March 19, 2024 • 37 mins
Episode 1 of 10
New York Times journalist Frances “Frenchie” Robles gets a tip about a group of wrongfully convicted men in the New York State prison system. The common denominator: many were arrested by the same detective. Frenchie tracks down the story in a surprise visit to prison.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, Steve Fishman here, creator of The Burden as well
as the number one true crime podcast, My Friend The
Serial Killer. For those of you who liked The Burden,
I have good news. Season two starts August seventh. It's
a series called The Burden Empire on Blood and it's
the director's cut of the true crime classic Empire on Blood,
(00:22):
which reached number one on the charts when it debuted
half a dozen years ago. Then the fat cat funders
abandon it. I wrangled it back, and now I'm thrilled
to share this story of a man who fought the
law for two decades, fought against the Bronx's top homicide
prosecutor and a detective sometimes known as the Luis Scarcela
(00:44):
of the Bronx. It's all coming to you August seventh,
wherever you get your podcasts, Dax. This is the first
(01:08):
story I ever heard Louis Scarcella tell.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
The legendary New York detective tell me more so.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Detective Scarcella is with his partner. They're testifying in court.
One day. It's lunchtime. The court breaks and Detective Scarcella
and his partner decide that this is the moment to
track down a murder suspect.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
We park right here, right here, there was an Italian
guy right here smoking a shred. I say, ben bennygoy,
and I showed him the picture. He looked at the picture.
He backed off and he points to the white house.
Lo and behold of me. Six foot three hundred pounds
(01:53):
comes out of the house.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I said, that's him. I said, I'm going to run
him down. I gunned the car stch jump out. I
run over him. I put the gun on him.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
He's got a sig sour in his waistband, all big
sig sur.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
I jump on him. He's going for the gun. I
put my glock to his head and pulled the trigger.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
But the gun's no good.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
My gun's no good.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
I kilt him my.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Pawn to shoot him. He's bucking me.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
He's bucking me like a bronco.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I grab him and I knock him to the ground.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Do you ever imagine that clock goes off? I mean
I intended it too.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
I intended it to What do you want me to do?
Speaker 5 (02:46):
He's got a six hour going for a six se
one am.
Speaker 6 (02:48):
I supposed to kiss him.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Welcome to Louis Brooklyn. We're bad guys were around every corner,
and it was up to Dtective Scarcella 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,
(03:14):
even the most liberal columnists, wanted law and order.
Speaker 7 (03:20):
When you have babies being shot in their grandmother's arms,
people's throats being slit for a five dollars vial of crack, I.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Don't care where those prisons are and want I'm sent
there for long terms.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Louis Garcela had movie star good looks, smoked a cigar everywhere,
and he was tough. He seemed like he was the
kind of tough cop the city needed.
Speaker 8 (03:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Louis Garcella was known as the closes, the one who
got the confession, and with that came fame. He was
on the Doctor Phil's show.
Speaker 9 (04:07):
No One Knows the Art of Getting confessions better than
twenty nine year better in New York City homicide detectives, and.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
He earned the respect of his peers.
Speaker 5 (04:16):
Louis my god, he's my man, you know, he's my friend,
the hell of a cop, great detective.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
God forbid something happened to me or my family.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
I would want Louis Scarsella to do the investigation.
Speaker 10 (04:29):
A p trust in him.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
He looks like shit. Now we'll call 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 testimoniy.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
Garsola cracked numerous murder cases in the eighties and nineties,
but his techniques had been questioned.
Speaker 8 (04:59):
A group of convicted murders says, it all comes back
to one rogue official and they want their names clear.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Oh yeah, I'm the devil and disgraced devil.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Yeah yeah, Well, what can I tell you?
Speaker 1 (05:17):
I'm Steve Fishman. I've lived in New York a long time.
I've been writing about crime for a long time. As
a journalist. I've interviewed cops, prosecutors, criminals, son of Sam
Bernie Madoff. They opened up to me. I felt. I
knew a lot about the criminal justice system, so when
I heard these headlines about Scarsella, my thought, this cannot
(05:41):
be the whole story. Was this really about one rogue
cop who what hoodwinked an entire system?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
We're gonna go deep.
Speaker 9 (06:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
I don't know, man, Maybe they want vindication.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
You know that's what Louis Scarcella feels he deserves too.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I'll tell you what, though, we need to know the truth,
both about Louis Scarcela and the band of convicted murders
who took him.
Speaker 11 (06:34):
On, and about the city we live in.
Speaker 12 (06:47):
Stonecloud of comment commonstrate to you you can't run for shelter.
There's nothing you can't do.
Speaker 13 (07:00):
From orbit media. This is the burden. Today on the
show The Scoop, you.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Gotta hold old time, all right, Steve, Where do we begin?
Speaker 1 (07:46):
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.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
The Porto Rican grow now French, I do not speak French.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Frenchie's from Queens, from an Italian neighborhood called Howard Beach.
Speaker 7 (08:06):
Howard Beach was a astoundingly racist place.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
And growing up there, it taught Frenchie to be fierce.
Speaker 7 (08:16):
My best friend in elementary school is Puerto Rican, and
so this one kid was like Ayblada Rica 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
outza wherever is Anthony home? And she's like ane. So
(08:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
This was the nineteen eighties, and Frenchie was in high school,
living in a dangerous neighborhood, in a dangerous one night,
her mother was a victim. Her mother was carjacked, a
gun was put to her head right in front of
their house, and then her mother was summoned to the
police station to identify the carjacker in a lineup, the
(09:15):
man who'd been arrested in the stolen vehicle.
Speaker 7 (09:19):
And the detective puts his right hand on his left
arm and he makes like a figure of the number two,
you know, holding up two fingers, and he looks at
my mother, telling her to choose number two. So my
mother goes in there. She looks at the guys. She
has no idea who it is. She doesn't remember. It
was dark, you know, she had a gun in her face,
(09:41):
So she picked number two. I remember thinking, well, screw him.
You know, he was driving a stolen car. He's at
the very least was involved in car theft.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Guilty enough for her.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah, back then, it didn't matter, Frenchie if this guy
did this crime. But later Frenchie became a reporter, first
at the Miami Herald and then at the New York Times,
and their views evolved you know.
