Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Hello listeners. The Burden is a new investigative podcast. In
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties, Detective Louis en Scarseller was legendary New
Speaker 2: York City seemed to be overrun by violent crime, but
Speaker 2: Scarcellar got results, cracking the toughest cases and eliciting confessions
Speaker 2: that no one else could. But then Scarceller himself became
Speaker 2: embroiled in controversy. A group of convicted murderers turned jailhouse
Speaker 2: lawyers discovered that he was the man who'd put all
Speaker 2: of them away, and they vowed to bring him down.
Speaker 2: This gripping new true crime podcast is brought to you
Speaker 2: by Orbit Media in association with Signal Cone Number one.
Speaker 3: Here's a preview, Dax, this is the first story I
Speaker 3: ever heard Louis Scarcella tell.
Speaker 4: The legendary New York detective tell me more so.
Speaker 3: Detective Scarcella is with his partner. It's lunchtime, and Detective
Speaker 3: Scarcella and his partner decide that this is the moment
Speaker 3: to track down a murder suspect.
Speaker 5: We park right here, right here, lo and beholds a
Speaker 5: men six foot three hundred pounds.
Speaker 4: Comes out of the house.
Speaker 3: I said, that's him. I run over him.
Speaker 5: I put the gun on him. He's got a sig
Speaker 5: sour in his waistband, all big sig sur I jump
Speaker 5: on him. He's going for the gun. I put my
Speaker 5: glock to his head and pull the trigger. But the
Speaker 5: gun's no good. My gun's no good. I grab him
Speaker 5: and I knock him to the ground.
Speaker 3: Do you ever imagine that clock goes off? I intended
Speaker 3: it to.
Speaker 5: I intended it to one am. I supposed to kiss him.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Louis Brooklyn, where bad guys were around every
Speaker 3: corner and it was up to Detective Scarcella to protect
Speaker 3: the people. They needed me, and I loved doing it.
Speaker 3: Louis heyday was the eighties and nineties, and back then
Speaker 3: all New Yorkers wanted law and order. Louis Garcela had
Speaker 3: movie star good looks, smoked a cigar everywhere. He seemed
Speaker 3: like he was the kind of tough cop the city needed.
Speaker 6: He was everybody's idea of the prince of the city.
Speaker 6: He was the guy who solved the hardest cases and
Speaker 6: made sure the worst killers were brought to justice.
Speaker 3: Louis Garcela was known as the closer, the one who
Speaker 3: got the confession and with that came fame. He was
Speaker 3: on the Doctor Phil.
Speaker 7: Show No one knows the art of getting confessions better
Speaker 7: than twenty nine years better in New York City homicide detectives.
Speaker 4: And he earned the respect of his peers.
Speaker 7: Louis my god, he's you know, he's my friend, the
Speaker 7: Helio cop Rate detective.
Speaker 2: He looks like shit.
Speaker 4: Now, will call this shit, Steve the poor the poor guy,
Speaker 4: the beat the balls off of me. You know that's right.
Speaker 4: Years later, the Louis Scarcela story changed.
Speaker 2: The once decorated detective now stands accused of coaching witnesses,
Speaker 2: coercing confessions, and trading drugs for testimony.
Speaker 5: Garsoa cracked numerous murder cases in the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 5: but his techniques had been questioned.
Speaker 6: And a group of convicted murders says, it all comes
Speaker 6: back to one rogue official, and they want their names clear.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I'm the devil and disgraced devil. Yeah, yeah, Well, what
Speaker 5: can I tell you?
Speaker 3: I'm Steve Fishman. I've lived in New York a long time.
Speaker 3: I've been writing about crime for a long time. Son
Speaker 3: of Sam Bernie Madoff. They opened up to me when
Speaker 3: I heard these headlines about Scarcella. My thought, this cannot
Speaker 3: be the whole story? Was this really about one rogue
Speaker 3: cop who what hoodwinked an entire system?
Speaker 4: And I'm Dax Stevlin Ross, journalist, author, lawyer. I've written
Speaker 4: about criminal justice for years. I know what it's like
Speaker 4: to be wrongfully arrested personally, and I'm interested in the
Speaker 4: people who went to jail and maybe shouldn't have.
Speaker 3: We're gonna go deep. Is Louis a hero cop, a scapegoat,
Speaker 3: or a super villain who helped put away more than
Speaker 3: twenty innocent men, men whom now want. We'll then.
Speaker 9: Storm cloud of comments common straight to you. You can't
Speaker 9: run for shelter.
Speaker 1: There's nothing you.
Speaker 4: Can't do.
