The brutal reality of the 'Hurricane' commune

They can't remember the reason for that particular beating -- not Martin Swinton, the child who endured it, not Gus Sinclair, the adult who passively looked on. But the image they separately recall is vivid.

The aggressor was Lisa Carter, one of the Canadians praised in Norman Jewison's movie The Hurricane for rescuing Rubin Carter from jail.

"She's yelling and screaming at me and I'm in the middle of the sun room, just standing there," Martin says. "That's going on for a couple of hours. Then she got really angry and she just grabbed me. . . . She's kicking me in the rear end and throws me down and keeps kicking me and starts pushing me up the stairs. She's saying, 'You're a no-good, lousy, stupid piece of shit.' She's pushing me up the stairs and calling me a dog. 'You're nothing but a dog. You're nothing but a dog. You're lower than a dog.' "

"He was 16," Mr. Sinclair says. "She was so angry. She said, 'That's it.' She grabbed him by the neck, she pushed him upstairs and made him walk on his hands and knees. 'You're a dog,' she said. 'You're going to walk like a dog.' "

The movie and two very different books on the subject have sparked a surge of interest in the Toronto-based commune that helped the boxer win his release after serving 19 years in prison for three murders he did not commit.

Not much is revealed about the group in the movie. Lisa Carter and Mr. Carter's other saviours are presented in the film as three bland do-gooders. In reality, there were nine of them, and while Mrs. Carter is presented as someone with only the highest motives, there is a darker side to her story that has never been revealed.

Some former residents of The House, where the group lived together, including Mr. Sinclair who was part of the commune for 18 years, as well as Rubin Carter himself, maintain that real life with the group was nothing like the fairy tale in the movie, and that Mrs. Carter's motivation was not nearly as selfless as has been suggested.

And there is one person whose voice has not been heard, who was all but eliminated from the "official" versions of the story: Martin Swinton, Mrs. Carter's son, the only person who didn't enter The House of his own free will.

The first of many conversations takes place at an antique shop on a pleasant stretch of Avenue Road in north Toronto. For the past year, Martin and his wife, Andrea, have operated the shop, the foundation of a new life he hopes to build after many false starts. The police have been by a few times already, checking out the merchandise, just to let him know they're watching, a reminder -- as if he needed one -- of the biggest of his missteps, the one that sent him to jail four years ago.

When he was a child, Martin was the only resident of The House, in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood, whom neighbours ever saw. Mrs. Carter and the others had earned a comfortable living from their importing business, which had allowed them to buy and lovingly restore the property. They would drive their expensive cars into the garage and were rarely seen outside.

It was behind those walls that the Canadians' campaign to free Mr. Carter began -- though to Martin, it certainly looked different than it does in the movie.

His mother had told him stories about growing up dirt poor in a small town not far from Huntsville, Ont. Her mother died in childbirth; her father when she was 16. She moved alone into what was then a very rough-and-tumble Toronto neighbourhood called Cabbagetown. Martin doesn't know who his father was -- his name was Bruce, he was told, and he vaguely remembers a picture of a man with curly hair.

Later, Mrs. Carter and Martin lived in an apartment above a store. "I was a latchkey kid," he says. "A can of soup was left open for me and I would eat that."

When he was 6, his mother became involved with a man named Terry Swinton, the product of a secure, upper-middle-class upbringing.

"I fell in love with him," Martin says. "He was warm. He was nice. He really liked me." (Eventually, Martin would take Mr. Swinton's name, and consider him his father.)

All of which stood out in sharp contrast to his mother, who was rough and coarse and not gentle at all.

Mrs. Carter's high hopes for her son didn't last long.

Martin struggled during his first years in school. He was severely dyslexic, a condition not readily diagnosed at the time. Mrs. Carter would fight hard to make sure he was given a chance at an education -- which culminated years later, against enormous odds, in his graduation from the University of Toronto.

But while she could commit herself to the cause of Martin's education, everyday maternal affection seemed beyond her. The verbal and physical abuse began when Martin was still a young boy. "She used to say within his hearing, 'If I had known about it, I would have had an abortion,' " Mr. Sinclair remembers.

When Martin was 8, his mother, Mr. Swinton, Mr. Sinclair and two others journeyed to Malaysia, in search of jobs and adventure. There they would eventually begin the batik-importing company, Five Believers, which became the economic underpinning of the commune in Toronto. And there, Mr. Sinclair saw for the first time Mrs. Carter beat her son.

"He had done something that boys do," he says. "He and the little boy downstairs -- they had fences around the yard with little arrow points on top, and they'd pulled a bunch of them off. The maid came from downstairs with a handful of these things, and Lisa hit the roof. She took the belt out. I couldn't even look. I just heard the language and his screams.

