Saturday Matinee: The Burden

This episode delves into the story of Luis Scarcella, a former detective whose controversial methods led to multiple wrongful convictions.

1. Luis Scarcella used unethical methods to solve cases, leading to numerous wrongful convictions.
2. Many of Scarcella’s cases have been revisited, resulting in exonerations, showing systemic issues in the justice process.
3. The episode illustrates the importance of ethical practices in law enforcement to prevent miscarriages of justice.
4. It emphasizes the role of investigative journalism in uncovering truths and correcting past injustices.
5. The story of Scarcella is a cautionary tale about the consequences of a win-at-all-costs approach in policing.

1: Introduction

Overview of the episode's theme focusing on justice and Scarcella's controversial career.
Noiser: "Justice is a deeply primal feeling, evident even in children."

2: The Fall of Scarcella

Details Scarcella's tactics and the subsequent legal challenges that led to exonerations.
Steve Fishman: "Scarcella was known as the closer, the one who got the confession."

3: The Victims' Stories

Shares personal accounts from those wrongfully convicted by Scarcella's actions.
Louis Scarcella: "I intended it to. When am I supposed to kiss him?"

4: Investigative Breakthroughs

Discusses the role of journalists and lawyers in revisiting these cases.
Frances Robles: "This is going to get you exonerated."

5: Reflections and Conclusions

Considers the broader implications of Scarcella's methods on the justice system.
Dax Devlin Ross: "Is Louis a hero cop, a scapegoat, or a supervillain?"

1. Educate Yourself: Learn about your rights and the legal system to protect yourself against injustice.
2. Support Transparency: Advocate for body cameras and other forms of accountability in policing.
3. Engage in Civic Activities: Participate in community oversight committees to oversee local law enforcement.
4. Promote Ethical Journalism: Support investigative journalism that holds power to account.
5. Stay Informed: Follow legal cases in the media and question narratives presented by authorities.

On today’s Saturday Matinee, we get the scoop on "disgraced detective" Louis N. Scarcella who helped incarcerate over twenty people that ended up walking free. Was Scarcella a crooked cop, or is there more to this story?

People

Louis Scarcella, Frances Robles, Dax Devlin Ross, Steve Fishman

Content Warnings:

None

There are more ways than ever to listen to history daily ad free. Listen with wondery in the Wondery app, or you can get all of history daily, plus other fantastic history podcasts@intohistory.com. Dot I'm no anthropologist or social scientist, but I have a hunch that justice is a deeply primal feeling. You need only look at squabbling children to know how early and strongly the feeling manifests. Protests that's not fair.

They'll scream. And what is our desire for revenge if not a selfish will to balance the scales, to see justice done? Why do we root for the underdog? Find satisfaction in the fall of the hubrid? We want a level playing field.

We want reward and punishment equally meted out. But our world is one where bad things happen to good people and bad people can get away with almost anything. It's not fair. And today we have a tale of such injustice. On this week's Saturday matinee, we bring you a teaser from the first episode of the new podcast, the Burden, in which a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent realize the same New York detective helped put many of them away.

Educating themselves on the law and enlisting the help of a New York Times reporter, they attempt to find justice for themselves and others. And three decades later, more than 20 people this detective helped in prison have walked free. In the media, he's a disgraced detective, a rogue cop who hoodwinked an entire system. But is this a fair assessment or yet another injustice? I hope you enjoy?

While you're listening, be sure to search for and follow the burden. We put a link in the show notes to make it easy for you.

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Steve Fishman
Dax this is the first story I. Ever heard Luis Scarcella tell the legendary New York detective. Tell me more. So Detective Scarcella is with his partner. It's lunchtime, and Detective Scarcella and his partner decide that this is the moment to track down a murder suspect.

Louis Scarcella
We park right here. Right here. Lo and behold, a man, six foot, 300 pounds, comes out of the house. I said, that's him. I run over him.

