However, it took Gretchen many long months to get the record together and write her brief. During the oral argument in the appellate division, I was hopeful (even with Chief Justice Taney peering down from the ceiling). Of the five judges hearing the appeal, Gretchen told me two were fair minded, and two virtually always favored the prosecution. That left Theodore Kupferman, a former moderate Republican congressman from the “silk stocking” Upper East Side, as the swing vote. I had reason to think he might go our way: My dad had supported him financially in his election campaigns. Kupferman, however, sided with the two “law and order” judges, and we lost three to two. Courthouse scuttlebutt had it that the district attorney’s office had spread the word far and wide that Maynard was guilty and clever lawyers were trying to get him off. Perhaps that had swayed Kupferman. Or maybe Wechsler’s solid support of the Democratic Party turned him against us. It was impossible to know. Certainly it was not that the law was against us as the three-man majority literally wrote nothing to justify their votes, and Chief Judge Murphy wrote a powerful dissent that was joined by the same Harold Stevens who had written the Gaynor opinion.
Even with the loss, there was still hope. Gretchen would appeal to the state’s highest court, and the judges there would all read Murphy’s dissent. At the same time, events on the local front were promising. I had received a jumbled, semicoherent letter from a prisoner in which he said that he had killed the Marine. As the letter contained facts that had not been reported in the press, and the man had had no contact with Maynard, I was hopeful this could be our break.
I called Sawyer and asked him to investigate. He turned me down flat. As Davidson was still the judge on the case, I filed a motion with him and attached the letter, but when the Legal Aid Society attorney counseled the prisoner to take the Fifth Amendment, Davidson sent the man back to his upstate prison and denied my motion. There had been no investigation, no court hearing. No nothing.
Then I got word that Sawyer had a man held in civil jail before and during the trial as a material witness. According to a psychiatrist friend who had access through his work to the jail’s medical records, this man was kept in a near-catatonic state with massive doses of drugs. Sawyer’s plan was to have this man, despite his altered state, testify that Tony had confessed to him. During the trial, however, Sawyer decided not to risk calling him. After Maynard was convicted, the man was released, despite the fact that he would need his drugs on the outside and had committed a homicide. Again I sought a hearing to prove to what lengths Sawyer was willing to go to manufacture a case against Maynard. But Judge Irving Lang, who was filling in for an ailing Davidson, denied my motion.
Finally in 1974, before Tony’s appeal was argued in the court of appeals, I struck gold. A reader of Jimmy Wechsler’s called him up to tell him that a key prosecution witness, Michael Febles, had a criminal record. As Febles had identified Maynard as the killer, Sawyer was bound to turn over information about him—such as prior arrests—but, despite my request, had failed to do so. When I obtained the court transcript of Febles’s guilty plea for what turned out to be a Peeping Tom crime, I found out he had a long and severe psychological history that I could have used to show that his testimony was untrustworthy. That got Judge Lang’s attention. He held a hearing and determined that this evidence could well have changed the verdict. As a result the conviction was vacated and Tony was released on bail, which was posted by William Styron. He had spent seven years in prison.
Tony was euphoric. He ran down the steps of the courthouse and up the street away from the Tombs. Kitty, Valerie, and I ran with him. It was as if we were fleeing from the possibility that the court might suddenly decide that there had been a mistake, and drag him back. But that didn’t happen. Tony was free.
That evening Kitty and I took Tony to a restaurant that he picked out called Nirvana. It was on the top floor of the Essex House Hotel on Central Park South, a high-class place next to the Hampshire House, where my Warner grandparents had lived along with Bill and Lorraina. Tony was delighted, but the space and the lights and Central Park shimmering below were almost too much for him.
“I feel the walls closing in on me,” he said. Then he smiled and said over and over as if it were a mantra, “Yes.”
The next day Tony came down from Harlem, where he was staying in Valerie’s work space, to our apartment on Central Park West. He came bearing something that was new and fantastical to me, but is now fairly commonplace: a bird-of-paradise flower for Kitty.
