Moreover, when Carter did exact revenge and lash out, he used only his fists. The rules of the streets were clear. Punks and sissies used guns or knives; warriors used their fists. If Carter wanted to punish or even kill someone, he would consider it an insult to his manhood if he did not use his bare hands. He would want the victim to know that it was “Hurricane” Carter meting out his punishment. Carter owned and occasionally carried guns, but that was because of his own fears—perhaps exaggerated, perhaps not—that he would be shot at. What is clear is that until the Lafayette bar murders, no one had ever accused Carter of pointing a gun at another person.
The Lafayette bar shooting “wasn’t Rubin’s style,” said Martin Barnes, an acquaintance of Carter’s who was elected mayor of Paterson in the 1990s. “If you were bad, you did it with your hands, and Rubin did it strictly with his hands.”
Carter initially wanted F. Lee Bailey to represent him, but the famed defense lawyer was already embroiled in the Kavanaugh case, so instead he hired Raymond Brown from Newark. Brown was known for being the only black lawyer in the state to take on whites. He did not, at first glance, look like a dragon slayer in his rumpled brown and gray suits, Ben Franklin-type bifocals, and a plaid hat. He smoked a pipe and ambled around in a kind of slouch, as if he were getting ready to sit down after every step. But he was an expansive orator whose voice filled a courtroom, a firebrand with a rapier wit. In his fifties, he had short, dust-colored hair and a high yellow complexion; in fact, he was light enough to pass for white. When he was in the Army, an officer candidate once told him, “Be careful, some people will think you’re a nigger.” “I am!” Brown shot back.
The trial against Carter and Artis took place at the Passaic County Court on Hamilton Street, where grandeur and tradition welcomed every visitor. Completed just after the turn of the century, the building featured large white Corinthian columns and a ribbed dome with a columned cupola; on it stood a blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice. In the courtroom where Carter was tried, the judge’s large dark wood desk stood on a platform in dignified splendor. On the desk lay a black Bible with its red-edged pages facing the gallery. An American flag stood to the side.
Paterson was a tinderbox as jury selection began on April 7, 1967. The establishment was terrified that blacks would riot if the defendants were found guilty. Black youths had rioted three summers before, and a conviction of Paterson’s most celebrated, most feared, most hated black man could trigger another firestorm. To quell any possible disturbance, the courthouse was transformed into a fortress, with extra uniformed and plainclothes police perched in the building’s halls and stairwells, on the streets outside, and on neighborhood rooftops. The roads around the building were blocked off. The authorities questioned known troublemakers and even rummaged through garbage cans in search of contraband. According to an internal FBI report dated May 27, 1967, an informant told the agency that in the “Negro district, five large garbage cans were filled with empty wine and beer bottles and some beer cans … and these might be a source of Molotov cocktails … and this condition could be caused by the feeling of people regarding the Carter-Artis trial.”
Presiding was Samuel Larner, an experienced New Jersey lawyer who had recently been appointed to the Superior Court in Essex County and had already developed a reputation as a no-nonsense judge. Larner gained widespread acclaim in the 1950s when he spearheaded an investigation of government corruption in Jersey City. The inquest triggered more than fifty indictments, culminating in the suicide of one employee and the resignation of several others. Sam Larner knew Ray Brown well. The two men were co-counsel for John William Butenko, an American engineer, and Igor Ivanov, a Soviet national, who just a few years earlier had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage.
Judge Larner had been reassigned from Essex to Passaic County, evidently because Passaic was either experiencing a shortage of judges or a backlog of cases. Carter always suspected he had been reassigned to keep Ray Brown under control. Larner intervened often when Brown was pressing witnesses, and their jousting was a running sideshow during the trial.
Each day during the voir dire, for example, the proceedings lasted into the early evening. Then one afternoon Judge Larner abruptly rose at 4 P.M. and declared, “The court is adjourned.” The stunned courtroom silently watched the judge walk toward his chamber. Suddenly, Ray Brown stood up.
“Judge Larner!”
“What is it now, Mr. Brown?”
“Tell me, Judge Larner, why is this night different from all other nights?”
It was the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover, and the judge needed to get home. He first glared at Brown for his effrontery in questioning a judge’s decision to end the day prematurely. Then he realized Brown’s clever invocation of a line from the Passover Seder. Larner smiled at his former colleague and continued out the door.
Carter, however, found little to smile about. He had never been on trial before. When he did something wrong, he owned up to it, as he had ten years earlier when he pled guilty to robbery and assault. Carter figured he was in trouble during jury selection, a three-week ordeal that saw one potential juror dismissed for being a member of Hitler’s youth movement in Germany and another for believing that blacks who grew up in ghettos were more prone to violence. Despite such efforts, the jury that was selected comprised four white women, nine white men, and one black man—a West Indian. Fourteen jurors in all, two of whom would be selected as alternates at the end of the trial. This was a jury of my peers? Carter thought. Aside from being a different color than all but one of them, I probably had more education than any person sitting on the jury, and even I didn’t understand a damn thing that was going on.
The prosecuting attorney was Vincent Hull, the son of a state legislator, whose precise, low-key manner contrasted sharply with Brown’s showmanship. Hull was young, slim, and conservatively dressed with prematurely gray hair. In his opening statement, he described how the two defendants, after circling the bar in Carter’s 1966 Dodge, parked the car, walked into the Lafayette bar, and without uttering a word “premeditatedly, deliberately, and willfully” shot four people, killing three of them. Hull meticulously described the victims and their wounds and asserted that Detective Emil DeRobbio found an unspent 12-gauge shotgun shell and an unspent .32 S&W long bullet in Carter’s car. Those were the same kinds of bullets, Hull said, used in the bar shooting. When Hull completed his opening, he thanked the jury and sat down.
Judge Larner turned to the defense table. “Mr. Brown,” he said.
Ray Brown rose from the table, his glasses perched on his nose and a legal document in his hand. While the prosecutor had not mentioned race except as it related to the identification of the suspects, Brown argued that Carter stood accused because the police were looking for a Negro on the night in question, and therefore every Negro was suspect. Brown told the jury that Carter didn’t know what happened in the bar and refuted Hull’s assertions point by point, including the alleged discovery of bullets in the Dodge. If the police actually found the bullets on the night of the crime, Brown asked, why wasn’t Carter arrested then instead of four months later?
To convict, the state needed a unanimous vote of guilt from the jurors, so Brown’s strategy was to direct his entire defense to the West Indian juror, hoping to persuade him that the state was victimizing his client. “Any man can be accused,” Brown thundered, “but no man should have his nerves shredded and his guts torn out without a direct charge.”
“Mr. Brown!” Judge Larner exploded. “I don’t want to interrupt you, but I think it is time you limited yourself to the facts to be shown, and let’s get beyond the speeches on philosophy.”
“This is not philosophy, Your Honor. This is a fact.”
The state’s first witness, William Marins, who lost his left eye in the shooting, set the tone for the trial. Carter had hoped that Marins, a balding, stocky man in his forties who was the lone survivor of