The Burden

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Enjoy the show, Dax, this is the first story I ever heard Louis Scarcella tell.

The legendary New York detective tell me more so.

Detective Scarcella is with his partner. They're testifying in court one day. It's lunchtime. The court breaks and Detective Scarcella and his partner decide that this is the moment to track down a murder suspect. We park right here, right here.

There was an Italian guy right here smoking a shrew, I said Ben Bennygoy, and I showed him the picture.

He looked at the picture, he backed up and he.

Points to the White House. Lo and beholds of me.

Six foot three hundred pounds.

Comes out of the house.

I said, that's him. I said, I'm going to run him down.

I gunned the car stch jump out.

I run over him.

I put the gun on him.

He's got a sig sour in his waistband, all big sig sur I jump on him.

He's going for the gun.

I put my glock to his head and pulled the trigger. But the gun's no good.

My gun's no good.

I kilt him my pawn to shoot him.

He's bucking me.

He's bucking me like a bronco.

I grab him and I knock into the ground.

Do you ever imagine that clock goes off?

I mean I intended it to. I intended it to.

What do you want me to do?

He's got a six hour going for a six I want am?

I supposed to kiss him. Welcome to Louise Brooklyn, where bad guys were around every corner and it was up to the hective Scarcella to protect the people.

They needed me, and I loved doing it.

Louis heyday was the eighties and nineties, and back then all New Yorkers, even the most liberal calumnists, wanted law and order.

When you have babies being shot in their grandmother's arms, people's throats being slit for a.

Five dollars vial of crack, I don't care where those prisons are and when I'm sent there for long terms.

Louis Garcela had movie star good looks, smoked a cigar everywhere, and he was tough. He seemed like he was the kind of tough cop the city needed.

He was everybody's idea of the prince of the city. He was the guy who solved the hardest cases and made sure the worst killers were brought to justice.

Louis Garcella was known as the closes, the one who got the confession, and with that came fame. He was on the Doctor Phil's show, No One Knows the Art of getting confessions better than twenty nine year better in New York City homicide detectives, and.

He earned the respect of his peers.

Louise, my god, he's my man, you know, he's my friend, the hell of a cop, the rat detective.

God forbid something happened to me or my family.

I would want Louis Scarcella to do the investigation. A collot of trust in him.

He looks like shit. Now we'll go all this shit.

Steve the poor the poor guy that beat the balls off him, like, you know that's right. Years later, the Louis Scarcella story changed. The once decorated detective now stands accused of coaching witnesses, coercing confessions, and trading drugs for testimony.

Garsola cracked numerous murder cases in the eighties and nineties, but his techniques had been questioned.

A group of invicted murder says it all comes back to one rogue official and they want their names clear.

Oh yeah, I'm the devil in disgraced devil. Yeah yeah, Well, what can I tell you?

I'm Steve Fishman. I've lived in New York a long time. I've been writing about crime for a long time. As a journalist, I've interviewed cops, prosecutors, criminals, son of Sam Bernie Madoff. They opened up to me. I felt I knew a lot about the criminal justice system. So when I heard these headlines about Scarcela, my thought, this cannot be the whole story. Was this really about one rogue cop who what hoodwinked an entire system?

And I'm dak Stevlin Ross, journalist, author, lawyer. I've written about criminal justice for years. I know what it's like to be wrongfully arrested personally, and I'm interested in the people who went to jail and maybe shouldn't have.

We're gonna go deep. Is Louis a hero, cop, a scapegoat, or a super villain who helped put away more than twenty innocent men, men who now want revenge.

I don't know, man, Maybe they want vindication.

You know that's what Louis Scarcella feels he deserves too.

I'll tell you what though, Well, you need to know the truth, both about Louis Scarcela and the band of convicted murders who took him on, and about the city.

We live in stonecloud of comments commonstrate to you.

Can't run for shelter.

There's nothing you can't.

Do from orbit me. This is the burden today on the show the Scoop, you gotta hold all time?

All right, Steve, where do we begin?

