The Butler's Child

by Lewis M. Steel

  Like other former defense attorneys who had become judges, Leopizzi had represented a lot of guilty clients. He didn’t become a judge by offending prosecutors and the other powers that control judicial appointments. He knew how to toe the line, and he expected us to do the same. In our early discussions with him he gave the impression that part of his job was maintaining appearances. We weren’t supposed to make the prosecutor or the police look bad. If you play hardball, I can play hardball too, was Leopizzi’s subliminal message. The subtext seemed to be, We all know the truth, so don’t rock the boat. The rules, however, were different for the two sides, beyond the assumption of guilt presupposed by that stance. Humphreys and his assistants made up their own rules. They threatened witnesses, allowed or encouraged police officers to make up testimony, accused us of engaging in a gigantic conspiracy, and even commandeered a grand jury. When we fought back, Humphreys and his assistants replied with sanctimony.

  Our intensity was another problem. Both Myron and I were fervent in different ways, he more courtly and diffident and I more direct, but it amounted to the same thing. It didn’t matter if we were in court, having a casual chat in the judge’s chambers, or talking to the press, our message was the same: Rubin and John are innocent. The more the judge tried to get us to loosen up and act like members of the old boys’ club, the more Myron and I dug in our heels, which drove Leopizzi batty. In Leopizzi’s eyes we were the cliché moral-high-ground types; overwrought in manner, overworried about abstractions like justice, hypervigilant, and dogmatic. Save it for the jury, was the message we got: With me, just be straight. We know what happened.

  Early on, once the trial started, Humphreys raised his racial revenge theory again. We were in chambers, and Myron and I said we wanted the argument to take place in open court. Leopizzi was not pleased, saying it would be taken care of the next morning.

  Our objection to the racial revenge theory was straightforward. It had no connection to our clients, it appealed only to racial prejudice, and it would force us to try two cases instead of one. But before Myron and I could state our positions the next morning, Leopizzi announced that he was going to allow the racial revenge evidence. I was shocked: We had been denied our right to argue.

  “You are turning this trial into a racial nightmare,” I blurted, rising to confront him. “That is what you’re doing, and you should know it.”

  “I’m not even going to respond to that idiotic accusation, because that’s all it is.” Leopizzi glared down at me.

  “It’s the truth.” I defied him, my voice resonating with all the strength I could summon.

  “Mr. Steel,” Leopizzi replied, “you should learn to keep your mouth shut at the proper times and choose your words, and you should think before you speak.”

  Seeing that this ruling could likely determine the outcome of the trial, I was beyond being silenced. Rubin and John looked on intently. Tension etched both their faces as I dug deep inside myself to keep this judge from using their blackness as the measure of whether they would spend the rest of their lives in prison.

  “For two hundred years of trials in the country,” I shot back at him, “courts have been trying blacks for no other crime than the color of their skin.”

  “You just accused the court of turning this case into a racial nightmare,” he growled, “and for this I will cite you for contempt and take care of it at the end of the trial.”

  The threat of sending me to the county jail for up to six months served only to provoke me more. The first two rows of the spectators’ gallery were filled with press people who were following the showdown. As I continued to argue, it seemed to me that Leopizzi realized he could be the target of some fairly damaging news stories. Whether or not that was true, he loosened the reins. For the next two hours, while the jury remained tucked away in its little back room, Myron and I took turns hammering away at the prosecution’s theory.

  “Stop double-talking,” Leopizzi commanded us every now and then. Other times he tried to reason. “Let’s assume it’s a tavern where black people go and they did become completely enraged over the type of homicide that Conforti committed. What’s wrong with that?”

  “You honestly believe that each of the blacks felt the same way, that each and every one of them—”

  “Let’s assume,” Leopizzi cut me off, “that maybe five or six felt that way out of a crowd and say—”

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor, but that’s the nightmare,” I said, interrupting him.

  It really was unthinkable. Our clients were up against the “fact” of angry black patrons from a different bar where a white-on-black murder had occurred the same night as the shooting at the Lafayette. Turning that into Rubin and John gunning down four people was madness.

  “When people are not treated as individuals and are lumped together and called ‘angry blacks,’” I told Leopizzi, “that triggers an emotional response.”

  “Is that evidential?” Leopizzi asked. “Talk from a lawyer’s standpoint and not from not any other standpoint.”

  “We are talking about stereotypes,” I said, almost begging the man to understand what was at stake.

  Amazingly, Leopizzi seemed to weaken.

  “How can these defendants who allegedly knew nothing about an angry black mob be bound by what it did?” Leopizzi, visibly irritated now, asked Humphreys.

  It was not the right question, but it illustrated the situation. Leopizzi didn’t get that the angry black man was a stereotype. It was a cipher, interchangeable with vague racial fear. Humphreys’s vision was of a universal black mob. It presupposed that black anger toward whites was everywhere, like oxygen. That Leopizzi formulated any question at all, however, signified a willingness at least to give us a foothold—not much of one, but better than nothing.

  “Without that,” Humphreys replied, “Carter and Artis—both of them guilty men—stand a good chance of being acquitted.”

