After The Hurricane

The man the authorities came to blame. The man the big stars came to love

The man the authorities came to blame. The man the big stars came to love. The man Denzel Washington portrays in The Hurricane. The Hurricane. Rubin Carter is unavailable for interview this week. Life at present is a speaking tour, a long homily of injustice and redemption. Hollywood has set the Rubin Carter industry in motion again and Carter is on the road, singing his story like a spiritual.

His life in a few stolen moments: dragged up hard and seething in New Jersey. Aged 14 and his fourth juvenile complaint got Carter inside the system for the first time. Broke a bottle over a man's head, took his wristwatch and his cash. Escaped from reformatory into uniform. Twenty-one months and four courtmartials later, discharged from the army. Unfit to serve. Nine more months in reformatory on escape charges. Released. Arrested soon after, on two counts of robbery and one of assault. Jailed for another four years. Freed in 1961.

Becomes a professional boxer. In June 1966, on the night three people are blown away in the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, Carter gets picked up in a car matching a witness's description. Released. Later, witnesses make him as one of the guys with the guns. He goes down. Found guilty in May 1967. Witnesses recant and celebrities - from Jesse Jackson to Norman Mailer - march and sing. Out again in March 1976. Witnesses recant their recantation.

Two trials in all. Weed patches of lies, stories and shifting alibis. Back in jail until 1985. Freed, without chimes of exoneration, on the basis of procedural errors and a finding of racism running through the hearings. When Carter's convictions were overturned in 1985, Judge H. Lee Sarokin decided that the prosecution had committed "grave constitutional violations" and that the convictions were based on "racism rather than reasons, and concealment rather than disclosure".

READ MORE

Moves to Canada. Today, works for the wrongfully convicted. Fifteen years later, Hollywood anoints him again. Denzel Washington is on the big screen as Carter. Bob Dylan's impassioned whine is everywhere once more: "He could-a-bin the champion of the world". On the night Washington received a Golden Globe award for the role, he beckoned Carter on stage and declared: "this man is love".

If Carter is love, Washington is excellent playing him. Subtract Washington and The Hurricane is a travesty, a tidal wave of sentimentality and blurred facts. The movie could have enjoyed the light and shade of Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. Instead, we get the razzle dazzle of Rocky Balboa. Worse, the movie started a war which has damaged it at the box office and which hurt the film at Oscar nomination time. Pickets have been placed. Lawsuits have been issued. The families of the victims of the Lafayette murders have attempted to take ads out in the Hollywood trade papers. The ads have been declined.

Arguments over the film's veracity have been played out across the pages of newspapers all over the US. The arguments have spread like bushfire across the Internet. Voices from the 1960s are raised again, looking back in undissolved anger.

You are Joey Giardello. Once you were Carmine Tilelli out of Brooklyn, but that tag was too ethnic for boxing. So you moved and became Joey Giardello out of Philly. Giardello, middleweight champion of the world.

In Philly, you were the real deal. You kept your gloves laced, managing a few pros, a few amateurs in gyms around Philly. Now you are 69, retired and living in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Not long ago: "A reporter took me to see a movie in a cinema in Philly. I felt humiliated and disgraced. I felt sick to my stomach watching how the character who portrayed me was being beaten to a pulp. I couldn't believe my eyes. Still to this day, it depresses me to see or hear anything about the movie."

You sat in the cinema with the popcorn munchers and saw a version of yourself being beaten by Denzel Washington. You saw a version of your arm lifted in the air and a crowd of good people rise as one in horror at this racially inspired fix. You saw Washington being robbed by Giardello. Nobody remembers it that way. So your son Steve put the tape of the original fight up on the Web at joeygiardello.com. Easy to see why you are sick. Hurricane Carter had dynamite in his shoulders and for a few rounds, he seemed interested in detonating it. For the last nine or 10, though, a fool can see that Carter is a spring breeze. He coulda been champion of the world? Not really. Back in December 1964, you gave the black kid Carter his shot, over an Irish kid with a better claim. Carter was in there despite his thoroughly mediocre record. Decades later, Hollywood thanks you.

