Speaker 1: Hi, Steve Fishman here, creator of The Burden as well
Speaker 1: as the number one true crime podcast, My Friend The
Speaker 1: Serial Killer. For those of you who liked The Burden,
Speaker 1: I have good news. Season two starts August seventh. It's
Speaker 1: a series called The Burden Empire on Blood and it's
Speaker 1: the director's cut of the true crime classic Empire on Blood,
Speaker 1: which reached number one on the charts when it debuted
Speaker 1: half a dozen years ago. Then the fat cat funders
Speaker 1: abandon it. I wrangled it back, and now I'm thrilled
Speaker 1: to share this story of a man who fought the
Speaker 1: law for two decades, fought against the Bronx's top homicide
Speaker 1: prosecutor and a detective sometimes known as the Luis Scarcela
Speaker 1: of the Bronx. It's all coming to you August seventh,
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts, Dax. This is the first
Speaker 1: story I ever heard Louis Scarcella tell.
Speaker 2: The legendary New York detective tell me more so.
Speaker 1: Detective Scarcella is with his partner. They're testifying in court.
Speaker 1: One day. It's lunchtime. The court breaks and Detective Scarcella
Speaker 1: and his partner decide that this is the moment to
Speaker 1: track down a murder suspect.
Speaker 3: We park right here, right here, there was an Italian
Speaker 3: guy right here smoking a shred. I say, ben bennygoy,
Speaker 3: and I showed him the picture. He looked at the picture.
Speaker 3: He backed off and he points to the white house.
Speaker 3: Lo and behold of me. Six foot three hundred pounds
Speaker 3: comes out of the house.
Speaker 1: I said, that's him. I said, I'm going to run
Speaker 1: him down. I gunned the car stch jump out. I
Speaker 1: run over him. I put the gun on him.
Speaker 4: He's got a sig sour in his waistband, all big
Speaker 4: sig sur.
Speaker 1: I jump on him. He's going for the gun. I
Speaker 1: put my glock to his head and pulled the trigger.
Speaker 2: But the gun's no good.
Speaker 1: My gun's no good.
Speaker 4: I kilt him my.
Speaker 1: Pawn to shoot him. He's bucking me.
Speaker 4: He's bucking me like a bronco.
Speaker 2: I grab him and I knock him to the ground.
Speaker 1: Do you ever imagine that clock goes off? I mean
Speaker 1: I intended it too.
Speaker 4: I intended it to What do you want me to do?
Speaker 5: He's got a six hour going for a six se
Speaker 5: one am.
Speaker 6: I supposed to kiss him.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Louis Brooklyn. We're bad guys were around every corner,
Speaker 1: and it was up to Dtective Scarcella to protect the people.
Speaker 1: They needed me, and I loved doing it. Louis heyday
Speaker 1: was the eighties and nineties, and back then all New Yorkers,
Speaker 1: even the most liberal columnists, wanted law and order.
Speaker 7: When you have babies being shot in their grandmother's arms,
Speaker 7: people's throats being slit for a five dollars vial of crack, I.
Speaker 2: Don't care where those prisons are and want I'm sent
Speaker 2: there for long terms.
Speaker 1: Louis Garcela had movie star good looks, smoked a cigar everywhere,
Speaker 1: and he was tough. He seemed like he was the
Speaker 1: kind of tough cop the city needed.
Speaker 8: He was everybody's idea of the prince of the city.
Speaker 8: He was the guy who solved the hardest cases and
Speaker 8: made sure the worst killers were brought to justice.
Speaker 1: Louis Garcella was known as the closes, the one who
Speaker 1: got the confession, and with that came fame. He was
Speaker 1: on the Doctor Phil's show.
Speaker 9: No One Knows the Art of Getting confessions better than
Speaker 9: twenty nine year better in New York City homicide detectives, and.
Speaker 2: He earned the respect of his peers.
Speaker 5: Louis my god, he's my man, you know, he's my friend,
Speaker 5: the hell of a cop, great detective.
Speaker 1: God forbid something happened to me or my family.
Speaker 4: I would want Louis Scarsella to do the investigation.
Speaker 10: A p trust in him.
Speaker 2: He looks like shit. Now we'll call this shit Steve
Speaker 2: the poor the poor guy that beat the balls off
Speaker 2: of me. You know that's right. Years later, the Louis
Speaker 2: Scarcella story changed. The once decorated detective now stands accused
Speaker 2: of coaching witnesses, coercing confessions, and trading drugs for testimoniy.
