NEW YORK — Three defendants jailed as teens for setting a fatal 1995 token booth fire that killed an innocent clerk were exonerated Friday, with authorities again linking two notorious Brooklyn detectives to the wrongful convictions.
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced he will move to vacate the guilty verdicts against defendants Thomas Malik, James Irons and Vincent Ellerbe in the headline-grabbing case where MTA worker Harry Kaufman was mortally injured when his assailants squirted a flammable liquid through the change tray and set the booth afire.
Malik and Irons remain behind bars for what authorities had described as a robbery gone bad, while Ellerbe was paroled in 2020. The defendants were all scheduled for court Friday afternoon for the hearing that will clear their names a full 27 years after the deadly attack.
According to Gonzalez, the lead detectives in the case were partners Louis Scarcella and Stephen Chmil — a hard-charging pair once considered two of the New York Police Department top investigators but more recently exposed for misconduct leading to 15 overturned convictions.
“The findings of an exhaustive, years-long re-investigation of this case leave us unable to stand by the convictions of those charged,” said Gonzalez. “Above all, my obligation is to do justice, and because of the serious problems with the evidence on which these convictions are based, we must move to vacate them.”
The copycat crime appeared motivated by the movie “Money Train,” starring Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson and featuring a similar token booth scene, and set off a national furor.
Kaufman, 50, died two weeks after the Nov. 26, 1995, hold-up try that tore the booth apart and sent the screaming victim, his clothes still burning, running through the station.
Gonzalez said their review found Scarcella and Chmil fed key details about the case evidence to Irons, showing him photos from the crime scene before the suspect said anything useful to investigators about what happened. The DA said details of his confession, made when he was 18, were also false.
In the case of Malik, Scarcella testified at a 1996 trial that he grilled the teen for more than three hours and acknowledged that he did not immediately inform the suspect of his Miranda rights.
And jurors never heard about the numerous inconsistent statements from a witness who pointed to a different man before identifying the 18-year-old Malik as holding the bottle of gasoline used in the arson. The same witness made other inconsistent pre-trial statements about what happened, raising doubts about her testimony.
The 17-year-old Ellerbe’s supposed confession was inconsistent with the facts and the evidence of the deadly crime, including an inaccurate claim that fire was set using a spray bottle. The fire marshal said the flammable liquid was poured through the coin opening.
“The DA’s Office cannot stand by the convictions,” said Gonzalez. “Among many reasons are the problematic circumstances of the identifications, the myriad factual contradictions between the confessions and the evidence recovered at the scene, and the material contradictions between the confessions themselves.”
Legal reversals in cases closed by the two decorated detectives during the ‘80s and ‘90s have cost the city more than $50 million in payouts to wrongly convicted suspects later cleared. Scarcella has repeatedly denied any misconduct.
The DA’s conviction review unit has now vacated 33 cases since 2014, with another 50 or so still under review.
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