  When Myron and I attacked Humphreys’s reply, Leopizzi became enraged. His moment of weakness behind him, he shot us an “I see through you shysters” sneer: “Be lawyers!” he barked. “And stop pretending you don’t understand why the racial motive theory makes sense!”

  He was going to allow it. It didn’t matter that the killings could have been a robbery gone awry. Or that they could have been the result of a mob hit on a numbers bar that had withheld the take. Of all the possible explanations, racial revenge was the most far-fetched, especially as Humphreys had no evidence that either Carter or Artis had ever been in the bar or even knew it was there.

  I had to fight the impulse to sag a little when the jury reappeared after lunch. Leopizzi apologized for the delay, explaining to the jury that that was how the system worked to ensure that both sides got a fair trial. It was an ironic thing to say given the situation he was describing. The system needed no advocate—it needed a watchdog. Rubin and John had just forfeited their presumed innocence to a cultural stereotype.

  And so it began. A cop who was on duty when Waltz Inn owner Roy Holloway was killed talked about the outpouring of anger among the bar’s black patrons. Humphreys drew out all the frightening details of the bloodthirsty black mob. Myron and I were dead in the water. We used our cross-examinations to establish that Rubin and John were not a part of the crowd, and to insert the shadow of a doubt in the form of a suggestion that perhaps not everyone there was angry, or even black. It was useless. The die was cast, and the vibrations of black rage had infiltrated the courtroom. We could nibble away at the edges at best.

  It got worse. Two more police officers testified that some people from the Waltz Inn went down to the police station to demand action. Ed Rawls, a bartender who worked at the Nite Spot, where Rubin and John had been that same night, was part of the crowd. It was his stepfather who had been killed, and he had yelled at the desk sergeant.

  “If you don’t take care of him,” Ed Rawls said, speaking of the gunman, “we will.”

  The jurors listened with rapt attention as t
hey were told about this other case of white-on-black murder, with its threat of black street justice. Critically, however, there was no connection to the murders at the Lafayette. After leaving the police station, Rawls went back to work at the Nite Spot. Rubin was at his special table, called “the Champion’s Corner.” John was dancing in the back room. The jury heard testimony that when Rubin and John learned about the shooting, both men gave Rawls their condolences. In Humphreys’s mind, and apparently in Leopizzi’s as well, that was enough of a connection.

  Had Rawls been on trial for the Lafayette murders, motive might been established, but the only connection between Rubin and John and Rawls’s warring words at the police station was in the imaginations of white people who had seen too many news stories about angry black men, black people running wild through streets, black kids smashing anything in sight, black women carrying looted merchandise, cars overturned, shattered store windows, firebombs exploding, burned-out buildings, and everything else associated with urban blight. Too many movies, including Warner Bros. pictures, featured ink-black bodies, eyes flashing, drums beating, spears in flight.

  The jurors were accustomed to this sort of cultural junk food, and they gobbled up Humphreys’s feast of racial stereotypes. Rawls had threatened revenge, and Carter and Artis gave him their condolences, but in Humphreys’s way of framing the information, it sounded like a scene from The Godfather—slick innuendo and polish. The jurors were supposed to know that condolences meant “I’ll kill those white devils.” It was a nasty strategy, but effective. Just look at that shiny-shaved bald black head and those staring eyes, Humphreys might as well have said of Rubin. Look at that frown. Look at that tense, wiry body ready to spring. This man did not have the capacity to feel sorry for another human being. He was barely human. He was an animal. He didn’t care about anything.

  Then there was more.

  Another witness produced by DeSimone’s Carter-Artis Task Force testified that on the same night—it was unclear if before or after Holloway was shot—Rubin had visited a woman’s apartment looking for a shotgun that had been stolen while he was at training camp. So there was Rubin looking for the same sort of weapon used on the very night a white man had gunned down a black man and around the time two blacks had gunned down four white people. The evil aspect of the racial revenge theory was clearly visible; Humphreys didn’t need to connect the dots. If Rubin didn’t find his own gun, weren’t there lots of shotguns floating around in the black part of town available just for the asking? Of course there were: Black people always have guns.

  Next came the bullet-and-shell testimony. Paterson police detective Emil DiRobbio testified that he was given the keys to Carter’s car and conducted a search. Consistent with his 1967 testimony, he said he found a 12-gauge shotgun shell under some boxing equipment in the trunk and a bullet near the right front seat, both of which he placed in his pocket. This time around, however, DiRobbio tried to cover up the weakness caused by the mismatches. He added that three people saw him with the bullet and shell around the time he found them: Paul Alberta, a police reporter who worked for a proprosecution Paterson daily newspaper, another detective, and Patricia Valentine, who happened to be standing nearby at a watercooler in the police garage.

  Myron and I would have been conceding way too much of this testimony if we did not go on the attack, so we took on all four witnesses, and according to many press reports we did brilliantly. It wasn’t hard. The police reports were at odds with DiRobbio’s story. Another problem for Humphreys was the fact that Valentine never testified during the first trial about seeing the bullet and shell in the police garage after the crime. As for Paul Alberta, who didn’t testify in 1967, none of his many trial stories back then mentioned the discovery of the bullet and shell. Yet now he remembered DiRobbio’s claimed exclamation, “Holy cow, look what I found!” When Alberta admitted that DiRobbio was his personal friend, I could hear the press corps snickering.