We begin with the person who broke the Louis Scarcella story long before you or I got involved. That's Francis Robless, known to her New York Times colleagues as Frenchie.

The Porto Rican grow known as Frenchie.

I do not speak for Frenchie's from Queens, from an Italian neighborhood called Howard Beach.

Howard Beach was a astoundingly racist place.

And growing up there, it taught Frenchie to be fierce.

My best friend in elementary school was Perto Rican, and so this one kid was like, hey, pldorica Isy switch Lane and my girlfriend Jenevieve and I we went to his house.

In sixth grade.

We rang the doorbell and his mother answered the door and she was pregnant or belly outza wherever is Anthony home? And she's like ane. So he comes and he's you know, you can see he's kind of looking at us rather suspiciously, like one of the two Puerto Rican girls that I believe in school doing at my door. And we beat the crap out of him right there in front of his mother.

This was the nineteen eighties and Frenchie was in high school, living in a dangerous neighborhood in a dangerous city. One night, her mother was a victim. Her mother was carjacked, a gun was put to her head right in front of their house, and then her mother was summoned to the police station to identify the carjacker in the lineup, the man who'd been arrested in the stolen vehicle.

And the detective puts his right hand on his left arm and he makes like a figure of the number two, you know, holding up two fingers, and he looks at my mother, telling her.

To choose number two.

So my mother goes in there. She looks at the guys. She has no idea who it is. She doesn't remember. It was dark, you know, she had a gun in her face, So she picked number two. I remember thinking.

Well, screw him. You know, he was driving a stolen car.

He's at the very least was involved in car theft.

Guilty enough for her.

Yeah, back then, it didn't matter to Frenchie if this guy did this crime. But later French she became a reporter, first at the Miami Herald and then at the New York Times, and their views evolved.

You know, maybe my mother helped send the innocent person to prison. He got seven years. Everybody was in on it. Everybody it was in on the game. The cops were in on it, the witnesses were in on it, and the prosecutor probably knew that my mother didn't know who he was and was like whatever she said, Number.

Two, number two.

Fast forward to twenty thirteen and Frenchy is at the New York Times. She's itching for a good story, a big story, something that will make a splash. One day, she's on a routine assignment when she meets someone interesting.

Was a guy named Derek Hamilton, who was an ex Cohn who had been kind of like a jail house lawyer.

You meet her and Hispanic woman, beautiful, long hair, you know, made up.

And this is Derek remembering meeting Frenchie for the first time. He's a bigger guy, broadcast, about six foot two. He's got a single gold tooth in the front and a shaved head, big presence.

I've been in Queens Boulevard, Course Street from the courthouse. There was some restaurant there and we had dinner at twelve.

And so we're just chatting and he says, oh, you know, I see that you're kind of interested in this issue of you know, the Brooklyn Dida's office having screwed somebody over. I know a lot of cases in Brooklyn of wrongful convictions.

Okay, really okay, good.

You know, I was kind of in the New York office sharpening pencils, so that seemed like a good idea to me.

And to follow up on that tip.

So Frenchie brings it to her editor and I'm like, oh, I have a tip.

You know, there's a lot of wrongfully convicted guys in Brooklyn, and I have a good source.

He was a jail house lawyer.

And so my editor says to me, well, what else do the cases have in common? Like what connects them? I was so offended by that question. I was like, well, I don't know, maybe they didn't do it like that connects them. You know, maybe they're all black, you know, and the railroaded.

By the criminal justice system.

Like I just thought it was such a hoity toity New York Times view of journalism that I couldn't just come up with the wrongful conviction. I had to come up with what connects them?

So I nod politely, you know, yes, ma'am.

And I'm like I go back to my desk, kind of grumbling under my breath, and I called Derek and I'm like, all right, well, this editor of mine wants to know what connects these cases, and he goes, well, a lot of them are the same cop and his name is Luis Garsov.

This smoke behind the story that's after the break Welcome back. Derek Hamilton was out of prison but still connected to people on the inside. He's a self taught lawyer, learned the law behind bars, and he was still in the prison grape vine.

So I meet with Derek again.

