Louis Scarcella was your classic 70s New York City detective, a hard-charging renegade who lived for locking up bad guys. In 26 years on the beat, most of that time overlapping with New York’s crack era, he was famous for his ability to close cases and seal murder convictions. There was just one problem with his carefully crafted reputation: he was crooked.
It took a group of wrongfully convicted people who were imprisoned based on Scarcella’s overzealous policing to reveal the lie. “We pledged that whoever got out of prison first would spread the word that there were many men in jail for crimes they didn’t commit,” says the 58-year-old Derrick Hamilton, now a paralegal teaching at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law.
