Here comes the story of The Hurricane. Again.

Nearly 53 years after the murder of three white people in a Paterson bar that ensnared Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and John Artis in a web of mystery wrapped around a racially tinged struggle for justice, the BBC is set to air a 13-episode podcast that promises to shed new light on a case that still haunts Silk City.

"The Hurricane Tapes" begins Monday, Jan. 14, on the BBC World Service site, adding, at the very least, another layer of intrigue to a case that has been steeped in mystery ever since gunfire erupted at the Lafayette Grill near closing time on June 17, 1966. Who caused the deaths of James Oliver, Fred Nauyaks and Hazel Tanis and the wounding of William Marins may never be known, but within an hour of the killings, the prime suspects were Carter and Artis.

"Both John [Artis] and Rubin point the finger squarely at the cops and prosecutors. But I guess what makes our series unique is the fact that we also hear from the people who John and Rubin believe framed them," said Steve Crossman, a reporter for the BBC who conducted interviews with 30 people for the project.

Carter and Artis stood trial twice for the triple homicide, first in 1967 and again in 1976, and were convicted both times and sent to prison. But Carter and Artis always maintained their innocence and said they'd been framed by vindictive Paterson cops, two alleged eyewitnesses in trouble with the law who cut deals in exchange for their testimony, and prosecutors who withheld evidence and prejudiced both juries.

It would take nearly 20 years of fighting from behind bars before a U.S. District judge, H. Lee Sarokin, would overturn their convictions in 1985. Sarokin, after reviewing thousands of pages of transcripts, found that during the second trial, the state had advanced a "racial revenge" theory as motive for the shootings without sufficient evidence, and had withheld the results of a lie detector test taken by one the state's key witnesses, Alfred Bello.

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In his opinion, Sarokin wrote that the convictions "were predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure." Carter moved to Canada, and he and Artis became advocates for the wrongfully convicted through their non-profit, Innocence International. Carter died in 2014.

Throughout the ordeal, there have been numerous articles, books (two written by Carter himself) and songs (one, "Hurricane," by Bob Dylan, brought the Carter/Artis saga to the world stage), and a 1999 movie starring Denzel Washington that was criticized for playing fast and loose with the facts. Now comes the BBC podcast, which is based on 40 hours of tapes that Carter made while he was working on his second book, "Eye of the Hurricane," written with Ken Klonsky, which was published in 2011.

Crossman said he interviewed Klonsky, who gave the tapes to one of Carter's closest friends, Tom Kidrin, who planned to hand them over to the Hurricane Carter archive at Tufts University in Boston. After hearing the tapes, Crossman said, he interviewed 30 people with deep connections to the case.

Among them are Artis, former Passaic County Assistant Prosecutor Ronald Marmo, and Paterson Detective Robert Mohl, who made the arrest in 1966. Crossman said he also spoke to the son of Vincent DeSimone, the Paterson detective in charge of the case whose motives and tactics have often been questioned.

DeSimone's son gave Crossman a tape his father made about the case before his death in 1979. Crossman said the series offers an objective look at the case, but also offers alternative theories on what might have happened if Carter and Artis didn't do it.

A three-minute series preview that has been airing on BBC World hints at a deathbed confession in a sound bite provided by Johnny Carter, Rubin's cousin.

"He says there is a group of people in Paterson who know who at least one of the gunmen were," Crossman said. "I can't reveal too much more, as that sound bite really launched us down a rabbit hole. It's a natural thing to do when considering the guilt of Rubin and John, to look at who else might have done it, how well other people were investigated, etc. Safe to say, that's not the last we hear from Johnny on the subject."

The Lafayette Grill still stands at the corner of East 18th and Lafayette streets in Paterson's impoverished 4th Ward, but it changed hands long ago. Since 2003, it's been Moya Bar and Liquors, and the interior looks like nothing like it did in 1966, with the pool table and the piano gone. But people in the neighborhood know what happened there.

"Yes, some people still talk about it when they come in here," Euclides Moya Jr., said with a slight roll of the eyes as he worked the bar one recent afternoon. Moya, 23, was born after Carter and Artis were already free, but he's heard the story time and time again.

Moya said an occasional reminder of the shooting is the candles that he finds burning on the sidewalk in front of the bar. "As I remember it, happens in warm weather. It must be in June," he said, figuring the candles are left by relatives of the victims.

Carter was 30 years old at the time of the Lafayette shooting, a locally famous middleweight boxer who grew up in Paterson and had lost a title fight in 1964. Artis, just 20, was a few years out of Paterson Central High School, where he was a track star.

The basic facts of what happened at the Lafayette Grill on June 17, 1966, have been shrouded in mystery. A woman who lived upstairs from the bar, Patty Valentine, was awakened at 2:30 in the morning by loud noises. She looked out the window and saw black men jump into a white car with out-of-state plates and distinctive taillights and head down Lafayette Street.

