0:00

There. Are more ways than ever to

0:02

listen to history daily ad free, listen

0:04

with wonder He plus and the wonder

0:06

Yeah or you can get All of

0:08

History daily plus other fantastic history podcasts

0:11

at Into history.com. I'm

0:21

no anthropologist or social scientists, but

0:23

I have a hunch that justice

0:25

is a deeply primal feeling. You

0:27

need only look at squabbling children

0:29

to know how early and strongly

0:31

that feeling manifests. That's not fair,

0:33

they'll scream. And what is our

0:35

desire for revenge, if not a

0:37

selfish will to balance the scales

0:39

to see justice done? Why do

0:41

we root for the underdog? Find

0:43

satisfaction in the fall of the

0:45

Hubert? We want a level playing

0:47

field. We want reward and punishment

0:49

equally meted out. But. Our world is

0:51

one where bad things happen to good

0:53

people and bad people can get away

0:55

with almost anything. It's not fair and

0:57

today we have a tale of such

0:59

and justice. On this week Saturday matinee,

1:01

we bring you a teaser from the

1:04

first episode of the new Podcast The

1:06

Burden in which a group of convicted

1:08

murderers who all say they are in

1:10

his realized the same New York detective

1:12

help put many of them away, educating

1:14

themselves on the law and enlisting the

1:16

help of a New York Times reporter.

1:18

They attempt to find justice for themselves

1:20

and. Others and three decades later, more

1:22

than twenty people this detective help them

1:24

prison have walked free in the media.

1:27

He's a disgrace detective, a rogue cop

1:29

who hoodwinked an entire system. What is

1:31

this? a fair assessment or yet another

1:34

injustice? I hope you enjoy. While you're

1:36

listening, be sure to search for and

1:38

follow the burden. We put a link

1:40

in the shown us to make it

1:43

easy for. History.

1:47

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Five Hundred Five Hundred. Decks

3:54

This is the first story I ever

3:57

heard Louis score cel as hell. legendary

4:00

New York detective. Tell me more. So

4:03

Detective Scarcella is with his

4:06

partner. It's lunchtime and Detective

4:08

Scarcella and his partner decide

4:10

that this is the moment

4:12

to track down a murder

4:14

suspect. We

4:16

park right here. Right

4:19

here! Lo

4:21

and behold, a man, six

4:23

foot three hundred pounds comes out of the

4:26

house. I said, that's

4:28

him. I

4:30

run over him. I put the gun on him. He's

4:33

got a sig sour in his waistband.

4:35

A big sig sour. I

4:37

jump on him. He's going for

4:40

the gun. I put my Glock to his head

4:42

and pull the trigger. But

4:45

the gun's no good. My gun's no good.

4:47

I grab him and I knock him to

4:49

the ground. Do

4:52

you ever imagine that clock goes off? I

4:55

intended it to. I

4:57

intended it to! What

4:59

am I supposed to kiss him? Welcome

5:05

to Louie's Brooklyn where bad guys

5:07

were around every corner and

5:10

was up to Detective Scarcella to protect

5:12

the people. They

5:15

needed me. And

5:18

I loved doing

5:20

it. Louie's heyday was

5:22

the 80s and 90s and back then

5:24

all New Yorkers wanted law and honor.

5:28

Louie Scarcella had movie star good

5:31

looks, smoked a cigar everywhere. He

5:33

seemed like he was the kind of tough cop

5:35

the city needed. He was everybody's

5:38

idea of the

5:41

Prince of the city. He

5:44

was the guy who solved the

5:46

hardest cases and made sure

5:48

the worst killers were brought to justice.

5:53

Louie Scarcella was known as the

5:55

Closer. The one who got

5:57

the confession. He

6:01

was on the Dr. Phil show. No

6:04

one knows the art of getting confessions

6:06

better than 29 year veteran New York

6:08

City homicide detectives. And

6:10

he earned the respect of his peers. He's

6:13

my guy. He's my

6:15

friend. He's a hell of a cop. A

6:17

rape detective. He

6:23

looks like shit now we'll call it his

6:25

shit. Steve, the poor guy, he beat the

6:28

balls off of him. That's

6:30

right. Years later, the

6:33

Louis Scarcella story changed.

6:36

The once decorated detective now

6:38

stands accused of coaching witnesses,

6:40

coercing confessions and trading drugs

6:42

for testimony. Scarcella cracked numerous murder

6:44

cases in the 80s and 90s, but

6:46

his techniques have been questioned. A group

6:48

of convicted murders says it all comes

6:50

back to one rogue official and they

6:52

want their names cleared. Oh,

6:55

yeah. Yeah, I'm the

6:58

devil and disgraced devil.

7:00

Yeah. Yeah. Well,

7:03

what can I tell you? I'm

7:06

Steve Fishman. I've lived in

7:09

New York a long time. I've been writing

7:11

about crime for a long time. Son of

7:13

Sam, Bernie Madoff. They opened up to me.