Speaker 4: Garsola cracked numerous murder cases in the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 4: but his techniques had been questioned.
Speaker 8: A group of convicted murders says, it all comes back
Speaker 8: to one rogue official and they want their names clear.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I'm the devil and disgraced devil.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, Well, what can I tell you?
Speaker 1: I'm Steve Fishman. I've lived in New York a long time.
Speaker 1: I've been writing about crime for a long time. As
Speaker 1: a journalist. I've interviewed cops, prosecutors, criminals, son of Sam
Speaker 1: Bernie Madoff. They opened up to me. I felt. I
Speaker 1: knew a lot about the criminal justice system, so when
Speaker 1: I heard these headlines about Scarsella, my thought, this cannot
Speaker 1: be the whole story. Was this really about one rogue
Speaker 1: cop who what hoodwinked an entire system?
Speaker 2: And I'm dak Stevlin Ross, journalist, author, lawyer. I've written
Speaker 2: about criminal justice for years. I know what it's like
Speaker 2: to be wrongfully arrested personally, and I'm interested in the
Speaker 2: people who went to jail and maybe shouldn't have.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go deep.
Speaker 9: Is Louis a hero cop, a scapegoat, or a super
Speaker 9: villain who helped put away more than twenty innocent men,
Speaker 9: men who now want revenge.
Speaker 2: I don't know, man, Maybe they want vindication.
Speaker 1: You know that's what Louis Scarcella feels he deserves too.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you what, though, we need to know the truth,
Speaker 2: both about Louis Scarcela and the band of convicted murders
Speaker 2: who took him.
Speaker 11: On, and about the city we live in.
Speaker 12: Stonecloud of comment commonstrate to you you can't run for shelter.
Speaker 12: There's nothing you can't do.
Speaker 13: From orbit media. This is the burden. Today on the
Speaker 13: show The Scoop, you.
Speaker 2: Gotta hold old time, all right, Steve, Where do we begin?
Speaker 1: We begin with the person who broke the Louis Scarcella story,
Speaker 1: long before you or I got involved. That's Francis Robless,
Speaker 1: known to her New York Times colleagues as Frenchie.
Speaker 7: The Porto Rican grow now French, I do not speak French.
Speaker 1: Frenchie's from Queens, from an Italian neighborhood called Howard Beach.
Speaker 7: Howard Beach was a astoundingly racist place.
Speaker 1: And growing up there, it taught Frenchie to be fierce.
Speaker 7: My best friend in elementary school is Puerto Rican, and
Speaker 7: so this one kid was like Ayblada Rica Isy switch
Speaker 7: Lane and my girlfriend Jenevieve and I we went to
Speaker 7: his house in sixth grade. We rang the doorbell and
Speaker 7: his mother answered the door. She was pregnant, her belly
Speaker 7: outza wherever is Anthony home? And she's like ane. So
Speaker 7: he comes and he's you know, you could see he's
Speaker 7: kind of looking at us rather suspiciously, like one of
Speaker 7: the two Puerto Rican girls that I believe in school
Speaker 7: doing at my door. And we beat the crap out
Speaker 7: of him right there in front of his mother.
Speaker 1: This was the nineteen eighties, and Frenchie was in high school,
Speaker 1: living in a dangerous neighborhood, in a dangerous one night,
Speaker 1: her mother was a victim. Her mother was carjacked, a
Speaker 1: gun was put to her head right in front of
Speaker 1: their house, and then her mother was summoned to the
Speaker 1: police station to identify the carjacker in a lineup, the
Speaker 1: man who'd been arrested in the stolen vehicle.
Speaker 7: And the detective puts his right hand on his left
Speaker 7: arm and he makes like a figure of the number two,
Speaker 7: you know, holding up two fingers, and he looks at
Speaker 7: my mother, telling her to choose number two. So my
Speaker 7: mother goes in there. She looks at the guys. She
Speaker 7: has no idea who it is. She doesn't remember. It
Speaker 7: was dark, you know, she had a gun in her face,
Speaker 7: So she picked number two. I remember thinking, well, screw him.
Speaker 7: You know, he was driving a stolen car. He's at
Speaker 7: the very least was involved in car theft.
Speaker 2: Guilty enough for her.
Speaker 1: Yeah, back then, it didn't matter, Frenchie if this guy
Speaker 1: did this crime. But later Frenchie became a reporter, first
Speaker 1: at the Miami Herald and then at the New York Times,
Speaker 1: and their views evolved you know.