"I never beat him. But I will say this -- and this is one of the things that I really regret and I may have to live with for the rest of my life. At one point in Malaysia, and this may have been her way of drawing everybody into it, she had Terry and I hold him while she beat him."

"I was mischievous," Martin says. "And I guess my mother just couldn't handle that, so her attitude was just beat the shit out of him and he'll learn not to do it.

"Gus and Terry saw one of these beatings. I remember it was the first time anyone ever stood up for me. Both of them said to her, 'This is a losing battle. This isn't going to work.' She just turned around at them and said, 'You don't ever tell me what to f---ing do with my f---ing child.' And that was that."

"What you see with her child is also what got Rubin Carter out of prison," Mr. Sinclair says. "She thought, 'No one's going to defeat me.' She believed that she could will things to be different from what they were."

When contacted about this story, Mrs. Carter replied with a faxed statement: "I have been the subject of a number of scurrilous allegations over the past few months, and I categorically deny them. I do not understand how the relationship I have with my grown son should ever be national news nor do I understand the value, purpose, or motive of making it such.

"Had I not participated in the freeing of Rubin Carter, I would be able to cope with this relationship as any mother would: as a private citizen."

Sean Cunningham met Martin when they joined together to find a stray cat wandering around the neighbourhood where both lived. By this time, the commune's importing business was thriving. Several members remained in Malaysia, while the rest moved into The House in Toronto. At the business's peak, there were stores in Toronto, in Palm Beach, Fla., and on Long Island.

And by then, The House had evolved into its final form. Mrs. Carter was at the centre. She made the decisions. Her ideas were the only ideas that mattered.

While she sat reading and watching endless hours of television, the other members of The House carried out their appointed roles. Some cooked. Some gardened. Some worked on The House. There were responsibilities with the business, but as the retail side gradually wound down and as there were fewer reasons to venture outside, life became increasingly insular. It was a commune, but not in a conventional sense: relationships were monogamous, there was no guiding ideology but for a hodgepodge of astrology and philosophies borrowed piecemeal from a variety of sources. They were particularly sensitive to the oppression of African Americans. All monies earned went into a single bank account. And in all matters, Mrs. Carter called the shots.

Martin hadn't been in school since the trip to Malaysia -- members of the household were responsible for his education. And so Mr. Cunningham became his first best friend.

"Marty would always introduce the people in The House as, this is my uncle, as though they were all related to each other," he says. "He lived in a very odd arrangement compared to most of his peers. Marty wouldn't bring a lot of people home. He wasn't allowed to.

"There were incredible amounts of verbal abuse," Mr. Cunningham says. "She hates Marty. Marty was picked on constantly. I saw Marty's mother beat the shit out of him. Many times I saw the physical abuse. No one ever intervened. No one ever said, 'Lisa, you're out of line.'

"This was far beyond corporal punishment. This was far beyond a spanking or a slap upside the head. This was punching and kicking and being sat on and punched. This was a real beating."

The story of Lesra Martin's arrival is told both in The Hurricane,and in the book written by Mr. Swinton and Sam Chaiton, Lazarus and the Hurricane.

While in New York, testing an invention that was supposed to produce miraculous gas mileage in automobiles, members of the group met Lesra and another boy named William. The Canadians decided to save Lesra from his grim ghetto existence, bringing him back to Toronto, educating him (at 14, Lesra was illiterate), and providing him with a happy home. William, who was perceived to be comfortably middle class by comparison, was sent back to New York. According to the book and the film, it was Lesra's reading of Mr. Carter's autobiography, The Sixteenth Round,which set off the Canadians' effort to free the boxer. Also according to the book, Lesra and Martin became the best of friends.

"Martin hated Lesra," Mr. Cunningham says. "He could not stand this kid."

Aside from a clash of cultures and personalities, there were other reasons that Martin might have resented the new arrival.

"I remember going to The House, and Lisa would sit on the couch with Lesra and put her arms around his shoulders. She was so affectionate with him," Eileen Swinton, Mr. Swinton's mother, remembers. "Whereas she had absolutely no affection for Martin whatsoever."

Lesra did read the book -- or at least everyone in The House read the book, because that's how it worked. Lesra wrote the famous letter to Mr. Carter -- or at least he wrote it with Mrs. Carter hanging over his shoulder, virtually dictating what he should say. "This is the way they're going to get in," Martin says. "Because they know that they can't go directly [to Mr. Carter] He's had lots of liberal white do-gooders coming around, and he's just sent them all off packing. It is Lisa who runs to the mailbox everyday, waiting for the letter that finally comes.

