Three decades of injustice: Worcester's Big Nate Allstar channels father's wrongful arrest into song

On Dec. 20, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu stood at a podium and issued an official apology from the city to two Black men it had wrongfully targeted 34 years before.

Both men, Willie Bennett and Alan Swanson, were accused of and subsequently arrested for the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart, a pregnant white woman shot dead in the passenger seat of her car in the Mission Hill neighborhood.

Stuart’s husband Charles, who was driving, had planned the shooting in advance and later tried to avoid suspicion by claiming a Black male stranger had hijacked the car. Three months later, Charles’ brother Matthew told police about the plot, and the next morning, Charles took his own life by jumping off the Tobin Bridge.

In 2023, a multi-part Boston Globe investigation and HBO’s “Murder In Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning” docuseries brought the case back into the spotlight, both locally and nationwide.

After Wu’s speech at the December ceremony, the floor belonged to Bennett’s son, Worcester musician Nate Nelson, who is no stranger to a microphone.

'Everything had to happen'

A rapper known onstage as Big Nate Allstar, Nelson spoke his piece in front of city officials, family friends and TV cameras, telling his father’s and his family’s story from his own perspective. Soon, he realized it was time for him to tell that story in another way: through his music.

“Everything had to happen. If the documentary didn't get released and if the mayor didn't apologize after the documentary was released, if the Globe podcast didn't come out, all of those pieces together gave me the landscape to make a song about it and tell my story,” Nelson said. Nelson alluded to an episode of the "Murder in Boston" podcast, which detailed the case, and which Nelson sampled in a song.

Nelson released that song, “William Bennett,” a month later, explaining three decades of injustice and adding a new and important point of view to the Stuart case’s narrative.

Audio clips from recent media coverage of the case play in between verses, and the track begins with Wu’s voice echoing over sirens and ominous piano chords.

“I am so sorry for the pain that you have carried for so many years. What was done to you was unjust, unfair, racist and wrong,” Wu says, and then the beat kicks in and Nelson responds.

“Apology accepted, family neglected,” he raps. “It’s not about the money, it’s not a reparation/Is it heaven or hell? What’s the destination?”

'I know I didn’t do it. They know I didn’t do it.'

According to Nelson, Wu and other Boston city officials visited Bennett at home recently to apologize in person, as Bennett, now in his 80s, has Alzheimer’s dementia and is mostly bedridden.

“That's what (Wu) could do, but otherwise, it's a City of Boston issue, if you ask me. They're the ones who hired the people who didn't do their job properly,” Nelson said.

Boston police first focused on Bennett as a suspect in the Stuart murder two weeks after the shooting.

Rumors were spreading in Mission Hill because of Bennett’s reputation as a dangerous man. One teenager, afraid police would lock him up if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, told homicide detectives he heard from a friend that Bennett was the one who held up Stuart’s car.

“I know I didn’t do it. They know I didn’t do it. It’s just that I had a reputation in the projects,” Bennett told WBZ News in a 2017 interview. “They were coming at me anyway because of my past. I was a wild one.”

A moment of a nightmare

In November 1989, police arrested Bennett on a traffic infraction, unable to bring murder charges but looking to keep him in custody while building a case against him. Days later, Bennett was charged with an armed robbery in Brookline, which he told WBZ News he did not commit.

When officers raided the house where Bennett was staying, one of the witnesses was a small child just old enough to vividly remember the scene.

“I was going on 6 years old, and I remember cops coming in with flashlights and searching the house,” Nelson said. “I remember (my father) being in handcuffs for hours. It stopped me from being able to trust cops when I was a kid.”

Nelson grew up with that memory in the back of his mind, but he did not learn his father had been falsely accused in one of Boston’s most high-profile murder cases until he was 12.

Seven years later, Bennett was in state prison, serving a 12-year sentence after being convicted of the Brookline armed robbery.

'Who did it? That's my dad!'

Nelson’s mother had long since moved the family out to Worcester, hoping to start fresh, and Nelson was a kid like any other, visiting his father on the weekends and spending most of his days in class at Worcester East Middle School.

His teacher turned the lights off and popped a tape into the VCR underneath one of the school’s televisions. Instead of a nature documentary or an episode of “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” what appeared onscreen was “Goodnight Sweet Wife: A Boston Murder,” a 1990 CBS drama that portrayed the Stuart case.

“At first, I don't know what's going on, but 10 minutes into it, they mention Willie Bennett. I said, 'Who did it? That's my dad!'” Nelson said. “They said, 'You don't have the same last name.' I said, 'You ask me every weekend how my visits are going. This is the person I visit. That's my dad.' They apologized and turned the movie off.”

A terrible truth

When Nelson came home from school that day, he asked his mother if the story laid out in the movie was true. After explaining the false accusation and the basics of the case to him, she picked up the phone and called the school, furious.

“That was how I found out it was a big story and he wasn't just a regular guy in jail,” Nelson said.

While his father waited in prison, Nelson made a name for himself on Worcester’s baseball fields as a star first baseman, third baseman, and pitcher for St. Paul Diocesan Junior-Senior High School, then known as Holy Name.

After graduating in 2002, he was drafted by the Oakland Athletics, but he chose to study at Worcester State University instead. There, he returned to the infield, gaining nationwide attention at first base. The Toronto Blue Jays offered him a workout and liked what they saw, and soon, he was a professional athlete.

