Trial 4 (2020): Season 1, Episode 4 - Badge Of Shame - full transcript
[somber music playing]
-[Sean] Hi, how are you?
-God, I've finally met you.
-[Sean] Yeah.
-[chuckles] Jesus Christ, man.
I've been looking forward
to meeting you for a while.
-[Sean] Yes.
-Yeah. [chuckles]
I am so sorry, man,
for what you went through.
It's one of those things that, you know…
[chuckles] …you only see that on TV
and then, the reality comes in.
Then you get to see
what's going on. It's crazy.
It's just, uh, 22 years, man,
that's-- that's insane.
[Sean] Yeah.
I was 19 years old when I got arrested
and so, once I got to my 20th year,
I started to reflect, like, "Damn.
Like, I-- I got more time in prison
than I have on the Earth."
[indistinct chatter]
[Jose De La Rosa] When I saw the video
of them pulling you out of a van…
-Yeah.
-…those are two faces I'll never forget.
Kenneth Acerra.
He was the one who tied me up with a rope.
[indistinct chatter]
And Walter Robinson.
Walter's face will never go away for me.
You know, he had this smile on him
all the time, and yeah.
[DeeDee] We love you, Sean!
The fact
that we went through the same situation,
similar stuff,
like, you know, by the same people,
doing the kind of, you know,
stuff that they did back in 1991,
it's just insane.
They wasn't doing this for one year.
They wasn't doing it for two years.
They was doing it,
I want to say, if I remember correctly,
for a decade or more.
For ten or more years.
Was it ever asked,
did it ever come up, like…
How was they allowed
to stay on the police force?
It sticks in my head.
It's like, "My God, what did they do?"
The city turned,
you know, a blind eye on this.
[upbeat music playing]
[Jose De La Rosa]
I was born in the Dominican Republic,
came to the U.S. in 1988,
and, uh, settled in the city
of Boston in 1989.
I used to be a baseball player, which is
like every Dominican, uh, kid's dream.
And I got scouted by one team
that they were interested in me,
so they, you know, hired me
to do some of the practices,
and just, you know,
so they actually got me in the U.S.
[crowd cheering]
But it didn't last.
I had to, uh,
find another way of-- of living.
So, um, I got a job at the airport.
Um, I was working at-- at Logan Airport,
and, uh, there was this…
I was working… You see those guys,
they, you know, park the plane?
America was great. I mean,
I always, you know, dreamed to be here.
It's been a good ride, until
an event that happened to me. [chuckles]
It was September 26, 1991.
I park in front of my apartment,
and when I leave my--
when I get out of my car,
all I see is a gun pointed to my head.
There were two guys.
I remember there were two of them.
Two guys wearing normal clothes.
One of them was Walter Robinson.
He said, "Give me your keys."
I'm shaking, hand him my keys,
and I told him, I point to my pocket,
I said, "I have $40."
I'm thinking I'm being robbed.
That's when they flashed the badge,
and they said, "We're police."
The other guy's telling me,
"Where do you live?"
"I live in that building."
They took the keys from my hand.
They put the gun away
and, you know, one of them
was pushing me towards the apartment.
[steps going up]
So, he opened the door with my key.
My girlfriend was there at the apartment,
and she panics.
She has no idea what's going on.
One of them grabbed me by the shirt
and-- and-- and sat me in a chair,
just like I'm sitting right now.
He said, "We're gonna find what
we're looking for." He pulls out a rope,
puts my hands on my back,
and he tied me with a rope.
My girlfriend is sitting,
and, uh, she was sobbing.
She had no idea
what the heck was happening.
[woman sobbing]
[rattling]
The guy comes back
and asks me, "Where is it?"
I say, "What are you looking for?"
I'm shaking, I'm crying.
And then I can hear one of them
in the back and in my bedroom,
just going through everything,
throwing stuff on the side,
and I'm really,
really getting really pissed off.
So, then they stood me up,
told my girlfriend,
you know, um, "We're gonna take him,"
and they sit me into the back of the car.
I'm really thinking
I am going to get shot.
They're gonna put me somewhere,
dump me somewhere into the woods.
[sinister music playing]
We drive for about 20, 25 minutes.
And then the door opens up,
and I see a police station.
I see a bunch of police officers
all over the place.
I still don't know what's going on.