  Patricia Valentine’s eagerness to add to her prior testimony also made her an easy target. What she had to say about the car’s taillights in particular should have undermined her testimony. From her window above the bar, she said the taillights lit up almost all the way across the back of the car when the fleeing driver hit the brakes at the end of the street. The lights looked like butterflies, she claimed, forming triangles at the outer edges of both sides of the back of the car, with the triangles at their widest at the car’s sides and narrowing toward the center as they ran along the trunk to within a foot or so of each other.

  The more expensive version of the 1966 Dodge Monaco did have taillights that matched this description, but Carter’s rented car was the cheaper model. The taillights on that model were different—chrome replaced the horizontal lights. In daylight, with the sun glinting off the detailing, someone might get confused, but at night, if you hit the brakes of the model Carter rented, as Valentine said the driver did, there would be no butterfly taillights, just the vertical lights of the cheaper model.

  My cross-examination of Valentine made her cry, but she defiantly stuck with her story. The car she saw leaving the scene was Carter’s, not merely a similar one as she testified in 1967. And the lights did light up almost all the way across the rear end, she was sure. At the trial’s end Leopizzi refused to let me place into evidence photographs of the two models, showing their taillights.

  Looking and talking every bit like the bloated thug he was, Alfred Bello told the jury his 1967 story. Myron and I kept Bello on the stand for days, drawing out his life of crime, the many favors DeSimone had done for him since he had become a prosecution witness, and asking him to help us understand the two or three different versions of what he claimed to have seen. That’s when Humphreys surprised us in the judge’s chambers. His office had used a lie detector expert to get Bello to tell the truth, he said. If we cross-examined him on why he returned to his original story, Humphreys wanted Judge Leopizzi’s permission to call the polygrapher as a witness and enter the lie detector test into evidence.

  Lie detector tests are not admissible evidence because their reliability is questionable. When we pointed that out, Leopizzi quickly agreed. But this was different, he ruled. The prosecution only wanted the jury to learn about the test to explain why Bello had once again changed his story, not to prove the truth of the original story. Myron and I were boxed into a corner. We knew the jury would not make Humphreys’s and Leopizzi’s distinction. Ignoring our objections, Leopizzi warned us that if we questioned Bello about why he made the final switch, that would “open the door” to the lie detector testimony. We had no choice: It was better to hope that the jury would discount Bello’s testimony.

  Rubin was another matter. In The Sixteenth Round he laid bare his early life of street crime. Escaping from a juvenile detention center, Rubin had joined the army, where he became its European Theater boxing champion. After receiving an honorable discharge, he returned to New Jersey, thinking that the past would be forgotten. Instead the authorities found him and locked him up again. Angry at the world, he returned to his old ways and ended up back in prison. Eventually, however, he came to his senses, put his street life behind him, and turned to boxing to make his living. But the past still trailed him like a ghost.

  By 1964 Rubin had become a middleweight contender. In what was supposed to be a curtain-raiser article for his middleweight championship challenge against the champ, Joey Giardello, Rubin said some things to the sportswriter Milton Gross that could hurt him at trial. According to James Hirsch, the author of a book on Rubin, there were a few things that were left out of Gross’s Saturday Evening Post article that provided context, including Rubin’s opinion that “blacks were living in a dream world if they thought equality was around the corner, that reality was trigger-happy cops and redneck judges.”

  What got quoted, however, was far more incendiary: “We used to get up and put our guns in our pockets like you put your wallet in your pocket. Then we got out in the streets and start[ed] shooti
ng—anybody, everybody. We used to shoot folks.” According to Hirsch this was sheer bluster intended to rattle Rubin’s opponents. The article also brought up an incident in Harlem where a group of bottle-wielding boys got into it with a building superintendent, which ended with one of the boys, a fifteen-year-old, getting shot and killed by an off-duty police lieutenant. A friend told Gross that Rubin had said at the time, “Let’s get guns and go up there and get us some of those police. I know I can get four or five before they get me. How many can you get?” That sealed Rubin’s image as the face of black militancy in America, two years before the triple murder at the Lafayette.

  Rubin knew Humphreys would cross-examine him relentlessly about his criminal record and the outlandish things he said to the press and in his own book. But Myron and I were convinced that not only could Rubin survive his cross-examination, but it would give him the opportunity to show the jury that he was a person of real substance, a writer as well as a boxer, a self-educated thinker, and street philosopher rather than a racist killer, and that writing and doing were two totally different things.

  “You have left the prosecution case in tatters,” Rubin said by way of explaining why he saw no reason to take the stand. “If the jury sees Humphreys cross-examine me, they will see a white man and a black man going toe-to-toe, and they will convict me.”

  No matter what Myron and I said, Carter held firm. “Racial revenge is the problem,” he said. “Without me, Humphreys has nothing to go on. If I take the stand, he will try to use me to make up what he doesn’t have.”