Speaker 7 (10:13):
Maybe my mother helped send that innocent person to prison.
He got seven years. Everybody was in on it. Everybody
it was in on the game. The cops were in
on it, the witnesses were in on it, and the
prosecutor probably knew that my mother didn't know who he
was and was like whatever she said, Number two, number two.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Fast forward to twenty thirteen and Frenchie is at the
New York Times. She's itching for a good story, a
big story, something that will make a splash. One day,
she's on a routine assignment when she meets someone interesting.
Speaker 7 (10:48):
Was a guy named Derek Hamilton, who was an ex
Cohn who had been kind of like a jail house lawyer.
Speaker 14 (10:54):
We meet her and Hispanic woman, beautiful, long hair. You
know it up.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
This is Derek remembering meeting Frenchie for the first time.
He's a bigger guy, broadcast, about six foot two. He's
got a single gold tooth in the front and a
shaved head, big presence.
Speaker 14 (11:14):
I've been in Queens Boulevard, Course Street from the courthouse.
There was some restaurant there and we had dinner at tell.
Speaker 7 (11:23):
And so we're just chatting and he says, oh, you know,
I see that you're kind of interested in this issue
of you know, the Brooklyn DA's office having screwed somebody over.
I know a lot of cases in Brooklyn of wrongful convictions.
Oh okay, really okay, good. You know, I was kind
of in the New York office sharpening pencils, so that
seemed like a good idea to me to follow up
on that tip.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
So Frenchie brings it to her editor.
Speaker 7 (11:45):
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? Like what connects them?
And I was so offended by that question. I was like, well,
(12:05):
I don't know, maybe they didn't do it like that
connects them. You know, maybe they're all.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Black, you know, and the railroaded.
Speaker 7 (12:11):
By the criminal justice system. 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? So
I nod politely, you know, yes, ma'am, and I'm like,
I go back to my desk, kind of grumbling under
(12:32):
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 Luis Garsower.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
This smoke behind the story. That's after the break.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Hi, it's Steve Fishman. I want to introduce you briefly
to our next series featuring deep reporting and an amazing story.
This one's about a journalist who goes on the hunt
for some torturers, her torturers. It's great. Here's the trailer.
Speaker 15 (13:28):
It was much more than a feeling. I knew that
I was being followed.
Speaker 6 (13:35):
Late afternoon, nineteen seventy seven, Medium Lewin is running for
her life. She's nineteen. Argentina's military has taken power.
Speaker 16 (13:45):
I turn my head and I see a dark red
Ford falcon and a long gun barrel hanging out from
one of the windows. He says, I am the man
responsible for your life and your death.
Speaker 6 (14:01):
Four decades later, Medium is among the few to survive.
Her fellow prisoners had been put on planes and tossed
into the sea.
Speaker 15 (14:10):
This plane was used to throw people to their deaths,
people I knew, people I loved. I still ask myself
why did I survive? I'd say it was to bring
at least some of those pilots of the death flights
to justice.
Speaker 6 (14:28):
From Orbit Media, This is Avenger.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
A quick word about subscriptions. If you love ads, listen
on you're not so keen on ads, sign up for
True Crime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts. That's our subscription channel.
You'll get no ads, and also you can binge the
entire Avenger series. It's just two ninety nine a month. Thanks,
(15:01):
Welcome back.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
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.
Speaker 7 (15:15):
So I meet with Derek again. And Derek, you know,
he was interesting because he knew some things, but he
did not know a lot of things. 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,
(15:39):
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, and I thought, oh my god, you know
what am I going to do?
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Now?
Speaker 7 (15:54):
You know, I don't have anywhere to turn.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
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.
Speaker 7 (16:18):
So he gives me, Shabacca chaqueurs for forty.
Speaker 5 (16:24):
I probably rewrote that one hundred times because I wanted
to make sure that I was saying what I wanted
to say.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
This is Shabacca Shakur. 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. More on that.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Later, Shabacca and Derek got close in prison. Now, Derek
ERGI Shabaka to talk to FRENCHI. So I called her.
Speaker 5 (17:05):
She was like, okay, you said, scar Seller is 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.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
In that dense document, two pages focused on Louis Garcela.
Speaker 7 (17:33):
He says in his in this document, it says something something.
Louis Garcella was notorious in Brooklyn for his you know,
unethical and you know framing people basically. In fact, he
was known to use the same witness over and over again,
a woman named Teresa Gomez. And I'm like, gee, you
(17:56):
know that's it. That's the thing, that's like, that's what
I've been waiting for. I'm waiting to find out the
name of the of the witness.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
So Frenchie has the name. Now she does what a
lot of us do when we're hunting for information. She googles.
Speaker 7 (18:10):
That's my big investigative reporting secret. So I google Lewis, Garsola,
and Teresa Gomes together. You know, I don't know what
I thought I was going to find, and I got
a hit, and I'm like, well, this is curious. It
was like some random Google forum, a cigar smoker forum
(18:36):
where somebody has asked I think the question on the
forum was when did you first smoke your first great cigar?
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Okay, so a cigar smoker's form not exactly where i'd
expect to find a lead about a crooked.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Cop exactly, but what she comes across there turns out
to be crucial to her understanding of the entire story.
Speaker 7 (18:58):
This guy man answers. The first cigar, which truly made
me realize how much I was going to enjoy cigars,
was smoked in nineteen eighty eight at a bar on
Remsen Street in Brooklyn, New York called Callahan's. The cigar
was given to me by a legendary detective of the
Brooklyn North Homicide Squad named Louis Garcela. Lewis had been
(19:21):
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
(19:44):
folly 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 it's
the district attorney and he's now at charge.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Here's what I'm wondering, What the fuck the assistant district attorney,
he's not the district attorney. Just to be clear about that,
it's basically saying that no one should have believed his witness,
the one he put on the stand, who happens to
be the lone eyewitness, and two alleged murders by Robert
Hill on two different occasions.
Speaker 7 (20:23):
My head mark is probably still on the roof of
the New York Times office from my jumping up and
down and realizing that I had hit batter.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
So Frenchie was excited by her discovery. I want to
point out, though, that what the prosecutor is saying is
that he'd be stunned if a jury believed Teresa Gomez.
