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The Burden | 6. Does a New D.A. Mean a New Day?

Published Apr 16, 2024, 7:00 AM

Episode 6 of 10

It’s 2013, and a fierce election for Brooklyn D.A. is in process. It’s an election that will change Brooklyn forever. The old guard is on the ropes and Louie Scarcella is a hot button issue. The lives of our main characters - Derrick, Shabaka, Louie, converge and no one will be the same.

The Burden is available everywhere you get your podcasts.
All episodes will be available one week early and ad free, along with exclusive bonus content on Orbit’s newly launched “True Crime Club House” subscription channel on Apple Podcasts. 

The Burden is a production of Orbit Media in association with Signal Co. No1

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, 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 of the Bronx. It's all coming to you August seventh. Wherever you get your podcasts.

Previously on The Burden, they have.

No concept of what it was like back then, two hundred murders a year in the city.

Violence was happening everywhere.

We're here in the belly of the Beast. We're here doing what we gotta do, and we did it.

Everybody was in on it. The cops were in on it, and the witnesses were in on it all. Hell was breaking loose.

Says to me, kid, get your head out your ass.

I want you to know what they're doing in your life.

He told a moment put us, hey, now, what's going on with you? A lot? They've got me way up here in this bullshit that has joy away. This ship here is ridiculous. Oh yeah, on my transfer, I think they just destroyed my typewritters so to keep me from doing legal work. They haven't send me my typewriter back here. Ain't no saying to me for sailing ship. What the fuck am I doing? Way up shit? How the fuck can I be of any use? Way up here? You can't even get to the lawn linerary is you got to wait two weeks fifty get to the law lickery.

It's twenty thirteen and Shobacca Shakur has been shipped to a prison near the Canadian border. At that moment, he's been in prison twenty five years for a double homicide. He insists he didn't commit. He's challenged his murder conviction who knows how many times, and almost exhausted his appeals.

It's depressing.

He calls his friend and advisor Derek Hamilton, who's out of prison on parole.

We got a hold of about one hundred.

Hours of Shabaka's calls from prison, all recorded by corrections officials.

One thing you got to remember the moment is in your favorite rate. I agree with that.

Listen man, it's your time.

Brother, Maybe it is Shabacca's time. He's still working the courts and suddenly there's another possibility, a little flashlight at the end of his long tunnel, because at that moment changes in the air. There's a heated campaign for Brooklyn District Attorney, and wrongful convictions are becoming a crucial campaign issue. There is the possibility, maybe for the first time, that a sincere reinvestigation of questionable convictions will take place inside the DA's office.

When God says your time is your time, you know what I mean. Nobody can't stop.

At me, but Shabaka, he's not quite sure.

It's politics now, it's no longer, it's no long a thought.

Stone cloud of comments common strate to you.

You can't run for shelter.

There's nothing you can't do.

Welcome to the burden.

I'm Steve Fishman and i'm DA's Devlin Ross. In this episode, does a new DA mean a new day?

We have concluded that men were wrongfully convicted.

I think that your state is going to be one of the primary one.

These are real wives that you're impacting.

You got to your parents go to court.

You gotta hold old time.

Goo Okay, Steve, before things really heat up in the Brooklyn DA's race.

Let's rewind the clock.

It's twenty twelve and Luis Garcela is living on Staten Island. He's been retired for a dozen years. At one point he'd become a commercial diver, building stuff like piers underwater. He frequents the Russian baths and regularly plunges into the freezing water off Coney Island for his health. As he liked to say, his former life is a cigar smoking, swashbuckling detective is by now long behind him, living on mainly as memories archived on TV.

My partner and I have investigated more than three hundred motives, but there's one case that stands out from the rest because of in my neighborhood and the people who lived there.

Like when he started an episode of Top Cops that was a nationally syndicated TV show, from the early nineties. It dramatized great detective.

Work in Williamsburg.

The minute I arrived, I knew something big was going.

On with cheesy recreations like this actor who played Louis.

Hey, what's what.

