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Hey everyone, it's Jason Flamm. As you might

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have noticed, we've begun dropping some clips

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of our favorite podcast into the feed here

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that we feel are telling the most important

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innocence and justice stories. So

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today we have a special clip

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of a new investigative true crime podcast here.

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He is called The Burden from Morbid Media.

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It tells the story of a once celebrated

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NYPD detective named Luis Scarcella

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who became embroiled in controversy

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by the innocent men whom he

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helped wrongfully convict. The

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series follows the host, Steve Fishman,

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who gains Garcella's trust, allowing

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us to listen in from Scarcella's

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perspective as he continues

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to battle people whom i'm regular users

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will recognize Derek Hamilton, Shabaka,

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Shaquur, Nelson Cruz, all

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of whom banded together while still

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in prison to fight their common

0:58

enemy. The lucked and legal

1:00

heroes have helped to free over twenty

1:03

more victims of this same detective,

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Lewis Garcela, whose handiwork

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has cost New York City over

1:10

one hundred and fifty million dollars in

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counting. So here's the clip. Don't

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forget to subscribe to the Burden wherever

1:17

you get your podcasts, and follow

1:19

along as this incredible

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story unfolds.

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Dax, this is the first story

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I ever heard Louis Scarcella tell.

1:40

The legendary New York detective

1:42

tell me more so.

1:44

Detective Scarcella is with his partner.

1:46

It's lunchtime, and Detective Scarcella

1:49

and his partner decide that

1:51

this is the moment to track down

1:54

a murder suspect. We

1:57

talk right here, right

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here, lo, and

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behold, a man six

2:04

foot three hundred pounds.

2:05

Comes out of the house.

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I said, that's him.

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Wow.

2:10

I run over him. I put the gun on him.

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He's got a sig sour in his waistband,

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all big sig sur I

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jump on him.

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He's going for the gun. I put my

2:21

glock to his head and pulled the trigger.

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But the gun's no good.

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My gun's no good. I grab

2:28

them and I knock him to the ground.

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Do you ever imagine that clock goes off? I

2:35

mean I intended it too. I

2:37

intended it to one

2:39

am. I supposed to kiss him.

2:45

Welcome to Louis Brooklyn, where bad

2:47

guys were around every corner and

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it was up to Detective Scarsella to

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protect the people. They

2:55

needed me, and

2:58

I loved doing

3:00

it. Louis heyday was

3:02

the eighties and nineties, and back then all

3:05

New Yorkers wanted law and order.

3:09

Louis Garcela had movie star good looks,

3:11

smoked a cigar everywhere. He

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seemed like he was the kind of tough cop

3:16

the city needed.

3:17

He was everybody's

3:19

idea of the

3:22

prince of the city. He was

3:24

the guy who solved the hardest

3:27

cases and made sure the

3:29

worst killers were brought to justice.

3:34

Louis Garcela was known as the closer,

3:37

the one who got the confession, and

3:39

with that came fame. He

3:42

was on the Doctor Phil show No one

3:44

knows the art of getting confessions better

3:46

than twenty nine year better in New York City

3:48

homicide detectives.

3:50

And he earned the respect of his peers.

3:53

Louis my god, he's you know, he's

3:55

my friend, the de Helibo cop Rate

3:58

detective. He

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looks like shit.

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Now we'll all this shit.

4:05

Steve the poor the poor

4:07

guy that beat the balls off of me.

4:09

You know that's right.

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Years later, the Louis Scarcella

4:14

story changed.

4:16

The once decorated detective now stands

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accused of coaching witnesses, coercing

4:21

confessions, and trading drugs for testimonies.

4:23

Garcela cracked numerous murder cases

4:26

in the eighties and nineties, but his techniques had

4:28

been questioned, and a group of convicted murders

4:30

says, it all comes back to one rogue official

4:33

and they want their names clear.

4:35

Oh yeah, I'm the

4:38

devil and disgraced

4:40

devil. Yeah yeah, Well,

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what can I tell you? I'm

4:47

Steve Fishman. I've lived in New York

4:49

a long time. I've been writing about

4:51

crime for a long time. Son of Sam

4:53

Bernie Madoff. They opened

4:55

up to me when I heard these

4:58

headlines about Scarcella. I

5:00

thought this cannot be the whole

5:02

story. Was this really about

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one rogue cop who what

5:06

hoodwinked an entire system?

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And I'm dak Stevlin Ross, journalist,

5:12

author, lawyer. I've written about criminal

5:15

justice for years. I know

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what it's like to be wrongfully arrested personally,

5:20

and I'm interested in the people who went to jail

5:22

and maybe shouldn't have.