"Then the telephone calls start. It's not Les who's talking to Rube. It's my mother," Martin says. "Initially it's group conversations. There's a speaker phone, and everyone can hear. Then it starts to change and it becomes just my mother speaking with Rube.

"As time went on, this new creature was developing. The mother that I knew, that said 'I'll never wear make-up, I'll never do my hair, I'll never wear dresses,' was suddenly going out and buying dresses and wearing make-up and looking like Dolly Parton. Photos are being taken to send to Rubin. She never had photos taken. I hadn't seen a picture of her since we were in Malaysia."

Mrs. Carter's passion for the boxer, the infatuation (that would become mutual and culminate in their marriage -- they are now estranged) was a driving force behind the group's efforts, along with the sense that an injustice had been done. Whatever the motivation, their role in securing Mr. Carter's release can't be diminished -- an achievement that's been called into question because of the various inaccuracies in the film.

Martin was thrown out of The House for the first time in 1982, when he was 18 years old. He acknowledges that he wasn't a model teenager, that he made mistakes, that he was a thief -- though it wasn't any great crime that led to his departure.

"I was stealing money from The House," he says. "Partially it was my way of getting back at everything that was happening to me."

One of the regular blow-ups with Mrs. Carter had escalated, and this time she ordered him to leave. He was told to pack two suitcases, and get out.

"My dad had told me, 'If you go to [Kurt and Eileen Swinton]for help, we're going to tell them all kinds of things about you, and they're going to hate you.' The last thing I wanted was that."

The Swintons were admittedly ambivalent about their "grandson." He wasn't a blood relative, and they were certainly no fans of his mother -- she was the one who had stolen not only their son, but their daughter, Kathy, who also lived in The House. Martin didn't go to them first: he stayed with a girlfriend, and then lived for a time on his own, having found a job. But then he badly injured a knee and, incapacitated, needed to be looked after. Only then did he call the Swintons, and only gradually did he begin to tell them a little of what his life in The House had been like.

Martin lived with the Swintons for a few months before members of the group found out where he was.

"Kurt talked to Terry. And then Kathy gets on the phone. And they both say, 'Marty's lying. Throw him out.' And so my grandmother comes to me the next day and says, 'You've got to leave. You can't be here any more.' "

"It was just a situation we couldn't do much about," Ms. Swinton says (Kurt Swinton died in 1987). "Unless we had perhaps taken Marty and tried to deal with the situation ourselves.

"I guess we felt it wasn't totally our responsibility."

Years later, when Gus Sinclair left The House, he went to Ms. Swinton and told her the truth about what had happened. She was upset, and her attitude to Martin changed. "The saddest thing was that there was no room in that house for the simple milk of human kindness," Ms. Swinton says. "If somebody had wanted to be kind to Martin, they couldn't have been in that household."

Martin was left with no choice but to return to The House. "I couldn't walk. I couldn't work. My grandparents weren't going to help me. There was nowhere to go."

In order to return, he was forced to stand in front of the others and endure a kind of inquisition, to pledge to follow orders, and to accept an even lower place on the totem pole, explicitly subordinate to Lesra.

In some ways, it was worse after he went back, Martin says. But some relief came from the fact that he spent time outside The House, completing his university studies, and from the fact that his mother's attention was now focused on the efforts to win Mr. Carter's freedom. For long stretches, Mrs. Carter and a revolving group of others moved to New Jersey to be closer to Mr. Carter and the case.

It was in the middle of one of Mrs. Carter's long absences, in 1984, that Martin was thrown out for good. The subject of the dispute -- a summer job they didn't think was appropriate and his "bad attitude" -- seems trivial now. But it was enough to prompt Kathy Swinton, who was running The House in Toronto in Mrs. Carter's absence, to phone New Jersey and solicit Mrs. Carter's approval to evict Martin. Mrs. Carter had no reservations, and never spoke to Martin. (Nor have they spoken since.)

"Well, good riddance," she said to Kathy on the phone.

"He sure is a handful," Kathy said.

"You're telling me," Mrs. Carter replied. "I lived with him all of my life."

From that moment on, it was as if Martin had never been there -- just as, in the epilogue to Lazarus and the Hurricane,which details what happened to everyone after Mr. Carter was freed, he doesn't merit even a mention.

"It's not as if people were afraid to talk about him," Mr. Sinclair says. "It was just like the snowstorm of 10 years ago. Do you remember? No. He had that little impact." Stephen Brunt will write about life after the commune for Martin Swinton and others in his column in the sports section of Monday's Globe and Mail.