On this episode of Top Cops. It's the story of Louie's most famous case. It's nineteen ninety one and a leader in the Jewish community has been gunned down. Dozens of detectives were assigned to the case. No one can catch the murderer, and so the lieutenant sends in his top dog, Louis Scarcella.

Okay, you're up to chart until this one's finished. This baby's yours.

In the show, Scarcella arrested a crack addict for the rabbi's murder, a streak Mutt. Scarcella like to call him. His name David Ranta. Scarcella was eventually alone with Ranta in Central Booking, and he went to work.

Be a man about it. You won't be a nothing.

You did this.

Right in impatient, all right?

All right?

That was there, So Ranta just comes clean.

Kind of what happened, according to Scarcela, just like in Schebacca's case, is that Ranta doesn't make a full confession. The statement attributes three fateful words to Ranta. I was there that puts Ranta at the scene of the crime, and because of that a jury will decide, in effect, he's an accomplice to murder, for which Ranta will be sentenced to thirty seven and a half years behind bars.

Fast forward two decades, two decades after the show that lauded Scarcella's detective work, and the real David Ranta appears before Brooklyn judge the DA. The same DA who prosecuted him, has petitioned the court to overturn the conviction, and as Ranta leaves the Court of Freeman, the press surrounds him.

Right now, I feel like I'm on the water swimming, So I can't really just be honest with an answer, because this is overwhelming.

If you have any one thing you want to do.

Yeah, get the hell out of here.

Maybe the rant To ruling detonates in Scarcella's life. For years, the DA's office had stood by Scarcella's police work. No longer, the DA said quote The decision to overturn the rant To conviction was made in part because of the conduct of detective Scarcella.

David Ranta getting out was the match that lit the spark.

Detective Scarcela, I'm retired.

You served.

The day Ranta was freed, a reporter caught up with Scarcella as he was heading into his Staten Island home.

What do you think about this release of Ranta.

I really can't talk about it, but well, what I will say is this, I'm certainly not running from you.

I stand by the confession. I stand by the case.

Shebacca knows the Ranta case has echoes of his case, namely that supposed confession. Remember, Scarcella claimed he took a confession from Schabacca, just as he says he took one from Ranta. Both Ranta and Shabacca deny they gave statements.

But there was also a key difference between their cases. David Rant gets a case overturned. He the important part, David Ranta was white.

So now it made it seem like you got a bunch of people who have been saying he's a crooked cop all this time, and y'all didn't do anything. But here comes the white guy and says it, and y'all let him out of jail. So the newspaper hopped on it immediately. We was able to get it to the New York Times and say, look, look what's going on here. How is he getting out for saying the same thing that we've been saying for twenty something years.

It's the Rantom case that drives me because I know now that I'm right. You know that Hamilton is right, that Derek Hamilton has told me something that's true.

New York Times reporter Franchie roblas Derek had told Franchie that Carcela's alleged misdeeds were responsible for lots of wrongful convictions. The district attorney now said he was right in at least one case, when Ranta was freed in twenty thirteen. Charles Hines is the Brooklyn District Attorney and he's running for reelection. It is politics now. Heines overturns Ransa's conviction, and that's good for his campaign, but remember it was Heinz's office that also prosecuted Rancid twenty years earlier, and that that's not a good look for his campaign. So Heines paints Detective Scarcella as the culprit a rogue, a lone bad actor, nothing to do with the DA's work. Keep moving people. Nothing to see here.

The Brooklyn District Attorney's office, for whatever reason, was remaining really, really, really adamant that they were not going to open any other Scarcella cases. They were like, no, this is a one time thing. We don't have any reason to believe that it was a pattern.

French didn't buy it. She put together her explosive story, asserting that Scarcella's alleged misdeeds may have led to lots of wrawful convictions. Before her story was published, French she had posed a crucial question to the DA.

Do you stand behind these convictions or not?

Turned out he wasn't standing behind them. Frenchie's article lands in the middle of what was turning out to be a brutal reelection campaign. Her reporting puts pressure on Hines. He responds he reopens more than fifty Scarcella cases, among them Shabacca's.

