Hurricanes, Hollywood and the Lafayette Bar & Grill

This is the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For something that he never done
Put in a prison cell, but one time
He could have been the champion of the world

Remember that? Bob Dylan's 'Hurricane'? About 1975? The sad story of the boxer Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter and his 'false' imprisonment for multiple murder? A sorry tale of stitch up, conspiracy and malice against a poor, hapless, black boxer, too uppity for his own good. I don't know why, but the lyric came into my head and to pass the time I went and had a look for the story. What was funny was that I didn't quite find what I was looking for.

In the aftermath of the 1999/2000 film, with Denzel Washington, someone had set up a web site to lambast the film for its inattention to facts, its total lack of objectivity and for its completely 'fairy tale' like quality in lionising Carter. Now the site is quite extensive and has all the hallmarks of the 'single issue fanatic'; you know, those loonies who obsess over one thing to the exclusion of everything else, eating, sleeping, washing, you know the kind I mean. Except......

The site's author spent about 20 years as a journalist. Now journalists are a queer bunch, I know, I have a few in my address book, especially once they get wind of a story. For journalists, it's often all that counts while they're working on it, the story. So I was a little intrigued and delved. What the site's author has amassed is a huge amount of official documents which puts a whole different slant on both the film and Carter's account, on which the film is based. What you come away with is an ever growing realisation that in many ways, we seem to have been conned.

The site's author actually covered the second trial for his newspaper and like a good journalist has created a site which, to this penguin, marshalls so many facts, discrepancies in accounts and what appear to be outright fabrications in Carter's account that you can't help but feel that the juries in both trials (yes there were two, separated by about 10 years) actually may have got it right, after all. On the balance of probabilities, the police probably, like the Mounties, did get their man.

Now this is not to say that I think they should pop Carter back in the slammer. He was released by a federal judge on a couple of procedural issues (mainly lack of disclosure by the prosecution) in a last ditch appeal in the late eighties for a writ of habeus corpus and seems now to be leading a perfectly law abiding life, albeit one which seems to be founded on spinning his story of his life at $20,000 a throw. I suppose if you want to pay that kind of money to listen to someone who now says he was running guns to the ANC in the '60s :) all well and good but the American judicial system took a hard knock in the wake of Carter's release and the film made matters worse; perhaps the issue does need to be looked at again. Having said that, there probably is no point, even the prosecutor saw no point trying to pursue the case again in the late eighties so long after the original event, despite the fact that they were decidedly unhappy about the decision. They considered it perverse in the extreme, given that previous appeals by Carter's team based on the evidence had failed.

So why bother to write about it? Well, as I was googling around the subject I came across an obituary for Joey Giardello, who died in September this year.

Oh dear, the penguin's going off topic again :)

Joey Giardello was the undisputed middleweight champion of the world from 1964 to 1965. One of the old school of boxers who fought his way up from rookie to champion the hard way with over 100 fights. A capable and a skillful boxer. When he lost to the man he had beaten in 1964 to gain the title, Dick Tiger, he effectively retired. So what has that got to do with Rubin Carter? Carter was the first challenger for Giardello's title in 1964. Carter lost, as he usually did to boxers who had any real skill, to a unanimous (and undisputed) points decision, effectively 10 rounds to Giardello, 5 to Carter. From then on in Carter seemed to go a little downhill, losing seven of his next fifteen fights and had slipped from one to five in the ranking list of contenders and looked on his 'way out'. A little after that he was 'inside'.

So what did the WBC (which didn't exist in 1964) do in 1993, it awarded Carter a middleweight championship belt (they gave one to Giardello as well at the same time). I wonder how Giardello must have felt? He beat the man fair and square but Carter ends up getting a belt anyway? And then in 2000, the film portrays Carter as a man robbed of the title by a corrupt and crooked system, with Giardello an inept and shambling wreck of a fighter who spends the last round on the ropes being pummeled to a pulp by Carter, when in reality, Carter scarcely got a look in after round five.

Giardello sued and had footage of the whole fight to back up his claim. Universal settled out of court. I wonder why? Perhaps they didn't want anyone else coming forward saying exactly how much fabrication was in a 'true story'?

You see, in one way, it was that story that tipped the penguin over the edge. If the story could be so wrong on that issue, what else might it be wrong on? And if Carter is making a living spinning lies, then shouldn't someone point this out?

I suppose not really, politicians do it all the time, why shouldn't the citizens?

If you want to waste :) an afternoon digging around Cal Deal's site it's here.