[indistinct chatter]
[Dick Lehr] In 1995, '96, '97,
we spent a fair amount of time
looking at the Boston Police Department
and its practices.
We started hearing more about Area E
and in particular Walter Robinson,
Kenny Acerra, his partner,
and other officers there, John Brazil.
What we studied was their search warrants.
They were a very active, high-volume unit,
Uh, Robinson, Acerra and Brazil,
in terms of, uh, drug busts.
Before you execute a drug bust,
you have to get a judge to sign off
that you have, you know,
to override their privacy rights
with an authorized search warrant.
And most search warrants,
to be authorized,
have to be based
on some evidence and credibility.
And what we were able to show
by studying their practices
was they relied almost exclusively
on a single informant
for all their search warrants.
For 1992, for example,
we studied 47 busts that they did
relying on a single informant.
This was the mother lode
of underworld informants.
Uh, God's gift to,
uh, law enforcement, apparently.
And we're talking about busts
that made it all the more remarkable
that weren't in just West Roxbury
or in Area E,
but were all over the city.
It just defies credibility that there'd be
a single someone in the drug world
who would know about things going on
in Charlestown, in Southie.
You might know
something going on in your neighborhood,
uh, if you're plugged in.
It was beyond belief.
-[muffled yelling]
-Stop it! Ow!
[car honking]
[Dick Lehr] After cops execute a search
warrant, they have to file a return,
which is paperwork
that codifies what they seized,
what they found.
And again,
about Robinson and Acerra and Brazil,
only in 20% of their busts
did they record
that they seized money with the drugs.
It was kind of a laugh-out-loud result
because the rule of thumb is
when you find drugs, you find money.
They go hand in hand,
but they never seemed to find money.
So, that became
a recurring refrain of sorts
through-- through our investigation.
Where's the money?
What happened to the money?
[Jose] They sit me down.
The guy that grabbed me by the shirt,
he goes in front of me, and he slams,
puts his fist on the table
and he goes, um, uh, you know,
"You're in big trouble right now
unless you call someone, you know,
that can deliver something for you,
you know, someone big
that we can just go and pick him up."
I started crying again,
told them I don't know anyone,
you know, that deals drugs,
that's someone that can deliver this stuff
that you're asking right now.
The shorter of the two guys
came in and said, "You know what?
You're not gonna help us?
Here's what's going to happen to you."
He walks into a, um, mailbox.
He opens it,
and he pulls a big bag of white stuff.
And he said, "This is cocaine.
"This is going to be yours
in court tomorrow morning
when we take you to court."
[sinister music playing]
I just pee in my pants.
I just broke down.
I know what my fate was right now.
I just knew
that these people were gonna put me away.
And that's it,
so I went to this small little cell,
they put me in there, and, uh…
It was the longest night of my life.
I can tell you that.
[door closes]
Comes the morning,
and they ask me to come out
and, uh, I hear my name,
"Jose De La Rosa."
And, uh, I stand up,
and, you know, here's this guy,
this short guy, you know, in a suit.
And he said, "I'm the, uh,
I'm your court-appointed, uh, lawyer."
Then he's telling me, uh,
"Well, you've been charged
with trafficking in cocaine.
That is a mandatory 15-year,
you know, sentence,"
and my knees fail me.
Fifteen years?
I mean, what the heck?
Um, I hear the judge asking…
I guess was the prosecutor
like, you know,
"Who was behind this case?"
or "Who-- who are the arresting officers?"
or something like that.
Uh, my lawyer comes out and says,
"Well, you know. He doesn't have
a criminal record. Just go easy on him."
Some sort of that language.
I remember that the bail
was set at 2500, I think it was.
My girlfriend, you know,
actually paid that $2500.
Then, um, they call my name again,
and, you know, "Okay, you-- you go home."
So, I'm going home.
I came into the house.
A tornado had come in,
and just everything was upside down.
Everything. I mean,
there was nothing that was not unturned.
And the first thing I'm-- I'm looking for
is my jacket where I have $2300.
So, I had $2300 to buy a car,
and that was why the money
was in, you know, in my pocket.
When I go to the jacket,
there's no money there.
So, I am going, you know,
"Jesus Christ, they stole this money."
They took $2300 from me.
[sad music playing]
When I picked up my copy
of The Boston Globe,
and there was a spotlight series
on, uh, Detective Walter Robinson
and Detective Ken Acerra,
that was quite, uh…
quite eye-opening to us.