Speaker 7: Maybe my mother helped send that innocent person to prison.
Speaker 7: He got seven years. Everybody was in on it. Everybody
Speaker 7: it was in on the game. The cops were in
Speaker 7: on it, the witnesses were in on it, and the
Speaker 7: prosecutor probably knew that my mother didn't know who he
Speaker 7: was and was like whatever she said, Number two, number two.
Speaker 2: Fast forward to twenty thirteen and Frenchie is at the
Speaker 2: New York Times. She's itching for a good story, a
Speaker 2: big story, something that will make a splash. One day,
Speaker 2: she's on a routine assignment when she meets someone interesting.
Speaker 7: Was a guy named Derek Hamilton, who was an ex
Speaker 7: Cohn who had been kind of like a jail house lawyer.
Speaker 14: We meet her and Hispanic woman, beautiful, long hair. You
Speaker 14: know it up.
Speaker 2: This is Derek remembering meeting Frenchie for the first time.
Speaker 2: He's a bigger guy, broadcast, about six foot two. He's
Speaker 2: got a single gold tooth in the front and a
Speaker 2: shaved head, big presence.
Speaker 14: I've been in Queens Boulevard, Course Street from the courthouse.
Speaker 14: There was some restaurant there and we had dinner at tell.
Speaker 7: And so we're just chatting and he says, oh, you know,
Speaker 7: I see that you're kind of interested in this issue
Speaker 7: of you know, the Brooklyn DA's office having screwed somebody over.
Speaker 7: I know a lot of cases in Brooklyn of wrongful convictions.
Speaker 7: Oh okay, really okay, good. You know, I was kind
Speaker 7: of in the New York office sharpening pencils, so that
Speaker 7: seemed like a good idea to me to follow up
Speaker 7: on that tip.
Speaker 1: So Frenchie brings it to her editor.
Speaker 7: And I'm like, oh, I have a tip. You know,
Speaker 7: there's a lot of wrongfully convicted guys in Brooklyn, and
Speaker 7: I have a good source. He was a jailhouse lawyer.
Speaker 7: And so my editor says to me, well, what else
Speaker 7: do the cases have in common? Like what connects them?
Speaker 7: And I was so offended by that question. I was like, well,
Speaker 7: I don't know, maybe they didn't do it like that
Speaker 7: connects them. You know, maybe they're all.
Speaker 1: Black, you know, and the railroaded.
Speaker 7: By the criminal justice system. Like I just thought it
Speaker 7: was such a hoity toity New York Times view of
Speaker 7: journalism that I couldn't just come up with a wrongful conviction.
Speaker 7: I had to come up with what connects them? So
Speaker 7: I nod politely, you know, yes, ma'am, and I'm like,
Speaker 7: I go back to my desk, kind of grumbling under
Speaker 7: my breath, and I called Derek and I'm like, all right, Well,
Speaker 7: this editor of mine wants to know what connects these
Speaker 7: cases and he goes, well, a lot of them are
Speaker 7: the same cop and his name is Luis Garsower.
Speaker 2: This smoke behind the story. That's after the break.
Speaker 1: Hi, it's Steve Fishman. I want to introduce you briefly
Speaker 1: to our next series featuring deep reporting and an amazing story.
Speaker 1: This one's about a journalist who goes on the hunt
Speaker 1: for some torturers, her torturers. It's great. Here's the trailer.
Speaker 15: It was much more than a feeling. I knew that
Speaker 15: I was being followed.
Speaker 6: Late afternoon, nineteen seventy seven, Medium Lewin is running for
Speaker 6: her life. She's nineteen. Argentina's military has taken power.
Speaker 16: I turn my head and I see a dark red
Speaker 16: Ford falcon and a long gun barrel hanging out from
Speaker 16: one of the windows. He says, I am the man
Speaker 16: responsible for your life and your death.
Speaker 6: Four decades later, Medium is among the few to survive.
Speaker 6: Her fellow prisoners had been put on planes and tossed
Speaker 6: into the sea.
Speaker 15: This plane was used to throw people to their deaths,
Speaker 15: people I knew, people I loved. I still ask myself
Speaker 15: why did I survive? I'd say it was to bring
Speaker 15: at least some of those pilots of the death flights
Speaker 15: to justice.
Speaker 6: From Orbit Media, This is Avenger.
Speaker 1: A quick word about subscriptions. If you love ads, listen
Speaker 1: on you're not so keen on ads, sign up for
Speaker 1: True Crime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts. That's our subscription channel.