And Derek, you know, he was interesting because he knew some things, but he did not know a lot of things. He told me kind of loosey goosey stuff like he said, oh that this guy was notorious for using the same witness over and over again, but he didn't know the names of the defendants who had had the same witness testify against them.

And he did not know the name of the witness.

So I was like, oh, brother, you know, here I am talking this up to my editor like I'm some hotshot who's going to crack this cane. And I got nothing, And I thought, oh my god, you know what am I going to do?

Now?

You know, I don't have anywhere to turn.

So she went back to Derek. She needed the name of that very talented witness, and that's when Derek gives her a legal document. This was a document written by one of his friends still in jail, another jailhouse lawyer. It's called a four forty motion, and it's what you file if you're trying to get your conviction overturned.

So he gives me Shabacca chaqurs for forty.

I probably rewrote that one hundred times because I wanted to make sure that I was saying what I wanted to say.

This is Shabacca Shakur. Scarcella helped convict Shabacca of a double murder, which he says he didn't do. His four forty was impressive, sixty pages of legal argument written while he was part of a prison law firm. That's right, a law firm formed in prison and run by convicted murderers, all of whom claimed innocence. More on that later. Schbacca and Derek got close in prison. Now Derek urges Shabaka to talk to Frenchy.

So I called her.

She was like, okay, you said, scar Seller is a crooked cop. I read your brief. I said, listen. I gave a list of names, a list of you know, people she could talk to. Information that would substantiate that he was a crooked cop. And I remember telling her, like you an investigative reporter, go and investigate.

In that dense document, two pages focused on Louis Garcella.

He says in this document, it says something something. Lewis Garcella was notorious in Brooklyn for his you know, unethical and you.

Know, framing people basically.

In fact, he was known to use the same witness over and over again, a woman named Teresa Gomes.

And I'm like, you know, that's it.

That's the name.

That's what I've been waiting for.

I'm already to find out the name of the of the of the witness.

So Frenchie has the name. Now she does what a lot of us do when we're hunting for information. She googles.

That's my big investigative reporting secret. So I google Lewis Garsella and Teresa Gomes together. You know, I don't know what I thought I was going to find. And I got a hit, and I'm like, well, this is curious. It was like some random Google forum, a cigar smoker forum where somebody has asked I think the question on the forum was when did you first smoke your first great cigar.

Okay, so a cigar smoker's form not exactly where I'd expect to find a lead about a.

Crooked exactly, but what she comes across there turns out to be crucial to her understanding of the entire story.

This guy a man answers. The first cigar which truly made me realize how much I was going to enjoy cigars, was smoked in nineteen eighty eight at a bar on Remsen Street in Brooklyn, New York called Callahan's. The cigar was given to me by a legendary detective of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad named Louis Scarcela. Lewis had been the detective on the first two murder cases I prosecuted, both of which featured the same witness testifying against the

Here's what I'm wondering, what the fuck the assistant district attorney, he's not the district attorney, Just to be clear about that, is basically saying that no one should have believed his witness, the one he put on the stand, who happens to be the lone eye witnessed in two alleged murders by Robert Hill on two different occasions.

My head mark is probably still on the roof of the New York Times office from my jumping up and down and realizing that I had hit badr.

So Frenchie was excited by her discovery. I want to point out, though, that what the prosecutor is saying is that he'd be stunned if a jury believed Teresa Gomez. What he's not saying is that she's lying.

So Frenchie now has the name of this troubled and doupling witness, and now she's also got the name of the person Teresa help convictive murder want Robert Hill, former drug dealer. So Steve, where does she go from here?

She goes to prison unannounced to find Robert Hill. Frenchie is waiting in the visitors room for Robert Hill. He's serving eighteen years to life. He's not expecting her.

So this guy comes in and he walks with a cane and he's kind of hunched over and he has.

Very very long dreadlocks all down his back.

And I see him looking around the room like, you know oo, So I don't see anybody here who's here to see me, And so I raised my hands and he looks at me like, you know, who.

The heck is that, you know?

