through to Baldwin through his brother who had a brownstone in the city, and he agreed to meet Tony and me at a popular restaurant called the Ginger Man, which was near Lincoln Center. The three of us met there in midafternoon sitting at the bar, Tony to my left, looking young and handsome, dapper as ever, and the famous writer to my right—smaller and older than I would have thought from pictures I had seen, looking alternately with his large bulging eyes at Tony and me. How the two men greeted each other I have forgotten, but I remember that Baldwin was noticeably wary.
Tony was hungry, so he ordered oysters, and we each had a glass of wine. Then I made the pitch.
“Tony can’t take care of himself,” I said. “He won’t work or can’t work, and Valerie is tired of taking care of him. There is a great story in what happened to him, and only you can tell it. Both of us would cooperate, helping in any way we could, and a book could open doors for Tony.”
Baldwin said their relationship had been over for years and that he had no intention of it starting up again. He was in a different place now and didn’t want Tony coming around. He asked Tony if he understood that, and Tony said yes, he would do whatever Baldwin wanted.
“I’ll do the book,” Baldwin said, “but our relationship is long over. If I need to talk to you,” he said, eyeing Tony, “Lewis will arrange it. And you are not going to like the book I will write about you. I will say you were guilty, not of the crime, but of being an arrogant black man who didn’t know his place and who thought he was free to do whatever he pleased.”
Tony shrugged, and picked at his oysters.
A few months later Baldwin received a big advance for the project. Tony got a substantial check out of it and immediately purchased a car. When I saw him next, he was wearing fancy fingerless driving gloves. Then Tony disappeared for a while. When he reappeared back in my office, it was to tell me how he had crashed the car in Central Park and walked away from it.
I hoped there would be more money when Baldwin finished the book, and maybe a movie, but it was not to be.
“You have to keep Tony away from Baldwin,” Jimmy’s literary agent told me, “or Jimmy won’t write the book.”
“It’s my story,” Tony said when I talked to him about it. “I want to see that Jimmy gets it right.”
“Leave him alone,” I told him, “or the deal will be off.” And that’s what happened. Baldwin backed out. So there was Tony again, needing rescue.
For quite a few years he found white women—there was a series of them—to take him in. I remember one in particular, a very attractive Canadian, who appeared to have money and seemed really to care for and understand him, but that relationship also came to an end.
Somewhere in the middle of these adventures, I persuaded one of the city’s finest negligence lawyers, Alfred Julien of the Julien & Schlesinger law firm to bring a case against the city for wrongful imprisonment. Julien turned the case over to his partner, who did a great job, finally settling the case for $250,000. Tony got two-thirds of the proceeds. Again he went off with his stash of money, and once again I was hopeful. For months I did not hear from him, but then he showed up, this time telling me about a sailboat he had purchased that had sunk in the so-called Bermuda triangle during a storm.
18
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and John Artis
The battle to free Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and John Artis was unavoidable for me. Tony Maynard’s case revealed the desperate situation blacks confronted every time they were hauled into criminal court to defend themselves in a world dominated by white people. Having experienced “white man’s justice” firsthand, I knew guilt or innocence didn’t matter much once someone was in the system. You could see it any day of the week in Manhattan’s massive criminal courthouse, one African American or Latino after another represented by lawyers who maybe knew their names—or not—facing cynical, indifferent, bored, or hostile white judges. Most of them were guilty of crimes, some of them heinous, but the process assumed they were all wild animals, black beasts, the scum of the earth—and of course guilty. You could