Speaker 1: You'll get no ads, and also you can binge the
Speaker 1: entire Avenger series. It's just two ninety nine a month. Thanks,
Speaker 1: Welcome back.
Speaker 2: Derek Hamilton was out of prison but still connected to
Speaker 2: people on the inside. He's a self taught lawyer, learned
Speaker 2: the law behind bars, and he was still in the
Speaker 2: prison grape Vine.
Speaker 7: So I meet with Derek again. And Derek, you know,
Speaker 7: he was interesting because he knew some things, but he
Speaker 7: did not know a lot of things. He told me
Speaker 7: kind of loosey goosey stuff, Like he said, oh that
Speaker 7: this guy was notorious for using the same witness over
Speaker 7: and over again, but he didn't know the names of
Speaker 7: the defendants who had had the same witness testify against them,
Speaker 7: and he did not know the name of the witness.
Speaker 7: So I was like, oh, brother, you know here I
Speaker 7: am talking this up to my editor, like I'm some
Speaker 7: hotshot who's going to crack this case open. And I
Speaker 7: got nothing, and I thought, oh my god, you know
Speaker 7: what am I going to do?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 7: You know, I don't have anywhere to turn.
Speaker 1: So she went back to Derek. She needed the name
Speaker 1: of that very talented witness, and that's when Derek gives
Speaker 1: her a legal document. This was a document written by
Speaker 1: one of his friends still in jail, another jailhouse lawyer.
Speaker 1: It's called a four to forty motion and it's what
Speaker 1: you file if you're trying to get your conviction overturned.
Speaker 7: So he gives me, Shabacca chaqueurs for forty.
Speaker 5: I probably rewrote that one hundred times because I wanted
Speaker 5: to make sure that I was saying what I wanted
Speaker 5: to say.
Speaker 2: This is Shabacca Shakur. Scarcella helped convict Shabacca of a
Speaker 2: double murder, which he says he didn't do. His four
Speaker 2: to forty was impressive, sixty pages of legal argument written
Speaker 2: while he was part of a prison law firm. That's right,
Speaker 2: a law firm formed in prison and run by convicted murderers,
Speaker 2: all of whom claimed innocence. More on that.
Speaker 1: Later, Shabacca and Derek got close in prison. Now, Derek
Speaker 1: ERGI Shabaka to talk to FRENCHI. So I called her.
Speaker 5: She was like, okay, you said, scar Seller is a
Speaker 5: crooked cop. I read your brief. I said, listen. I
Speaker 5: gave a list of names, a list of you know,
Speaker 5: people she could talk to, information that would substantiate that
Speaker 5: he was a crooked cop. And I remember telling her, like,
Speaker 5: you an investigative reporter, go and investigate.
Speaker 2: In that dense document, two pages focused on Louis Garcela.
Speaker 7: He says in his in this document, it says something something.
Speaker 7: Louis Garcella was notorious in Brooklyn for his you know,
Speaker 7: unethical and you know framing people basically. In fact, he
Speaker 7: was known to use the same witness over and over again,
Speaker 7: a woman named Teresa Gomez. And I'm like, gee, you
Speaker 7: know that's it. That's the thing, that's like, that's what
Speaker 7: I've been waiting for. I'm waiting to find out the
Speaker 7: name of the of the witness.
Speaker 1: So Frenchie has the name. Now she does what a
Speaker 1: lot of us do when we're hunting for information. She googles.
Speaker 7: That's my big investigative reporting secret. So I google Lewis, Garsola,
Speaker 7: and Teresa Gomes together. You know, I don't know what
Speaker 7: I thought I was going to find, and I got
Speaker 7: a hit, and I'm like, well, this is curious. It
Speaker 7: was like some random Google forum, a cigar smoker forum
Speaker 7: where somebody has asked I think the question on the
Speaker 7: forum was when did you first smoke your first great cigar?
Speaker 2: Okay, so a cigar smoker's form not exactly where i'd
Speaker 2: expect to find a lead about a crooked.
Speaker 1: Cop exactly, but what she comes across there turns out
Speaker 1: to be crucial to her understanding of the entire story.