Later, on the street, Tony picked Patrick up high above his head. Patrick shrieked with delight. Thinking back, I remembered Bill Rutherford picking me up like that. That memory, in all probability, tied me even closer to Tony.
In the days that followed, on the weekends sometimes I would take long walks with Tony and a stray dog that he adopted, having to double-step from time to time trying to keep up with his long strides. There was no talk of what Tony would do with his newfound freedom, which in any event was not complete, since the district attorney’s office could still decide to retry him. To persuade District Attorney Richard H. Kuh, who had replaced Hogan, to drop the charges once and for all, I hired a polygraph expert—one the district attorney had also used—who submitted a report that concluded there was a high likelihood that Tony was not involved in the killing of Sergeant Kroll. Still we waited, Tony walking the city, trying to get the bleak walls and steel bars of prison life out of his head.
Finally word came. There would be no retrial. Tony was free.
Winter approached, and Tony asked if he could live in our Bridgehampton house until we started going out there again in the spring, which was fine with Kitty and me. I alerted the person who watched our house, but still I received a few calls asking about a black man being there. Tony came back to the city refreshed, but still unable to think about what to do with his life or about working. By then I had begun to give him some spending money.
Worried, I wondered what would become of Tony. I did not want him as a dependent. In my mind I had enough on my plate already. I had three children to support and a law practice that barely paid the rent of our office. Yet I could not say good-bye to Tony. So I tried to motivate him.
“I got you out of prison, and you have two sisters to help get you on your feet. You have got to start taking care of yourself,” I thought about telling him. However, something told me that would not work. Still, I felt responsible, perhaps because I lost his trial and he had spent all those years in prison, or perhaps deep down because I had been unable to set things right with Bill, or maybe just because Tony had my number. He had that quick intelligence and saw right through all the bullshit.
In desperation I came up with the idea of persuading James Baldwin to write a book about Tony. But Jimmy always seemed to be traveling or away, and I did not really know what their relationship had been.
Finally I got through to Baldwin through his brother who had a brownstone in the city, and he agreed to meet Tony and me at a popular restaurant called the Ginger Man, which was near Lincoln Center. The three of us met there in midafternoon sitting at the bar, Tony to my left, looking young and handsome, dapper as ever, and the famous writer to my right—smaller and older than I would have thought from pictures I had seen, looking alternately with his large bulging eyes at Tony and me. How the two men greeted each other I have forgotten, but I remember that Baldwin was noticeably wary.
Tony was hungry, so he ordered oysters, and we each had a glass of wine. Then I made the pitch.
“Tony can’t take care of himself,” I said. “He won’t work or can’t work, and Valerie is tired of taking care of him. There is a great story in what happened to him, and only you can tell it. Both of us would cooperate, helping in any way we could, and a book could open doors for Tony.”
Baldwin said their relationship had been over for years and that he had no intention of it starting up again. He was in a different place now and didn’t want Tony coming around. He asked Tony if he understoo
d that, and Tony said yes, he would do whatever Baldwin wanted.
“I’ll do the book,” Baldwin said, “but our relationship is long over. If I need to talk to you,” he said, eyeing Tony, “Lewis will arrange it. And you are not going to like the book I will write about you. I will say you were guilty, not of the crime, but of being an arrogant black man who didn’t know his place and who thought he was free to do whatever he pleased.”
Tony shrugged, and picked at his oysters.
A few months later Baldwin received a big advance for the project. Tony got a substantial check out of it and immediately purchased a car. When I saw him next, he was wearing fancy fingerless driving gloves. Then Tony disappeared for a while. When he reappeared back in my office, it was to tell me how he had crashed the car in Central Park and walked away from it.
I hoped there would be more money when Baldwin finished the book, and maybe a movie, but it was not to be.
“You have to keep Tony away from Baldwin,” Jimmy’s literary agent told me, “or Jimmy won’t write the book.”
“It’s my story,” Tony said when I talked to him about it. “I want to see that Jimmy gets it right.”
