Frances Robles (Frenchie)
Appearances
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
This guy, a man, answers, The first cigar which truly made me realize how much I was going to enjoy cigars was smoked in 1988 at a bar on Remsen Street in Brooklyn, New York, called Callahan's. The cigar was given to me by a legendary detective of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad named Louis Scarcella.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Louis had been the detective on the first two murder cases I prosecuted, both of which featured the same witness testifying against the same defendant for two different murders. The defendant was a dealer named Robert Hill. The witness was named Teresa Gomez, a woman who was even then ravaged from head to toe by the scourge of crack cocaine.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
It was near folly to even think that anyone would believe Gomez about anything, let alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy kill two different people. And the guy signs it. It's the district attorney, and he's now a judge.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
My head mark is probably still on the roof of the New York Times office from my jumping up and down and realizing that I had hit pay dirt.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
So this guy comes in, he walks with a cane, and he's kind of hunched over, and he has very, very long dreadlocks all down his back. And I see him looking around the room, like... You know, I don't see anybody here who's here to see me. And so I raised my hands and he looks at me like, you know, hmm, who the heck is that? You know, but all right, fine.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
You know, he doesn't have anything better to do. So he sits down and I'll probably never forget this moment for the rest of my life. I said to him, you know, my name is Francis Robles. I'm a reporter for The New York Times. I'm doing a story on Teresa Gomez. And he just froze and his eyes welled up with tears. And he said, I've been telling people about Teresa Gomez for 25 years.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
And he said to me, is this going to mess up my parole? And I remember I said something that, you know, ethically I should not have said. And I probably shouldn't even repeat that I said. But I said it. I said, no, this isn't going to mess up your parole. I said, this is going to get you exonerated. And I said something so ridiculous because I believed it.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
It's like six o'clock that Thursday and I call the spokesman and I said, I got a 2,500 word article about all these guys, you know, who say that they were wrongly accused. And you know what it doesn't have? It doesn't have a quote from the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office because your quote was so pathetic. I said, so we're going to do a do-over. And it's a one question do-over.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Do you stand firm? behind these convictions or not. That's it. We're not going to negotiate a response. We're not going to be like, off the record, background, upside down, inside out. What's your answer? And so the spokesman said, I'll call you back. Okay, call me back. So they called back and he said, well, you have to come back to the office tomorrow. I'm like, oh, I'm crying out loud.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
I go to the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, sit down, like, all right, what is it? were reopening all of Scarcella's cases.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
So I go back to the office and I go find the editor, the same person that had originally asked me what connects these cases. And I said, you're not gonna believe this. The DA is reopening all of his cases. They're gonna go back 30 years. And her eyes welled up in tears. And she said, oh, my God. She goes, these are lives. These are real lives that you're impacting.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
The Puerto Rican girl known as Frenchie. I do not speak French.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
My best friend in elementary school was Puerto Rican. And so this one kid was like, hey, Puerto Rican, where's your switchblade? And my girlfriend Genevieve and I, we went to his house in sixth grade. We rang the doorbell. His mother answered the door. She was pregnant. She had her belly out to wherever. Is Anthony home? And she's like, Anthony!
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
So he comes, and you can see he's kind of looking at us rather suspiciously, like, what are the two Puerto Rican girls that I bullied in school doing at my door? And we beat the crap out of him right there in front of his mother.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
And the detective puts his right hand on his left arm and he makes like a figure of the number two, you know, holding up two fingers. And he looks at my mother, telling her to choose number two. So my mother goes in there. She looks at the guy. She has no idea who it is. She doesn't remember. It was dark. You know, she had a gun in her face. So she picked number two.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
I remember thinking, well, screw him. You know, he was driving a stolen car. He, at the very least, was involved in car theft.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
You know, maybe my mother helped send an innocent person to prison. He got seven years. Everybody was in on it. Everybody was in on the game. The cops were in on it. The witnesses were in on it. And the prosecutor probably knew that my mother didn't know who he was and was like, whatever. She said number two, number two.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
was a guy named Derek Hamilton, who was an ex-con who had been kind of like a jailhouse lawyer.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
And so we're just chatting. And he says, oh, you know, I see that you're kind of interested in this issue of, you know, the Brooklyn DA's office having screwed somebody over. I know a lot of cases in Brooklyn of wrongful convictions. Well, OK, really? OK, good. You know, I was kind of in the New York office sharpening pencils. So that seemed like a good idea to me to follow up on that tip.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
And I'm like, oh, I have a tip. You know, there's a lot of wrongfully convicted guys in Brooklyn and I have a good source. He was a jailhouse lawyer. And so my editor says to me, well, what else do the cases have in common? Like what connects them? And I was so offended by that question. I was like, well, I don't know, maybe they didn't do it. Like that connects them.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
Maybe they're all black, you know, and the railroaded by the criminal justice system. Like, I just thought it was such a hoity-toity New York Times view of journalism that I couldn't just come up with a wrongful conviction. I had to come up with what connects them. So I nod politely, you know, yes, ma'am. And I'm like, I go back to my desk, kind of grumbling under my breath. And I call Derek.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
And I'm like, all right, well, this editor of mine wants to know what connects these cases. And he goes, well, a lot of them are the same cop. And his name is Louis Garcello.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
So I meet with Derek again. And Derek, you know, he was interesting because he knew some things, but he did not know a lot of things. He told me kind of loosey-goosey stuff. Like he said, oh, that this guy was notorious for using the same witness over and over again. But he didn't know the names of the defendants who had had the same witness testify against them.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
And he did not know the name of the witness. Right. So I was like, oh, brother, you know, here I am talking this up to my editor like I'm some hotshot who's going to crack this case open and I got nothing. And I thought, oh, my God, you know, what am I going to do now? You know, I don't have anywhere to turn.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
He says, in this document, it says, something, something, Luis Garcella was notorious in Brooklyn for his, you know, unethical and, you know, framing people, basically. In fact, he was known to use the same witness over and over again, a woman named Teresa Gomez. You know, that's it. That's the name. That's what I've been waiting for. I've been waiting to find out the name of the witness.
Spotlight: Snitch City
Introducing The Burden
That's my big investigative reporting secret. So I Google Luis Garzala and Teresa Gomez together. I don't know what I thought I was going to find. And I got a hit. And I'm like, well, this is curious. It was like some random Google forum, a cigar smoker forum, where somebody has asked, I think the question on the forum was, when did you first smoke your first great cigar?