Louis N. Scarcella (, born 1951) is a retired detective from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) who earned frequent commendations during the "crack epidemic" of the 1980s and 1990s, before many convictions resulting from his investigations were overturned during his retirement. As a member of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, he and his longtime partner Stephen Chmil built a reputation for obtaining convictions in difficult cases. Since 2013, Scarcella has received extensive and sustained publicity for multiple allegations of investigative misconduct that resulted in false testimony against crime suspects, leading to innocent parties serving long prison terms and guilty individuals going free.
As of June 2025, at least 21 people have had their convictions vacated in Scarcella's homicide cases, after more than 420 combined years of imprisonment, as the Kings County District Attorney's Office (Brooklyn DA) continued to review many of the detective's estimated 200 homicide investigations. Prosecutors or judges have explicitly cited evidence of his improper conduct, in criminal cases involving at least 12 wrongfully convicted defendants, and legal settlements to 17 defendants have reached approximately $150 million of taxpayer funds. Of the 21 defendants with overturned convictions, only two have been reconvicted. Nevertheless, Scarcella has consistently denied wrongdoing, while qualified immunity and the statute of limitations have protected him from possible legal consequences.
Biography and family Louis Scarcella grew up in an Italian-American family living in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. His father, Domenick, was an NYPD homicide detective in Manhattan. Scarcella studied at Midwood High School, then served for three years in the US Navy during the Vietnam War. Upon returning to New York City, he entered the police academy, graduating in 1973. His younger brother, Michael, also joined the NYPD, serving until his death by suicide in 2014. Louis transferred into the newly created Brooklyn North Homicide Squad in 1987, and retired in 1999. His daughter, Jacqueline Scarcella, became a prosecutor in the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office. His uncle, Nicholas "Nicky Black" Grancio, was the victim of a Brooklyn homicide that police attributed to a leadership struggle within the Colombo crime family, after he previously avoided arrest for a murder that Scarcella was questionably assigned to investigate. Scarcella is a longtime resident of Great Kills, Staten Island, and a former president of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club for winter swimming.
Allegations of investigative misconduct
Under the spotlight of a high-profile New York Times investigation that went on to win a George Polk Award for Justice Reporting, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes in 2013 reopened the cases of 56 people arrested by Scarcella. At least another five cases of his partner Chmil were deemed "probably wrongful" by the nonprofit Exoneration Initiative of the Innocence Network, citing "the same pattern of cajoled and inconsistent witnesses". The New York Daily News later described the "swaggering" Scarcella's "shady investigations involving tainted evidence, misleading testimony or forced confessions". The Times found that at least six murder cases relied on the same crack-addicted witness, at least five disputed confessions started with the same wording frequently used in Scarcella's own storytelling, and at least six disputed confessions lacked the standard recordings or interview notes for supporting documentation. In one of several front-page articles that year, the Times warned how Scarcella's flawed work "raises the prospect that innocent people may be serving life sentences for crimes they did not commit, or that guilty people whose cases were compromised could go free."
As of June 2025, itemized in a section below, at least 21 Scarcella-related convictions have been vacated after more than 420 years of imprisonment and family separation. The resulting monetary settlements have reached approximately $150 million to 17 defendants. (The settlement totals have been confirmed by New York government officials.) Three of the overturned convictions were featured in the documentary series Brooklyn North: Guilty Until Proven Innocent, a best-selling podcast in 2020.
James Jenkins (identification disallowed 1987) Courts have faulted Scarcella's professional conduct since at least 1983, when he answered "I don't remember" so often that a judge declared him less credible than an accused rapist. In 1987, the first year of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, a different judge actually disallowed the identification of murder suspect James Jenkins at trial because of Scarcella's misleading photo presentation. The detective showed a single photograph to a group of multiple witnesses in conversation together, telling them: "We have the guy who committed the murder." Justice Francis X. Egitto called this identification procedure "a classic illustration of what not to do."
Jeffrey Campbell (charge dropped 1985) and Valance Cole (judged "probably innocent" 2003) According to attorney Michael Baum, drug addict Jeffrey Campbell was pressured by detectives to testify against a murder suspect in 1985, or else they would set up Campbell on a phony charge. A few months later, Campbell was arrested for robbing a shoe salesman, who told Baum that the police had coerced him into falsely identifying Campbell. The salesman later refused to testify, and the robbery charge against Campbell was dropped.
