Yo what's good streets fam, you know the deal we back at it again with another chapter, big shout to all my day ones and subscribers for locking in daily, y'all really the backbone of this whole operation, the real reason we growing and thriving out here. Anybody trying to get their music, brand or hustle promoted, hit the email evil streets media at gmail.com, we can work something out. Much respect to everybody sending them cash app donations too, and for anyone trying to support the movement you can catch us at evil streets tv on cash app, every dollar goes right back into building this empire. Aight y'all let's dive into this gangster chronicle.
A tidal wave of narcotics flooding the boroughs, way beyond what we equipped to handle. From '85 to 1990, I was documenting a crack-connected homicide every single day. Send the message clear, you gonna push weight, you gonna do serious time behind them walls. Deborah Johnson talking about ever since them crack slingers set up shop six months back, life on Dean street been absolute hell. Me and my moms and my whole bloodline, we couldn't even rest at night, I had to watch the entrance when I shut my eyes, constantly, every little sound. One in New Yorkers been locked down in the system in the last quarter century for charges they ain't commit. Two cats who did decades in the bing got exonerated today. Shame on them individuals that orchestrated this violation against me. The Brooklyn DA's office disclosed they vacated twenty-two convictions since 2014. The Brooklyn man officially got cleared of all wrongdoing. Right now the DA's office investigating at least a hundred other cases. Brooklyn district attorney Charles Hines wasn't showing no concern about the pressure, but that's what he catching from the New York City Police Department, police top brass claiming they warned Hines office about potential police corruption while he was a special state prosecutor, but alleging Hines never pushed for an investigation. The Brooklyn DA's office in straight crisis mode. We can't be having innocent men getting thrown in the penitentiary for violations they ain't commit, and that's what's transpiring in that office under Joe Hines.
One of the realest statements about county or the penitentiary in general, it's packed with people claiming they innocent. But what if they really are? If you ever posted up in a major city, and when I say major city I'm referencing population not the size, and it ain't gotta be as massive as the one we dissecting today, New York City. Though I'd argue all the elements of New York create a perfect storm for this type of situation, and unless you ever resided in a major city before, you might not understand how simple it is to get knocked for a charge you ain't commit.
My government John Bond, I was recently exonerated after twenty-seven years, getting accused and convicted of a violation I had zero knowledge of, had nothing to do with. I was fourteen years old, I was having breakfast and got a banging on our door and it was a squadron of police. They rushing into my crib and they started claiming I was involved in an altercation and a robbery and they wanted to transport me down to the station house for interrogation. August 13th 1991, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, two off-duty correction officers got ambushed. Police stating the two gunmen forced the officers from their whip, shot them and then stole the vehicle.
They transported me down to the seven-seven precinct, the interrogation with Icy Leibach, a road to take them by the name of Luke Sassana. The headquarters of man walks free after spending nearly twenty-five years in the bing, a judge today threw out the murder conviction for Elisio de Leon after his lawyer stated his confession back in '96 was forced by a now disgraced attack. It's in case we're spending in solitary confinement. Hamilton now enjoying time with his peoples, but he also been working as a paralegal fighting for others who claim they got wrongly convicted too. He says that type of help hard to come by when you behind them walls. There was a problem trying to find lawyers to finance investigations and things like that, you find that a lot of poor people don't got the money to level the playing field. Hamilton's case and the others he working on involved retired detective Louis Scarcella.
In total, one thousand nine hundred ninety-five people got bodied in New York City in 1989, setting a new homicide record, up half a percentage point from the year previous, 1988, also a record breaking year when the city witnessed one thousand eight hundred ninety-six people bodied. With crime seemingly looking like it was overtaking the city, law enforcement officials would break out new strategies and tactics to tackle the war on crime.
Governor Coleman today announced a new plan to give police officers more firepower, an effort to make cops as well armed as the criminals. Governor Coleman, President Bush, to fight crime by banning a special new to a news conference held at the police firing range at Rodman's Neck off City Island, Governor Coleman succeeding in attracting media attention with a demonstration of the very weapon he wants to keep away from everyone except police. Do hunters use weapons like this now? This basic weapon not basically designed as a hunting weapon, it's more of a military application, rather than you wouldn't basically use this to hunt deer. The governor had choreographed today's gathering, setting his sights on sending a strong message to the legislature and the public, announcing a three point plan to fight crime. One, assigning sixty new investigators for the city's drug enforcement task force, these to come from the state police. Two, outlawing semi automatic weapons like the AK-47 and the Uzi. And third, providing state police with new nine millimeter revolvers to cope with the heavy firepower of criminals.
