Steve Fishman
Appearances
Conspiracy Theories
The Assassination of Malcolm X Pt. 1
Listen to Get the Money and Run on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Conspiracy Theories
The Assassination of Malcolm X Pt. 1
Hi there, this is Steve Fishman from Orbit Media. Our new series, season four in the Burden Feed, is Get the Money and Run. You'll love it. Here's the trailer.
Conspiracy Theories
The Kinross Incident: Did a UFO Abduct an Entire Jet?
Hi there, this is Steve Fishman from Orbit Media. Our new series, Season 4 in the Burden Feed, is Get the Money and Run. You'll love it.
Conspiracy Theories
The Kinross Incident: Did a UFO Abduct an Entire Jet?
Listen to Get the Money and Run on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Conspiracy Theories
Argentina's Death Flights
Hi there, this is Steve Fishman from Orbit Media. Our new series, season four in the Burden Feed, is Get the Money and Run. You'll love it. Here's the trailer.
Conspiracy Theories
Argentina's Death Flights
Listen to Get the Money and Run on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Conspiracy Theories
Argentina's Death Flights
One of the boys started to exhibit demonic possession.
Conspiracy Theories
Argentina's Death Flights
Something very snake-like lifted its head out of the water.
Conspiracy Theories
Curse of the Crying Boy
Hi there, this is Steve Fishman from Orbit Media. Our new series, Season 4 in the Burden Feed, is Get the Money and Run. You'll love it. Here's the trailer.
Conspiracy Theories
Curse of the Crying Boy
Listen to Get the Money and Run on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Conspiracy Theories
Buried Gold: How the FBI Got Involved In a Treasure Hunt
Hi there, this is Steve Fishman from Orbit Media. Our new series, season four in the Burden feed, is Get the Money and Run. You'll love it.
Conspiracy Theories
Buried Gold: How the FBI Got Involved In a Treasure Hunt
Listen to Get the Money and Run on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Conspiracy Theories
Buried Gold: How the FBI Got Involved In a Treasure Hunt
Some monster reminded me of Bigfoot.
Conspiracy Theories
Buried Gold: How the FBI Got Involved In a Treasure Hunt
One of the boys started to exhibit demonic possession.
Conspiracy Theories
Buried Gold: How the FBI Got Involved In a Treasure Hunt
Something very snake-like lifted its head out of the water.
Conspiracy Theories
The Death of Ned Doheny
Hi there, this is Steve Fishman from Orbit Media. Our new series, Season 4 in the Burden Feed, is Get the Money and Run.
Conspiracy Theories
Death on Aconcagua
Here's the trailer. I'm standing here with Joe Loya. Over 14 months, Joe robbed so many banks, he lost count.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Exactly. But what she comes across there turns out to be crucial to her understanding of the entire story.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
So Frenchy 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.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Frenchy is waiting in the visitor's room for Robert Hill. He's serving 18 years to life. He's not expecting her.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
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 got to ask forgiveness. Now, that's going to be hard to do if you're also telling a New York Times reporter, hey, I didn't do it.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
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 front-page story for The Times, one that she hopes will make a splash.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
A copy of Frenchie's story eventually arrives at the prison library.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
By this point, Chewbacca's been incarcerated for 22 years.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
It's Derek and his jailhouse law firm that will lead the charge against Scarcella. With Derek and Louie, it will be a zero-sum game. If one rises, the other must fall. We got to get at this guy. Here's where I enter the story. It was a few years after Frenchie's scoop. I was a New York Magazine journalist back then.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
I'd 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, 224 square feet. How hard could it be? I called it Irv's 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 Irv's resided? What a block.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Old school. Hey, it was like the 90s 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 frighten me.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
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 Luis Scarcella 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 a tough cop to come in and restore some order so I could run my little business.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Later, Louie would come by, and he'd offer an appraisal, an appraisal which proved prophetic.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
I remember that first night you came, and I remember you telling me about your experience with cops.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Yes, you did. But the one I remember, the one that made an impression on me, starts with a pull-up on a scaffold.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
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.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Well, here's what I can say. We enter this journey through different doors, don't we? Yes, we do.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Welcome to Louie's 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. Louie's heyday was the 80s and 90s, and back then, all New Yorkers, even the most liberal columnists, wanted law and order.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Buckle up. In this series, we're gonna look at it all from the inside. We'll get deep on Scarcella. We're here.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Next time on The Burden, I try to get Luis Scarcella to give it all up. He used to be a talker. Then with the bad headlines, he mostly shut up. Frenchy 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 bathing suits don't come off today. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Well, I did it last time.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Luis Garcella 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.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Luis Garcella was known as the closer, the one who got the confession. And with that came fame. He was on the Dr. Phil show.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
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 Scarcella, my thought, this cannot be the whole story.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Was this really about one rogue cop who, what, hoodwinked an entire system?
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
We're gonna go deep. Is Louis a hero cop, a scapegoat, or a super villain who helped put away more than 20 innocent men? Men who now want revenge. I don't know, man. Maybe they want vindication. You know, that's what Luis Garcella feels he deserves, too.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Today on the show, The Scoop. All right, Steve, where do we begin? We begin with the person who broke the Luis Garcello story long before you or I got involved. That's Frances Robles, known to her New York Times colleagues as Frenchie.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Frenchie's from Queens, from an Italian neighborhood called Howard Beach.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
And growing up there, it taught Frenchie to be fierce.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
This was the 1980s, and Frenchie was in high school, living in a dangerous neighborhood in a dangerous city. 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 the lineup, the man who'd been arrested in the stolen vehicle.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Guilty enough for her. Yeah, back then, it didn't matter to Frenchy if this guy did this crime. But later, Frenchy became a reporter, first at the Miami Herald and then at the New York Times. And her views evolved.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Dax, this is the first story I ever heard Louis Scarcella tell. The legendary New York detective. Tell me more. So 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.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
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.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Shabaka and Derek got close in prison. Now, Derek urges Shabaka to talk to Frenchie.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
So Frenchie has the name. Now she does what a lot of us do when we're hunting for information. She Googles.