What he's not saying is that she's lying.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
So Frenchie now has the name of this troubled and
troubling witness. And now she's also got the name of
the person Teresa helped convictive murder one, Robert Hill, former
drug dealer. So Steve, where does she go from here?
Speaker 1 (21:02):
She goes to prison unannounced to find Robert Hill.
Speaker 7 (21:12):
Oh my god, these are lives, These are real lives.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
More on those real lives. After the break, Frenchie is
waiting in the visitors room for Robert Hill. He's serving
(21:38):
eighteen years to life. He's not expecting her.
Speaker 7 (21:42):
So this guy comes in. He 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, you know oo, So
I don't see anybody here who's here to see me?
And so I raised my hands and he looks at
(22:02):
me like, you know, who the heck is that?
Speaker 16 (22:05):
You know?
Speaker 7 (22:05):
But all right, fine, you know, he doesn't have anything
better to do. 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 Roblanz.
I'm a reporter for the New York Times. I'm doing
a story on Teresa Gomez. And he just froze and
(22:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
But for Robert Hill, talking about Teresa Gomez is not
an easy decision. He's about to come up for parole,
and one of the things that's drilled into somebody applying
for parole is you got to go in, take responsibility,
show remorse, you gotta add forgiveness. Now that's going to
(23:02):
be hard to do if you're also telling a New
York Times reporter, hey, I didn't do it.
Speaker 7 (23:08):
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
(23:30):
I said something so ridiculous because I believed it.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
That's our frenchie. She'll save your life at your peril.
And Robert Hill, let's face it, he needs his life saved,
so maybe it's worth the risk. Hill starts talking and
he tells Frenchie Teresa Gomez is a liar. Frenchie goes
on her way, and soon she's working on a on
(24:00):
page story for The Times, one that she hopes will
make a splash.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Standard journalism practice is to get a comment from everyone
mentioned in a story, especially a high stake story like
this one. She calls the District Attorney's office.
Speaker 7 (24:17):
It's like six o'clock that Thursday, and I call the
spokesman and I said, I got a two thousand and
five hundred word article about all these guys, you know,
say that they were wrongly accused, and you know what
it doesn't have It doesn't have a quote from the
Brooklyn District Attorney's office because your quote was so pathetic.
(24:38):
I said, so we're going to do a do over,
and it's a one question do over. Do you stand
behind these convictions or not?
Speaker 2 (24:51):
That's it.
Speaker 7 (24:52):
We're not going to negotiate a response. We're not going
to be like, oh, if the record background upside down
inside out, what's your answer? So the spoken said, oh,
come back, okay, call me back, say call back, and
he said, well, you have to come back to the
office tomorrow. I'm crying out loud. I go to the
book and District Attorney's office sit down, like, all right,
what is it. We're reopening all of Scarcella's cases.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
And I'm like, oh my god.
Speaker 7 (25:25):
So I go back to the office and I will
find the editor, the same person that had originally asked
me what connects these cases? And I said, you're not
going to believe this. The DA is reopening all of
his cases. They're going to go back thirty years. And
her eyes welled up in tears and she said, oh
my god. She goes, these are lives, These are real
(25:47):
lives that you're impacting.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Frenchy story breaks on May eleventh, twenty thirteen, the headline
review of fifty Brooks murder Cases ordered. The story lays
it all out how Teresa Gomez says she witnessed six
separate murders, who sees six murders, and Frenchie tells other
(26:13):
stories like Shabacca's how Scarcella told the court he had
made an incriminating statement that Shabacca says he never made
a copy of Frenchie's story eventually arrives at the prison library.
Speaker 5 (26:26):
It got spread around, you know, word went like wildfire,
and everybody had their own copy that they took back
to their cell.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
By this point, Shehabacca's been incarcerated for twenty two years.
Speaker 5 (26:37):
I had a couple of copies. I even mail copies
out for people like yo. Look, so we was excited
about it. And I think that that was the first
time that I knew, like I always thought I was
going to get out, but I knew I was going
to get out.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Then Sabacca'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,
you see, Scarcela was the cop who arrested Derek for murder,
(27:16):
a murder he insists he didn't do.
Speaker 14 (27:18):
You gotta understand something, man, My kids grew up without
a father.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
This bass who was able to raise his.
Speaker 14 (27:28):
This guy is a piece of shit, but he gets
to run around.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Like he's God.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
It's Derek and his jailhouse law firm that will lead
the charge against Scarcella. With Derek and Louis, it will
be a zero some game. If one rises, the other
must fall. We gotta get at this guy. Here's where
(28:04):
I entered the story. It was a few years after
Frenchy's scoop. I was a New York magazine journalist. Back then,
I just moved to a new neighborhood in Brooklyn, and
on a whim, I decided to open a cocktail bar.
I did not have a grand vision. There was an
empty space two hundred and twenty four square feet. How
(28:25):
hard could it be? I called it IRVS after my
dad and I loved the place. The neighborhood loved it.
The people on the block loved it. Some even worked there.
But that little dead end on which IRVS resided. What
a block old school? Hey, it was like the nineties
(28:47):
in New York City. That block. One day there was
a guy chasing somebody with a machete. Another day a
guy ran down the block shooting at someone, fortunately not
a terrific shot. Intellectually, politically, I'm skeptical of the police.
I marched in the marches. Their methods sometimes frightened me.
