Speaker 1: Hey everyone, it's Jason Flamm. As you might have noticed,
Speaker 1: we've begun dropping some clips of our favorite podcast into
Speaker 1: the feed here that we feel are telling the most
Speaker 1: important innocence and justice stories. So today we have a
Speaker 1: special clip of a new investigative true crime podcast here.
Speaker 1: He is called The Burden from Morbid Media. It tells
Speaker 1: the story of a once celebrated NYPD detective named Luis
Speaker 1: Scarcella who became embroiled in controversy by the innocent men
Speaker 1: whom he helped wrongfully convict. The series follows the host,
Speaker 1: Steve Fishman, who gains Garcella's trust, allowing us to listen
Speaker 1: in from Scarcella's perspective as he continues to battle people
Speaker 1: whom i'm regular users will recognize Derek Hamilton, Shabaka, Shaquur,
Speaker 1: Nelson Cruz, all of whom banded together while still in
Speaker 1: prison to fight their common enemy. The lucked and legal
Speaker 1: heroes have helped to free over twenty more victims of
Speaker 1: this same detective, Lewis Garcela, whose handiwork has cost New
Speaker 1: York City over one hundred and fifty million dollars in counting.
Speaker 1: So here's the clip. Don't forget to subscribe to the
Speaker 1: Burden wherever you get your podcasts, and follow along as
Speaker 1: this incredible story unfolds.
Speaker 2: Dax, this is the first story I ever heard Louis
Speaker 2: Scarcella tell.
Speaker 3: The legendary New York detective tell me more so.
Speaker 2: Detective Scarcella is with his partner. It's lunchtime, and Detective
Speaker 2: Scarcella and his partner decide that this is the moment
Speaker 2: to track down a murder suspect. We talk right here,
Speaker 2: right here, lo, and behold, a man six foot three
Speaker 2: hundred pounds.
Speaker 3: Comes out of the house.
Speaker 2: I said, that's him.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: I run over him. I put the gun on him.
Speaker 5: He's got a sig sour in his waistband, all big
Speaker 5: sig sur I jump on him.
Speaker 2: He's going for the gun. I put my glock to
Speaker 2: his head and pulled the trigger.
Speaker 4: But the gun's no good.
Speaker 2: My gun's no good. I grab them and I knock
Speaker 2: him to the ground. Do you ever imagine that clock
Speaker 2: goes off? I mean I intended it too. I intended
Speaker 2: it to one am. I supposed to kiss him. Welcome
Speaker 2: to Louis Brooklyn, where bad guys were around every corner
Speaker 2: and it was up to Detective Scarsella to protect the people.
Speaker 2: They needed me, and I loved doing it. Louis heyday
Speaker 2: was the eighties and nineties, and back then all New
Speaker 2: Yorkers wanted law and order. Louis Garcela had movie star
Speaker 2: good looks, smoked a cigar everywhere. He seemed like he
Speaker 2: was the kind of tough cop the city needed.
Speaker 5: He was everybody's idea of the prince of the city.
Speaker 5: He was the guy who solved the hardest cases and
Speaker 5: made sure the worst killers were brought to justice.
Speaker 2: Louis Garcela was known as the closer, the one who
Speaker 2: got the confession, and with that came fame. He was
Speaker 2: on the Doctor Phil show No one knows the art
Speaker 2: of getting confessions better than twenty nine year better in
Speaker 2: New York City homicide detectives.
Speaker 3: And he earned the respect of his peers.
Speaker 4: Louis my god, he's you know, he's my friend, the
Speaker 4: de Helibo cop Rate detective. He looks like shit.
Speaker 6: Now we'll all this shit.
Speaker 3: Steve the poor the poor guy that beat the balls
Speaker 3: off of me.
Speaker 1: You know that's right.
Speaker 3: Years later, the Louis Scarcella story changed.
Speaker 4: The once decorated detective now stands accused of coaching witnesses,
Speaker 4: coercing confessions, and trading drugs for testimonies.
Speaker 5: Garcela cracked numerous murder cases in the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 5: but his techniques had been questioned, and a group of
Speaker 5: convicted murders says, it all comes back to one rogue
Speaker 5: official and they want their names clear.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'm the devil and disgraced devil. Yeah yeah, Well,
Speaker 2: what can I tell you? I'm Steve Fishman. I've lived
Speaker 2: in New York a long time. I've been writing about
Speaker 2: crime for a long time. Son of Sam Bernie Madoff.
Speaker 2: They opened up to me when I heard these headlines
Speaker 2: about Scarcella. I thought this cannot be the whole story.
Speaker 2: Was this really about one rogue cop who what hoodwinked
Speaker 2: an entire system?
Speaker 3: And I'm dak Stevlin Ross, journalist, author, lawyer. I've written
Speaker 3: about criminal justice for years. I know what it's like
Speaker 3: to be wrongfully arrested personally, and I'm interested in the
Speaker 3: people who went to jail and maybe shouldn't have.