5:24

We're gonna go deep. Is Louis

5:26

a hero cop, a scapegoat,

5:29

or a super villain who helped put

5:31

away more than twenty innocent men,

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men who now want revenge.

5:46

Stormcloud of common

5:49

strate to you, you

5:51

can't run for shelter.

5:54

There's nohing you can do.

5:59

From orbit media. Yeah, this is

6:02

the burden today

6:10

on the show The Scoop.

6:19

You gotta hold all the time.

6:41

All right, Steve, where do we

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begin?

6:45

We begin with the person who broke the Louis

6:47

Scarcella story long before

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you or I got involved. That's

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Francis Robless, known to her

6:54

New York Times colleagues as Frenchie.

6:57

The Porto Rican grow known as Frenchie. I do not speak

6:59

French.

7:00

Frenchie's from Queens, from an Italian

7:02

neighborhood called Howard Beach.

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Howard Beach was a

7:08

astoundingly racist place.

7:10

And growing up there, it taught Frenchie

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to be fierce.

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My best friend in elementary school is Perto Rican, and

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so this one kid was like, hey, ladarica

7:19

Isy switch Lane and

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my girlfriend Jenevieve and I we

7:24

went to his house in

7:26

sixth grade. We rang the doorbell

7:29

and his mother answered the door. She was pregnant, her

7:31

belly out to wherever is Anthony

7:33

home? And she's like ane.

7:37

So he comes and he's you know you could see he's

7:39

kind of looking at us rather suspiciously, like one of the

7:41

two Puerto Rican girls that I believe in school doing at

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my door. And we beat the crap out

7:45

of him right there in front of his mother.

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Fast forward to twenty thirteen

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and Frenchie is at the New York Times. She's

7:57

itching for a good story, something that will

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make us. One

8:01

day, she's on a routine assignment when

8:03

she meets someone interesting.

8:06

Was a guy named Derek Hamilton, who was an ex con

8:08

who had been kind of like a jailhouse lawyer,

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and so we're just chatting and he says,

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oh, you know, I know a lot of cases in Brooklyn

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of wrongful convictions.

8:20

So Frenchie brings it to her editor and

8:23

I'm.

8:23

Like, oh, I have a tip. You know, there's a lot

8:25

of wrongfully convicted guys in Brooklyn,

8:27

and I have a good source. He was a jailhouse lawyer.

8:30

And so my editor says to me, well,

8:34

what else do the cases have in common? And

8:37

I was so offended by

8:40

that question, Like I just thought it was

8:42

such a hoity toity New York Times

8:45

view of journalism that

8:47

I couldn't just come up with a wrongful conviction.

8:49

I had to come up with what connects them? Go

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back to my dask kind of grumbling under

8:54

my breath, and I called Derek

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and I'm like, all right, well, this editor

8:59

of mine

9:02

wants to know what

9:04

connects these cases. And

9:09

he goes, well, a lot

9:11

of them are the same cop and

9:14

his name is Lewis Garsala.

9:21

Derek Hamilton was out of prison but still

9:24

connected to people on the inside.

9:26

He's a self taught lawyer, learned the law

9:28

behind bars, and he was

9:30

still in the prison grape vine.

9:33

So I meet with Derek again.

9:36

He told me kind of loosey

9:39

goosey stuff, like he said, oh that this

9:41

guy was notorious for using

9:43

the same witness over and over again. But

9:45

he didn't know the names of the defendants

9:48

who had had the same witness testify

9:50

against them. And he did not know the name of

9:52

the witness. So I

9:55

was like, oh, brother, you

9:57

know, here I am talking this up to my editor,

9:59

like I'm some hotshot who's going to crack this case

10:01

open. And I got nothing.

10:03

So she went back to Derek. She

10:06

needed the name of that very talented

10:08

witness, and that's when Derek gives

10:10

her a legal document. This

10:13

was a document written by one of his friends

10:15

still in jail, another jailhouse

10:18

lawyer. It's called a four to forty

10:20

motion, and it's what you file if

10:22

you're trying to get your conviction overturned.

10:26

So he gives me Shabacca

10:29

chaqueurs for forty.

10:32

I probably rewrote that one hundred times

10:36

because I wanted to make

10:38

sure that I was saying what I

10:41

wanted to say.

10:42

This is Shabacca chacor. Scarcella

10:44

helped convict Shabacca of a double murder,

10:47

which he says he didn't do. His four

10:49

to forty was impressive, sixty

10:51

pages of legal argument written

10:53

while he was part of a prison law firm. That's

10:56

right, a law firm formed

10:58

in prison and run by convicted

11:00

murderers, all of whom claimed innocence.

11:04

So I called her.