One of those weapons would be an up and coming detective who years before the homicide crisis in New York City, in 1987, his supervisors would name him to a task force investigating a series of violent sex crimes in Brooklyn. The team would suspect that the same man had committed perhaps a dozen of the assaults, and at the end of a year long investigation, the Flatbush assaulter would be arrested and charged with eight assaults. Due to his help in that investigation, Luis Scarcella would be awarded the chief of detective citation for outstanding police investigation. It would be the first of many. He would then be assigned to the seventy-seventh precinct homicide investigation team in 1984.
The central Brooklyn precinct had become notorious by the mid eighties. Michael Daly, who years later would write a front page article for the New Yorker titled The Crack in the Shield, The Fall of the Seven-Seven, back in 1986, would call the seventy-seventh precinct an unmanageable precinct, describing it as a dumping ground for the department's misfits, malcontents and rebels. And it would be this assignment that would put the highly touted detective Scarcella on a crash course with Brooklyn's biggest crack kingpin, Baby Sam.
That case is overtime. Zest related NYPD investigator known for solving difficult homicide cases when the city's murder rate was its highest. Today, retired NYPD detective Louis Scarcella was in a Brooklyn courtroom defending his police work. Scarcella told Pix 11 News this week he stands by the 1989 arrest of Samuel Baby Sam Edmondson. According to the Brooklyn DA's office, Baby Sam was the head of a violent multi-million dollar operation that sold crack from Bed-Stuy to Brownsville. Baby Sam was convicted in 1990 for two murders and for running a criminal enterprise. But today, Keith Christmas, one of the original witnesses who helped send Baby Sam to prison, said he only testified against Baby Sam thirty years ago because he was pressured to do so by detective Scarcella, now saying quote, I was completely under coercion and duress. Christmas said he never saw Baby Sam commit murder and he lied under oath in 1990 after detective Scarcella and his partner promised Christmas a reduced sentence in his own case. In court today, detective Scarcella denied any wrongdoing in the Baby Sam case.
He reached a pandemic for questions during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in New York City. Brooklyn prosecutors said Samuel Baby Sam Edmondson was a kingpin running a multi-million dollar operation that created thousands of crack addicts in Brownsville and in Bed-Stuy. By 1990, Baby Sam was convicted of two murders and running a criminal enterprise, his sentence, life in prison. But today, a Brooklyn judge overturned Baby Sam's convictions, citing the work of a now disgraced retired NYPD detective, Louis Scarcella.
The evidence was clear, fam. Witness recantations kept coming, one after another, all pointing to the same narrative. Detective Scarcella orchestrated false testimony, leveraged vulnerable individuals caught up in the system, and constructed a house of cards built on lies and coercion. The confessions were coerced, the witnesses were threatened, and an innocent man spent decades behind bars for murders he never committed. The Brooklyn DA's office finally acknowledged the corruption that had infected their cases, and one by one, convictions tied to Scarcella's investigations began falling like dominoes. Baby Sam walked out of prison after thirty-six years, his life stolen by a system designed to protect the guilty when they wore the badge.
This is the real tragedy of the American criminal justice system, streets. Baby Sam's legacy ain't about the crack game or the streets he controlled back in the day. His legacy is about the thousands of cats still locked down right now, waiting for their moment, their evidence, their detective Scarcella to finally get exposed. It's about the power of speaking truth even after three decades in the bing, about one man's fight exposing an entire corrupt system designed to destroy Black and Brown communities. Baby Sam became a symbol, a living testament to why we gotta hold law enforcement accountable, why we gotta demand justice be blind and impartial, and why the fight for exoneration movements is the real frontline in this war. Rest easy knowing your case opened eyes and changed laws, Baby Sam. Your name will echo through Brooklyn streets for generations to come, a reminder that the truth, no matter how long it takes, eventually rises to the surface.