Speaker 10: From orbit media. This is the burden today on the
Speaker 10: show The Scoop.
Speaker 8: You gotta hold on time to this barble?
Speaker 4: All right, Steve, where do we begin?
Speaker 3: We begin with the person who broke the Louis Scarcella
Speaker 3: story long before you or I got involved. That's Francis Roebliss,
Speaker 3: known to her New York Times colleagues as Frenchie.
Speaker 1: The Puerto Rican girl, known as Frenchy. I do not
Speaker 1: speak French.
Speaker 3: Frenchie is from Queens, from an Italian neighborhood called Howard Beach.
Speaker 1: Howard Beach was a astoundingly racist place.
Speaker 3: And growing up there it taught Frenchie to be fierce.
Speaker 1: My best friend in elementary school is Puerto Rican, and
Speaker 1: so this one kid was like a ladorica Isy switch
Speaker 1: Lane and my girlfriend Jenevieve and I we went to
Speaker 1: his house in sixth grade. We rang the doorbell and
Speaker 1: his mother answered the door. She was pregnant, her belly
Speaker 1: out to wherever is Anthony Hame and she's like, So
Speaker 1: he comes, and he's you know, you could see he's
Speaker 1: kind of looking at us rather suspiciously, like one of
Speaker 1: the two Puerto Rican girls that I believe in school
Speaker 1: doing at my door. And we beat the crap out
Speaker 1: of him right there in front of his mother.
Speaker 4: Fast forward to twenty thirteen and Frenchie is at the
Speaker 4: New York Times. She's itching for a good story, something
Speaker 4: that will make a splash. One day, she's on a
Speaker 4: routine assignment when she meets someone interesting.
Speaker 1: Was a guy named Derek Hamilton, who was an ex
Speaker 1: con who had been kind of like a jail house lawyer.
Speaker 1: And so we're just chatting and he says, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: I know a lot of cases in Brooklyn of wrongful convictions.
Speaker 3: So Frenchie brings it to her editor.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, oh, I have a tip. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of wrongfully convicted guys in Brooklyn, and
Speaker 1: I have a good source. He was a jailhouse lawyer.
Speaker 1: And so my editor says to me, well, what else
Speaker 1: to the cases having common? And I was so offended
Speaker 1: by that question, Like I just thought it was such
Speaker 1: a hoity toity New York Times view of journalism that
Speaker 1: I couldn't just come up with a wrongful conviction. I
Speaker 1: had to come up with what connects them? Go back
Speaker 1: to my dask kind of grumbling under my breath, and
Speaker 1: I called Derek and I'm like, all right, well, this
Speaker 1: editor of mine wants to know what connects these cases.
Speaker 1: And he goes, well, a lot of them are the
Speaker 1: same cop and his name is Lewis Garsala.
Speaker 4: Derek Hamilton was out of prison but still connected to
Speaker 4: people on the inside. He's a self taught lawyer, learn
Speaker 4: the law behind bars, and he was still in the
Speaker 4: prison grape vine.
Speaker 1: So with Derek again, he told me kind of lucy
Speaker 1: goosey stuff, like he said, oh that this guy was
Speaker 1: notorious for using the same witness over and over again.
Speaker 1: But he didn't know the names of the defendants who
Speaker 1: had had the same witness testify against them, and he
Speaker 1: did not know the name of the witness. So I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, brother, you know, here I am talking
Speaker 1: this up to my editor, like I'm some hotshot who's
Speaker 1: going to crack this case open. And I got nothing.
Speaker 3: So she went back to Derek. She needed the name
Speaker 3: of that very talented witness, and that's when Derek gives
Speaker 3: her a legal document. This was a document written by
Speaker 3: one of his friends still in jail, another jailhouse lawyer.
Speaker 3: It's called a four forty motion and it's what you
Speaker 3: file if you're trying to get your conviction overturned.
Speaker 1: So he gives me Shabaka chakors for forty.
Speaker 7: I probably rewrote that one hundred times because I wanted
Speaker 7: to make sure that I was saying what I wanted
Speaker 7: to say.
Speaker 4: This is Shabacca sh court. Scarcella helped convict Shabacca of
Speaker 4: a double murder, which he says he didn't do. His
Speaker 4: four p forty was impressive, sixty pages of legal argument
Speaker 4: written while he was part of a prison law firm.
Speaker 4: That's right, a law firm formed in prison and run
Speaker 4: by convicted murderers, all of whom claimed innocence.
Speaker 7: So I called her. She was like, okay, you said,
Speaker 7: Scarcella is a crooked cop. I read your brief. I said, listen.