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More loss

Nelson was working his way up through the Blue Jays’ farm system in early 2009 when he got a call from home. His mother was terminally ill, and had been given eight months to live.

Realizing he was needed, he packed up and left spring training.

“I had to be the man of the house. My dad was just getting out of jail and couldn't take care of my sisters,” Nelson said. “I had to leave my dream, which I had worked so hard for, to take care of them and get things in order and make sure my mom was good.”

In September 2009, Nelson’s mother died.

'I had a story to talk about'

Unable to return to baseball, Nelson started making music as an outlet for his thoughts and energy, writing raps inspired by the East Coast hip-hop he listened to growing up — Busta Rhymes, Nas, Lauryn Hill, Wu-Tang Clan.

“I never really had music as a backup plan. A lot of what I talked about in my music was my life story, because I had a story to talk about,” Nelson said.

More than a decade later, Nelson’s backup plan is now his claim to fame. As Big Nate Allstar, he regularly performs alongside Wu-Tang rapper Cappadonna throughout the Northeast, and in 2022, he joined Nas, Wu-Tang, and Busta on tour across the country.

Local shows feature Big Nate Allstar on the bill often, too. Last summer, he performed at the Black Music Festival on the Worcester Common, and in April, he was part of the Roll Up music and cannabis festival at the Palladium, at one point rapping in front of an image of his father projected behind the stage.

Inspired by the storytelling lyricism of the ‘90s, Nelson said his songs aren’t “mumble rap” but narratives about life, whether his own, someone else’s, or both.

“Willie Bennett” is one such narrative, and in the first verse, Nelson lays out the injustices that his father and his family faced, from Bennett’s days in state prison to the family’s struggles without him to the initial, sensationalized media coverage of the case.

Nelson raps, “My family’s stronger than ever, we’re never gonna fold,” and the beat drops out, turning listeners’ attention to the voice of retired Massachusetts State Police Major Dan Grabowski.

'They rampage the roots, then they get to the wreckin’'

In 1989, days after the shooting, rumors began spreading among Charles Stuart’s friends and family that he was the real killer. Two men close to the family, Dennis MacLean and John Carlson, heard the rumors and passed along the information to every police officer they knew, including Grabowski.

As part of the Boston Globe’s 2023 series on the Stuart case, one Globe reporter contacted Grabowski to ask why he did not investigate the tip. Grabowski declined to comment in a long voicemail, which the Globe published in its “Murder In Boston” podcast. Worcester Magazine listened to the podcast episode.

In that voicemail, Grabowski brought up Bennett’s previous run-ins with the law and referenced the killing of George Floyd, a Black man whose murder by a police officer sparked protests throughout the world in 2020.

After arresting Floyd on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill, Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, suffocating him to death, for which Chauvin would be convicted. Years before, Floyd had served time in prison for drug possession and theft. During the 2020 protests, some right-wing commentators used his history to argue that Chauvin was justified.

“I know what’s going to happen. You’re going to make Willie Bennett a hero the same way they made George Floyd a hero,” Grabowski said in his voicemail to the Globe. “He’s a piece of trash that’s been terrorizing people and polluting people with drugs his whole life. You people question nothing.”

On the song, the recording serves as another piece of evidence that illustrates police mistreatment of Bennett and mishandling of the Stuart investigation.

“(Grabowski) was getting annoyed with people bringing up the past, and it showed his true colors and where the state police were at the time. They weren't doing their job to the best of their ability,” Nelson said.

“They rampage the roots, then they get to the wreckin’,” Nelson raps as the track comes back in, flipping the 2023 HBO docuseries’ “Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning” subtitle into a description of institutional racism. “Every hood has a Charles Stuart without the heart to do it.”

“Too many wrongs, nothing right, they label us the savages/’Hands up, Black man,’ they need another narrative,” Nelson says at the end of the song’s second verse, referencing the night of the murder.

When EMTs were pulling Stuart out of his car and loading him onto a stretcher, he only spoke two words to the surrounding police officers: “Black man.”

“They throw in Black TV, the propaganda. The 6 percent of good Black people are the ones on TV, when really, their behavior and their track record is atrocious,” Grabowski’s voicemail continues as the beat fades out.

'I wasn't OK'

The track doesn’t end there, though. After the last piano chord comes a clip of Nelson and his sister, Ebony Bennett-Nelson, speaking at the December 2023 ceremony after Wu’s apology.

“Everybody wants to know if we’re OK. We’re not OK. I wasn’t OK when I had to visit my dad in prison for 10 straight years. I wasn’t OK when he missed my little sister’s first steps. I wasn’t OK when he couldn’t see his mom pass away because he was in a cell,” Nelson says in the recording.

“I asked my father if he wanted to come here today and he said no,” Bennett-Nelson says next. “’Pay me, man!’ That’s all he said.”

Although the City of Boston paid a $12,500 settlement to the Bennett family after multiple lawsuits in 1995, much of the family feels there is more the city can do to address the past, including making sure Bennett gets the best possible medical care for his dementia as the years go by.

“I'm hoping they make sure my father is taken care of, along with the people directly affected by what happened,” Nelson said. “Other people are benefiting off the stories and other people are acknowledging the wrongdoings. To me, that shows that the family should be taken care of. Usually, in these kinds of situations, that's what people do.”