(29:11):
But when violence erupted on my block, the block where
my bar resided. I needed someone to call. Who else
was I going to call but the police. It turned
out that Louis Scarcela had spent a good part of
his career patrolling my bar's dead end block. And there
was a moment I found myself wondering if I needed
(29:34):
a tough cop to come in and restore some order
so I could run my little business. Later, Louis would
come by and he'd offer an appraisal, an appraisal which
proved prophetic.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
I remember that bar distinctly. It was where I entered
the story, coming there one night, sitting down with you
and having the first big conversation about this series.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
I remember that first night you came, and I remember
you telling me about your experience with cops.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
To be clear, there's been more than one, so we
could be talking about the time I got pulled over
twice within about twenty minutes because I had a vanilla
roma air freshenery in my rear view mirror.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yes you did. But the one I remember, the one
that made an impression on me, starts with a pull
up on a scaffold.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I'm entering my third year of law school, standing on
a street corner in Adams, Morgan and Washington, DC. You know,
I got my satchel on because at the time I
used to wear a satchel and keep my palm my
poems in my satchel, and I was first starting to
grow on my drop my dreads. I'm with my buddy,
who was a study who the study he was at
Georgetown Loan and he decides to jump up on a
(30:49):
scaffold and do a pull up. Okay, and I think
I jumped up and did maybe did a pull up
with me, and we got down. I turned around and
there as a cop. I don't know where the fuck
it came from, just next to us. Get down on
the ground, Get down the ground, and I me, you know,
having done two years of law school at this point.
Speaker 4 (31:12):
I got it.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
I just I took primpro. I'm just more like, I
haven't violated any laws that you're just gonna come in
broad daylight and tell me to get down on my girl,
get down on my knees. I'm not doing that. I
don't know what happened. Five more police cars show up,
and at some point my friend and I get separated somehow,
(31:33):
I end up in an alley on my back and
the three or four on me.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
My family has Sunday dinner. I don't show up.
Speaker 10 (31:42):
No one knows where I am.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
I remember hearing that story and thinking, man, this is
crazy law school students doing a pull up and then
end up getting beaten by cops. That's just racism, flat out.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
You'd be right except for one thing. Those cops who
arrested and beat me they were black.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Wow. I did not expect that.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, most people don't. But for me, what I took
away from that is that a cop is always a cop,
always blue, and to cops, I'm a black man, and
to be a black man, at least in some spaces
in this country, is to be a suspect.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Well, here's what I can say. We enter this journey
through different doors, don't we.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Yes, we do, and it's gonna be quite a ride.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Buckle up. In this series, we're gonna look at it
all from the inside. We'll get deep on Scarsella. We're here.
Speaker 4 (32:47):
We're here in the belly of the beast, but we're
here at doing what we got to do, and we
did it.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
We did God's work and we did.
Speaker 10 (32:57):
It to me.
Speaker 14 (32:58):
He's no better than a cereal kill right, because you
killed people's dreams.
Speaker 8 (33:02):
This diabolical character that he's been depicted as is just
pure nonsense.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
He had a great reputation well into a crazy world
of violence.
Speaker 8 (33:12):
This guy runs right down the middle of eight the Avenue.
Speaker 7 (33:15):
And he's got a gun.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Sergeant just you know, shot him.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
He goes down.
Speaker 7 (33:19):
Oh my god, so like the wild West.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
And we'll hear from the politicians trying to tame it.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
I am prepared to do anything to take back our streets.
By night as well as by day. We'll dive into
the Brooklyn criminal justice system. She definitely testified Hyazac Kite
one day.
Speaker 8 (33:39):
He's a judge and he puts his arms around me
and he says, we both know who this guy is.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
We both know he's guilty.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
And we'll follow Derek Hamilton and his band of convicted
murders who created their own law firm behind bars to
take on Scarsella and fight for their freedom. Its God, God,
when it comes to criminal law.
Speaker 14 (34:02):
Everybody knows how to make emotions, but how many times
do you really know what your burden is?
Speaker 5 (34:07):
Look, man, this is our team right here, This is
the AI team.
Speaker 14 (34:09):
We're gonna work for these cases and we're gonna.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Get out and targeting the detective at the center of
it all.
Speaker 14 (34:16):
I say, damn, it's the same fuck or that frame me.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
If I did one nanogram one nanogram of.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
What they said I did, and you know what I
mean by one nanogram and infinitesimal.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
If I did one of the things that they said
I did, I would have killed myself.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
I love myself.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
I'm not gonna kill myself. What do you love about
your simple I'm.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Gonna tell you.
Speaker 4 (34:55):
I think.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
I'm a very good person. Yeah, we'll see about.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
That next time. On the Burden, I try to get
Louis Scarcella to give it all up. He used to
be a talker, then with the bad headlines he mostly
shut up. Frenchie couldn't get him to talk. But I'm
on a mission. Turns out that mission starts with a
plunge into the freezing Atlantic. Make sure your.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Baby, you're gonna come off today?
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Well I did it last time. Yeah, it did, certainly did.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
That's next time. On the Burden, Stone.
Speaker 12 (35:38):
Common strating you can't run for shelter.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
There's nothing you can't do.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
The Burden is created by Steve Fishman. It's hosted and
reported by Steve Fishman and myself Do's Devlin Ross. Our
story editor is Dan Bobkoff. Our senior producer Simon Rittner.
Our producer is Sonam Skelly. Our associate producer is Austin Smith.
Our fact checker is Sona Avakian. Our production coordinator is
Davon Paradise. Mixing and sound design is provided by Mumble Media.
(36:13):
Our executive producers are Fisher Stevens, Steve Fishman and Evan Williams.
Additional production help has been provided by Josie Holtzman, Isaac Kestenbaum,
Naomi Brauner, Lucy Soucek, Drew Nellis, Micah Hazel, Priscilla A. Labbi,
Saxon faird, Katie Simon and Katie Springer. We want to
give us special thanks to Ellen Horn, Zach Stewart, Pontier,
(36:37):
Lizzie Jacobs, Nathan Tempe, To Buya Black, Rachel Morrissey, Mark
Smirling and Lila Robinson. Special thanks to Marcy Wiseman. We
want to thank our agents Ben Davis and Marissa Horowitz.
Special thanks to my wife Halana.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Special thanks to Ria Julian, my wife.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Legal support has been provided by Mona Hook at MKSR
ll P, and a very special thanks to Evan Williams,
one of our executive producers and the person who made
this podcast possible. We are honored to feature the song
black Lightning from the Bell Rais is our theme music.
The Burden is a production of Orbit Media and association
(37:15):
with Signal Company.
Speaker 10 (37:16):
Number one.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Season two of The Burden Empire on Blood will be
available everywhere you get your podcasts on August seventh. All
episodes will be available early and ad free, along with
exclusive bonus content on Orbit's newly launched True Crime Clubhouse
as subscription channel on Apple Podcasts. It's only two ninety
(37:55):
nine a month.