Speaker 7: I gave a list of names, a list of you know,
Speaker 7: people she could talk to information that would substantiate that
Speaker 7: he was a crooked cop. And I remember telling her, like, you,
Speaker 7: an investigative reporter, go and investigate.
Speaker 4: In that dense document two pages focused on Louis Scarcela.
Speaker 1: He says, in this document something something, Lewis Garcela was
Speaker 1: known to use the same witness over and over again,
Speaker 1: a woman named Teresa Gomes. And I'm like, you know,
Speaker 1: that's it.
Speaker 8: That's the name.
Speaker 1: That's what I've been waiting for.
Speaker 3: So Frenchie has the name. Now she does what a
Speaker 3: lot of us do when we're hunting for information. She googles.
Speaker 1: That's my big investigative reporting secret. And I got a hit,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, well, this is curious. It was like
Speaker 1: some random Google forum, a cigar smoke or forum where
Speaker 1: somebody has asked I think the question on The forum
Speaker 1: was when did you first smoke your first great cigar?
Speaker 1: This guy, a man answers. The first cigar which truly
Speaker 1: made me realize how much I was going to enjoy cigars,
Speaker 1: was smoked in nineteen eighty eight. The cigar was given
Speaker 1: to me by a legendary detective of the Brooklyn North
Speaker 1: Homicide Squad named Louis Scarcela. Lewis had been the detective
Speaker 1: on the first two murder cases I prosecuted, both of
Speaker 1: which featured the same witness testifying against the same defendant
Speaker 1: for two different murders. The defendant was a dealer named
Speaker 1: Robert Hill. The witness was named Teresa Gomez, a woman
Speaker 1: who was even then ravaged from head to toe by
Speaker 1: the scourge of crack cocaine. It was near falling to
Speaker 1: even think that anyone would believe Gomez about anything, let
Speaker 1: alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy kill
Speaker 1: two different people, and the guy signs it and he's
Speaker 1: now at charge.
Speaker 3: She goes to prison unannounced to find Robert Hill. Frenchie
Speaker 3: is waiting in the visitors room for Robert Hill.
Speaker 1: This guy comes in. He walks with a cane, and
Speaker 1: he's kind of hunched over and he has very very
Speaker 1: long dreadlocks all down his back. And I see him
Speaker 1: looking around the room like, who the heck is that
Speaker 1: you know? But all right, fine, so he sits down
Speaker 1: and I'll probably never forget this moment for the rest
Speaker 1: of my life. I said to him, you know, my
Speaker 1: name is Francis Roblans. I'm a reporter for the New
Speaker 1: York Times. I'm doing a story on Teresa Gomez. And
Speaker 1: he just froze and his eyes welled up with tears,
Speaker 1: and he said, I've been telling people about Teresa Gomez
Speaker 1: for twenty five years. And I said, well, now somebody's listening.
Speaker 1: And he said to me, is this going to mess
Speaker 1: up my parole? And I remember I said something that
Speaker 1: you know, ethically I should not have said, and I
Speaker 1: probably shouldn't repeat that I said, but I said it.
Speaker 1: I said, this isn't going to mess up your parole.
Speaker 1: I said, this is gonna get you exonerated. And I
Speaker 1: said something so ridiculous because I believed it.
Speaker 4: Frenchie story breaks on May eleventh, twenty thirteen, the headline
Speaker 4: review of fifty Brooklyn murder cases ordered. The story lays
Speaker 4: it all out how Teresa Gomez says she witnessed six
Speaker 4: separate murders. Who sees six murders Schebaka's friend Derek, the
Speaker 4: one who said all of this in motion.
Speaker 3: At first he's pleased.
Speaker 4: When he sees the article, but then he gets angry.
Speaker 4: This is personal, I say, damn man, it's the same
Speaker 4: fuck of that frame me. You see. Scarcella was the
Speaker 4: cop who arrested Derek a murder, a murder, he insists
Speaker 4: he didn't do.
Speaker 3: You gotta understand something, man.
Speaker 4: This guy is a piece of shit, but he gets
Speaker 4: to run around.
Speaker 7: Like he's God.
Speaker 10: We gotta get at this guy.
Speaker 3: We gotta attack Scott Selim.
Speaker 5: If I did one nano gram, one nano gram of
Speaker 5: what they said I did, I would have killed myself.
Speaker 9: Stone Climb, a comment commonstrate to you can't run for sheltering.
Speaker 9: There's nothing you can't do.
Speaker 8: You gotta hold a time. As pobout turning people in
Speaker 8: her