Speaker 2: We're gonna go deep. Is Louis a hero cop, a scapegoat,
Speaker 2: or a super villain who helped put away more than
Speaker 2: twenty innocent men, men who now want revenge.
Speaker 7: Stormcloud of common strate to you, you can't run for shelter.
Speaker 2: There's nohing you can do.
Speaker 8: From orbit media. Yeah, this is the burden today on
Speaker 8: the show The Scoop.
Speaker 2: You gotta hold all the time.
Speaker 3: All right, Steve, where do we begin?
Speaker 2: We begin with the person who broke the Louis Scarcella
Speaker 2: story long before you or I got involved. That's Francis Robless,
Speaker 2: known to her New York Times colleagues as Frenchie.
Speaker 6: The Porto Rican grow known as Frenchie. I do not
Speaker 6: speak French.
Speaker 2: Frenchie's from Queens, from an Italian neighborhood called Howard Beach.
Speaker 6: Howard Beach was a astoundingly racist place.
Speaker 2: And growing up there, it taught Frenchie to be fierce.
Speaker 6: My best friend in elementary school is Perto Rican, and
Speaker 6: so this one kid was like, hey, ladarica Isy switch
Speaker 6: Lane and my girlfriend Jenevieve and I we went to
Speaker 6: his house in sixth grade. We rang the doorbell and
Speaker 6: his mother answered the door. She was pregnant, her belly
Speaker 6: out to wherever is Anthony home? And she's like ane.
Speaker 6: So he comes and he's you know you could see
Speaker 6: he's kind of looking at us rather suspiciously, like one
Speaker 6: of the two Puerto Rican girls that I believe in
Speaker 6: school doing at my door. And we beat the crap
Speaker 6: out of him right there in front of his mother.
Speaker 3: Fast forward to twenty thirteen and Frenchie is at the
Speaker 3: New York Times. She's itching for a good story, something
Speaker 3: that will make us. One day, she's on a routine
Speaker 3: assignment when she meets someone interesting.
Speaker 6: Was a guy named Derek Hamilton, who was an ex
Speaker 6: con who had been kind of like a jailhouse lawyer,
Speaker 6: and so we're just chatting and he says, oh, you know,
Speaker 6: I know a lot of cases in Brooklyn of wrongful convictions.
Speaker 2: So Frenchie brings it to her editor and I'm.
Speaker 6: Like, oh, I have a tip. You know, there's a
Speaker 6: lot of wrongfully convicted guys in Brooklyn, and I have
Speaker 6: a good source. He was a jailhouse lawyer. And so
Speaker 6: my editor says to me, well, what else do the
Speaker 6: cases have in common? And I was so offended by
Speaker 6: that question, Like I just thought it was such a
Speaker 6: hoity toity New York Times view of journalism that I
Speaker 6: couldn't just come up with a wrongful conviction. I had
Speaker 6: to come up with what connects them? Go back to
Speaker 6: my dask kind of grumbling under my breath, and I
Speaker 6: called Derek and I'm like, all right, well, this editor
Speaker 6: of mine wants to know what connects these cases. And
Speaker 6: he goes, well, a lot of them are the same
Speaker 6: cop and his name is Lewis Garsala.
Speaker 3: Derek Hamilton was out of prison but still connected to
Speaker 3: people on the inside. He's a self taught lawyer, learned
Speaker 3: the law behind bars, and he was still in the
Speaker 3: prison grape vine.
Speaker 6: So I meet with Derek again. He told me kind
Speaker 6: of loosey goosey stuff, like he said, oh that this
Speaker 6: guy was notorious for using the same witness over and
Speaker 6: over again. But he didn't know the names of the
Speaker 6: defendants who had had the same witness testify against them.
Speaker 6: And he did not know the name of the witness.
Speaker 6: So I was like, oh, brother, you know, here I
Speaker 6: am talking this up to my editor, like I'm some
Speaker 6: hotshot who's going to crack this case open. And I
Speaker 6: got nothing.
Speaker 2: So she went back to Derek. She needed the name
Speaker 2: of that very talented witness, and that's when Derek gives
Speaker 2: her a legal document. This was a document written by
Speaker 2: one of his friends still in jail, another jailhouse lawyer.
Speaker 2: It's called a four to forty motion, and it's what
Speaker 2: you file if you're trying to get your conviction overturned.
Speaker 6: So he gives me Shabacca chaqueurs for forty.
Speaker 4: I probably rewrote that one hundred times because I wanted
Speaker 4: to make sure that I was saying what I wanted
Speaker 4: to say.
Speaker 3: This is Shabacca chacor. Scarcella helped convict Shabacca of a
Speaker 3: double murder, which he says he didn't do. His four
Speaker 3: to forty was impressive, sixty pages of legal argument written
Speaker 3: while he was part of a prison law firm. That's right,
Speaker 3: a law firm formed in prison and run by convicted murderers,
Speaker 3: all of whom claimed innocence.