On the big screen, you are part of a racist conspiracy. "I remember winning the fight easily by outboxing Rubin and making him miss through most of the fight. I thought I lost maybe three rounds, but it was a great fight. There was nothing odd about the aftermath. The crowd for the most part was happy with the decision, except for a small amount of fans that Rubin had there. "I spent over 20 years in the ring as a tough fighter who never ducked anyone. I was a guy who gave everybody a chance. For 30 or more years, I've remained proud to be a world champion at a time when there was only one champ in each weight class. My accomplishments, my reputation over the past 50 years, have been destroyed in a couple of minutes in a movie."

So Joey Giardello, you've called your lawyers and asked that the real fight be included in all video and DVD copies of The Hurricane. You've called your lawyers to see how interested Hollywood is in your truth.

You are Carolyn Kelley and you are an idealist. You are 62 years old and all this time later The Hurricane still sweeps through your brain some nights. Once upon a time, as a community activist, you used to take inner-city kids to Muhammad Ali's famed training camp in Deerlake, Pennsylvania, to show them all that a kid could be. Like Ali, you were a Muslim and when he asked you to work for Carter, you agreed. You worked for a year and helped Carter to get a retrial. One weekend in 1975, after he was free, you called Carter's room with a query. He cursed you like crazy. Hung up. You called again. The same.

"So I took the rollers out of my hair, went out downstairs and drove to his room on the other side of the motel. Walked up the stairs. I'll always remember the room. 223. Knocked. Who is it? I identified myself. He opened the door and he started laughing like a fat lady in the circus. He stepped away. I saw him go into the bathroom and gargle with Charlie cologne. "I told my feet to move, but just then he walked out and stood between me and the exit. He hit me so fast I can't tell anyone which hand he used. I felt everything get dark. Please help me God, I said. God turned my body over as I lay on the floor. Rubin Carter stomped and stomped and stomped on me.

"I lost consciousness and the security people found me there later in the foetal position."

You reacted first in fear and confusion and humiliation. "In the weeks that followed, I wanted to protect all these people who believed in this man. We had been responsible for actually effecting his release. I was in absolute shock. I protected people - Ali, Dyan Cannon, Ellen Burstyn, Harry Belafonte, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack . . . All these people. It seemed as if it was up to me to protect them, to protect the thing we all believe in."

So you went to hospital quietly, but word seeped out anyway. Carter told interviewers that you had asked him for $250,000 or you would pretend he had beaten you up. Later, he said $100,000.

It still makes you laugh. "Asking somebody for money who had been in jail for 10 years? Rubin didn't have 10 dollars. After his release, I guaranteed payment for the first clothes that went on his back in a store in Washington Street in Newark."

The police wanted you to embellish the story to try to get Carter put behind bars again. They served you with a subpoena. You fought that at your own expense. At a bail hearing in Passaic County that summer, you were still unable to walk when a judge heard your story and determined that the assault had occurred. Carter's travel was restricted to the state of New Jersey. With a triple murder retrial pending, the state of Maryland declined to prosecute the case. Chuck Stone, the great black journalist, was an old friend. You told him your story and he told the world. You went back to activism, back to life. "I refused to limit my own life. The perpetrator of this assault is not going to be the winner. "Rubin Carter called his book The Sixteenth Round. This is the Seventeenth Round. I want nothing except a public apology." You are Carolyn Kelley. You have nothing to sell. It is three books and one Carter movie since you lay on the floor in Room 223. Nobody from The Hurricane industry has ever called you up looking for your story.

YOU are Jim de Simone and your dad was a cop. Here's the guy you knew. He got shot in the face in the second World War and wore a scar which crippled him with shyness and forced him into 19 plastic surgery operations. He would apologise to you and your four sisters for not being a better-looking dad, for not being George Raft-handsome. "And you know what? We thought he was the most beautiful man in the world. He loved the law. We kids used to call him Dick Tracy." He left his work at work and when he spoke to his kids, he liked to leave a message. He'd talk about living life by the good book, he'd talk about being able to look at yourself in the mirror and be proud of yourself. He'd speak about doing unto others as you'd have done unto yourself. He'd clip your ear if he heard a racial slur creep from your lips.

