Athletes - Rubin Carter

Home > Listing Index > Athletes > Rubin Carter

	Athletes - Rubin Carter

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (born May 6, 1937), a middleweight boxer between 1961 and 1966, is better known for his controversial convictions (1967, 1976) for three June 1966 murders in Paterson, New Jersey, and his subsequent release from prison in 1985.

The question of Carter’s guilt or innocence remains a strongly polarizing one: either the criminal justice system imprisoned an innocent man for almost 20 years, or it released a triple murderer from the punishment that two separate juries had recommended.

Pre-boxing life

Carter grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, a middle son among seven children. His parents had a stable, long-lasting marriage, provided well for the family, and raised their other six children without significant problems. Only Rubin seems to have acquired a criminal record, one that resulted in his being sentenced to a juvenile reformatory for assault and robbery shortly after his fourteenth birthday.

Carter escaped from the reformatory in 1954 and joined the United States Army at age seventeen. Several months after he completed infantry basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he was shipped to Germany, where, according to his 1974 autobiography, he became interested in boxing. However, Carter was a poor soldier, and was court-martialed four times for charges ranging from insubordination to being AWOL. In May 1956, the Army discharged him as "unfit for military service", well short of his scheduled date of separation.

Shortly after his return to New Jersey, Carter was arrested for his reformatory escape, and served an additional year; he was released in 1957. Less than two months later - and probably after drinking heavily - Carter robbed and brutally beat three people, including a middle-aged woman. For these crimes, Carter spent four years in Trenton State Prison and Rahway State Prison.

Boxing career

While in prison, Carter resumed his interest in boxing, and promptly upon his release in September 1961, turned professional. At 5-feet-8, Carter was shorter than the average middleweight, but he fought all of his professional career at 155-160 pounds. His shaven head, prominent mustache, unwavering stare and solid frame made him an intimidating presence in the ring decades before such a look became commonplace. His aggressive style and punching power (which resulted in many early-round knockouts) drew attention, establishing him as a crowd favorite and earning him the nickname “Hurricane”. When he decisioned perennial contender Holley Mims on December 22, 1962, he entered Ring Magazine's list of the top 10 middleweights.

He fought six times in 1963, winning four of the fights and losing two. He remained ranked in the lower regions of the top 10 until December 20, when he surprised the boxing world by beating past and future world champion Emile Griffith in the first round, on the "three knock down" rule.

That win resulted in Carter being ranked as the #3 contender for Joey Giardello's middleweight title. Carter won two more fights (one a decision over future heavyweight champion Jimmy Ellis) in 1964, before meeting Giardello in Philadelphia for a 15-round championship match on December 14. Carter fought well, but the judges awarded Giardello a unanimous decision. Most of the press concurred; an informal poll conducted among sportswriters at ringside showed that 14 of 18 agreed that Giardello had outboxed the challenger. Carter was gracious in defeat and did not protest the judging.

After that fight, Carter's standing as a contender – as reflected by his ranking in Ring Magazine – began to decline. He fought nine times in 1965, but lost four out of five fights against top contenders (Luis Manuel Rodriguez, Harry Scott and Dick Tiger). Tiger, in particular, had no problem with the Hurricane, flooring him three times in their match.

In his autobiography, British boxing promoter Mickey Duff describes an event that occurred during Carter's 1965 visit to London for one of his two bouts with British boxer Harry Scott. Carter brought a pistol into the country, concealed in his suitcase, and discharged it in his hotel room. The hotel did not report the incident to the police, although private possession of handguns was then, and still is, illegal in the United Kingdom.

Carter’s boxing did not improve during 1966, and by that summer, Ring Magazine no longer ranked him among the top ten middleweight contenders.

June 17, 1966

Around 2:30 a.m. June 17, 1966, two black males entered the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, and started shooting. The bartender, Jim Oliver and one male customer, Fred, "Cedar Grove Bob" Nauyoks, were killed instantly. A badly-wounded female customer Hazel Tanis, died almost a month later, having been shot in the throat, stomach, intestine, spleen and left lung. Her arm was shattered by shotgun pellets. A third customer, Willie Marins survived the attack, despite being shot in the head and losing sight in one eye. Because Carter's car matched the description of the suspects', Carter and a companion, John Artis, were brought to the scene thirty minutes after the incident and questioned extensively before being released. There was little physical evidence, police didn't take fingerprints at the crime scene, didn't conduct a paraffin test on Carter and Artis, and no eyewitness identified them as the killers. However, when searching Carter's car, police found a live pistol round and a shotgun shell both of the same calibers used in the shootings.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Rubin Carter ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Rubin Carter; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay