4 ~ Wednesday, February 24, 1993 - North Shore News

Dedicated group behind

ONE OF the finest, most inspiring Canadian stories I have

ever read concerns an Ameri

can, Rubin ‘‘tiurricane”’

Carter, who vow lives in Toronto, after having spent 20
nightmarish years in prison for a triple murder he never

committed.

It is a story so depressing that it
would take a hard heart indeed to
get through it without weeping,
but which is so uplifting in the
end, you don’t know whether to
sing out or starting crying all over
again. [f nothing else, it makes
you damned proud (and relieved)
to be a Canadian.

It’s a universal story, the un-
breakable spitit of a man versus a
gigantic machine of injustice that
did everything it could to utterly
crush him.

No less universal, one hopes, is
the indefatigable generosity and
compassion of the Canadians who
rode to his rescue,

Apart from sports fans, most of
us know about ‘Hurricane’
Carter through the Bob Dylan
song Hurricune, which came out
in the early ‘70s,

Because they kept such a low
profile, few people anywhere real-
ize the pivotal role a small group
of Canadians played in getting the
former middleweight contender
released from the pitbull jaws of a
deranged, corrupt, crooked and
racist American justice system.

The drama began in the summer
of 1966, when two white men and
a white woman were shot to death
ina bar in Paterson, New Jersey.

Because of the unlucky accident
of happening to be driving ina
car near the scene of the crirne,
Carter and a young black man
whom he had given a lift, John
Artis, were hauled in for question-
ing, and later released. .

By October that year, with no
suspects in sight, the Paterson
pclice got a signed statement Jrom
a small-time local {hug named
Alfred Bello — in‘exchange, i
turned out, for letting him off the

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hook on several other thefts and
robberies.

At the time, Carter, a rising
prizefighter, was in the forefront
of the civil rights movement, and
the cops, quite simply, wanted to
kill two birds with one stone, first
by getting points for “solving”
the triple murder, and secondly by
getting Carter out of their hair.

Narrowly avoiding the death
syntence, Carter and Artis were

, given three life terms in prison by
an all-white jury,

Carter subsequenily wrote a
book, The Sixteenth Round, and
Dylan came out with his song, but
once the publicity settled down,
both ‘men were still behind bars,
and Carter would undoubtably
still be there today except for the
unlikely intervention of a handful
of Canadians who happened to
stumble across Carter's book, and
who were so moved and outraged
by it that they decided to take the

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unprecedented step of getting in
touch with the fighter in prison,
and deciding to take on the daun-
ling responsibility of trying to get
him freed.

The Canadians had met origi-
nally as students at the University
of Toronto in the mid-"60s, and
had moved in together, forming
what | presume to be a commune,
although they never describe it as
such.

There were eight of them,
children of the WASP establish-
ment, involved in such activities as
acting, social work and teaching,
who for a while ran a fabric and
fashion importing business.

The book, written by two of
them, Sam Chaiton and Terry
Swinton, is titled Lazarus and the
Hurricane.

ft tells how their involvement
began when they unofficially
adopted a black kid named
Lazarus Martin from the dead-
end streets of a Brooklyn ghetto
and brought him to Toronto,
where they set to work giving him
the education the American school
system had so glaringly failed to
provide.

lt was Lazarus, having finally
learned to read, who picked up
Carter’s book, The Sixtcenth
Round, at a book sale, and read it
aloud to the group.

They were all appalled by the
tale of the framing of Carter and
Artis, and of course, they knew
the Dylan song by heart.

This was in 1979. ‘They all
assumed that Carter must have
been released by then.

To their horror, when they
started looking up newspaper
clippings, they found that Carter,
despite all the hoopla, was still
languishing in a notorious hellhole
called Rahway State Prison in
New Jersey.

He'd been in there seven years
by then, with no hope of parole
until well into die next century,

Inspired by young Lazarus, who
took the exceptional step of ar-
ranging to go down to Rahway
Frison to visit Carter, the Cana-
dians started researching Carter's
case, went down to the prison to
visit him themselves, were deeply
moved by his strength, intelligence
and refusal to roll over and play
dead, and collectively decided to
volunteer to do everything neces-
sary to help him win his release.

{t took them 10 years to get him
oul.

Not only did these Canadians

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jurricane’s freedom

devote their spare time, weekends
and holidays included, but they
even uprooted themselves, taking
turns living down in New Jersey
to be near the prison where he
was kept, running back and forth
between his cell and the offices of
his volunteer lawyers in New York
City.

Lazarus and the Hurricane is
far from light reading, and it
amounts to a sweeping condemna-
tion of the State of New Jersey
legal system, where prosecutors
have the power of gods (or, more
aptly, demons). 1

But, more to the point, it is the
story of a truly remarkable human
being, Rubin Carter, and his
equally remarkable and admirable
and oh-so-low-profile Canadian
friends.

With people like this around,
maybe there is hope, after all, for
this squalid little planet. Read the
book. It'll get your mind off your
own woes, I'll tell you.

38 “Your Service Specialist”
: 984-9711
925-369