Speaker 7: This guy man answers. The first cigar, which truly made
Speaker 7: me realize how much I was going to enjoy cigars,
Speaker 7: was smoked in nineteen eighty eight at a bar on
Speaker 7: Remsen Street in Brooklyn, New York called Callahan's. The cigar
Speaker 7: was given to me by a legendary detective of the
Speaker 7: Brooklyn North Homicide Squad named Louis Garcela. Lewis had been
Speaker 7: the detective on the first two murder cases I prosecuted
Speaker 7: both of which featured the same witness testifying against the
Speaker 7: same defendant for two different murders. The defendant was a
Speaker 7: dealer named Robert Hill. The witness was named Teresa Gomez,
Speaker 7: a woman who was even then ravaged from head to
Speaker 7: toe by the scourge of crack cocaine. It was near
Speaker 7: folly to even think that anyone would believe Gomez about anything,
Speaker 7: let alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy
Speaker 7: kill two different people. And the guy signs it it's
Speaker 7: the district attorney and he's now at charge.
Speaker 2: Here's what I'm wondering, What the fuck the assistant district attorney,
Speaker 2: he's not the district attorney. Just to be clear about that,
Speaker 2: it's basically saying that no one should have believed his witness,
Speaker 2: the one he put on the stand, who happens to
Speaker 2: be the lone eyewitness, and two alleged murders by Robert
Speaker 2: Hill on two different occasions.
Speaker 7: My head mark is probably still on the roof of
Speaker 7: the New York Times office from my jumping up and
Speaker 7: down and realizing that I had hit batter.
Speaker 1: So Frenchie was excited by her discovery. I want to
Speaker 1: point out, though, that what the prosecutor is saying is
Speaker 1: that he'd be stunned if a jury believed Teresa Gomez.
Speaker 1: What he's not saying is that she's lying.
Speaker 2: So Frenchie now has the name of this troubled and
Speaker 2: troubling witness. And now she's also got the name of
Speaker 2: the person Teresa helped convictive murder one, Robert Hill, former
Speaker 2: drug dealer. So Steve, where does she go from here?
Speaker 1: She goes to prison unannounced to find Robert Hill.
Speaker 7: Oh my god, these are lives, These are real lives.
Speaker 1: More on those real lives. After the break, Frenchie is
Speaker 1: waiting in the visitors room for Robert Hill. He's serving
Speaker 1: eighteen years to life. He's not expecting her.
Speaker 7: So this guy comes in. He walks with a cane,
Speaker 7: and he's kind of hunched over, and he has very
Speaker 7: very long dreadlocks all down his back. And I see
Speaker 7: him looking around the room like, you know oo, So
Speaker 7: I don't see anybody here who's here to see me?
Speaker 7: And so I raised my hands and he looks at
Speaker 7: me like, you know, who the heck is that?
Speaker 16: You know?
Speaker 7: But all right, fine, you know, he doesn't have anything
Speaker 7: better to do. So he sits down and I'll probably
Speaker 7: never forget this moment for the rest of my life.
Speaker 7: I said to him, you know, my name is Francis Roblanz.
Speaker 7: I'm a reporter for the New York Times. I'm doing
Speaker 7: a story on Teresa Gomez. And he just froze and
Speaker 7: his eyes welled up with tears, and he said, I've
Speaker 7: been telling people about Teresa Gomez for twenty five years.
Speaker 7: And I said, well, now somebody's listening.
Speaker 1: But for Robert Hill, talking about Teresa Gomez is not
Speaker 1: an easy decision. He's about to come up for parole,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that's drilled into somebody applying
Speaker 1: for parole is you got to go in, take responsibility,
Speaker 1: show remorse, you gotta add forgiveness. Now that's going to
Speaker 1: be hard to do if you're also telling a New
Speaker 1: York Times reporter, hey, I didn't do it.
Speaker 7: And he said to me, is this going to mess
Speaker 7: up my parole? And I remember I said something that
Speaker 7: you know, ethically I should not have said, and I
Speaker 7: probably shouldn't even repeat that I said, but I said it.
Speaker 7: I said, this isn't going to mess up your parole.
Speaker 7: I said, this is going to get you exonerated. And
Speaker 7: I said something so ridiculous because I believed it.
Speaker 1: That's our frenchie. She'll save your life at your peril.
Speaker 1: And Robert Hill, let's face it, he needs his life saved,
Speaker 1: so maybe it's worth the risk. Hill starts talking and
Speaker 1: he tells Frenchie Teresa Gomez is a liar. Frenchie goes
Speaker 1: on her way, and soon she's working on a on
Speaker 1: page story for The Times, one that she hopes will
Speaker 1: make a splash.
