To Brooklyn defense lawyers and convicts, he might be the worst detective in NYPD history — a rogue investigator who, they claim, invented confessions, tampered with lineups, railroaded suspects and jailed the innocent.
But in a two-hour sit-down with The Post, legendary-turned-infamous former Detective Louis Scarcella, 63, fired back, saying that he has being scapegoated and that those he put away deserved to be punished for their crimes.
His self-defense comes as six convictions he won have been vacated and seven men exonerated, 40 more cases are under review, and a Brooklyn judge recently ruled in another case that he and former partner Steve Chmil engaged in “corrupt investigative processes.”
Attorneys claim innocent men have served, cumulatively, 143 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit — all cases that involved Scarcella.
“I have done very good detective work,” Scarcella said. “I feel slighted. I feel disappointed. I don’t want to call it a witch hunt. I hope they look at every case. If they’re looking for the truth, they will find I did nothing wrong.”
He offered a point-by-point refutation of Justice ShawnDya Simpson’s April 14 decision, which referenced the previously vacated judgments but was, he claimed, filled with mistakes and unsupported accusations.
And he gave a spirited defense of his methods, including the use of Teresa Gomez, a crack-addicted prostitute who testified in five different homicide cases.
Scarcella stressed Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson has not uncovered any wrongdoing or found fault with the detective’s techniques after the DA’s conviction-review unit completed its work on 30 of 70 cases involving him. In some of the overturned cases, it found, Scarcella played a minor part.
“They found nothing,” he said.
The carjacking
Simpson ruled that allegations of Scarcella’s misconduct were enough to toss out the murder conviction of Rosean Hargrave.
Hargrave and a teen cohort were found guilty in the fatal shooting and carjacking of off-duty city Correction Officer Ronald Neischer outside a Crown Heights housing project in 1991.
Scarcella said that he was barely involved in the case and that Simpson was after a conspiracy that doesn’t exist.
“I didn’t get a witness. I didn’t get any evidence,” he said. “I didn’t conduct a lineup. I didn’t take a statement. I did no detective work whatsoever.”
Scarcella noted the relatively straightforward investigation came amid the blood-soaked 1990s, when he and others in the Brooklyn North homicide squad were overwhelmed with murder probes.
“In one year in the 77th [Precinct], I had 36 homicides. And in the squad, we usually got the whodunits,” he said.
Scarcella pointed out that the witness who picked Hargrave out of a lineup, Robert Crosson, has been unwavering in his testimony.
Crosson fingered Hargrave again at Simpson’s hearing in September, while the two defendants gave conflicting alibi statements.
Still, Scarcella acknowledged concerns about the case. Blood and ballistics evidence was not tested. Two bikes ridden by the shooters when they approached Neischer’s vehicle went missing. The defendants’ fingerprints were not found in the car — but neither were those of Neischer, who owned it, or Crosson, who was in the passenger seat.
“None of that was my responsibility,” Scarcella said.
In the cards
Simpson also ripped Scarcella for his personal conduct, taking issue with his not being able to recall details of the investigation and with the wording of business cards he used on the job.
The cards described him and Chmil as “adventures [sic], marathoners, regular guys, and mountain climbers,” which Simpson said showed a “cavalier disposition to the serious obligation of investigating homicides.”
She noted his statement on the “Dr. Phil” show that he “did not play by the rules,” and she alleged he came into her courtroom with his gun after she told him not to.
“This indicates a lack of boundaries or no regard to any consequences in violating rules,” Simpson wrote.
Her conclusion: “The testimony provided at the hearing by Scarcella was false, misleading and noncooperative . . . The pattern and practice of Scarcella’s conduct. which manifest a disregard for rules, law and the truth, undermines our judicial system and gives cause for a new review of the evidence.”
Much of that is just plain wrong, Scarcella said.
Yes, he handed out business cards that listed his hobbies, but there was a point: “They helped me solve homicides,” he said.
“I never liked the business cards of the Police Department. They were very impersonal. My partner and I did a lot of marathons together. We were regular guys. I saw a card like that somewhere, and we used it and people liked it. We wanted them to remember us. Those cards really came in handy.”
Midair confession
He acknowledged making the “Dr. Phil” statement but said Simpson’s citation was out of context.
“I did say that, but I also said ‘under the law.’ Under the law, you can trick suspects. You can say things that are not true in order to try to elicit a statement,” he recalled.
