remember, this ‘dedication to the lost cause of clearing the boxer Hurricane Carter from a murder rap … drained Nelson’s energy and emptied his pockets. The Hurricane Carter case turned into a quicksand of unresolvable complexities and Hurricane was never cleared. After years of effort, Algren finally converted his commitment into material for his novel
The Devil’s Stocking
, but by then he had grown old and tired.’
¹⁹

The novel was published posthumously in 1983, but Algren’s weariness was understandable. The case was a horrible tangle of claim and counterclaim. Thanks to recantations, undisclosed deals between prosecution and witnesses, and to apparent lying by Bello and Bradley, the new trial that had been denied to Carter in 1974 was granted. In March of 1976, the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned his conviction on the grounds that the prosecution had withheld the tape of an interview with Bello proving he had been promised leniency for his misdoings in return for testimony. Hurricane and Artis were freed on bail, with most of the bail money posted by Muhammad Ali. The New Jersey prosecutor soon re-indicted the pair.
²⁰

In November 1976, after Bello yet again changed his mind and again claimed to have seen Hurricane and Artis near the Lafayette, the boxer was convicted for a second time. The judge had allowed testimony describing angry black people gathering outside the Waltz Inn after the shooting – by a white man – of the black bartender on the evening before the Lafayette murders. The prosecution claim that revenge had been the motive for the killings was therefore deemed to have been supported. Neither Bob Dylan songs nor famous novelists were of any help. Rubin Carter’s conviction was not overturned finally until 1985.