7:16

When I heard these headlines about Scarcella,

7:19

my thought? This cannot be

7:21

the whole story. Was this

7:23

really about one rogue cop

7:26

who, what, hoodwinked an entire

7:28

system? And

7:30

I'm Dak Steblin Ross, journalist,

7:32

author, lawyer. I've written about

7:34

criminal justice for years. I

7:36

know what it's like to be wrongfully arrested,

7:38

personally. And I'm interested in the

7:41

people who went to jail and maybe shouldn't

7:43

have. We're going to

7:45

go deep. Is Louis a hero

7:47

cop, a scapegoat, or a supervillain who

7:49

helped put away more than 20 in

7:51

a row? Innocent men. Men

7:54

who now want revenge. History

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Daily is sponsored by Mint Mobile. Increasingly,

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Today on the show, The Scoop.

11:05

Alright Steve, where do we

11:07

begin? We begin with

11:09

the person who broke the Louis

11:11

Scarcella story long before you or

11:13

I got involved. That's

11:15

Frances Robles, known to her

11:18

New York Times colleagues as Frenchie.

11:21

The Puerto Rican girl known as Frenchie. I do not speak

11:23

French. Frenchie is from

11:25

Queens, from an Italian neighborhood called

11:27

Howard Beach. Howard

11:29

Beach was a

11:31

astoundingly racist place. And

11:34

growing up there, it taught Frenchie to

11:36

be fierce. My best friend in

11:38

elementary school is Puerto Rican and so

11:40

this one kid was like, hey Puerto Rican, where's

11:42

your switch? And

11:45

my girlfriend Genevieve and I, we went to

11:47

his house in

11:50

sixth grade. We rang the doorbell and

11:52

his mother answered the door. She was pregnant and she was

11:54

belly-out to wherever. Is Anthony

11:56

home? And she's like, Anthony!

12:00

So he comes and he's, you know, you can see he's

12:02

kind of looking at us rather suspiciously like one of the

12:04

two Puerto Rican girls that I bullied in school doing at my

12:06

door. And we beat the crap out

12:08

of him right there in front of his mother. Fast

12:16

forward to 2013 and Frenchie is at

12:18

the New York Times. She's

12:20

itching for a good story, something that will

12:22

make a splash. One

12:25

day she's on a routine assignment when

12:27

she meets someone interesting. There

12:29

was a guy named Derek Hamilton who was

12:31

an ex-con who had been kind of like

12:33

a jailhouse lawyer. And

12:36

so we're just chatting and he says, oh, you know,

12:38

I know a lot of cases in Brooklyn

12:40

of wrongful convictions. So

12:44

Frenchie brings it to her editor. And

12:46

I'm like, oh, I have a tip. You know, there's

12:49

a lot of wrongfully convicted guys in Brooklyn and I

12:51

have a good source. He was a jailhouse lawyer. And

12:54

so my editor says to me, well,

12:58

what else do the cases have in common? I

13:01

was so offended by that

13:03

question. Like, I just

13:05

thought it was such a hoity

13:07

toity New York Times view of

13:09

journalism that I couldn't just come up

13:12

with a wrongful conviction. I had to come up with

13:14

what connects them. Go back to

13:16

my dad's kind of grumbling under my breath

13:19

and I called Derek and I'm all right. Well, this

13:22

editor of mine wants

13:26

to know what

13:28

connects these cases. He

13:32

goes, well, a lot of

13:35

them are the same cop and

13:37

his name is Louis Garçal. Derek

13:45

Hamilton was out of prison, but still connected

13:47

to people on the inside. He's

13:49

a self-taught lawyer. Learned the law

13:52

behind bars and he was

13:54

still in the prison grapevine. So

13:57

I meet with Derek again.

14:00

He told me kind of loosey-goosey

14:02

stuff. Like he said, oh, that this

14:04

guy was notorious for using the same

14:06

witness over and over again. But

14:09

he didn't know the names of the

14:11

defendants who had had the same witness

14:13

testify against them, and he did not

14:15

know the name of the witness. So

14:18

I was like, oh, brother, you know, here

14:20

I am talking this up to my editor,

14:22

like I'm some hotshot who's gonna crack this

14:24

case open, and I got nothing. So

14:27

she went back to Derek. She

14:29

needed the name of that very talented

14:31

witness. And that's when Derek

14:33

gives her a legal document. This

14:36

was a document written by one of his

14:38

friends still in jail, another

14:40

jailhouse lawyer. It's called a 440 motion,

14:44

and it's what you file if you're

14:46

trying to get your conviction overturned. So

14:50

he gives me Shabaka

14:52

Shakur's 440. I

14:55

probably rewrote that 100 times because

15:00

I wanted to make sure

15:02

that I was saying what I

15:04

wanted to say. This is Shabaka

15:06

Shakur. Scarcella helped convict Shabaka

15:08

of a double murder, which he said he

15:10

didn't do. His 440 was impressive.