They reopened the Kings because we forced them to. Hines actually dodged me for the eleven months that I spent on that story.

And so suddenly Louis Scarcella is a campaign issue. A guy from the Post is low. Hines just threw you under the bus.

What did that?

What was the feeling you had? I was enraged.

I was angry.

I was very very angry.

But Chabacca he was elated.

The most excited I was was when the newspaper article that The New York Times printed came out. When that came out, I said, I'm going home.

Wrongful convictions were a full blown scandal, now a contagion, and District Attorney candidate Hines could not contain it.

He'd been the DA for twenty three years, and suddenly it looked like he was part of the problem.

Yeah, what's up?

Was this dude of Kenneth Thomas, This dude Kenneth Thompson, the man trying to unseat Hines, the man who could change Shabaka's fate. That's after the break.

I'm running for a DA for every person that is wrongfully convicted and sentenced to prison for murders they didn't commit.

Kenneth Thompson.

It's twenty thirteen and Thompson is running against Charles Hines, a seventy eight year old man in his sixth term as Brooklyn District Attorney.

Thompson is an exciting candidate. He's a black man only forty seven years old, and his message is in sync with the moment.

I believe in my heart that it is the job of the DA to correct such mischaracters of justice and to freemen from prison who do not belong in prison.

He's a former prosecutor who grew up in a public housing project. He sympathizes with the wrongfully convicted. In law school, he'd memorized every account of police abuse in the country. He could recite dates and details.

Because these wrongful convictions not only destroy the lives of those who are wrongfully convicted, but their families, and they undermine the integrity of our criminal justice system.

So Shebaca and Derek are extremely excited about the possibility that Thompson might be the new DA. Maybe Thompson will clear Derek's record, maybe he'll help Shobacca win his freedom. But first Thompson has to get elected, and that isn't going.

To be easy.

He has virtually no support from the political establishment. What's more, no incumbent has lost a Brooklyn DA election in a century, and the incumbent he's up against he's not going to go down without a fight.

Joining me once again is the district Attorney of Brooklyn, Charles Hines, welcome to reaching out once again.

Could to be with it, Greg, thank you very much for this is.

A clip from local radio station AM nine seventy.

Quickly the background.

I had the privilege of becoming da In nineteen ninety there were one hundred and fifty eight thousand serious felonies in Brooklyn.

But by the time of this election, murders in the city had fallen eighty five percent. Hines liked to claim credit for safer streets, but to a public, many of whom didn't remember the bad old days of the eighties and nineties, that seemed like old news, kind of like Heines himself.

So this campaign is heated, and Hines accuses Thompson of misrepresenting the record.

Why why do you lie repeatedly?

You know, damn, let's be well, you have to go a sibyl if you don't mind to be civil here to be civil.

I don't think you understand what the word means.

Les all.

To Derek and Shabaka, Hines is the enemy.

Derek pressed them when they would have on press conferences. He would ask them what about wrong for convictions?

Heines hoped that by reopening fifty scar Seller cases. He could put the wrong for conviction issue behind him, but Thompson he wasn't going to let him outrun his past. He called out Hines for ducking responsibility, for blaming one rogue cop.

It is extraordinary that he has to review fifty tainted homicide cases and he wants to throw Detective scars Sell up under the bus. The tect divescus Seller did not operate in a vacuum. He operated hand in hand with the DA's office. So you can't stand here and awfully convict people and then turn around and try to make Captain of America and say that you're going to free them.

Find the.

Shabaka says that Thompson's attacks fired Derek up.

He went and advocated, and we had all the people of families and friends of the wrong conviction spread in the word. And Derek went to Ken Thompson and said, I am going to advocate for you. I'm going to push for everybody, but you're going to do what you said about wrongful convictions, or I am going to advocate against you once you're in office.

Derek Tellschabaka that he got to know Thompson.

Me and them guys have a pretty decent relationship because I was out knocking on doors for them all. You know what I mean the project.

Derek says he has a decent relationship with Thompson's people because he was out campaigning for him in the projects.