Last November you swung an invite to the premiere of The Hurricane. The dad you remembered, Vincent de Simone, had been turned into Vincent Della Pesca, a big, ugly composite of all the evils a police force could have. Della Pesca pursues Carter from childhood, a bent, racist, pathological chase.

When Carter is set free, Della Pesca glowers and twitches in the courtroom. You felt sick. Your father did not know Carter before he was arrested for the Lafayette Bar and Grill murders. By the time Carter was freed, your father had been dead from cancer for six years. The producers would claim later that the character was a composite designed to represent a system. Even on that level it failed but, to you and your family, it was your father they were out to get.

"The depiction of my dad, to the facts of the case, to the way it handled things during the case - there is such a small thread of truth there. I came out and said I wouldn't and this.

That they mentioned my dad at all hurt me.

"My father lived for law enforcement, he never saw black and white in his life; he couldn't tell you what colour a guy's skin was. He was an only child and I was an only son and when I was young, he gave me a poem which I have on my wall to this day. The poem talked about your name being the only thing he would be able to pass on to me, about never doing anything to darken that name, about doing the right thing always."

You came out of that theatre and said that this wasn't going to happen, that your father's name would be given back to him in the same condition it was in when he passed it to you.

YOU are Cal Deal and when you quit journalism, you moved to Florida. You saw a book touted on the Internet last autumn. Rubin Carter. Some stories stay with you, and Carter's was one of them. You interviewed him in jail twice. You went in thinking he was innocent, came out with doubts. Carter wouldn't take a lie detector test at this point. Certain discrepancies wouldn't go away, certain things he said never checked out. So you went back and investigated. More and more. Things rankled. The story stayed with you. So, years afterwards, you ordered the book.

Serendipity. A few weeks later, a movie erupted. You dug out your old files. One day you went to the cinema with Patty Valentine, the woman who called the cop on the night of the Lafayette murders. Your jaws dropped to the floor watching the Hollywood version of this story.

You're not a hard-ass rightwinger bent on revenge and retribution. You believe what you believe, and if Hollywood can blow the bank putting its version on the screen, you decide you can get your version out there too. So you launch your own show and every shred of evidence you possess is up there on www.graphic witness.com/carter "It appalls me to see Rubin Carter celebrated like this. I don't believe in his innocence. I don't believe Hollywood took any significant account of the facts of this case. That's what I have offered to people. "It's not about money. There's none involved. It's not a vendetta. I believe what I believe about Rubin Carter. I believe the documentation backs that up. It's a matter of not sitting back and doing nothing."

Your website is not comforting reading. Reams of documents, witness statements, newspaper interviews, maps, illustrations, records. The anatomy of a murder story, a story with no clean ending.

He is Rubin Carter or, as Denzel Washington has portrayed him, the Dalai Lama with gloves on. Washington has found a serenity in the young Carter which nobody, even Carter in his autobiography, remembers. Whichever way you look at his life, the real Rubin Carter is an American tragedy.

He is 62 now, a man who has finally blown his rage out. Today he describes his life as "a miracle". He has done bad things and he has done slow time, lots of it, but the past won't slip below the horizon.

Hollywood has turned over settled earth. The Hurricane could have been a story of dark complexity and ambiguity adhering to the truths of a tumultuous life. Instead it splurges on primary colours and paints a morality tale. A hundred old wounds have been opened again.

Rubin Hurricane Carter. He fights other people's wars now, but the voices tell him that his own battle isn't quite done. Peace comes slow.

The Hurricane opens at cinemas around the country on April 7th

Hurricane - The Life of Rubin Carter, Fighter, by James S. Hirsch, is reviewed by Antonia Logue in the Books pages