15:14

60 pages of legal argument written while he

15:16

was part of a prison law firm. That's

15:19

right, a law firm formed

15:21

in prison and run by convicted murderers,

15:23

all of whom claimed innocent. So

15:27

I called her, she was like, okay, you

15:30

said Scarcella's a crooked cop. I read

15:32

your brief. I said, listen,

15:35

I gave her a list of names, a list

15:37

of people she could talk to,

15:40

information that would substantiate that he

15:43

was a crooked cop. And

15:45

I remember telling her like, you an

15:48

investigative reporter. Go and investigate.

15:52

In that dense document, two

15:54

pages focused on Luis Scarcella. He

15:57

says in this document, something, something,

16:00

Louis Garcella was known to use the same

16:02

witness over and over again, a woman

16:05

named Teresa Gomez. And

16:08

I'm like, gee, that's it, that's the name, that's what I've

16:10

been waiting for. So Frenchie has

16:12

the name. Now she does what

16:14

a lot of us do when we're hunting for

16:16

information. She Googles. That's

16:20

my big investigative

16:22

reporting secret. And

16:26

I got a hit. And I'm like,

16:28

well, this is curious. It was like

16:30

some random Google forum, a cigar

16:34

smoker forum, where

16:37

somebody has asked, I think the question on

16:39

the forum was, when did you first smoke

16:41

your first great cigar? This

16:44

guy, a man, answers.

16:46

The first cigar, which truly made me

16:49

realize how much I was going to

16:51

enjoy cigars, was smoked in 1988. The

16:54

cigar was given to me by a

16:57

legendary detective of the Brooklyn North Homicide

16:59

Squad named Louis Garcella. Louis

17:01

had been a detective on the first two

17:04

murder cases I prosecuted, both

17:06

of which featured the same witness

17:08

testifying against the same defendant for

17:11

two different murders. The defendant

17:13

was a dealer named Robert Hill. The

17:15

witness was named Teresa Gomez, a

17:18

woman who was even then ravaged from

17:20

head to toe by the scourge of

17:22

crack cocaine. It was near

17:25

folly to even think that anyone

17:27

would believe Gomez about anything, let

17:30

alone the fact that she witnessed

17:32

the same guy kill two

17:34

different people. And the guy finds

17:37

it and is now in charge. She

17:42

goes to prison, unannounced, to

17:45

find Robert Hill. Do

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bluenile.com. Frenchie

19:19

is waiting in the visitor's room for Robert

19:21

Hill. So this guy comes in,

19:24

he walks with a cane, and he's kind of hunched

19:26

over, and he has very,

19:28

very long dreadlocks all down his back.

19:31

And I see him looking

19:34

around the room like, who

19:36

the heck is that? You know, but all right, fine. So

19:39

he sits down, and

19:42

I'll probably never forget this moment for the rest

19:44

of my life. I said to him, you know,

19:46

my name is Frances Roblands. I'm a reporter for the New

19:48

York Times. I'm doing a

19:50

story on Teresa

19:52

Gomez. And

19:54

he just froze, and

19:57

his eyes welled up with tears.

20:00

And he said, I've been telling

20:02

people about Teresa Gomez for

20:04

25 years. And

20:07

I said, well, now somebody's listening.

20:12

And he said to me, is this going

20:14

to mess up my parole? And

20:16

I remember I said something that, you

20:19

know, ethically, I should not have said.

20:21

And I probably shouldn't even repeat that

20:23

I said. But

20:25

I said it. I said, this

20:28

isn't going to mess up your parole. I

20:30

said, this is going to get you exonerated. And

20:34

I said something so ridiculous

20:38

because I believed it. Frenchie's

20:41

story breaks on May 11th, 2013. The

20:46

headline, review of

20:48

50 Brooklyn murder cases ordered. The

20:51

story lays it all out. How

20:53

Teresa Gomez says she witnessed six

20:56

separate murders. Who

20:58

sees six murders? Chewbacca's

21:01

friend, Derek, the one who said all of

21:03

this in motion. At first, he's

21:05

pleased when he sees the article. But

21:08

then he gets angry. This

21:12

is personal. I

21:14

say, damn, man, it's the same motherfucker

21:16

that framed me. You

21:19

see, Scarcello was the cop who

21:22

arrested Derek for murder. A

21:24

murder he insists he didn't do. You

21:26

got to understand something, man. This

21:30

guy is a piece of shit

21:33

to run around like

21:35

he's God. We

21:43

got to get out this guy. We

21:45

got to attack Scarcello. If

21:48

I did one nanogram,

21:52

one nanogram of what they said I

21:54

did, I would have

21:56

killed myself. You've

22:03

been listening

22:06

to half

22:08

of episode one of The

22:10

Burden. To

22:19

hear episode one in its entirety,

22:21

please find and follow The Burden

22:24

wherever you get your podcast. And

22:26

hear episode of The Burden one

22:28

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