In the darkest hours, when his only reality was a life sentence and a five-by-seven cell, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter studied Plato, George Gurdjieff, Viktor Frankl, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and every criminal law book he could get his hands on.
"All of the world's wisdom," he later wrote, "(for) trying to find my spiritual path to freedom."
In the earliest days of a 19-year internment that he endured for a crime he did not commit, he also wrote an eloquent autobiography that burst through the walls of Trenton State Prison and aroused the compassion of people throughout the world, including Muhammad Ali and Bob Dylan.
So when this former middleweight contender with an eighth-grade education and a truculent countenance died Sunday morning a free man at his home near Toronto, Carter could mostly be remembered as a self-made symbol of implacable resolve, one who authored his own quest for freedom and became a cause celebre for the way millions perceived racial justice in America.
The cause of death at age 76 was prostate cancer, according to John Artis, the man with whom he had been wrongly accused, who had cared for Carter the last two years.
The Paterson product spent the last decades of his life advocating for the wrongly convicted, founding Innocence International in Toronto since 2004, after serving as executive director of a non-profit, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, for 12 years.
Most recently, Carter pursued a new trial for a Brooklyn man named David McCallum, and he penned an op-ed piece in the Feb. 21st Daily News that was typed "quite literally from my death bed."
"My aim in helping this fine man is to pay it forward," he wrote, "to give the help that I received as a wrongly convicted man to another who needs such help now."
The pursuit echoed Carter's own battle from 1966 to 1985, when he was finally exonerated for a triple-murder in Paterson that a federal judge ruled he did not commit. It was the only way Carter could have left the ring: As was often said, there may have been more skilled boxers, but there was never a more determined fighter.
'Eye of the Hurricane'
Carter was born in Clifton on May 6, 1937, the fourth of seven children born to Bertha and Lloyd Carter, two native Georgians.
May 6, 1937
Rubin Carter is born in Clifton.
1954
Escapes from the State Home for Boys and joins the Army, where he takes up boxing.
1957
Begins 4½-year stint in Rahway State Prison for assault.
Sept. 22, 1961
Makes his boxing debut, a four-round decision over Pike Reed
Dec. 20, 1963
Defeats welterweight champ Emile Griffith in the first round, the crowning achievement of his career.
June 17, 1966,
Four people shot at the Lafayette Grill in Paterson. Three of them die from their injuries.
May 27, 1967
Carter and friend John Artis are convicted of murder and sentenced to multiple life sentences.
1975
Publishes his autobiography, "The Sixteenth Round." Bob Dylan writes "Hurricane," a song defending Carter's innocence, and performs it at Trenton State Prison, where Carter is an inmate.
March 17, 1976
Carter and Artis have their convictions overturned.
Dec. 22, 1976
After a two-month retrial, Carter and Artis are re-convicted
November 1985
A federal judge overturns the convictions, saying the prosecution had been "predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure." The decision is upheld by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court declines to hear the case.
Dec. 29, 1999
Release of "The Hurricane", a biographical movie about Carter starring Denzel Washington.
He knew violence from an early age, beaten regularly with a belt by a father who "cried real tears as he prayed" as senior deacon at a Baptist church every Sunday, and who was rigidly "stern, humorless, and unforgiving of my trespasses," as Carter affirmed in his 2011 autobiography, "Eye of the Hurricane."
Carter grew up with a pronounced stutter, and he usually responded to taunts by throwing his fists. After one assault conviction, he was taken from his home on 12th Avenue in Paterson and placed in the Jamesburg State Home for Boys at age 14.
He took up boxing after joining the Army when he was 17, immediately impressing the brass by knocking down a heavyweight in the first round of his first bout. He left the Army with 51 wins in 56 bouts, and was back in jail by 1957 for robbery and assault, which Carter said was the "most despicable thing" he had ever done.
He was sent to Rahway State Prison for 41/2 years — much of it spent fighting other inmates — and upon his release, he pursued a boxing career. At 5-foot-8, he was not big for a middleweight, but he had an intimidating presence, a ferocious style, and knockout power with each hand. He made his debut on September 22, 1961, with a four-round decision over Pike Reed, and then knocked out 11 of his next 14 opponents.
Getting his shot in the ring
After watching Carter score a first-round KO at the State Garden in Union City in early 1962, Fred Cranwell of the Jersey Journal gave him the nickname, "Hurricane." By then, Carter was already a rising star, and he became a regular at Madison Square Garden throughout 1963. On Dec. 20 of that year, he destroyed welterweight champ Emile Griffith in just two minutes at Pittsburgh Civic Arena, the crowning achievement of his career.
That earned him a shot at middleweight champ Joey Giardello on Dec. 14, 1964, at the Philadelphia Convention Hall.
"I hadn't fought for six months, and I didn't fight my fight in Philadelphia," said Carter, who lost a unanimous decision. "Although he may have looked a lot worse at the end of the fight than I did, he punched effectively enough to keep me at bay and retain the championship."
Carter's career stalled. He went 7-6-1 over the next 15 months, which probably made his opinions about race in America less tolerable to the media and the public. In a 1964 Saturday Evening Post profile leading up to the Giardello fight, he infamously stated that Harlem residents should fight back against police abuse, even to the death if necessary. He added that he told a friend that they should "get our own guns. . . .and get us some of those cops. I know I can get four or five before they get me."
Carter later claimed it was said in jest, but the remark drew the attention of every law enforcement body in the country - and if it didn't, the FBI always advised local agencies that a convicted felon was coming to town wherever Carter traveled.
A moment when life changed
It was already established around Paterson that Carter was belligerent and outspoken — two qualities that did not sit well with the cops, especially when they belonged to a black man with a shaved head and a fu manchu at the height of the civil rights movement.