But all right, fine, you know, he doesn't have anything better to do. So he sits down and I'll probably never forget this moment for the rest of my life. I said to him. You know, my name is Francis Rolez. I'm a reporter for the New York Times. I'm doing a story on Teresa Gomez. And he just froze and his eyes welled up with tears, and he said, I've been telling people about Teresa Gomez for twenty five years. And I said, well, now somebody's listening.

But for Robert Hill, talking about Teresa Gomez is not an easy decision. He's about to come up for parole. And one of the things that's drilled into somebody applying for parole is you got to go in, take responsibility, show remorse, you got to ask forgiveness. Now that's going to be hard to do if you're also telling a New York Times reporter, hey, I didn't do it.

And he said to me, is this going to mess up my parole? And I remember I said something that you know, ethically I should not have said, and I probably shouldn't even repeat that I said, but I said it. I said, this isn't going to mess up your parole. I said this is going to get you exonerated. And I said something so ridiculous because I believed it.

That's our frenchie. She'll save your life at your peril. And Robert Hill, let's face it, he needs his life saved, so maybe it's worth the risk. Hill starts talking and he tells frenchie Teresa Gomez is a liar. Frenchie goes on her way, and soon she's working on a front page story for the Times, one that she hopes will make a splash.

Standard journalism practice is to get a comment from everyone mentioned in a story, especially a high stake story. Like this one. She calls the District Attorney's office.

It's like six o'clock that Thursday, and I call the spokesman and I said, I got a two thousand and five hundred word article about all these guys, you know, say that they were wrongly accused, and you know what it doesn't have It doesn't have a quote from the Brooklyn District Attorney's office. Because your quote was so pathetic. I said, so we're going to do a doue over and it's the one question, do over do you stand behind these convictions or not?

That's it.

We're not going to negotiate a response.

We're not going to be like, oh if the record background upside down inside out, what's your answer? And so the spokesman said, oh, quite back, Okay, call me back, say call back, and he said, well, you have to come back.

To the office tomorrow.

I'm crying out loud. I go to the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, sit down, like, all right, what is it. We're reopening all of Scarcella's cases.

And I'm like, oh my god.

So I go back to the office and I find the editor, the same person that had originally asked me what connects these cases?

And I said, you're not going to believe this.

The DA is reopening all of his cases.

They're going to go back thirty years.

And her eyes welled up in tears.

And she said, oh my god.

She goes, these are lies.

These are real lives that you're impacting.

Frenchie story breaks on May eleventh, twenty thirteen, the headline review of fifty Brooklyn murder cases ordered. The story lays it all out how Teresa Gomez says she witnessed six separate murders. Who's see six murders? And Frenchie tells other stories like Shabacca's, how Scarcella told the court he had made an incriminating statement that Shabacca says he never made.

A copy of Frenchi's story eventually arrives at the prison library.

It got spread around, you know, word went like wildfire, and everybody had their own copy that they took back to their cell.

By this point, Sabacca's been incarcerated for twenty two years.

I had a couple of copies.

I even mail copies out for people like yo, look, so we was excited about it. And I think that that was the first time that I knew, like I always thought I was going to get out, But I knew I was going to get out.

Then Sabacca's friend Derek, the one who said all of this in motion. At first, he's pleased when he sees the article, but then he gets angry. This is personal, you see. Scarcela was the cop who arrested Derek for murder, a murder, he insists he didn't do.

You gotta understand something, man, My kids grew up without a father.

This basket was able to raise his.

This god is a piece of shit, but he gets to run around.

Like he's God.

It's Derek and his jailhouse law firm that will lead the charge against Scarcella. With Derek and Louis, it will be a zero some game. If one rises, the other must fall. We gotta get at this out. Here's where I enter the story. It was a few years after Frenchy Scoop. I was a New York magazine journalist. Back then, I just moved to a new neighborhood in Brooklyn, and on a whim, I decided to open a cocktail bar. I did not have a grand vision. There was an

I remember that bar distinctly. It was where I entered the story, coming there one night, sitting down with you and having the first big conversation about this series.

I remember that first night you came, and I remember you telling me about your experiences with cops.