Speaker 2: So I called her.
Speaker 4: She was like, okay, you said, scar Sellers a crooked cop.
Speaker 4: I read your brief. I said, listen. I gave a
Speaker 4: list of names, a list of you know, people she
Speaker 4: could talk to, information that would substantiate that he was
Speaker 4: a crooked cop. And I remember telling her, like you
Speaker 4: an investigative reporter, go and investigate.
Speaker 3: In that dense document, two pages focused on Louis Garcela.
Speaker 6: He says in this document something something Louis Garcella was
Speaker 6: known to use the same witness over and over again,
Speaker 6: a woman named Teresa Gomez. And I'm like, gee, you
Speaker 6: know that's it. That's the name, that's that's what I've
Speaker 6: been waiting for.
Speaker 2: So Frenchie has the name. Now she does what a
Speaker 2: lot of us do when we're hunting for information. She googles.
Speaker 6: That's my big investigative reporting secret. And I got a hit,
Speaker 6: and I'm like, well, this is curious. It was like
Speaker 6: some random Google forum, a cigar smoker forum where somebody
Speaker 6: has asked. I think the question on the forum was
Speaker 6: when did you first smoke your first great cigar? This guy,
Speaker 6: a man answers. The first cigar, which truly made me
Speaker 6: realize how much I was going to enjoy cigars, was
Speaker 6: smoked in nineteen eighty eight. The cigar was given to
Speaker 6: me by a legendary detective of the Brooklyn North homicide
Speaker 6: Squad named Louis Garcela. Lewis had been the detective on
Speaker 6: the first two murder cases I prosecuted, both of which
Speaker 6: featured the same witness testifying against the same defendant for
Speaker 6: two different murders. The defendant was a dealer named Robert Hill.
Speaker 6: The witness was named Teresa Gomez, a woman who was
Speaker 6: even then ravaged from head to toe by the scourge
Speaker 6: of crack cocaine. It was near falling to even think
Speaker 6: that anyone would believe Gomez about anything, let alone the
Speaker 6: fact that she witnessed the same guy kill two different people.
Speaker 6: And the guy signs it and he's now a charge.
Speaker 2: She goes to prison unannounced to find Robert Hill. Frenchie
Speaker 2: is waiting in the visitors room for Robert Hill.
Speaker 6: So this guy comes in and walks with a cane,
Speaker 6: and he's kind of hunched over, and he has very
Speaker 6: very long dreadlocks all down his back. And I see
Speaker 6: him looking around the room like, who the heck is that?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 6: But all right, fine, So he sits down and I'll
Speaker 6: probably never forget this moment for the rest of my life.
Speaker 6: I said to him, you know, my name is Francis
Speaker 6: Roblans Order for the New York Times. I'm doing a
Speaker 6: story on Teresa Gomez. And he just froze and his
Speaker 6: eyes welled up with tears, and he said, I've been
Speaker 6: telling people about Teresa Gomez for twenty five years and
Speaker 6: I said, well, now somebody's listening. And he said to me,
Speaker 6: is this going to mess up my parole? And I
Speaker 6: remember I said something that you know, ethically I should
Speaker 6: not have said, and I probably shouldn't even repeat that
Speaker 6: I said, but I said it. I said, this isn't
Speaker 6: going to mess up your parole. I said this is
Speaker 6: going to get you exonerated. And I said something so
Speaker 6: ridiculous because I believed it.
Speaker 3: Frenchy story breaks on May eleventh, twenty thirteen. The headline
Speaker 3: reviewed you who have fifty Brooklyn murder cases ordered? The
Speaker 3: story lays it all out how Teresa Gomez says she
Speaker 3: witnessed six separate murders. Who sees six murders? Schabaka's friend Derek,
Speaker 3: the one who said all of this in motion. At first,
Speaker 3: he's pleased when he sees the article, but then he
Speaker 3: gets angry. This is personal.
Speaker 2: I say, damn man, it's the same fuck of that
Speaker 2: frame me.
Speaker 4: You see.
Speaker 3: Scarcella was the cop who arrested Derek for murder a
Speaker 3: murder he insists he didn't do.
Speaker 2: You gotta understand something, man, this guy is a piece
Speaker 2: of shit. But he gets to run around.
Speaker 8: Like he's God. We gotta get at this guy.
Speaker 4: We gotta attack. It's gonna sell it.
Speaker 5: If I did one nano gram, one nanogram.
Speaker 2: Of what they said I did, I would have killed myself.
Speaker 7: Strong crowd a comment commonstrate to you. You can't run
Speaker 7: for shelter.
Speaker 3: There's nothing you can't do.
Speaker 2: You gotta hold old time.
Speaker 1: Go to
Speaker 2: This ble,