Speaker 2: Standard journalism practice is to get a comment from everyone
Speaker 2: mentioned in a story, especially a high stake story like
Speaker 2: this one. She calls the District Attorney's office.
Speaker 7: It's like six o'clock that Thursday, and I call the
Speaker 7: spokesman and I said, I got a two thousand and
Speaker 7: five hundred word article about all these guys, you know,
Speaker 7: say that they were wrongly accused, and you know what
Speaker 7: it doesn't have It doesn't have a quote from the
Speaker 7: Brooklyn District Attorney's office because your quote was so pathetic.
Speaker 7: I said, so we're going to do a do over,
Speaker 7: and it's a one question do over. Do you stand
Speaker 7: behind these convictions or not?
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 7: We're not going to negotiate a response. We're not going
Speaker 7: to be like, oh, if the record background upside down
Speaker 7: inside out, what's your answer? So the spoken said, oh,
Speaker 7: come back, okay, call me back, say call back, and
Speaker 7: he said, well, you have to come back to the
Speaker 7: office tomorrow. I'm crying out loud. I go to the
Speaker 7: book and District Attorney's office sit down, like, all right,
Speaker 7: what is it. We're reopening all of Scarcella's cases.
Speaker 2: And I'm like, oh my god.
Speaker 7: So I go back to the office and I will
Speaker 7: find the editor, the same person that had originally asked
Speaker 7: me what connects these cases? And I said, you're not
Speaker 7: going to believe this. The DA is reopening all of
Speaker 7: his cases. They're going to go back thirty years. And
Speaker 7: her eyes welled up in tears and she said, oh
Speaker 7: my god. She goes, these are lives, These are real
Speaker 7: lives that you're impacting.
Speaker 2: Frenchy story breaks on May eleventh, twenty thirteen, the headline
Speaker 2: review of fifty Brooks murder Cases ordered. The story lays
Speaker 2: it all out how Teresa Gomez says she witnessed six
Speaker 2: separate murders, who sees six murders, and Frenchie tells other
Speaker 2: stories like Shabacca's how Scarcella told the court he had
Speaker 2: made an incriminating statement that Shabacca says he never made
Speaker 2: a copy of Frenchie's story eventually arrives at the prison library.
Speaker 5: It got spread around, you know, word went like wildfire,
Speaker 5: and everybody had their own copy that they took back
Speaker 5: to their cell.
Speaker 1: By this point, Shehabacca's been incarcerated for twenty two years.
Speaker 5: I had a couple of copies. I even mail copies
Speaker 5: out for people like yo. Look, so we was excited
Speaker 5: about it. And I think that that was the first
Speaker 5: time that I knew, like I always thought I was
Speaker 5: going to get out, but I knew I was going
Speaker 5: to get out.
Speaker 2: Then Sabacca's friend Derek, the one who said all of
Speaker 2: this in motion. At first, he's pleased when he sees
Speaker 2: the article, but then he gets angry. This is personal,
Speaker 2: you see, Scarcela was the cop who arrested Derek for murder,
Speaker 2: a murder he insists he didn't do.
Speaker 14: You gotta understand something, man, My kids grew up without
Speaker 14: a father.
Speaker 1: This bass who was able to raise his.
Speaker 14: This guy is a piece of shit, but he gets
Speaker 14: to run around.
Speaker 2: Like he's God.
Speaker 1: It's Derek and his jailhouse law firm that will lead
Speaker 1: the charge against Scarcella. With Derek and Louis, it will
Speaker 1: be a zero some game. If one rises, the other
Speaker 1: must fall. We gotta get at this guy. Here's where
Speaker 1: I entered the story. It was a few years after
Speaker 1: Frenchy's scoop. I was a New York magazine journalist. Back then,
Speaker 1: I just moved to a new neighborhood in Brooklyn, and
Speaker 1: on a whim, I decided to open a cocktail bar.
Speaker 1: I did not have a grand vision. There was an
Speaker 1: empty space two hundred and twenty four square feet. How
Speaker 1: hard could it be? I called it IRVS after my
Speaker 1: dad and I loved the place. The neighborhood loved it.
Speaker 1: The people on the block loved it. Some even worked there.
Speaker 1: But that little dead end on which IRVS resided. What
Speaker 1: a block old school? Hey, it was like the nineties
Speaker 1: in New York City. That block. One day there was
Speaker 1: a guy chasing somebody with a machete. Another day a
Speaker 1: guy ran down the block shooting at someone, fortunately not
Speaker 1: a terrific shot. Intellectually, politically, I'm skeptical of the police.