I put the gun on him. He's got a sig Sauer in his waistband, a big sig sauer. I jump on him. He's going for the gun. I put my Glock to his head and pull the trigger.

But the gun's no good. My gun's no good. I grab him and I knock him to the ground. Did you ever imagine that clock goes off? I.

I intended it to. I intended it to. When am I supposed to kiss him?

Steve Fishman
Welcome to Louis, Brooklyn, where bad guys were around every corner, and it was up to detective 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 wanted law and order. Luis Carcella had movie star good looks, smoked a cigar everywhere. He seemed like he was the kind of tough cop the city needed.

Louis Scarcella
He was everybodys 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.

Steve Fishman
Luis Garcella was known as the closer, the one who got the confession. And with that came fame. He was on the doctor Phil show. No one knows the art of getting confessions better than 29 year veteran New York City homicide detectives. And he earned the respect of his peers.

Louis Scarcella
He's my guy. He's my man, you know? He's my friend. A hell of a cop. Great detective.

Frances Robles
He looks like shit now with all. This shit, Steve, the poor. The poor guy, that he beat the. Balls off him, you know? That's right.

Dax Devlin Ross
Years later, the Luis Garcella story changed. The once decorated detective now stands accused. Of coaching witnesses, forcing confessions, and trading drugs for testimony. Scorsella cracked numerous murder cases in the eighties and nineties, but his techniques have been questioned. A group of convicted murders says it all comes back to one rogue official.

And they want their names cleared. Oh, yeah. I'm the, um, devil and disgrace devil. Yeah. Yeah.

Louis Scarcella
Well, what can I tell you? I'm Steve Fishman. I've lived in New York a long time. I've been writing about crime for a long time. Son of Sam.

Steve Fishman
Bernie Madoff. They opened up to me. When I heard these headlines about Scarcella. My thought, this cannot be the whole story. Was this really about one rogue cop who, what, hoodwinked an entire system?

Dax Devlin Ross
And I'm Dax Devlin 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. We're gonna go deep.

Steve Fishman
Is Louis a hero cop, a scapegoat, or a supervillain who helped put away more than 20 innocent men, men who now want revenge?

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Storm cloud a comin coming straight to you. You can run for shelter. There's nothing you can do.

Dax Devlin Ross
From orbit media, this is the burden.

Steve Fishman
Today on the show, the scoop.

You gotta hold on tightly don't you tell it go. I'm gonna ride this mama till we both let's go.

Dax Devlin Ross
All right, Steve, where do we begin? We begin with the person who broke the Louis Scarcella story long before you or I got involved. That's Frances Robles, known to her New York Times colleagues as Frenchie. The puerto rican girl known as Frenchie. I do not speak French.

Steve Fishman
Frenchie's from Queens, from an italian neighborhood called Howard Beach. Howard beach was a astoundingly racist place. And growing up there, it taught Frenchie to be fierce. My best friend in elementary school was Puerto rican. And so this one kid was like, hey, Puerto Rican, where's your switch play?

Frances Robles
And my girlfriend Genevieve and I, we went to his house in 6th grade. We rang the doorbell, and his mother answered the door. She was pregnant, her belly out to wherever is Anthony home? And she's like, Antony? So he comes and he's, you know, you can see he's kind of looking at us rather suspiciously, like, what are the two puerto rican girls that I bully in school doing at my door, and we beat the crap out of him right there in front of his mother.

Dax Devlin Ross
Fast forward to 2013, and Frenchie is at the New York Times. She's itching for a good story, something that will make a splash one day. She's on a routine assignment when she meets someone interesting. Was a guy named Derek Hamilton, who was an ex con who had been kind of like a jailhouse lawyer. And so we're just chatting, and he says, oh, you know, I know a lot of cases in Brooklyn of wrongful convictions.

Steve Fishman
So Frenchie brings it to her editor. 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?