We spread the word to everybody that we knew in the streets, vote for this person, vote for that person's.

Pure They wouldn't go, you know, I'm knocking on doors given.

People, and we had the prisoners in jail telling them, make sure your family votes for Ken Thompson. He went, he did more rallies.

You have a vac prepaid call from an inmate, Aunt Wendy, and it works vot correctional.

Hello Hello Leah Hi, yeah backo Yeah.

This is one of Chbacca's lawyers, Leah Busby.

Hi.

I didn't say your name, but I guess it was you.

That's it going, oh rings all.

Oh, by the way, did you hear about what happened in the election.

Oh, Heine's is out.

Oh that's it's a huge upset in an historic victory. The vote wasn't close. Thompson fifty five percent, Heines forty five. Thompson would become the first black DA in Brooklyn history.

I just got a change tonight at Berl Hall downtown. They got a unitie rally for Ken Thompson.

It's a victory rally, and Derek goes to celebrate. Meanwhile, back in prison, Chabaka allows himself to think that maybe maybe this new DA will help him.

I definitely need Jonna holla at him about my case. Let him know this man, that's gonna be done.

That's going to be done. We just had a conversation. I was in his office. They asked for a list of cases. I said, hey, what what case was jury from? He said, of course. So everybody agreed man that you know you are one of the primary cases that should be the view.

Now Thompson just needs to keep his word.

If that happens, then Schabacca believes he will walk free, and so does Derek. But Derek has another priority, his own case. Derek wants his own conviction overturned, and now he knows someone on the inside.

KENFF Johnson is a very good man. Max.

That's after the break.

Here's Ken Thompson's situation as he walks in the door. The DA's office is a trouble place. On one side, there's Thompson's new Guard. These are the people he selected.

So this sense of writing past injustices was very important to him.

That's Eric Gonzales back then he was Thompson's number two.

And then there's the Old Guard, the people Thompson inherited, Hinz's crew. These are prosecutors who'd fought Shabaka's and Derek's appeals for decades. Assistant DA Taylor Coss remembers what the Old Guard was saying about Derek.

Hamilton was so he was notorious in the office right. He was a known quantity. In fact, they got to know his stuff so well so that when another inmate would make a submission, they could tell when he helped them out.

Derek was out on parole. He wanted to fight for Shabaka, but he was also determined to get his own conviction overturned.

His case was.

Being reviewed by the new DA's Conviction Review Unit, which was at that moment still influenced by the Old Guard.

They was a real big movement to stop by his hooneration. There was actually people in the DA's office that hated me to the degree that they didn't want this to happen.

Why did DA's Office fight your exoneration so much?

Because I won so many cases against the DA's office.

For other people.

The DA's office look at me as being a trouble maker. They look at me as interfering in how they do business.

Derek's case becomes a test for Ken Thompson's office. Eric Gonzales, this was.

The hardest one for the agency because there was so much internal pushback.

Taylor Costs heard the grumblings. He knew exactly how the Old Guard felt. They remember Derek's earlier cases, like the bread truck murder, the case he'd gotten overturned in the previous episode.

I just don't think people think he was a good guy to begin with. Yeah, I don't have any reason to know one way or the other, but I did hear, and you know, people think he obviously commanded those original murders. Yeah, they were extraordinarily displeased that he was released so early on the first homicide.

The Old Guard is blocking Derek's path inside the conviction review unit. Derek realizes, now electing Thompson that wasn't enough. He writes Thompson a personal.

Letter, and I tell him I said, hey, man, do you promise integrity? Dan was transparent, it was fair, and this is not what I'm getting and I look forward to whooping yell ass in court.

Thompson takes the letter seriously. He has a message for the Old Guard.

It was a moment for the DA where he basically said to the office, if you can't get with the new way of us going back and looking at these conviction review matters, then maybe you.

Have to leave.

Gonzalez reviews the file and comes to a different conclusion than the Old Guard. He recommends that Thompson overturned the conviction.

Once the decision was made, it was done quickly.

Please hold a moment. Sure he's going on with your wall.