11:05

She was like, okay, you said,

11:07

scar Sellers a crooked cop. I read

11:09

your brief. I said, listen.

11:12

I gave a list of names, a list of you

11:14

know, people she could talk

11:16

to, information that would

11:19

substantiate that he was a crooked cop. And

11:22

I remember telling her, like you an investigative

11:24

reporter, go and investigate.

11:28

In that dense document, two

11:30

pages focused on Louis Garcela.

11:33

He says in this document something

11:35

something Louis Garcella was

11:38

known to use the same witness over

11:40

and over again, a woman

11:42

named Teresa Gomez. And I'm like,

11:44

gee, you know that's it. That's the name, that's that's

11:46

what I've been waiting for.

11:47

So Frenchie has the name. Now

11:50

she does what a lot of us do when we're hunting

11:52

for information. She googles.

11:56

That's my big investigative

11:59

reporting secret.

12:03

And I got a hit, and I'm like, well,

12:05

this is curious. It was like some random

12:08

Google forum, a

12:10

cigar smoker forum where

12:14

somebody has asked. I think the question

12:16

on the forum was when did you first smoke

12:18

your first great cigar? This

12:20

guy, a man answers.

12:23

The first cigar, which truly

12:25

made me realize how much I was going to

12:27

enjoy cigars, was smoked in nineteen

12:30

eighty eight. The cigar was given

12:32

to me by a legendary detective of

12:34

the Brooklyn North homicide Squad named

12:36

Louis Garcela. Lewis had

12:38

been the detective on the first two murder

12:40

cases I prosecuted, both of

12:42

which featured the same witness testifying

12:45

against the same defendant for two different

12:48

murders. The defendant was a dealer

12:50

named Robert Hill. The witness was

12:52

named Teresa Gomez, a woman

12:55

who was even then ravaged

12:57

from head to toe by the scourge of crack

12:59

cocaine. It was near falling

13:02

to even think that anyone would

13:04

believe Gomez about anything, let

13:07

alone the fact that she witnessed

13:09

the same guy kill two

13:11

different people. And the guy signs

13:13

it and he's now a charge.

13:19

She goes to prison unannounced

13:21

to find Robert Hill. Frenchie

13:32

is waiting in the visitors room for Robert

13:34

Hill.

13:35

So this guy comes in and walks with a cane,

13:37

and he's kind of hunched over, and he

13:39

has very very long dreadlocks

13:42

all down his back. And I

13:44

see him looking around

13:46

the room like, who

13:49

the heck is that?

13:49

You know?

13:50

But all right, fine, So he

13:52

sits down and I'll

13:54

probably never forget this moment for the rest of my life. I

13:57

said to him, you know, my name is Francis

13:59

Roblans Order for the New York Times. I'm

14:02

doing a story on Teresa

14:05

Gomez. And he

14:07

just froze and his eyes

14:10

welled up with tears, and

14:12

he said, I've been telling people

14:15

about Teresa Gomez for twenty

14:17

five years and

14:19

I said, well, now somebody's listening.

14:24

And he said to me, is this

14:26

going to mess up my parole? And

14:29

I remember I said something that

14:31

you know, ethically I should not have said,

14:34

and I probably shouldn't even repeat that I said,

14:37

but I said it. I said, this

14:40

isn't going to mess up your parole. I

14:42

said this is going to get you exonerated. And

14:46

I said something so ridiculous

14:50

because I believed it.

14:53

Frenchy story breaks on May eleventh,

14:56

twenty thirteen. The headline

14:59

reviewed you who have fifty Brooklyn murder cases

15:02

ordered? The story lays

15:04

it all out how Teresa Gomez

15:06

says she witnessed six separate murders.

15:10

Who sees six murders? Schabaka's

15:13

friend Derek, the one who said all of this

15:15

in motion. At first, he's

15:18

pleased when he sees the article, but

15:20

then he gets angry.

15:24

This is personal.

15:26

I say, damn man, it's the same fuck

15:28

of that frame me.

15:31

You see.

15:32

Scarcella was the cop who arrested

15:34

Derek for murder a murder

15:37

he insists he didn't do.

15:38

You gotta understand something, man, this

15:42

guy is a piece of shit.

15:45

But he gets to run around.

15:49

Like he's God. We

15:56

gotta get at this guy.

15:58

We gotta attack. It's gonna sell it.

16:01

If I did one

16:04

nano gram, one

16:06

nanogram.

16:07

Of what they said I did, I

16:09

would have killed myself.

16:16

Strong crowd a comment commonstrate

16:20

to you. You can't

16:22

run for shelter.

16:24

There's nothing you can't do.

16:27

You gotta hold old time.

16:30

Go to

16:34

This ble,