So his life was changed permanently at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1966, when four people, all white, were gunned down by what witnesses said were two black assailants at the Lafayette Grill on the corner of East 18th St. in Paterson. Two died at the scene, and a third would die two weeks later.
Less than an hour later, Paterson police stopped a white car that resembled the one used by the shooters. The vehicle, a 1966 Dodge Polara, was occupied by Carter and John Artis, a former track star at Paterson Central who had met Carter at a bar earlier in the evening. The cops took the two men to St. Joseph's Medical Center to be identified by a shooting victim, Willie Marins, who despite taking a bullet just above the left eye told police that Carter and Artis were not the gunmen.
Both men passed a lie detector test, and were released later that morning. The detective in charge, Lt. Vincent DeSimone, even told a grand jury that the physical description of the killers "was not even close" to that of Carter and Artis, and he confirmed the absence of physical evidence linking them to the scene.
'I refused to act the part of a guilty man'
But the investigation went on, and on Oct. 14, DeSimone charged them with a triple murder anyway, because two eyewitnesses, Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley, placed them at the scene.
The credibility of these witnesses — both convicted felons, who on the night of the shooting were in the vicinity to commit a factory robbery — was immediately questioned; as were the motives of DeSimone, described in some historical accounts as racist and as fierce as Carter himself, a man who was not even stopped by the grenade blast to the face that he took while serving in France during World War II.
Still, it was clear that the case brought on April 7, 1967 by the Passaic County prosecutor was based more on character than evidence. They could not offer a motive for the murders, and alibi witnesses produced by the defense were discounted. But testimony from Bello and Bradley convinced the all-white jury to convict, and on July 29, the judge imposed two consecutive life sentences for Carter, three for Artis.
They were sent to Trenton State Prison, where Carter put his greatest gift — his iron will — to good use.
"I refused to act the part of a guilty man. I refused to become a good prisoner," Carter said. "Resistance was my defense. I would not speak to the guards or acknowledge their existences. I refused to move to the rhythm of the prison or obey its arbitrary rules."
A first book, a recanted testimony
Frequently, it landed him in solitary. At one point he estimated that 50 percent of his prison time was spent in dark isolation, where he refused to eat anything but bread in defiance of the rules, training his mind to not acknowledge hunger.
Other times, he turned his cell into an "unnatural laboratory of the human spirit," as author James Hirsch quoted him, immersing himself in philosophy, history, metaphysics and law as he prepared his appeals.
By 1974, Carter had gained public attention and no small amount of sympathy after publishing his first book, an extraordinary memoir entitled "The Sixteenth Round." Among those inspired by it was an investigator named Fred Hogan, who looked into the case. A former public defender from Brielle, Hogan got Bello to admit he lied at the trial, then took the news of the recanted testimony to the New York Times.
One of the top advertising men of the period, George Lois, designed a campaign to rally support, and placed two ads in the Times that drew widespread interest. The cause gained momentum after Muhammad Ali and other celebrities marched on Trenton in support of getting Carter's another trial. It reached the tipping point after Bob Dylan — who read The Sixteenth Round — wrote an eight-minute epic entitled "Hurricane" in 1975.
That was enough for the New Jersey Supreme Court to overturn the 1967 conviction, and order a retrial.
Hope came in the form of a 15-year-old boy
Carter lost some celebrity support when he was accused of beating a Newark woman who helped raise funds for his legal defense while he was out on bail. Once the second trial began, it got worse. Bello recanted his recantation. The Passaic County prosecutors played the race card, introducing a new motive for the murders: Now, Carter and Artis were accused of avenging the murder of a black bar owner by a white man at the nearby Waltz Inn that same night in 1967. Excerpts from Carter's book were introduced as evidence that he was hostile toward whites.
And once again, Carter and Artis were convicted and sent to prison on Dec. 22, 1976. Artis would make parole in 1981.
Carter shunned virtually all human contact until 1980, when a 15-year-old boy from Brooklyn named Lesra Martin read his book and wrote him a series of letters that helped restore Carter's faith that he could prove his innocence. The following year, Martin became Carter's first visitor in five years, traveling to Trenton State Prison from his new home in a commune outside Toronto.
Then the teenager enlisted his idealistic guardians to examine Carter's case, which entailed three of them moving from Canada to New Jersey, strategy visits with Carter each month, and the pursuit of a 10-year paper chase. None were lawyers, but as Carter put it, "They had the wherewithal to say to this guy behind these bars, 'Man, we're coming in.'"
In the end, Martin and the Canadians uncovered evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and convinced Carter's attorneys to file for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court.
Freedom achieved
Finally, on Nov. 7, 1985, U.S. District Court Judge H. Lee Sarokin ruled that Carter's constitutional rights to due process were violated, and overturned the convictions because they had been based on "an appeal to racism rather than reason, concealment rather than disclosure."
At age 48, Rubin Carter was free.
He chose to live the rest of his life in Toronto, using his celebrity to advocate for the wrongly convicted, and he was acclaimed as a hero by those who had no prior knowledge of his life before Denzel Washington portrayed him in "Hurricane," a 1999 film directed by Norman Jewison.
The film contained some artistic embellishments, though Carter's life was not the purest morality tale. He was a hardened criminal whose encounter with injustice made him an unlikely underdog, and as Carter himself wrote in the Daily News recently, "If I find a heaven after this life, I'll be quite surprised."
He did, however, lead a small but intrepid army to fight racism, corruption, and public ignorance — and then used his remaining time helping people avoid a similar fate.
"Once his freedom became a physical fact," Nelson Mandela wrote in the foreword of Carter's last book, "Rubin determined that he must come to the aid of all those languishing in prison for crimes they never committed, the victims of injustice. That has been the life of Rubin Carter since he was released from prison."