And then we can start to use
the investigative tools that we have
to, uh, sometimes go a lot deeper
than-- than the media can.
And we started pulling all the warrants
that, uh, Robinson and Acerra
had written and executed,
uh, over the past few years.
And from there,
starting with the paper,
we started actually going out
and knocking on doors
and talking to people
and, uh, trying to put some meat
on-- on the paper.
I was working at the airport.
I'm leaving work, go to the post office,
and there's this huge, tall guy.
And he goes, "Are you Jose De La Rosa?"
"Yeah, I'm Jose. What's going on?"
He said, "Well, I'm Detective Giovettio."
I'm like, "Gosh, here we go again."
Um, "You had a-- an incident back in 1991,
and I want to talk to you about that."
I said, "Sir, I'm done with that.
I don't want to talk about this anymore.
I mean, this is gone…"
He said, "No, I want you to understand
that I'm on your side this time.
"I'm doing an investigation,
and I need your help.
I need you to help me with this."
And I said, "If you're real,
if this is true what you're talking about,
I-- I-- I'm more than willing to help you
'cause this is a big deal in my life.
These people turned me upside down,
and I need to see
what, you know, what can be done."
So, we had some pretty strong suspicions
about what was going on.
And we have a tool that's called,
uh, immunity, statutory immunity,
that we can force people to-- to testify.
And then eventually,
we were able to, uh, get testimony
from one of their colleagues,
Detective John Brazil.
Brazil became a cooperating witness.
He, you know, he cut a deal.
[indistinct chatter]
[Merritt] Brazil testified
he had some real regrets
that he had been involved in this,
and he confirmed what we had suspected.
And that was
that they were fabricating the informants,
that they were fabricating that
they had conducted surveillance on places.
And, um, they pretty much
had it down to a routine
where Robinson would tell Brazil,
"Well, just put down someone
who you recently arrested
as giving you the information."
They did it by falsified warrants,
uh, to be able to get into a place
where they had some belief
that there would be money and/or drugs.
And once they were able
to fabricate these search warrants,
they would go in and seize
thousands and thousands of dollars.
And instead of doing
what they're supposed to do
and turn it back in to the Boston Police
Department, so it could be forfeited,
they kept it.
They kept it for themselves.
Sometimes they kept all the money.
Sometimes they would record some of it
and keep some of it.
Sometimes they would record all of it
'cause they lost track.
And this happened
over the course of at least four years
in over 50 different search warrants
to the tune of, uh, over $250,000
that was unaccounted for
and in the defendants' possessions.
Part of the investigation
was that they were
putting the drugs back on the street
and, you know, earning [chuckling]
illegal profits that way as well.
[police siren blaring]
[car honks]
To them, the perfect victim
was someone who's got a lot of cash…
uh…
that there's some, uh,
level of criminal liability
because there were some drugs found.
And the equation is,
what do I care more about,
you know, my cash, or my liberty?
So, if, uh, essentially,
the offer's on the table,
we're gonna keep the cash.
Your case is gonna get dismissed.
Most of them were not gonna,
you know, complain about it.
The complaints
from drug dealers has no credibility.
Why should anyone
believe a drug dealer versus a cop?
Um…
And that's what corrupt cops,
uh, depend on
and rely on and invoke,
as Walter Robinson did when he said,
"You can't trust a whore
and a drug dealer."
[reporter] Detectives Kenneth Acerra
and Walter Robinson
pleaded guilty to conspiracy, theft,
and intimidation of witnesses,
and falsifying informants.
Well, nobody's happy about it.
I mean, obviously,
it makes everybody look bad.
I wouldn't have any idea
what they were doing.
I mean, all you know
is they were active cops,
they were arresting people.
If they were, you know,
executing search warrants,
whether they were stealing money or drugs,
we wouldn't have any knowledge.
There is a culture of lying and cover-up
that, uh, has affected
the Boston Police Department,
but police departments
everywhere across the country.
Even if you see,
and even if you're not corrupt,
but even if you see wrongdoing
by another officer,
um…
you stay silent.
We were ready to go to trial,
and there was then a movement
by the defense
that they were interested
in finding a plea.
We ended up agreeing
to an agreed-on sentence
of three years for each
and $100,000 restitution for each
and, um, at that time,
felt that it was an equitable result.
[Jose De La Rosa]
A few weeks later, I'm at work.