Valance Cole's conviction for a later 1985 homicide was based partly on the testimony of Campbell, after the addict was arrested again. "In 1994, Mr. Campbell, dying of AIDS, suddenly recanted. He said prosecutors had promised to drop charges if he falsely blamed Mr. Cole for the murder. Detective Chmil, he said in a sworn statement, gave him a script." Campbell's recantation was not judged sufficiently credible and Cole stayed in prison. A decade later in 2003, a different judge declared that Cole was "probably innocent", but refused to overturn his conviction because Cole failed to meet the legal standard of "clear and convincing evidence". A different suspect was later implicated by his own confessions and multiple eyewitnesses, but under Hynes the Brooklyn DA's Office rejected them as insufficiently reliable to exonerate Cole.
Theresa Capra, Lennel George, and Kathy Pelles (school investigation overturned 2007) After Scarcella's retirement from the NYPD in 1999, he led a city investigation of public-school officials accused of inflating student scores on state-wide Regents exams in 2002 and 2003. At Brooklyn's Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Scarcella's investigation triggered the resignation of assistant principal Theresa Capra, the removal of principal Lennel George, and the reprimand of superintendent Kathy Pelles. Then in 2007, an extensive review by the special commissioner of investigation for New York City schools concluded that Scarcella's work was deeply flawed, biased, and overly influenced by one disgruntled teacher who falsely accused Capra of directing a cheating scheme with "no credible evidence". Capra's employment was re-authorized, George was appointed principal of another high school, Pelles's reprimand was rescinded, and the accusing teacher Philip Nobile was removed. Scarcella resigned as a school investigator, and his supervisor was demoted.
Teresa Gomez (witness in six murder cases, judged "extremely problematic" in 2014) Teresa Gomez served as Scarcella's "key witness" in six separate murder cases during the 1980s and 1990s. Describing Gomez as "a junkie prostitute", GQ reported that Scarcella first met Gomez plying her trade in an apartment that he had been canvassing, subsequently taking her to the stationhouse and debriefing her on several cases. Scarcella would later testify that he did not recall how he first met Gomez. Even so, the detective found her credible after she gave "good information" on two homicides in the 1980s, given how "her living in a crackhouse in Crown Heights put her in close proximity to scores of murders each year." Scarcella later praised Gomez as "a very intelligent girl who spoke three languages." He would ultimately use her court testimony to land five murder convictions. Joe Ponzi, former chief of investigations for the Brooklyn DA, worked with Gomez in 1987 for the second murder trial of Robert Hill. Of the case, he stated, "I interviewed her and might have even polygraphed her... I found her to be credible, and that case resulted in a conviction."
Neil Ross, a New York judge and former prosecutor, wrote in 2000 that Gomez "was ravaged from head to toe by the scourge of crack cocaine... 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." According to the award-winning investigation by The New York Times in 2013, she "seemed to have a knack for witnessing homicides Mr. Scarcella was assigned to", until her own death in a hit-and-run accident. Finally in 2014, a prosecutor from the Kings County Conviction Review Unit described her in court as "hopelessly addicted to drugs, criminal in her conduct for the most part, increasingly erratic in terms of her accounts", and an "extremely problematic" witness. Nonetheless, Gomez's testimony was originally presented to juries by prosecutors and deemed credible on numerous occasions, before most of the resulting convictions were overturned years later.
District Attorney review panels (2011 to date)
Charles "Joe" Hynes created a small "Conviction Integrity Unit" at the Brooklyn DA's Office in 2011, toward the end of his 24-year tenure as district attorney (1990–2013), as forensic DNA analysis was improving. While the implementation of this unit was one step forward in investigating wrongful conviction cases, Hynes was "sharply criticized for moving too slowly, defending prosecutors accused of misconduct, and clinging to convictions even after they were discredited."
In July 2013, after Scarcella's first prominent overturned conviction and the resulting New York Times investigation, Hynes appointed an "independent" advisory panel to review approximately 50 problematic Scarcella cases. Hynes's effort was met with skepticism, as he stocked the panel with close friends and campaign donors, and he continued to employ Scarcella's daughter as a prosecutor. Exoneration advocate Jeffrey Deskovic criticized: "Relying on the DA to do the investigation is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse." The Legal Aid Society, which represented defendants in 20 of the reopened cases, also raised concerns that the review was too narrow, because it was limited to cases in which Scarcella had testified in court. In Hynes's sixth re-election bid, at age 78 in November 2013, he lost by nearly 50 points to former federal prosecutor Kenneth P. Thompson, who had expressed a willingness to widen the scope of the review.