“Leave him alone,” I told him, “or the deal will be off.” And that’s what happened. Baldwin backed out. So there was Tony again, needing rescue.
For quite a few years he found white women—there was a series of them—to take him in. I remember one in particular, a very attractive Canadian, who appeared to have money and seemed really to care for and understand him, but that relationship also came to an end.
Somewhere in the middle of these adventures, I persuaded one of the city’s finest negligence lawyers, Alfred Julien of the Julien & Schlesinger law firm to bring a case against the city for wrongful imprisonment. Julien turned the case over to his partner, who did a great job, finally settling the case for $250,000. Tony got two-thirds of the proceeds. Again he went off with his stash of money, and once again I was hopeful. For months I did not hear from him, but then he showed up, this time telling me about a sailboat he had purchased that had sunk in the so-called Bermuda triangle during a storm.
18
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and John Artis
The battle to free Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and John Artis was unavoidable for me. Tony Maynard’s case revealed the desperate situation blacks confronted every time they were hauled into criminal court to defend themselves in a world dominated by white people. Having experienced “white man’s justice” firsthand, I knew guilt or innocence didn’t matter much once someone was in the system. You could see it any day of the week in Manhattan’s massive criminal courthouse, one African American or Latino after another represented by lawyers who maybe knew their names—or not—facing cynical, indifferent, bored, or hostile white judges. Most of them were guilty of crimes, some of them heinous, but the process assumed they were all wild animals, black beasts, the scum of the earth—and of course guilty. You could see it in the faces of the people whose daily life involved pushing defendants into the prison system. Contempt permeated the air.
The exception that proved the rule was one of the Manhattan court’s few black judges, Bruce Wright. Turned down as an undergraduate by Princeton and Notre Dame in 1939 because of his race, he had served in the army in World War II and afterward had become a lawyer and then a judge who wrote books telling it like it was. At bail hearings before most judges, it was a foregone conclusion that most poor and black defendants could not come close to raising the money needed to obtain their freedom. Not so with Judge Wright. He treated every bail hearing with the seriousness it deserved, and often would find drug programs or even jobs so that he could release a defendant rather than have him languish many months in jail without a trial, unless he agreed to a plea bargain to shorten his possible sentence and obtain his release. For his diligence and concern the press anointed Wright with the sobriquet “Turn ’Em Loose Bruce.” That intimidated the other judges into sticking to the high-bail protocol or seeing their prospects for long careers on the bench, let alone promotions, greatly diminished. So when the question of fairness arose in cases involving black defendants, I had a ready ear.
That Harlem Four case was a good example. With Bill Kunstler I also represented two black prisoners who had been awaiting trial in the Brooklyn House of Detention charged with killing an inmate who broke ranks with prisoners who were refusing to go to court on the grounds that they couldn’t get a fair trial. After they were acquitted, Bill asked me to join him on cases all over the country.
“That’s the way you make your name,” he told me. “When the newspaper stories start coming in about you from everywhere, people take notice.”
There was enough work for me in New York, I had told Bill. But the real reason was that I couldn’t bear the prospect of spending months on the road away from Kitty and my children. Not that I would take just any work offered to me in the city: I turned down an attaché case lined with hundred-dollar bills the day Roy Cohn visited our little office on Broadway to see if I would consider a federal criminal case involving mobsters. A big-time lawyer, former counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy, and friend of New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman, Cohn was smooth. While I enjoyed the spectacle of him sitting in my straight-backed metal chair trying to hide his disdain for my cramped office that looked out on the tar roof of the local United Auto Workers’ second-floor office right below us, I knew it was the most paltry of Faustian bargains that he was offering.
* * *
Having followed Selwyn Raab’s 1975 coverage of the Carter case in the New York Times, I felt the case’s pull, so I called him. Raab had written that the prosecution’s two key witnesses had recanted their testimony that they had seen Hurricane Carter and John Artis leaving the scene of a 1966 triple murder at a bar in Paterson, New Jersey. Raab didn’t say Carter and Artis were innocent, just that nothing he’d seen or heard established their guilt, and the more he looked into the state prosecutor’s case, the more questions arose.