Speaker 1: I marched in the marches. Their methods sometimes frightened me.
Speaker 1: But when violence erupted on my block, the block where
Speaker 1: my bar resided. I needed someone to call. Who else
Speaker 1: was I going to call but the police. It turned
Speaker 1: out that Louis Scarcela had spent a good part of
Speaker 1: his career patrolling my bar's dead end block. And there
Speaker 1: was a moment I found myself wondering if I needed
Speaker 1: a tough cop to come in and restore some order
Speaker 1: so I could run my little business. Later, Louis would
Speaker 1: come by and he'd offer an appraisal, an appraisal which
Speaker 1: proved prophetic.
Speaker 2: I remember that bar distinctly. It was where I entered
Speaker 2: the story, coming there one night, sitting down with you
Speaker 2: and having the first big conversation about this series.
Speaker 1: I remember that first night you came, and I remember
Speaker 1: you telling me about your experience with cops.
Speaker 2: To be clear, there's been more than one, so we
Speaker 2: could be talking about the time I got pulled over
Speaker 2: twice within about twenty minutes because I had a vanilla
Speaker 2: roma air freshenery in my rear view mirror.
Speaker 1: Yes you did. But the one I remember, the one
Speaker 1: that made an impression on me, starts with a pull
Speaker 1: up on a scaffold.
Speaker 2: I'm entering my third year of law school, standing on
Speaker 2: a street corner in Adams, Morgan and Washington, DC. You know,
Speaker 2: I got my satchel on because at the time I
Speaker 2: used to wear a satchel and keep my palm my
Speaker 2: poems in my satchel, and I was first starting to
Speaker 2: grow on my drop my dreads. I'm with my buddy,
Speaker 2: who was a study who the study he was at
Speaker 2: Georgetown Loan and he decides to jump up on a
Speaker 2: scaffold and do a pull up. Okay, and I think
Speaker 2: I jumped up and did maybe did a pull up
Speaker 2: with me, and we got down. I turned around and
Speaker 2: there as a cop. I don't know where the fuck
Speaker 2: it came from, just next to us. Get down on
Speaker 2: the ground, Get down the ground, and I me, you know,
Speaker 2: having done two years of law school at this point.
Speaker 4: I got it.
Speaker 2: I just I took primpro. I'm just more like, I
Speaker 2: haven't violated any laws that you're just gonna come in
Speaker 2: broad daylight and tell me to get down on my girl,
Speaker 2: get down on my knees. I'm not doing that. I
Speaker 2: don't know what happened. Five more police cars show up,
Speaker 2: and at some point my friend and I get separated somehow,
Speaker 2: I end up in an alley on my back and
Speaker 2: the three or four on me.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: My family has Sunday dinner. I don't show up.
Speaker 10: No one knows where I am.
Speaker 1: I remember hearing that story and thinking, man, this is
Speaker 1: crazy law school students doing a pull up and then
Speaker 1: end up getting beaten by cops. That's just racism, flat out.
Speaker 2: You'd be right except for one thing. Those cops who
Speaker 2: arrested and beat me they were black.
Speaker 1: Wow. I did not expect that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, most people don't. But for me, what I took
Speaker 2: away from that is that a cop is always a cop,
Speaker 2: always blue, and to cops, I'm a black man, and
Speaker 2: to be a black man, at least in some spaces
Speaker 2: in this country, is to be a suspect.
Speaker 1: Well, here's what I can say. We enter this journey
Speaker 1: through different doors, don't we.
Speaker 2: Yes, we do, and it's gonna be quite a ride.
Speaker 1: Buckle up. In this series, we're gonna look at it
Speaker 1: all from the inside. We'll get deep on Scarsella. We're here.
Speaker 4: We're here in the belly of the beast, but we're
Speaker 4: here at doing what we got to do, and we
Speaker 4: did it.
Speaker 1: We did God's work and we did.
Speaker 10: It to me.
Speaker 14: He's no better than a cereal kill right, because you
Speaker 14: killed people's dreams.
Speaker 8: This diabolical character that he's been depicted as is just
Speaker 8: pure nonsense.
Speaker 2: He had a great reputation well into a crazy world
Speaker 2: of violence.
Speaker 8: This guy runs right down the middle of eight the Avenue.
Speaker 7: And he's got a gun.
Speaker 2: Sergeant just you know, shot him.
Speaker 1: He goes down.
Speaker 7: Oh my god, so like the wild West.
