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 they 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.