Despite a lack of forensic evidence linking Rubin Carter or John Artis to the murders, both men got convicted of first-degree murder. The case largely hinged on two eyewitnesses who admitted they were in the area to break into a warehouse. They later changed their stories to identify Carter and Artis as the shooters, which eventually led an all-white jury to convict both men. Judge Samuel Larner imposed two consecutive and one concurrent life sentences on Carter.
Artis received three concurrent life sentences for his alleged role in the deadly ordeal. The witnesses later withdrew their identifications in , which set up a retrial. Unfortunately for both men, a second trial led to a second conviction.
While Artis got paroled in , it took another four years for the former boxer to finally get his freedom. He spent his time reading and studying and had little contact with others. During his first 10 years in prison, his wife, Mae Thelma, stopped coming to see him at his own insistence; the couple, who had a son and a daughter, divorced in Beginning in , Carter developed a relationship with Lesra Martin, a teenager from a Brooklyn ghetto who had read his autobiography and initiated a correspondence.
Martin was living with a group of Canadians who had formed an entrepreneurial commune and had taken on the responsibilities for his education. Before long, Martin's benefactors, most notably Sam Chaiton, Terry Swinton, and Lisa Peters, developed a strong bond with Carter and began to work for his release. Their efforts intensified after the summer of , when they began to work in New York with Carter's legal defense team, including lawyers Myron Beldock and Lewis Steel and constitutional scholar Leon Friedman, to seek a writ of habeas corpus from U.
District Court Judge H. Lee Sarokin. On November 7, , Sarokin handed down his decision to free Carter, stating that "The extensive record clearly demonstrates that [the] petitioners' convictions were predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure.
Upon his release, Carter moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, into the home of the group that had worked to free him. He and Peters were married, but the couple separated when Carter moved out of the commune. The former prizefighter, who was given an honorary championship title belt in by the World Boxing Council, served as director of the Association in Defense of the Wrongfully Convicted, headquartered in his house in Toronto.
In , widespread interest in the story of Carter was revived with a major motion picture, The Hurricane , directed by Norman Jewison and starring Washington. The movie was largely based on Carter's autobiography and Chaiton and Swinton's book, which was re-released in late In , James S.
In , Carter founded the advocacy group Innocence International and often lectured about seeking justice for the wrongly convicted. Writings include Carter's notes, speeches, and drafts of articles and books in computer printout, typescript, and manuscript formats. There are also writings by other authors sent to Carter for review.
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Skip to Content. My List 0 Login. Tufts Digital Library. Contact About Search. Collection Home. Rubin "Hurricane" Carter Papers, -- Arrangement This collection is arranged in 9 series: Awards and artifacts; Business and financial records; Clippings, fliers, and programs; Correspondence; Court cases; Photographs; Printed materials; Subject files; and Writings.
Access and Use Access Restrictions This collection is open for research. Use Restrictions Requests for reproduction will be forwarded to Carter's designees. Collection History Processing Notes Original order and titles of materials were preserved where they existed.
This collection is processed. Custodial History Gift of Rubin Carter, Awards, -- 1. Artifacts, -- Business and financial records, -- Carter's business and financial records document his career as a motivational speaker, author, consultant, and prisoner advocate. Clippings, fliers, and programs, -- Clippings, fliers, and programs consist of articles in newspapers, magazines, and other publications on topics in which Carter had an interest, and fliers and programs from events he attended, including boxing matches, the Academy Awards, and speaking occasions.
Correspondence, -- The bulk of Carter's correspondence is fan mail, detailing his influence on hundreds of correspondents from many countries. The bottle smashed against the wall by the door. As Oliver turned to run the length of the bar, past an ice cooler and toward the overhead television set, a single shotgun blast from about seven feet away tore into his lower back, the gauge round ripping open a 2-inch by 1-inch hole and severing his spinal column.
Oliver died instantly, police say. He was 51 and had volunteered to tend bar that night because his girlfriend — a widow named Betty Panagia, who owned the Lafayette and lived in Saddle Brook — had been putting in long hours as Oliver recovered from a recent hernia operation. The cash register drawer remained open. Nauyoks, a year-old machinist who had stopped by after working at a local factory before heading to his Cedar Grove home, took a.
The lead slug plowed into his brain stem, killing him instantly, autopsy records say. Nauyoks was well-known in the area as a billiard player, and his relatives remember that he went by two nicknames — "Paterson Bob" and "Cedar Grove Bob.
The next day, when she arrived home and was told of her husband's killing, grandson Tom Vicedomini remembers that she walked silently upstairs and donned a black dress. With death arriving instantly, Nauyoks slumped on the bar, seemingly asleep, a cigarette still burning between his fingers when police arrived, his shot glass still standing on the bar next to cash to pay for his drink, his right foot still propped on the chrome leg of his bar stool.