Speaker 2: And we'll hear from the politicians trying to tame it.
Speaker 1: I am prepared to do anything to take back our streets.
Speaker 1: By night as well as by day. We'll dive into
Speaker 1: the Brooklyn criminal justice system. She definitely testified Hyazac Kite
Speaker 1: one day.
Speaker 8: He's a judge and he puts his arms around me
Speaker 8: and he says, we both know who this guy is.
Speaker 1: We both know he's guilty.
Speaker 2: And we'll follow Derek Hamilton and his band of convicted
Speaker 2: murders who created their own law firm behind bars to
Speaker 2: take on Scarsella and fight for their freedom. Its God, God,
Speaker 2: when it comes to criminal law.
Speaker 14: Everybody knows how to make emotions, but how many times
Speaker 14: do you really know what your burden is?
Speaker 5: Look, man, this is our team right here, This is
Speaker 5: the AI team.
Speaker 14: We're gonna work for these cases and we're gonna.
Speaker 1: Get out and targeting the detective at the center of
Speaker 1: it all.
Speaker 14: I say, damn, it's the same fuck or that frame me.
Speaker 4: If I did one nanogram one nanogram of.
Speaker 1: What they said I did, and you know what I
Speaker 1: mean by one nanogram and infinitesimal.
Speaker 4: If I did one of the things that they said
Speaker 4: I did, I would have killed myself.
Speaker 2: I love myself.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna kill myself. What do you love about
Speaker 1: your simple I'm.
Speaker 2: Gonna tell you.
Speaker 4: I think.
Speaker 2: I'm a very good person. Yeah, we'll see about.
Speaker 1: That next time. On the Burden, I try to get
Speaker 1: Louis Scarcella to give it all up. He used to
Speaker 1: be a talker, then with the bad headlines he mostly
Speaker 1: shut up. Frenchie couldn't get him to talk. But I'm
Speaker 1: on a mission. Turns out that mission starts with a
Speaker 1: plunge into the freezing Atlantic. Make sure your.
Speaker 3: Baby, you're gonna come off today?
Speaker 1: Well I did it last time. Yeah, it did, certainly did.
Speaker 2: That's next time. On the Burden, Stone.
Speaker 12: Common strating you can't run for shelter.
Speaker 1: There's nothing you can't do.
Speaker 2: The Burden is created by Steve Fishman. It's hosted and
Speaker 2: reported by Steve Fishman and myself Do's Devlin Ross. Our
Speaker 2: story editor is Dan Bobkoff. Our senior producer Simon Rittner.
Speaker 2: Our producer is Sonam Skelly. Our associate producer is Austin Smith.
Speaker 2: Our fact checker is Sona Avakian. Our production coordinator is
Speaker 2: Davon Paradise. Mixing and sound design is provided by Mumble Media.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Fisher Stevens, Steve Fishman and Evan Williams.
Speaker 2: Additional production help has been provided by Josie Holtzman, Isaac Kestenbaum,
Speaker 2: Naomi Brauner, Lucy Soucek, Drew Nellis, Micah Hazel, Priscilla A. Labbi,
Speaker 2: Saxon faird, Katie Simon and Katie Springer. We want to
Speaker 2: give us special thanks to Ellen Horn, Zach Stewart, Pontier,
Speaker 2: Lizzie Jacobs, Nathan Tempe, To Buya Black, Rachel Morrissey, Mark
Speaker 2: Smirling and Lila Robinson. Special thanks to Marcy Wiseman. We
Speaker 2: want to thank our agents Ben Davis and Marissa Horowitz.
Speaker 2: Special thanks to my wife Halana.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Ria Julian, my wife.
Speaker 2: Legal support has been provided by Mona Hook at MKSR
Speaker 2: ll P, and a very special thanks to Evan Williams,
Speaker 2: one of our executive producers and the person who made
Speaker 2: this podcast possible. We are honored to feature the song
Speaker 2: black Lightning from the Bell Rais is our theme music.
Speaker 2: The Burden is a production of Orbit Media and association
Speaker 2: with Signal Company.
Speaker 10: Number one.
Speaker 1: Season two of The Burden Empire on Blood will be
Speaker 1: available everywhere you get your podcasts on August seventh. All
Speaker 1: episodes will be available early and ad free, along with
Speaker 1: exclusive bonus content on Orbit's newly launched True Crime Clubhouse
Speaker 1: as subscription channel on Apple Podcasts. It's only two ninety
Speaker 1: nine a month.