She went downstairs and into the bar through a side entrance, where she saw a woman, Hazel Tanis, lying on the floor, and another bar customer, William Marins, bleeding from the head and clinging to a pole. Standing at the front door with a full view of the carnage was the man who would become the state's key witness, Alfred Bello.

The cash register behind the bar was open, but there was still money in it. When police arrived minutes later, Bello told them he was across the street at the time of the shooting with another man, Arthur Dexter Bradley, attempting to break into a machine shop. Bello and Bradley would later give statements to police that fingered Carter and Artis as the men seen leaving the bar just after the shooting. But both would later recant.

Only hours earlier, at the nearby Waltz Inn, a black bartender, Leroy Holloway, had been shot dead by a white man, Frank Conforti. Their dispute was over money — Conforti had sold the bar to Holloway — but the prosecution would later introduce this homicide as evidence of a "racial revenge" motive when Carter and Artis went on trial a second time in 1976.

The state offered no motive at the first trial, which was held in 1967. Instead, it relied heavily on the testimony of Bello, Bradley and Valentine and their accounts of two black men in a white car leaving the scene just after the shooting.

It seemed to make sense. After speaking to Valentine, Paterson police stopped a vehicle that matched the description a short time later, just 14 blocks away. Artis was behind the wheel, Carter was in the back seat, and a third man, John Royster, was in the front passenger seat.

Initially, cops let the vehicle go. But around 3 a.m., Paterson police relocated the car and brought Carter and Artis back to the Lafayette. Carter, Artis, Valentine and the car were all taken to police headquarters.

Around 3:45 a.m., police recovered a .12 shotgun shell from the trunk and a .32 bullet from under the front seat. Although the guns were never found, forensics determined that the weapons used in the Lafayette shooting were a shotgun and a .32 pistol.

Still, cops did not log those bullets as evidence until five days after the car was searched. They never checked the clothing that Carter or Artis was wearing for blood spatters or gunpowder residue. And neither Valentine or the wounded man who survived the shooting — Marins — could place Carter or Artis as the scene.

The case was presented to a Passaic County grand jury that summer, and neither man was indicted. On Oct. 14, 1966, Carter and Artis were arrested and charged with murder, the case against them leaning heavily on the statements given by Bello and Bradley.

The state offered no motive at the first trial, which was held in 1967 and played out amid a backdrop of racial tension as the civil rights movement's credo of non-violence gave way to increased militancy. The leader of the Carter-Artis defense team, Raymond Brown, was black. The prosecution, led by Vincent Hull, was white. An all-white jury found Carter and Artis guilty of murder in May 1967. Both were sent to prison.

Once behind bars at Rahway State Prison, Carter refused to see himself as a prisoner. He wouldn't eat the food, refused to hold a prison job and confined himself to his cell, where he read voraciously, wrote a book and worked on his appeals.

Kidrin visited him at Rahway, delivering food and books on philosophy — the works of Viktor Frankl, Jiddu Krishnamurti and G.I. Gurdjieff. Carter would later credit Kidrin with saving his life.

"Rubin had developed some metaphysical ideas that he related to the criminal justice system," Klonsky said. "There is something known as the 'truth,' and the truth is absolute. That is the highest level of thought. And then there is the lower level of thought on which the law operates."

Carter's and Artis' fight for freedom would become a cause célèbre. In 1974, Bello and Bradley recanted their police statements, opening the door to a new trial in 1976.

Carter and Artis were freed in early 1976 to await the second trial, which was moved to Hudson County. During the trial, which began in mid-October, the prosecution introduced the racial revenge motive, arguing that Carter and Artis went to the Lafayette looking to kill the white bartender, Oliver, to get even for the murder of Holloway at the Waltz Inn earlier that night.

Carter and Artis were convicted a second time and sent back to prison. Artis was paroled in 1981.

Carter remained behind bars until 1985, when Sarokin ruled the racial revenge motive a "thin thread" in the case.

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"Underlying the prosecutor's theory and summation is the insidious and repugnant argument that this heinous crime is to be understood and explained solely because the petitioners are black and the victims are white," Sarokin wrote. "Without that unacceptable assumption, the prosecution's theory of racial revenge becomes a thin thread (rather than the rope referred to in the prosecutor's summation) of largely irrelevant evidence and impermissible inferences."

Sarokin's law clerk at the time, Bruce Rosen, said the Carter case is still talked about in legal circles, and the guilt or innocence of the two men is still hotly debated.

"If you believe Carter, then there are no real answers as to else did it," Rosen said. "I'm fairly convinced that he didn't do it. But the thing I'm most convinced of is that he didn't get a fair shake."