Hi, Steve Fishman here, creator of The Burden as well
as the number one true crime podcast, My Friend The
Serial Killer. For those of you who liked The Burden,
I have good news. Season two starts August seventh. It's
a series called The Burden Empire on Blood and it's
the director's cut of the true crime classic Empire on Blood,
(00:22):
which reached number one on the charts when it debuted
half a dozen years ago. Then the fat cat funders
abandon it. I wrangled it back, and now I'm thrilled
to share this story of a man who fought the
law for two decades, fought against the Bronx's top homicide
prosecutor and a detective sometimes known as the Luis Scarcela
(00:44):
of the Bronx. It's all coming to you August seventh,
wherever you get your podcasts, Dax. This is the first
(01:08):
story I ever heard Louis Scarcella tell.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
The legendary New York detective tell me more so.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Detective Scarcella is with his partner. They're testifying in court.
One day. It's lunchtime. The court breaks and Detective Scarcella
and his partner decide that this is the moment to
track down a murder suspect.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
We park right here, right here, there was an Italian
guy right here smoking a shred. I say, ben bennygoy,
and I showed him the picture. He looked at the picture.
He backed off and he points to the white house.
Lo and behold of me. Six foot three hundred pounds
(01:53):
comes out of the house.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I said, that's him. I said, I'm going to run
him down. I gunned the car stch jump out. I
run over him. I put the gun on him.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
He's got a sig sour in his waistband, all big
sig sur.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
I jump on him. He's going for the gun. I
put my glock to his head and pulled the trigger.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
But the gun's no good.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
My gun's no good.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
I kilt him my.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Pawn to shoot him. He's bucking me.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
He's bucking me like a bronco.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I grab him and I knock him to the ground.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Do you ever imagine that clock goes off? I mean
I intended it too.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
I intended it to What do you want me to do?
Speaker 5 (02:46):
He's got a six hour going for a six se
one am.
Speaker 6 (02:48):
I supposed to kiss him.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Welcome to Louis Brooklyn. We're bad guys were around every corner,
and it was up to Dtective Scarcella 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,
(03:14):
even the most liberal columnists, wanted law and order.
Speaker 7 (03:20):
When you have babies being shot in their grandmother's arms,
people's throats being slit for a five dollars vial of crack, I.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Don't care where those prisons are and want I'm sent
there for long terms.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Louis Garcela had movie star good looks, smoked a cigar everywhere,
and he was tough. He seemed like he was the
kind of tough cop the city needed.
Speaker 8 (03:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Louis Garcella was known as the closes, the one who
got the confession, and with that came fame. He was
on the Doctor Phil's show.
Speaker 9 (04:07):
No One Knows the Art of Getting confessions better than
twenty nine year better in New York City homicide detectives, and.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
He earned the respect of his peers.
Speaker 5 (04:16):
Louis my god, he's my man, you know, he's my friend,
the hell of a cop, great detective.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
God forbid something happened to me or my family.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
I would want Louis Scarsella to do the investigation.
Speaker 10 (04:29):
A p trust in him.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
He looks like shit. Now we'll call 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 testimoniy.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
Garsola cracked numerous murder cases in the eighties and nineties,
but his techniques had been questioned.
Speaker 8 (04:59):
A group of convicted murders says, it all comes back
to one rogue official and they want their names clear.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Oh yeah, I'm the devil and disgraced devil.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Yeah yeah, Well, what can I tell you?
Speaker 1 (05:17):
I'm Steve Fishman. I've lived in New York a long time.
I've been writing about crime for a long time. As
a journalist. I've interviewed cops, prosecutors, criminals, son of Sam
Bernie Madoff. They opened up to me. I felt. I
knew a lot about the criminal justice system, so when
I heard these headlines about Scarsella, my thought, this cannot
(05:41):
be the whole story. Was this really about one rogue
cop who what hoodwinked an entire system?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
We're gonna go deep.
Speaker 9 (06:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
I don't know, man, Maybe they want vindication.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
You know that's what Louis Scarcella feels he deserves too.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I'll tell you what, though, we need to know the truth,
both about Louis Scarcela and the band of convicted murders
who took him.
Speaker 11 (06:34):
On, and about the city we live in.
Speaker 12 (06:47):
Stonecloud of comment commonstrate to you you can't run for shelter.
There's nothing you can't do.
Speaker 13 (07:00):
From orbit media. This is the burden. Today on the
show The Scoop, you.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Gotta hold old time, all right, Steve, Where do we begin?
Speaker 1 (07:46):
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.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
The Porto Rican grow now French, I do not speak French.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Frenchie's from Queens, from an Italian neighborhood called Howard Beach.
Speaker 7 (08:06):
Howard Beach was a astoundingly racist place.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
And growing up there, it taught Frenchie to be fierce.
Speaker 7 (08:16):
My best friend in elementary school is Puerto Rican, and
so this one kid was like Ayblada Rica 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
outza wherever is Anthony home? And she's like ane. So
(08:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
This was the nineteen eighties, and Frenchie was in high school,
living in a dangerous neighborhood, in a dangerous one night,
her mother was a victim. Her mother was carjacked, a
gun was put to her head right in front of
their house, and then her mother was summoned to the
police station to identify the carjacker in a lineup, the
(09:15):
man who'd been arrested in the stolen vehicle.
Speaker 7 (09:19):
And the detective puts his right hand on his left
arm and he makes like a figure of the number two,
you know, holding up two fingers, and he looks at
my mother, telling her to choose number two. So my
mother goes in there. She looks at the guys. She
has no idea who it is. She doesn't remember. It
was dark, you know, she had a gun in her face,
(09:41):
So she picked number two. I remember thinking, well, screw him.
You know, he was driving a stolen car. He's at
the very least was involved in car theft.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Guilty enough for her.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah, back then, it didn't matter, Frenchie if this guy
did this crime. But later Frenchie became a reporter, first
at the Miami Herald and then at the New York Times,
and their views evolved you know.
Speaker 7 (10:13):
Maybe my mother helped send that innocent person to prison.