To be clear, there's been more than one, so we could be talking about the time I got pulled over twice within about twenty minutes because I had a Vanilla Roma air freshener in my rear view mirror.

Yes, you did. But the one I remember, the one that made an impression on me, starts with a pull up on a scaffold.

I'm entering my third year of law school, standing on a street corner in Adams Morgan and Washington, DC. You know, I got my satchel on because at the time I used to wear a satchel night right, you know, keep my pal my poems in my satchel. And I was first starting to grow on my drop my dreads. I'm with my buddy, who's a study who the study he was at Georgetown Low and he decides to jump up on a scaffold and do a pull up. Okay, and I think I jumped up into maybe did a pull

Oh my god.

My family has Sunday dinner. I don't show up. No one knows where I am.

I remember hearing that story and thinking, man, this is crazy law school students doing a pull up and then ended up getting beaten by cops. That's just racism, flat out.

And you'd be right except for one thing. Those cops who arrested and beat me they were black. Wow.

I did not expect that.

Yeah, most people don't, But for me, what I took away from that is that a cop is always a cop, always blue, and to cops, I'm a black man, and to be a black man, at least in some spaces in this country, is to be a suspect.

Well, here's what I can say. We enter this journey through different doors, don't we.

Yes, we do, and it's gonna be quite a ride.

Buckle up. In this series, we're gonna look at it all from the inside. We'll get deep on Scarsella.

We're here, we're here in the belly of the beast, but we're here doing what we got to do, and we did it.

We did God's work and we did it.

To me, he's no better than a syrial change, right, because you chilled people's dreams.

This diabolical character that he's been depicted as is just pure nonsense.

If he had a great reputation.

We'll enter a crazy world of violence.

This guy runs right down the middle of eight their view and he's.

Got a gun.

Sergeant to you know, shot him.

He goes down and oh my god, so like the wild West.

And we'll hear from the politicians trying to tame it.

I ain't prepared to do anything to take back our streets by night as well as by day.

We'll dive into the Brooklyn criminal justice system. She definitely testified Hyazac Kite one day.

He's a judge and he puts his arms around me and he says, we both know who this guy is.

We both know he's guilty, and we'll follow Derek Hamilton and his band of convicted murderers who created their own law from them behind bars to take on Scarsella and fight for their freedom. It's guy's like god when it comes to criminal law.

Everybody knows how to make emotions, but how many times do you really know what your burden is?

Look, man, this is our team right here.

I team.

We're gonna work for these cases and we're gonna.

Get out and targeting the detective at the center of it all.

I say, damn, it's the same fuck or that frame me.

If I did one nanogram one nanogram of what they said I did, and you know what I mean by one nanogram and infinitesimal, If I did one of the things that they said I did, I would have killed myself.

I love myself.

I'm not gonna kill myself. What do you love about yourself? I'm gonna tell you.

I think.

I'm a very good person.

Yeah, we'll see about that.

Next time. On The Burden, I try to get Louis go sell it, to give it all up. He used to be a talker. Dan with the bad headlines, he mostly shut up. Frenchie couldn't get him to talk. But I'm on a mission. Turns out that mission starts with a plunge into the freezing Atlantic.

Make sure your baby's gonna come off today?

Well I did it last time?

Yeah, it did? Did That's next time. On The Burden, commonstrating.

You can't run for shelter.

There's nothing you can't do. The Burden is created by Steve Fishman. It's hosted and reported by Steve Fishman and myself, Dax Devlin Ross. Our story editor is Dan Bobkoff. Our senior producer is Simon Rittner. Our producer is Sonum Skelly. Our associate producer is Austin Smith. Our fact checker is Sona Abakan production coordinator is Davon Paradise. Mixing and sound design is provided by Mumble Media. Our executive producers are

Special thanks to Rhea Julian my wife.

Legal support has been provided by Mona Hoop at MKSR ll P, and a very special thanks to Evan Williams, one of our executive producers and the person who made this podcast possible. We are honored to feature the song Black Lightning The Bell Rings is our theme music. The Burden is a production of Orbit Media and association with Signal Company Number one