Frances Robles
And I was so offended by that question. 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. Go back to my dad's kind of grumbling under my breath, and I called Eric, 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 Louis Garcella.

Dax Devlin Ross
Derrick 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 grapevine. So I meet with Derek again. 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, 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 gonna crack this case open, and I got nothing.

Steve Fishman
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 440 motion, and it's what you file if you're trying to get your conviction overturned. So he gives me Shabaka, Shakur's 440.

Louis Scarcella
I probably rewrote that a hundred times because I wanted to make sure that I was saying what I wanted to. Say, this is Chewbacca Shakur. Scarcella helped convict Chebaca of a double murder, which he says he didn't do. His 440 was impressive. 60 pages of legal argument written while he was part of a prison law firm.

Dax Devlin Ross
That's right, a law firm formed in prison and run by convicted murderers, all of whom claimed innocence. So I called her, and she was like, okay, you said, scarcella is a crooked cop. I read your brief. I said, listen, I gave her a list of names, a list of, you know, people she could talk to, information that would substantiate that he was a crooked copy. And I remember telling her, like, you, an investigative reporter, go and investigate.

In that dense document, two pages focused on Luis Garcella. He says, in this document, something, something. Louis Scarcella was known to use the same witness over and over again, a woman named Theresa Gomez. And I'm like, ching, you know, that's it. That's the name.

Frances Robles
That's what I've been waiting for. So Frenchie has the name now. She does what a lot of us do when we're hunting for information. She googles. That's my big investigative reporting secret.

And I got a hit. And I'm like, well, this is curious. It was like some random Google forum, a cigar smoker forum, where somebody has asked. I think the question on the forum was, when did you first smoke your first grade cigar? This guy, a man answers the first cigar, which truly made me realize how much I was going to enjoy cigars, was smoked in 1988.

The cigar was given to me by a legendary detective of the Brooklyn north homicide squad named Lewis Garcella. Lewis had been 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 folly to even think that anyone would believe Gomez about anything, let alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy killed two different people.

And the guy signs it, and he's now a judge.

Steve Fishman
She goes to prison unannounced to find Robert Hill. If I asked you how many subscriptions you have, would you be able to list all of them and how much you're paying? If you would have asked me this question before I started using Rocket money, I would have said yes. But let me tell you, I would have been so wrong. I can't believe how many I had.

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Steve Fishman
Frenchie is waiting in the visitor's room for Robert Hill. 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, who the heck is that? You know? But all right, fine.

Frances Robles
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 Robles. I'm a reporter for the New York Times. I'm doing a story on Teresa Gomez. And he just froze.

And his eyes welled up with tears. And he said, I've been telling people about Teresa Gomez for 25 years. And I said, well, now somebody's listening.

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, no, this isn't going to mess up your parole. I said, this is going to get you exonerated.

And I said something so ridiculous because I believed it.

Dax Devlin Ross
Frenchie's story breaks on May 11, 2013. The headline review of 50 Brooklyn murder cases ordered. The story lays it all out, how Teresa Gomez says she witnessed six separate murders. Who sees six murders? Chewbacca's friend Derek, the one who set all of this in motion.

At first he's pleased when he sees the article, but then he gets angry. This is personal. I say, damn, man, it's the same motherfucker that framed me. You see, Scarcella was the cop who arrested Derek for murder. A murder he insists he didn't do.

You gotta understand something, man. This guy is a piece of shit. But he gets to run around like he's God.

We gotta get at this guy. We gotta attack Scott Selim. If I did one nano, one nanogram of what they said I did, I would have killed myself.

Stone cloud are coming. Coming straight to you. You can run for shelter. There's nothing you can do.

Steve Fishman
You've been listening to half of episode one of the burden. To hear episode one in its entirety, please find and follow the burden wherever you get your podcasts and hear episodes of the burden one week early and ad free with exclusive content. Subscribe to true crime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts. You gotta hold on tightly. Don't you tell it.

Go.

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