He got seven years. Everybody was in on it. Everybody
it was in on the game. The cops were in
on it, the witnesses were in on it, and the
prosecutor probably knew that my mother didn't know who he
was and was like whatever she said, Number two, number two.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Fast forward to twenty thirteen and Frenchie is at the
New York Times. She's itching for a good story, a
big story, something that will make a splash. One day,
she's on a routine assignment when she meets someone interesting.
Speaker 7 (10:48):
Was a guy named Derek Hamilton, who was an ex
Cohn who had been kind of like a jail house lawyer.
Speaker 14 (10:54):
We meet her and Hispanic woman, beautiful, long hair. You
know it up.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
This is Derek remembering meeting Frenchie for the first time.
He's a bigger guy, broadcast, about six foot two. He's
got a single gold tooth in the front and a
shaved head, big presence.
Speaker 14 (11:14):
I've been in Queens Boulevard, Course Street from the courthouse.
There was some restaurant there and we had dinner at tell.
Speaker 7 (11:23):
And so we're just chatting and he says, oh, you know,
I see that you're kind of interested in this issue
of you know, the Brooklyn DA's office having screwed somebody over.
I know a lot of cases in Brooklyn of wrongful convictions.
Oh okay, really okay, good. You know, I was kind
of in the New York office sharpening pencils, so that
seemed like a good idea to me to follow up
on that tip.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
So Frenchie brings it to her editor.
Speaker 7 (11:45):
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? Like what connects them?
And I was so offended by that question. I was like, well,
(12:05):
I don't know, maybe they didn't do it like that
connects them. You know, maybe they're all.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Black, you know, and the railroaded.
Speaker 7 (12:11):
By the criminal justice system. 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? So
I nod politely, you know, yes, ma'am, and I'm like,
I go back to my desk, kind of grumbling under
(12:32):
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 Luis Garsower.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
This smoke behind the story. That's after the break.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Hi, it's Steve Fishman. I want to introduce you briefly
to our next series featuring deep reporting and an amazing story.
This one's about a journalist who goes on the hunt
for some torturers, her torturers. It's great. Here's the trailer.
Speaker 15 (13:28):
It was much more than a feeling. I knew that
I was being followed.
Speaker 6 (13:35):
Late afternoon, nineteen seventy seven, Medium Lewin is running for
her life. She's nineteen. Argentina's military has taken power.
Speaker 16 (13:45):
I turn my head and I see a dark red
Ford falcon and a long gun barrel hanging out from
one of the windows. He says, I am the man
responsible for your life and your death.
Speaker 6 (14:01):
Four decades later, Medium is among the few to survive.
Her fellow prisoners had been put on planes and tossed
into the sea.
Speaker 15 (14:10):
This plane was used to throw people to their deaths,
people I knew, people I loved. I still ask myself
why did I survive? I'd say it was to bring
at least some of those pilots of the death flights
to justice.
Speaker 6 (14:28):
From Orbit Media, This is Avenger.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
A quick word about subscriptions. If you love ads, listen
on you're not so keen on ads, sign up for
True Crime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts. That's our subscription channel.
You'll get no ads, and also you can binge the
entire Avenger series. It's just two ninety nine a month. Thanks,
(15:01):
Welcome back.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
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.
Speaker 7 (15:15):
So I meet with Derek again. And Derek, you know,
he was interesting because he knew some things, but he
did not know a lot of things. 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,
(15:39):
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, and I thought, oh my god, you know
what am I going to do?
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Now?
Speaker 7 (15:54):
You know, I don't have anywhere to turn.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
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.
Speaker 7 (16:18):
So he gives me, Shabacca chaqueurs for forty.
Speaker 5 (16:24):
I probably rewrote that one hundred times because I wanted
to make sure that I was saying what I wanted
to say.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
This is Shabacca Shakur. 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. More on that.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Later, Shabacca and Derek got close in prison. Now, Derek
ERGI Shabaka to talk to FRENCHI. So I called her.
Speaker 5 (17:05):
She was like, okay, you said, scar Seller is 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.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
In that dense document, two pages focused on Louis Garcela.
Speaker 7 (17:33):
He says in his in this document, it says something something.
Louis Garcella was notorious in Brooklyn for his you know,
unethical and you know framing people basically. In fact, he
was known to use the same witness over and over again,
a woman named Teresa Gomez. And I'm like, gee, you
(17:56):
know that's it. That's the thing, that's like, that's what
I've been waiting for. I'm waiting to find out the
name of the of the witness.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
So Frenchie has the name. Now she does what a
lot of us do when we're hunting for information. She googles.
Speaker 7 (18:10):
That's my big investigative reporting secret. So I google Lewis, Garsola,
and Teresa Gomes together. You know, I don't know what
I thought I was going to find, and I got
a hit, and I'm like, well, this is curious. It
was like some random Google forum, a cigar smoker forum
(18:36):
where somebody has asked I think the question on the
forum was when did you first smoke your first great cigar?
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Okay, so a cigar smoker's form not exactly where i'd
expect to find a lead about a crooked.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Cop exactly, but what she comes across there turns out
to be crucial to her understanding of the entire story.
Speaker 7 (18:58):
This guy man answers. The first cigar, which truly made
me realize how much I was going to enjoy cigars,
was smoked in nineteen eighty eight at a bar on
Remsen Street in Brooklyn, New York called Callahan's. The cigar
was given to me by a legendary detective of the
Brooklyn North Homicide Squad named Louis Garcela. Lewis had been
(19:21):
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
(19:44):
folly 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 it's
the district attorney and he's now at charge.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Here's what I'm wondering, What the fuck the assistant district attorney,
he's not the district attorney. Just to be clear about that,
it's basically saying that no one should have believed his witness,
the one he put on the stand, who happens to
be the lone eyewitness, and two alleged murders by Robert
Hill on two different occasions.
Speaker 7 (20:23):
My head mark is probably still on the roof of
the New York Times office from my jumping up and
down and realizing that I had hit batter.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
So Frenchie was excited by her discovery. I want to
point out, though, that what the prosecutor is saying is
that he'd be stunned if a jury believed Teresa Gomez.
