Steve Fishman
speaker
79 appearances
20 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jul 2025
Steve Fishman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
Was this really about one rogue cop who, what, hoodwinked an entire system?
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.
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.
Frenchie's from Queens, from an Italian neighborhood called Howard Beach.
And growing up there, it taught Frenchie to be fierce.
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.
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.
So Frenchie brings it to her editor.
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.
Shabaka and Derek got close in prison. Now, Derek urges Shabaka to talk to Frenchie.
So Frenchie has the name. Now she does what a lot of us do when we're hunting for information. She Googles.
Exactly. But what she comes across there turns out to be crucial to her understanding of the entire story.
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.
She goes to prison, unannounced, to find Robert Hill.
Frenchy is waiting in the visitor's room for Robert Hill. He's serving 18 years to life. He's not expecting her.
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.
Showing 21–40 of 79 · page 2 of 4
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