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