What he's not saying is that she's lying.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
So Frenchie now has the name of this troubled and
troubling witness. And now she's also got the name of
the person Teresa helped convictive murder one, Robert Hill, former
drug dealer. So Steve, where does she go from here?
Speaker 1 (21:02):
She goes to prison unannounced to find Robert Hill.
Speaker 7 (21:12):
Oh my god, these are lives, These are real lives.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
More on those real lives. After the break, Frenchie is
waiting in the visitors room for Robert Hill. He's serving
(21:38):
eighteen years to life. He's not expecting her.
Speaker 7 (21:42):
So this guy comes in. He 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, you know oo, So
I don't see anybody here who's here to see me?
And so I raised my hands and he looks at
(22:02):
me like, you know, who the heck is that?
Speaker 16 (22:05):
You know?
Speaker 7 (22:05):
But all right, fine, you know, he doesn't have anything
better to do. 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 Roblanz.
I'm a reporter for the New York Times. I'm doing
a story on Teresa Gomez. And he just froze and
(22:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
But for Robert Hill, talking about Teresa Gomez is not
an easy decision. He's about to come up for parole,
and one of the things that's drilled into somebody applying
for parole is you got to go in, take responsibility,
show remorse, you gotta add forgiveness. Now that's going to
(23:02):
be hard to do if you're also telling a New
York Times reporter, hey, I didn't do it.
Speaker 7 (23:08):
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
(23:30):
I said something so ridiculous because I believed it.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
That's our frenchie. She'll save your life at your peril.
And Robert Hill, let's face it, he needs his life saved,
so maybe it's worth the risk. Hill starts talking and
he tells Frenchie Teresa Gomez is a liar. Frenchie goes
on her way, and soon she's working on a on
(24:00):
page story for The Times, one that she hopes will
make a splash.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Standard journalism practice is to get a comment from everyone
mentioned in a story, especially a high stake story like
this one. She calls the District Attorney's office.
Speaker 7 (24:17):
It's like six o'clock that Thursday, and I call the
spokesman and I said, I got a two thousand and
five hundred word article about all these guys, you know,
say that they were wrongly accused, and you know what
it doesn't have It doesn't have a quote from the
Brooklyn District Attorney's office because your quote was so pathetic.
(24:38):
I said, so we're going to do a do over,
and it's a one question do over. Do you stand
behind these convictions or not?
Speaker 2 (24:51):
That's it.
Speaker 7 (24:52):
We're not going to negotiate a response. We're not going
to be like, oh, if the record background upside down
inside out, what's your answer? So the spoken said, oh,
come back, okay, call me back, say call back, and
he said, well, you have to come back to the
office tomorrow. I'm crying out loud. I go to the
book and District Attorney's office sit down, like, all right,
what is it. We're reopening all of Scarcella's cases.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
And I'm like, oh my god.
Speaker 7 (25:25):
So I go back to the office and I will
find the editor, the same person that had originally asked
me what connects these cases? And I said, you're not
going to believe this. The DA is reopening all of
his cases. They're going to go back thirty years. And
her eyes welled up in tears and she said, oh
my god. She goes, these are lives, These are real
(25:47):
lives that you're impacting.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Frenchy story breaks on May eleventh, twenty thirteen, the headline
review of fifty Brooks murder Cases ordered. The story lays
it all out how Teresa Gomez says she witnessed six
separate murders, who sees six murders, and Frenchie tells other
(26:13):
stories like Shabacca's how Scarcella told the court he had
made an incriminating statement that Shabacca says he never made
a copy of Frenchie's story eventually arrives at the prison library.
Speaker 5 (26:26):
It got spread around, you know, word went like wildfire,
and everybody had their own copy that they took back
to their cell.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
By this point, Shehabacca's been incarcerated for twenty two years.
Speaker 5 (26:37):
I had a couple of copies. I even mail copies
out for people like yo. Look, so we was excited
about it. And I think that that was the first
time that I knew, like I always thought I was
going to get out, but I knew I was going
to get out.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Then Sabacca'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,
you see, Scarcela was the cop who arrested Derek for murder,
(27:16):
a murder he insists he didn't do.
Speaker 14 (27:18):
You gotta understand something, man, My kids grew up without
a father.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
This bass who was able to raise his.
Speaker 14 (27:28):
This guy is a piece of shit, but he gets
to run around.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Like he's God.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
It's Derek and his jailhouse law firm that will lead
the charge against Scarcella. With Derek and Louis, it will
be a zero some game. If one rises, the other
must fall. We gotta get at this guy. Here's where
(28:04):
I entered the story. It was a few years after
Frenchy's scoop. I was a New York magazine journalist. Back then,
I just moved to a new neighborhood in Brooklyn, and
on a whim, I decided to open a cocktail bar.
I did not have a grand vision. There was an
empty space two hundred and twenty four square feet. How
(28:25):
hard could it be? I called it IRVS after my
dad and I loved the place. The neighborhood loved it.
The people on the block loved it. Some even worked there.
But that little dead end on which IRVS resided. What
a block old school? Hey, it was like the nineties
(28:47):
in New York City. That block. One day there was
a guy chasing somebody with a machete. Another day a
guy ran down the block shooting at someone, fortunately not
a terrific shot. Intellectually, politically, I'm skeptical of the police.
I marched in the marches. Their methods sometimes frightened me.
(29:11):
But when violence erupted on my block, the block where
my bar resided. I needed someone to call. Who else
was I going to call but the police. It turned
out that Louis Scarcela had spent a good part of
his career patrolling my bar's dead end block. And there
was a moment I found myself wondering if I needed
(29:34):
a tough cop to come in and restore some order
so I could run my little business. Later, Louis would
come by and he'd offer an appraisal, an appraisal which
proved prophetic.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
I remember that bar distinctly. It was where I entered
the story, coming there one night, sitting down with you
and having the first big conversation about this series.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
I remember that first night you came, and I remember
you telling me about your experience with cops.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
To be clear, there's been more than one, so we
could be talking about the time I got pulled over
twice within about twenty minutes because I had a vanilla
roma air freshenery in my rear view mirror.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yes you did. But the one I remember, the one
that made an impression on me, starts with a pull
up on a scaffold.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I'm entering my third year of law school, standing on
a street corner in Adams, Morgan and Washington, DC. You know,
I got my satchel on because at the time I
used to wear a satchel and keep my palm my
poems in my satchel, and I was first starting to
grow on my drop my dreads. I'm with my buddy,
who was a study who the study he was at
Georgetown Loan and he decides to jump up on a
(30:49):
scaffold and do a pull up. Okay, and I think
I jumped up and did maybe did a pull up
with me, and we got down. I turned around and
there as a cop. I don't know where the fuck
it came from, just next to us. Get down on
the ground, Get down the ground, and I me, you know,
having done two years of law school at this point.
