True To His Words

They soon understood a lot of things, and they liked what they saw of Carter. Indeed, Carter quickly became another member of their family, one who happened to be living far from home. The Canadians began by visiting him once a month for long weekends, staying in cheap motels near Trenton, and by the spring Carter was calling them collect several times a week. He wrote them a letter in which he said, "For the first time in my life...I can truly say that I trust somebody. I trust you. And without reservations."

That letter deepened the Canadians' resolve to help Carter find his way out. "If you had a brother in jail for something he didn't do," Terry Swinton says, "wouldn't you do everything possible to help him?"

For the next 4½ years, that is precisely what the Canadians did. At the end of 1981, using money they had made selling batiks, they turned their business efforts to renovating houses in Toronto. They also began spending 10 days a month in New Jersey, visiting Carter and becoming immersed in the history of the Lafayette Bar case. On Dec. 5, just before Artis was released on parole after serving 15 years. Carter was exiled to Trenton State's dreaded Vroom Readjustment Unit for the system's incorrigibles. Artis, a model prisoner, had attended Glassboro (N.J.) State College while doing his time, leaving prison unguarded in the morning and returning at night, and had taught adult-education courses for inmates; Carter, meanwhile, was sent to Vroom for 90 days for refusing to stand up in his cell for a head count.

He spent the first 15 days in The Hole, "where you are like dead," he says. "No air, no ventilation. They turned on the heat in the summer and turned it off in the winter. Do you know what it's like to be powerless? Totally and utterly powerless? I never knew a prisoner who did not go to his cell at night and cry. Not every night, but every prisoner. You could hear them. You could hear everything. I still hear everything. Only this time I had Lisa, Lesra, Terry and Sam to hold on to. They were my anchors."

In January 1982, with Carter calling Toronto for several hours a day, the Canadians' long-distance telephone charges were $4,238.39. By then the Canadians had broken Carter's resistance to accepting their gifts of food, clothing and appliances. Peters had argued. "You are denying yourself stuff before [the guards] have a chance to take it away. You are helping them keep you kept. If they want to take it, let them."

Now Carter was walking around in a pair of sheepskin slippers, wearing a velvet robe and watching television in his cell. Moreover, every month the Canadians sent him a 25-pound box of his favorite canned foods, chiefly exotic nuts and date breads. The only time the Canadian anchors were not there for him was when he quietly cut them loose in the fall of 1982, a few months after the New Jersey Supreme Court, by a 4-3 decision, rejected his appeal for a third trial on the grounds that the defense had not adequately demonstrated that suppressed evidence might have affected the outcome of the second trial. "It was just crushing," Terry Swinton says. Carter was inconsolable over the decision, despite a strong dissent by Justice Robert Clifford, who wrote that the prosecution's chief witness. Bello, was "a complete, unvarnished liar, utterly incapable of speaking the truth."

Retreating into his carapace, Carter did not call his friends for nearly eight months. The house in Canada went into mourning. "I was getting ready to settle back into prison—absent good food, absent love and companionship." Carter says. "Lisa used to send me great big novelty cards. I had those pasted on those walls. I used to look at them. I felt helpless." He finally called the Canadians late in the summer of 1983. "I need you guys," he told them.

A few weeks later the Canadians decided to make one final push. They put their house on the market, and three of them—Chaiton, Terry Swinton and Peters—moved to New Jersey. The others moved into a smaller house in Toronto, where Lesra had graduated that year from high school with straight A's. Me had just enrolled at the University of Toronto, where he would major in anthropology. The Canadians' commitment staggered Carter. "I was astounded," he says. "They set up house!"

Carter asked for, and received, a transfer from Trenton to Rahway, and the Canadians look an apartment near the prison, which was closer than Trenton State was to the New York offices of Carter's and Artis's lawyers, Myron Beldock and Lewis Steel, and those of Leon Friedman, a renowned constitutional scholar who was assisting them with the case. For nearly two years the Canadians scoured New Jersey searching for new evidence and witnesses to exonerate Carter and Artis. They set up shop in Beldock's law firm at 46th Street and Fifth Avenue.

"The Canadians did the one thing that impresses me," says Beldock. "They did their homework." They had sent ahead a black case containing a three- by nine-foot chart in which they had painstakingly detailed how the testimony of various state witnesses had changed over the years, 'it was like a jump-start," says Beldock. "Very exciting."