Someone comes with a newspaper,
you know, a piece of the newspaper,
and front page of the newspaper,
you know, I see Walter Robinson's face
and Kenneth Acerra on the other side.
Boston police corruption.
The headline was "Badge of Shame."
That was the best thing
that ever happened to me
in those seven years.
I'm like, "Oh, my God!" [laughs]
And I'm looking at my name,
like, you know, "They've been indicted."
You know,
"They did this to Jose De La Rosa."
It was the best day of my life.
It-It-- Just seeing those two guys
going to what they made me go through.
Now they're the ones going to jail.
[exhales]
[breathing audibly]
It just happened.
These guys,
they were just going to take me away
just because they felt like it.
They had the power to do so.
They could just put me away,
and-and I would have been gone
with no one knowing.
Who in the heck was going to believe me?
That's too bad, man, what happened,
but I'm just glad that you stayed free.
You know, I look back right now
and I say…
you know, "I could have been gone
for all that time."
I can only imagine what you went through.
I spent a few days in that,
you know, those cells.
But 22 years out of your life,
I really feel horrible for you,
whatever happened to you.
It's crazy.
-When is the trial?
-[Sean] Mm.
They haven't decided yet, right?
I last heard something about October,
um, but I'm not for certain.
-Yeah.
-I really wish you the best.
Hopefully, you know,
you're gonna be okay, man.
Hopefully,
everything's gonna be all right.
-All right.
-All righty.
I wish you the best, man.
Thank you.
Robinson and Acerra were--
were corrupt cops.
Any time their names came up in connection
with any case, I think it's tainted.
Their work is completely questionable
and, uh, the starting point
is that it can't be trusted.
How can there be anyone think
that an investigation that
they're a part of have any integrity?
It was in the paper. Um…
They were excited about it.
Um, I remember one of them saying that
they knew something was there.
They knew something was going on.
It gave me hope that now, the Commonwealth
would look-- look-- look into the case,
look into all the discrepancies.
Um, and I believed
that I'd be going home soon.
[reporter] Sean Ellis was convicted
of killing Boston Police Detective
John Mulligan after two mistrials.
His attorneys filed a motion
yesterday asking for a new trial.
They stated that several corrupt
detectives involved in the investigation
were in part responsible
for Ellis' conviction.
We have this massive body of evidence
that these two people, uh,
were habitual and consistent liars.
And that they did this
as a part of their official duties.
They basically, that's the way
they operated as police officers.
[reporter] Ellis' attorney David Duncan
believes Robinson and Acerra, who
are serving three-year prison sentences,
influenced the testimony of a key witness
who puts Ellis at the scene of the crime.
So, we filed a new trial motion.
And they had an MO.
They basically were,
like, busting drug dealers,
stealing their drugs.
I mean,
they were basically lining their pockets
and, you know,
making busts through criminal activities.
So, we said to the court… [chuckles]
"These are the people you're depending on.
The people who are criminals
are the ones who shepherded this woman
in to, uh, make an identification."
And they asked for an evidentiary hearing
in order to substantiate the motion,
and Judge McDaniels
denied the evidentiary hearing,
um, and denied the motion.
What Acerra and Robinson did or did not do
had absolutely nothing
to do with the Mulligan case.
Nothing whatsoever.
I'm not here to vouch
for Acerra and Robinson.
What they did, they did.
They gotta pay the price.
But as far at the Mulligan case,
you're not gonna find a cleaner case.
[police talking via radio]
[Sean] In 1999,
I left Walpole
and went
to Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center.
That was deemed the supermax.
At the time, I'm sure they were
just trying to get bodies there.
It was a drop down.
Everything was closed.
You're in your cell 21 hours a day.
You get let out
for, like, an hour in the morning,
an hour in the afternoon,
and an hour at night.
[somber music playing]
That was hard.
I was feeling, um…
"Damn, is this how
I'm gonna spend the rest of my life,
you know, locked in a fucking cell?"
[yelling]
[Elaine Murphy] I learned about
Sean's conviction in the most uncanny way.
We were living in Montreal at that time.
We had old friends from New England
coming up to visit us.
They came in with their suitcases,
and they tossed that day's Boston Globe
on my kitchen counter.
I remember looking at it, thinking,
"The Globe, I haven't seen The Globe
in ever so long."
And then I looked a little more closely,
and I saw a very large photo of a boy,
and I saw the headline,
and it said, "Ellis convicted
in third trial of murder of detective."