Speaker 4 (31:12):
I got it.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
I just I took primpro. I'm just more like, I
haven't violated any laws that you're just gonna come in
broad daylight and tell me to get down on my girl,
get down on my knees. I'm not doing that. I
don't know what happened. Five more police cars show up,
and at some point my friend and I get separated somehow,
(31:33):
I end up in an alley on my back and
the three or four on me.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
My family has Sunday dinner. I don't show up.
Speaker 10 (31:42):
No one knows where I am.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
I remember hearing that story and thinking, man, this is
crazy law school students doing a pull up and then
end up getting beaten by cops. That's just racism, flat out.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
You'd be right except for one thing. Those cops who
arrested and beat me they were black.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Wow. I did not expect that.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, most people don't. But for me, what I took
away from that is that a cop is always a cop,
always blue, and to cops, I'm a black man, and
to be a black man, at least in some spaces
in this country, is to be a suspect.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Well, here's what I can say. We enter this journey
through different doors, don't we.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Yes, we do, and it's gonna be quite a ride.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Buckle up. In this series, we're gonna look at it
all from the inside. We'll get deep on Scarsella. We're here.
Speaker 4 (32:47):
We're here in the belly of the beast, but we're
here at doing what we got to do, and we
did it.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
We did God's work and we did.
Speaker 10 (32:57):
It to me.
Speaker 14 (32:58):
He's no better than a cereal kill right, because you
killed people's dreams.
Speaker 8 (33:02):
This diabolical character that he's been depicted as is just
pure nonsense.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
He had a great reputation well into a crazy world
of violence.
Speaker 8 (33:12):
This guy runs right down the middle of eight the Avenue.
Speaker 7 (33:15):
And he's got a gun.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Sergeant just you know, shot him.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
He goes down.
Speaker 7 (33:19):
Oh my god, so like the wild West.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
And we'll hear from the politicians trying to tame it.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
I am prepared to do anything to take back our streets.
By night as well as by day. We'll dive into
the Brooklyn criminal justice system. She definitely testified Hyazac Kite
one day.
Speaker 8 (33:39):
He's a judge and he puts his arms around me
and he says, we both know who this guy is.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
We both know he's guilty.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
And we'll follow Derek Hamilton and his band of convicted
murders who created their own law firm behind bars to
take on Scarsella and fight for their freedom. Its God, God,
when it comes to criminal law.
Speaker 14 (34:02):
Everybody knows how to make emotions, but how many times
do you really know what your burden is?
Speaker 5 (34:07):
Look, man, this is our team right here, This is
the AI team.
Speaker 14 (34:09):
We're gonna work for these cases and we're gonna.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Get out and targeting the detective at the center of
it all.
Speaker 14 (34:16):
I say, damn, it's the same fuck or that frame me.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
If I did one nanogram one nanogram of.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
What they said I did, and you know what I
mean by one nanogram and infinitesimal.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
If I did one of the things that they said
I did, I would have killed myself.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
I love myself.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
I'm not gonna kill myself. What do you love about
your simple I'm.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Gonna tell you.
Speaker 4 (34:55):
I think.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
I'm a very good person. Yeah, we'll see about.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
That next time. On the Burden, I try to get
Louis Scarcella to give it all up. He used to
be a talker, then with the bad headlines he mostly
shut up. Frenchie couldn't get him to talk. But I'm
on a mission. Turns out that mission starts with a
plunge into the freezing Atlantic. Make sure your.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Baby, you're gonna come off today?
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Well I did it last time. Yeah, it did, certainly did.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
That's next time. On the Burden, Stone.
Speaker 12 (35:38):
Common strating you can't run for shelter.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
There's nothing you can't do.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
The Burden is created by Steve Fishman. It's hosted and
reported by Steve Fishman and myself Do's Devlin Ross. Our
story editor is Dan Bobkoff. Our senior producer Simon Rittner.
Our producer is Sonam Skelly. Our associate producer is Austin Smith.
Our fact checker is Sona Avakian. Our production coordinator is
Davon Paradise. Mixing and sound design is provided by Mumble Media.
(36:13):
Our executive producers are Fisher Stevens, Steve Fishman and Evan Williams.
Additional production help has been provided by Josie Holtzman, Isaac Kestenbaum,
Naomi Brauner, Lucy Soucek, Drew Nellis, Micah Hazel, Priscilla A. Labbi,
Saxon faird, Katie Simon and Katie Springer. We want to
give us special thanks to Ellen Horn, Zach Stewart, Pontier,
(36:37):
Lizzie Jacobs, Nathan Tempe, To Buya Black, Rachel Morrissey, Mark
Smirling and Lila Robinson. Special thanks to Marcy Wiseman. We
want to thank our agents Ben Davis and Marissa Horowitz.
Special thanks to my wife Halana.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Special thanks to Ria Julian, my wife.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Legal support has been provided by Mona Hook at MKSR
ll P, and a very special thanks to Evan Williams,
one of our executive producers and the person who made
this podcast possible. We are honored to feature the song
black Lightning from the Bell Rais is our theme music.
The Burden is a production of Orbit Media and association
(37:15):
with Signal Company.
Speaker 10 (37:16):
Number one.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Season two of The Burden Empire on Blood will be
available everywhere you get your podcasts on August seventh. All
episodes will be available early and ad free, along with
exclusive bonus content on Orbit's newly launched True Crime Clubhouse
as subscription channel on Apple Podcasts. It's only two ninety
(37:55):
nine a month.
Hosts And Creators
Dax-Devlon Ross
Steve Fishman
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