Rubin Carter understood the feeling.
“You must be Lesra,” Carter said. He saw a frightened but good-looking young man about six inches shorter than he. (Carter was only five foot eight.) The prisoner’s appearance stunned the teenager. Every picture Lesra had seen of Carter showed him with a clean-shaven head, a thick goatee, and a menacing stare. Now he had a full Afro, a mustache, and a smile. The two embraced, then walked to the cell Carter had reserved. They sat facing each other and leaned forward so passing guards could not hear their conversation.
Lesra recounted his harrowing experience getting to the Visiting Center. “How do you survive in here?” he asked.
“I don’t acknowledge the existence of the prison,” Carter said. “It doesn’t exist for me.”
Lesra noticed that the guards patrolling the corridor did not walk as closely to their cell as to other cells, giving them a bit more privacy as a sign of respect. Lesra also heard inmates as well as guards refer to Rubin as “Mr. Carter.” When Lesra called him “Mr. Carter,” he laughed. “You can call me Rubin, or better yet, Rube.” As the inmate explained his refusal to participate in prison activities, Lesra remembered the words of Bob Dylan’s song “Hurricane,” which had been released in 1975 amid an outpouring of celebrity support:
But then they took him to a jailhouse
Where they tried to turn a man into a mouse.
The jailhouse, Lesra realized, had failed.
He described how he left his home in Bedford-Stuyvesant and moved to Toronto, where his new Canadian family was educating him. The arrangement puzzled Carter, and he told Lesra he need not worry about being alone. “I know they’re treating you well because of your smile, but if you’re ever not happy there, you let me know,” he said. The young man gave him the phone number to his home in Canada.
About an hour passed. As the visit was about to end, a prisoner who had a Polaroid camera approached them.
“You like me to take a picture of you and your son, Mr. Carter?”
“Absolutely!” he responded.
Lesra turned and began walking toward a wall that he believed would make a fine backdrop. Carter yanked him back.
“We don’t go that way,” he said. “That’s where the chair was.”
The electric chair had been removed a year or so earlier and was now in the Corrections Department Museum in Trenton. But the bolts were still in the ground, and the imprint of the chair was visible. The picture was taken against a different wall, with the two standing next to each other, smiles creasing their faces, Carter’s arm draped across Lesra’s shoulders.
As the two walked toward the holding bay, Lesra said, “I wish I could just walk you right on out.”
“Don’t worry,” Carter said. “I’m with you.”
This encounter marked the beginning of Carter’s reemergence from his self-imposed shell. He would always have a special bond with Lesra, but he would develop far more important ties with the Canadian commune, and its members would provide vital support on Carter’s journey through the federal courts. At the same time, the group’s strong-willed leader, Lisa Peters, and Carter would become intense but doomed soulmates in an unlikely prison love affair. But all that was in the future. After his visit to the Death House, Carter returned to his cell, lay down on his cot, and stared at the picture of Lesra and himself.
AT THE TIME of Rubin Carter’s arrest in 1966, his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, was dominated by Mayor Frank X. Graves. A smallish man with heavy jowls and thinning hair, he was one of the last of the old city bosses. He controlled every department in his bureaucracy, personally answered phone calls from irate citizens, and referred to anything in Paterson as “mine,” as in “my City Hall” or “my police force.” He had no hobbies and read few books. He did have a wife and three daughters, but Paterson was his life, and he took any infraction inside its boundaries as a personal wound. Faced with white flight and fears of rising crime rates, he launched a law-and-order crusade with a hard-edged moralism.
No one doubted his audacity. Graves had won two Purple Hearts in World War II for injuries suffered during the invasion of Italy. As mayor, he usually carried a pistol. Driving around Paterson in his black sedan, he monitored the police and fire radio scanners, his ears perked for any signs of disorder. He personally led several raids on what he called “hotbeds of prostitution,” and he denounced white suburbanites who came to Paterson to pursue ladies of the night. He donned a firefighter’s suit and busted up a bookmaking operation. He ordered the police to issue a warrant to the poet and Paterson native son Allen Ginsberg for smoking pot. Ginsberg, in town for a poetry reading, escaped to New York.
Nothing flustered Graves more than Paterson’s surplus of taverns. There were too damn many of them, about three hundred and fifty, give or take a stray moonshiner with a back porch brew strong enough to rip your gut out. The mayor attacked the jazz bars and gin joints, sometimes twenty on a block, as carriers of moral decay, seedy venues of gambling, brawling, and whoring. The very names of the bars—Cabin of Joy, Blue Danube, Polynesian Club, Bobaloo—evoked exotic, bacchanalian pleasures, which he felt threatened Paterson’s social equilibrium.
Graves was particularly concerned about the so-called ghetto bars and personally led raids on them to break up fights or ferret out other wrongdoing. Indeed, “checking” these bars, which entailed cops pushing, shoving, and threatening patrons, was a favorite method for maintaining the balance of terror between blacks and the authorities, however much observers decried these tactics as Gestapo-like.
Blacks took considerable pride in their rollicking circuit of jazz clubs and playhouses, burlesque shows and barrooms. They clustered at the bottom of Governor Avenue, known as “down the hill,” abutting the Passaic River and just outside Paterson’s cheerless Central Business District. Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole had played in black Paterson. So had Lou Costello, the fleshy wit who was a native son. But for the black machine operators and silk dye workers, the seamstresses and secretaries, Paterson’s nightlife was not about glamour or celebrities. It was about loud music, hard drinking, and dirty dancing. They cashed their checks on Friday and had money to spend on the weekend. Young men on the make, dressed in dark suits and narrow black ties, some with razor blades in their pockets, danced the slop, the boogaloo, or the grind. Well-dressed young women, many of them domestics, flirted with their suitors. The revelers, sometimes en masse, sometimes in a trickle, strolled through the neon-lit, one-way streets long into the night, circulating through the Kit Kat Club, the Do Drop Inn, or the Ali Baba. When these clubs closed at 3 A.M., the party moved to after-hours clubs tucked behind darkened grocery stores or to “basement socials,” where entrants paid a quarter to the house, slipped downstairs with their bottle in a brown bag, and swayed with a partner beneath an undulating red light.
The most popular black club, the Nite Spot, stood on the corner of Governor and East Eighteenth Streets. Female impersonators gave it a racy edge, while a black tile floor with drizzles of gray, a cover charge, and a kitchen grill conferred a veneer of sophistication. The crowd grooved on the wooden dance floor to Alvin Valentine’s jazzy, sweet-tempered organ and sipped Dewar’s White Label Scotch and Johnnie Walker Red (which was smoother than Black). Managers allowed in “young blood,” or bucks under the