A show transcript reveals the statement: “I will do whatever I have to do within the law to get a confession or to get someone to cooperate with me . . . Are there rules when it comes to homicide? No. No, there are none. I lie to them. I will use deception. The bad guys don’t play by the rules when they kill Ma and Pop . . . I don’t play by the rules.”
Scarcella gave an example of this approach. A man suspected in a killing had fled to Syracuse, where he was picked up. The detective flew there in a prop plane, going through heavy turbulence.
“Coming back, I said to the stewardess, ‘Listen, are we going to go through that turbulence again?’ She said yeah. So I said, ‘When we do that, come over and whisper something in my ear. Anything you want,’ ” Scarcella recalled.
She complied. As the plane rattled, Scarcella turned to the suspect and told him he had to remove his cuffs and leg irons. When he asked why, the detective said: “Trouble with the plane. We may go down, and I have to give you a chance.”
“He confessed to the whole thing,” Scarcella recalled. “I took down the confession on a cocktail napkin. He’s now doing 37 years.”
Scarcella said Simpson was wrong about him bringing his weapon to court.
“I vouchered it outside, then went through the metal detector just like everybody else,” he said, adding he handed off his gun to supervising court officer Maj. Sal Martucci.
Martucci backed that, saying the judge’s statement confused him.
“I know I vouchered his weapon. I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Martucci told The Post.
Said Scarcella’s lawyer, Alan Abramson, “Under no circumstances did Louie Scarcella bring a gun into the courtroom.”
Star witness
A persistent criticism of Scarcella is his reliance on Gomez as a witness to homicides. He defended her, saying she gave truthful statements. Her living in a crackhouse in Crown Heights put her in close proximity to scores of murders each year, Scarcella said.
“All within blocks of each other,” he said. “One year, we had 103 murders in the 77. And she was one of my people in the streets. I got to like her. I knew her mother.
“She was a crack addict and a prostitute in the belly of the beast. She was a troubled person. But she was a credible witness. Forget what Louie Scarcella says. The DA authorized her to testify in five different murder cases. And she was right about every homicide. I will go to my grave with that.”
An insight into her value involved murder suspect Glen Monseque, accused of killing a drug-addicted actress named Debra. Scarcella said he was stumped, so he went to Gomez, who, it turned out, knew both victim and perp.
“They had been partying at Teresa’s apartment,” he recalled. “I rang her bell, and she comes down. She says, ‘He shot my baby!’ I said, ‘Did you see it?’ She said, ‘Of course, I saw it!’ She said, ‘Check her pockets. Did she have a five-dollar bill in her right-hand pocket and a crack pipe in her left-hand pocket?’ Sure enough, she was right.”
It was to be Gomez’s fifth time testifying. But it never happened.
“As soon as she took the stand, Glen turns to his attorney and cops to the charges,” Scarcella recalled. “She didn’t even have to testify.”
Joe Ponzi, former head of investigations for the Brooklyn DA, backed Scarcella’s assessment of Gomez.
“I interviewed her and might have even polygraphed her,” he said, noting his work with Gomez was limited to the second murder trial of Bobby Hill. “I found her to be credible. And that case resulted in a conviction.”
‘Threats’
Ponzi also defended Scarcella’s handling of Jewel Smith, the girlfriend of Derrick Hamilton’s alleged murder victim. Hamilton’s conviction was tossed after Smith claimed she falsely implicated him because Scarcella threatened to have the city remove her children.
“Jewel accused me of threatening to take her kids away, not Louie,” Ponzi said. “That’s documented in court testimony. When she testified at trial, she testified to what she told me, which is that she was frightened to death of [Hamilton], as she should be. Not that anyone told her to lie.”
He said Smith also accused the prosecutor of threatening to take her kids.
“Now, of course, Hamilton’s innocent,” Ponzi said. “Trust me, he’s guilty as sin.
“I never saw Scarcella try to influence a witness or to try to pick out someone in photo spread. Never saw him do any of the things he’s accused of doing.”
Abramson and Joel Cohen, another lawyer representing Scarcella, blasted the Simpson decision.
“The recent decision by Judge Simpson is wrong on both the facts and the law,” they said in a statement. “Like many of the stories in the press, it is agenda driven and ignores the facts.”
Scarcella said Hamilton was in the courtroom during the Hargrave hearing in September and threatened to kill him. “When I walked out, he ran behind me and was screaming at me,” Scarcella said.
After Simpson’s ruling, he knows the battle over his reputation will continue.
“It looks like this could go on for quite some time,” he said.