Hey everyone, it's Jason Flamm. As you might have noticed, we've begun dropping some clips of our favorite podcast into the feed here that we feel are telling the most important innocence and justice stories. So today we have a special clip of a new investigative true crime podcast here. He is called The Burden from Morbid Media. It tells the story of a once celebrated NYPD detective named Luis Scarcella who became embroiled in controversy by the innocent men
whom he helped wrongfully convict. The series follows the host, Steve Fishman, who gains Garcella's trust, allowing us to listen in from Scarcella's perspective as he continues to battle people whom i'm regular users will recognize Derek Hamilton, Shabaka, Shaquur, Nelson Cruz, all of whom banded together while still in
prison to fight their common enemy. The lucked and legal heroes have helped to free over twenty more victims of this same detective, Lewis Garcela, whose handiwork has cost New York City over one hundred and fifty million dollars in counting. So here's the clip. Don't forget to subscribe to the Burden wherever you get your podcasts, and follow along as this incredible story unfolds.
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. It's lunchtime, and Detective Scarcella and his partner decide that this is the moment to track down a murder suspect. We talk right here, right here, lo, and behold, a man six foot three hundred pounds.
Comes out of the house.
I said, that's him.
Wow.
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 grab them and I knock him to the ground. Do you ever imagine that clock goes off? I mean I intended it too. I intended it to one am. I supposed to kiss him. Welcome to Louis Brooklyn, where bad guys were around every corner and it was up to Detective Scarsella 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 wanted law and order. Louis Garcela had movie star
good looks, smoked a cigar everywhere. 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 Garcela was known as the closer, the one who got the confession, and with that came fame. He was on the Doctor Phil 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.
Louis my god, he's you know, he's my friend, the de Helibo cop Rate detective. He looks like shit.
Now we'll all this shit.
Steve the poor the poor guy that beat the balls off of me.
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 testimonies.
Garcela cracked numerous murder cases in the eighties and nineties, but his techniques had been questioned, and a group of convicted murders says, it all comes back to one rogue official and they want their names clear.
Oh yeah, I'm the devil and 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. Son of Sam Bernie Madoff. They opened up to me when I heard these headlines about Scarcella. I 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.
Stormcloud of common strate to you, you can't run for shelter.
There's nohing you can do.
From orbit media. Yeah, this is the burden today on the show The Scoop.
You gotta hold all the 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 French.
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 is Perto Rican, and so this one kid was like, hey, ladarica 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. She was pregnant, her belly out to wherever is Anthony home? And she's like ane. So he comes and he's you know you could 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.
Fast forward to twenty thirteen and Frenchie is at the New York Times. She's itching for a good story, something that will make us. One day, she's on a routine assignment when she meets someone interesting.
Was a guy named Derek Hamilton, who was an ex con who had been kind of like a jailhouse lawyer, and so we're just chatting and he says, oh, you know, I know a lot of cases in Brooklyn of wrongful convictions.
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 jailhouse lawyer. And so my editor says to me, well, what else do the cases have in common? And I was so offended by that question, Like I just thought it was such a hoity toity New York Times view of journalism that I couldn't just come up with a wrongful conviction. I had
to come up with what connects them? Go back to my dask 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 Lewis Garsala.
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. 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 case open. And I got nothing.
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 to forty motion, and it's what you file if you're trying to get your conviction overturned.
So he gives me Shabacca chaqueurs 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 chacor. Scarcella helped convict Shabacca of a double murder, which he says he didn't do. His four to 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.
So I called her.
She was like, okay, you said, scar Sellers 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 Garcela.
He says in this document something something Louis Garcella was known to use the same witness over and over again, a woman named Teresa Gomez. And I'm like, gee, you know that's it. That's the name, that's that's what I've been waiting for.
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. 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? 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. The cigar was given to me by a legendary detective of the Brooklyn North homicide
Squad named Louis Garcela. Lewis had been the detective on the first two murder cases I prosecuted, both of which featured the same witness testifying against the same defendant for two different murders. The defendant was a dealer named Robert Hill. The witness was named Teresa Gomez, a woman who was even then ravaged from head to toe by the scourge
of crack cocaine. It was near falling to even think that anyone would believe Gomez about anything, let alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy kill two different people. And the guy signs it and he's now a charge.
She goes to prison unannounced to find Robert Hill. Frenchie is waiting in the visitors room for Robert Hill.
So this guy comes in and 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, who the heck is that?
You know?
But all right, fine, 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 Roblans Order 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. 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.
Frenchy story breaks on May eleventh, twenty thirteen. The headline reviewed you who have fifty Brooklyn murder cases ordered? The story lays it all out how Teresa Gomez says she witnessed six separate murders. Who sees six murders? Schabaka'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.
I say, damn man, it's the same fuck of that frame me.
You see.
Scarcella was the cop who arrested Derek for murder a murder he insists he didn't do.
You gotta understand something, man, this guy is a piece of shit. But he gets to run around.
Like he's God. We gotta get at this guy.
We gotta attack. It's gonna sell it.
If I did one nano gram, one nanogram.
Of what they said I did, I would have killed myself.
Strong crowd a comment commonstrate to you. You can't run for shelter.
There's nothing you can't do.
You gotta hold old time.
Go to
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