For instance, the Paterson police said that one 12-gauge shotgun shell and one .32-caliber bullet had been found in the car that Carter had rented and Artis was driving after the triple murder they were accused of committing. The only problem, Raab noted, was that the shotgun shell was older, had a different casing, and contained smaller pellets than the spent shells and pellets found at the crime scene. Also, all the recovered bullet fragments from the .32 were copper coated, but the bullet supposedly found in Carter’s car was unjacketed lead—typical ammunition for police officers’ backup weapons, which were often .32s. In addition there was another murder that same night—it would become central to the prosecutor’s case—committed by a white man named Frank Conforti, who had used a 12-gauge shotgun to kill a black man at the nearby Waltz Inn. Both the weapon and unfired shells had been seized when Conforti was arrested. Those shells matched the one the cops said was found in Carter’s car. The Conforti arresting officer’s report listed two “Westerns,” but there was only one such shell in the police property envelope that the department still kept. If that weren’t enough, it took five days for the bullet and shell that were allegedly found in Carter’s car to be vouchered into the police property book.
After a stop at the crime scene, the car and Carter and Artis were taken to the police station, where they were interrogated separately. Their hands were not checked for traces of gunpowder, and there were no weapons in the car. One was shown the bullet, the other the shell. Both men said they had nothing to do with the crime and had not seen any bullets or shells. Still in custody, Carter and Artis were then taken to local hospitals and shown to two survivors from the bar. After neither victim identified them as the killers, they were taken back to police headquarters and again placed in separate rooms. Both agreed to take lie detector tests, which were administered by a police sergeant. A few hours later they were released.
According to Raab, there was a dispute as to whether Carter and Artis had passed the lie detector tests, w
hich wasn’t going to be resolved because the Paterson police department claimed that the tapes were destroyed in a flood. But the fact that two black murder suspects were released in an investigation of a triple homicide where all the victims were white was pretty good proof that Carter and Artis passed the tests. Had a matching bullet and shell actually been found in the car, and/or if either man had failed the lie detector tests, the police would have found some way to keep them in custody.
There were many other discrepancies. The white car that left the crime scene had out-of-state plates, as did Carter’s car, but only two black men fled, speeding off in the getaway vehicle. In the Carter car, however, a third black man, John Royster, was sitting in the front passenger seat, next to Artis, who was driving normally and immediately pulled over when flagged down by a police cruiser. Carter was in the back when they were stopped. Seeing three men inside, all acting calmly, the officer asked Carter, whom he recognized, where they were going. Satisfied with Carter’s answer, the cop resumed his search. After dropping off Royster, Carter and Artis were stopped a second time by the same officer in the same squad car—only this time he called for backup and drove Carter and Artis to the crime scene so that a young woman named Patricia Valentine, who lived above the Lafayette Bar and Grill, where the crime occurred, could identify them. Valentine said she went to her window after hearing the gunshots. There she saw two black men wearing sports jackets run out of the bar and jump into a white car with out-of-state plates.
When Carter and Artis, neither of whom was wearing a sports jacket, were put in front of her, Valentine didn’t recognize them as the men she had seen from her window, but she said that the car looked similar to the one that sped away. As time passed, the differences between the car that Valentine had seen speeding away after the shooting and Carter’s car dwindled. Also, the two survivors of the shooting said both the killers were about six feet tall, light skinned, and one had a mustache, but neither Carter nor Artis had a mustache and their height disparity—one short and the other tall—was striking. Equally telling, Carter was a well-known middleweight contender who lived in a white Paterson residential neighborhood. With three hometown witnesses, it seems unlikely that no one would have recognized him. But even if they hadn’t, Carter’s baldness, his very dark skin, and his prominent goatee were standout features. At police headquarters neither Carter, who knew the value of lawyers from his past street crimes, or Artis, asked for an attorney. Instead they had continued to cooperate with the police. Finally Hurricane left the country for a boxing match, returning afterward.
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