Seated two stools away, William "Willie" Marins, 42 and also a machinist, had been battling numerous health problems, including tuberculosis, police say. The Lafayette even kept a special glass for Marins to drink from so he would not spread tuberculosis to other customers. Marins, who lived nearby in Paterson, was also shot in the head by the man with the pistol. But he was lucky. He stumbled to the floor, and, he later said, played dead.
He would lose the use of his right eye, but could still describe the killers to police. He died in of causes unrelated to the shootings. The woman was the killers' final target. And for her, court records indicate, one of the gunmen finally spoke. As the others were shot, Hazel Tanis, 56, a waitress at Westmount Country Club in then West Paterson, was trying to hide near the front door.
As Tanis slumped to the floor, the man with the. Miraculously, Tanis would struggle to live another month before finally succumbing to an embolism.
But during that time she would give police a description of the killers and, says her daughter, would tell in detail how she tried to beg for her life. I'm a grandmother. Please don't shoot me,'" Tanis' daughter, Barbara Burns, now 55, recalls her mother telling her later in the hospital. Burns would later insist that her mother picked out mug shots of Carter and Artis, explaining: "You don't look a man in the eyes and plead for your life and forget what he looks like.
At the hub of almost every aspect of the mystery, however, are Carter and Artis. That night, neither was able to provide an ironclad account of their whereabouts at the time of the Lafayette Grill killings. Carter, now 63 and a prisoners' rights activist in Canada, did not respond to numerous requests for an interview, although he has long proclaimed his innocence. Artis, 53 and a youth counselor in Virginia, reaffirmed his innocence in an interview, adding that "my heart goes out" to the victims' families "but, simply stated: I'm not the one.
Many police officers not only disagree with Carter's and Artis' not-guilty claims, but still resent being accused of railroading the two men. That night, cops surmise that the killers needed only a minute — maybe less — to unleash their fusillade on all the victims. And from there, other mysteries would spread like those haphazard mirror cracks — mysteries and pieces of mysteries that have endured for 34 years.
Not even the precise time of the shootings is certain. All that's known is that someone — there is no indication whether the voice was male or female — telephoned the Paterson police headquarters at a. Finally home, after a long day, a Paterson police detective with a name that bespoke a humorous irony for his profession picked up the receiver.
I grabbed two guns and ran out the door. Armed with his. The lights were on, he recalls. Near one end of the bar, he remembers hearing Tanis groan in pain. Gazing across the room, past the pool table, Lawless noticed Nauyoks and Marins. Pools of blood dotted the linoleum. At Nauyoks' feet sat a spent shotgun shell. Before he had time to check behind the bar, Lawless heard the sirens of approaching police cruisers and an ambulance. Indeed, the scene was so gruesome that an ambulance technician would later testify that he slipped on the bloody floor.
But the technician's testimony underscores a fact that has since come to hover over the killings: Cops were so lax in securing the crime scene that they were never able to detect whether the killers might have left footprints in the blood as they departed. What's more, police never took fingerprints at the crime scene, never photographed tire skid marks from the getaway car even though witnesses said the car screeched away, never took fingerprints from the spent shotgun shell that was found on the bar's floor.
How come they didn't take fingerprints? Caruso, now a lawyer in Brick Township and one of several members of the team who raised questions about the original police investigation, said he was eventually reassigned to "cleaning up a file room. That night in June , there was no second-guessing of the police. After Lawless entered the bar, other detectives arrived to take over.
Lawless had another important case to resolve — a killing in another bar that night. But at that moment, as he stood on the bloody floor of the Lafayette Grill, he did not know how the two shootings would eventually be linked in the minds of prosecutors. Six hours earlier and five blocks away from the Lafayette Grill, another bartender had been shot to death. The death of Leroy Holloway, 48, the bartender-owner of the Waltz Inn, bore three distinct parallels to the Lafayette Grill shootings.
Holloway was killed with a blast from a gauge shotgun. The killer did not steal any money. And — perhaps most significant to prosecutors — Holloway's killer had a different skin color from his. Jim Lawless had spent much of the previous six hours collecting evidence and interviewing witnesses at the Waltz Inn.
But unlike the Lafayette killings, the Waltz Inn case was relatively easy to wrap up. The killer, Frank Conforti, 48, who had recently sold the bar to Holloway, had stormed into the Waltz Inn to confront Holloway about lax payments.
Witnesses said Conforti and Holloway argued, and then Conforti left and went to his car. Minutes later, Conforti returned and without saying a word shot Holloway in the head, killing him instantly. Police soon arrived, and escorted the handcuffed Conforti through a gauntlet of black residents to a waiting police car.
Conforti was eventually convicted of second-degree murder and spent almost 15 years in prison. Vanecek of Wayne. Whatever the motives, the clientele at the Waltz Inn and Lafayette Grill underscored a well-known fact of life in Paterson. Like much of America in , Paterson was a city divided by color lines.
When it came to taverns, whites had their neighborhood bars, like the Lafayette Grill, and blacks had theirs, like the Waltz Inn.
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