Meanwhile, Shabaka is still waiting to hear back from Ken Thompson's office, so he calls Derek. He's hopeful that Ken Thompson will come through, but his lawyer, Ron Koby, isn't so sure.

He hasn't heard from this duel Kenneth Thompson. He doesn't have any faith in him. So I'll explain to him that, look, people that I deal with have been dealing with him. You see what I'm saying, And this guy is going to look into the matters of these lawful convictions.

It's a tough moment for Shabaka. He wants to put his faith in Ken Thompson.

At the same time, his legal skills have won him a court hearing and that court could just throw out his conviction. But going to court now pokes the bear. Instead of working with the DA, he'll have to fight the DA.

He calls Kooby to see how long it will take to get into court.

Probably another four to six weeks, that's my guess. So we're talking about some time in November.

Sometimes November, maybe beginning of December. You know, you have Thanksgiving. People go away. I don't go anywhere, and you don't go anywhere, but.

So definitely do not.

It's frustrating as hell for Shabaka. He can't even nail down at court date. Waiting seems like all he's doing.

Once you go to court, you lose what you know, a lot of control over a lot of moving parts, and sometimes they break in your favor and sometimes they break against you.

I don't want to go down there and then we don't have enough because if I lose this here and this is it.

Kobe follows Shabacca's lead and agrees to put the court case on hold, let Thompson's conviction review people just do their work.

For a while, I was happy.

I mean.

I really thought I said, yeah, he's gonna let me go because he's gonna do something.

But then the DA called his lawyer.

They contacted Ron and told Ron they wanted more time to investigate.

They wanted more time. They'd already had the case for two years.

Chabacca is calling Kobe's.

Office for morning, is just pushing me on. I have absolutely no faith in the District Attorney's office. Given the District attorney time for them to figure out some type of trick or whatever the fuck they want to do to try to fuck my case up, do not postpone my case. Do not postpone my case. I don't want my case going off for months and months and months.

Chabacca turns down the DA. He wants Koby to get him into court.

It forced them to make a decision.

It forced the DA's office to say once and for all whether or not they thought Chabacco was guilty. On the first day of the court hearing, the judge turns to the Assistant District attorney.

That's when the judge asks them, well, what's your position. So they took the position, well, we believe he is guilty. So rather than say okay, let's exonerate him and then say no, well let.

Him prove it.

That was okay with me because that's all I wanted anyway.

It was to prove it.

Now it's law, not politics.

Next time on The Burden, Shebacca has his day in court.

The biggest debate that Shebacca and I had, what's whether or not the call Scar self. I'm surely not gonna call it.

How do you bring in the information of his past mistive.

Stone Clark common commonstrating.

You can't run for shelter?

Does look that you can't do.

The Burden is created by Steve Fishman.

That's me.

It's hosted and reported by Steve Fishman and Dax Devlin. Ross. Story editor is Dan Bobkoff. Our senior producer is Simon Rentner. Our producer is Sanam Skelly, Associate producer Austin Smith. Fact checking by Sona Avakian. Our production coordinator is Davon Paradise. Mixing and sound design by Mumbo Media. Our executive producers are Fisher, Stevens, Evan Williams and me Steve Fishman. Additional production help from Josie Holtzman, Isaac Kestenbaum, Naomi Bronner, Lucy Suchek, Drew Nellis, Micah Hazel, Priscilla Alabi, Saxon Baard, Katie Simon, and Katie Spranger. We give special thanks to Ellen Horn, Lizzie Jacobs, Nathan Tempe, Tobiah Black, Rachel Morrissey, Lyla Robinson, Mark Smerling and Jack Stewart Pontier. And deep appreciation to Marcy Wiseman. Special thanks to our agents Ben Davis and Marissa Hurrowitz. Mona Hook provided our legal advice. She's from mksr LLLP, 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 Rays as our theme music. The Burden is a production of Orbit Media in association with Signal Company.

Number one.

Season two of The burdon Empire on blow Ud 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, our subscription channel on Apple Podcasts. It's only two ninety nine a month.

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