All of a sudden, I realized this was Sean.
I was just dumbstruck.
I was just stunned.
Completely shattered.
Because this was a kid I knew.
And I knew what he was.
He was a sweet, shy, gentle boy.
And I thought,
"Oh, my God, this kid is not a killer."
[soft music playing]
I met Sean Ellis back in the 1980s
in Needham, Massachusetts.
We were living there at the time.
And, uh, my son was in elementary school
at the Mitchell Elementary School,
and Sean was his classmate,
and they became fast friends.
He was the Black kid in the class,
and everybody else was lily white.
Sean was there
because he was bused every day
through a program called METCO.
It was a voluntary
school integration program.
And kids were selected very carefully
to be part of the program
and then sent
to suburban schools around Boston
for a so-called better-chance education.
In fact, it worked both ways
because the receiving community
benefited greatly by the integration.
[talking, laughing]
[Mary Jackie Ellis] The METCO program
basically took children out of the ghetto,
and took them to the, uh, suburbs
to get an education.
And that was, like, the best thing
that could happen to me
because I didn't, at the time,
feel that when I was coming up
that I got the best education possible.
And so, Sean went to first
and second grade in the METCO program.
[laughing]
We would get up,
I want to say around five in the morning.
Um, my mom always made sure
that we had breakfast
before leaving the house.
We was dressed and presentable for school.
She would drop us off at our bus stop.
When the weather was cold or whatever,
she would wait for the bus to come.
[sad music playing]
Don't look at me. Don't look at me.
[Elaine Murphy] METCO proved to be
a huge thing in his life.
The education, of course,
that came with it year over year,
had to have a hugely formative effect
on him and his growing up.
Use your pencil.
[Sean] We had host families in METCO
that lived in Needham.
And so Mark Murphy, um,
and his family became my host family.
That's how that relationship began
to happen and his parents met my mom.
You know…
[seagulls squeal]
[Shar'day Taylor]
It's amazing. I love the house.
[indistinct chatter]
-[woman 1] How are you?
-[woman 2] I'm good. How are you?
-Good to see you.
-[Elaine] Good to see you too.
-Hi.
-Hi.
-Welcome.
-Good to see you.
And you. [chuckles]
How are you?
Good to see you.
That landscape, it's just so beautiful.
We've been working.
I can't wait to see pictures.
[sad music intensifies]
We were a little behavioral--
behaviorally challenged.
Yeah.
-We were the two bad kids in class.
-Yeah.
Probably because
we were friends with each other,
we-- we caused trouble together.
And Ms. Santoro took us under her wing
and gave us stickers
or prizes for good behavior,
and we filled out a book,
and she got us in line, I would say.
She was a great…
-[Sean] In her own way.
-[Mark] In her way.
-[Sean] She was gorgeous.
-[Elaine] Like Sandra Bullock.
[Mark]
She did look like Sandra Bullock, really.
How do you not behave for her?
You know?
[laughing]
[Shar'day]
How was it for you when you found out
that something like this has happened
to someone you went to school with,
and you were so close to?
How was that for you?
To hear it was Sean, I was shocked.
I mean, it, uh, as my mom
was with the newspaper, that whole story.
Um, and as soon as we found out,
as soon as we could, uh, I visited him
and, uh, and it was surreal to see him
on the other side of the glass.
-[Shar'day] Yeah.
-It was surreal.
[Elaine] Of course, we'd never been
to prison before. We were nervous.
We didn't know what to do. They were
saying this and that. Then the lady looks
at Mark and says,
"You can't go in there dressed in those."
And she's pointing at his jeans.
And-- and she says, "No jeans allowed."
And Mark says, "What is this, the Ritz?"
[laughing]
[soft music playing]
When I felt for sure that he was innocent
and was likely railroaded,
I thought I'm a writer,
and I've done so much research and writing
and that's been my career.
I think I can help. I think
I have the skills to help this kid.
I wrote my op-ed article
that came out in The Globe that week,
just reminiscing about Sean
and what a tragedy this was.
It got favorable feedback
from people I knew around Boston,
and I thought at that time,
"Wow, the power of the pen."
I just realized Sean
and the world that he really lived in
and the-- the environment
that he grew up with,
that he came of age in-- in Dorchester,
was so very different from my own kids,
that his former friend Mark, grew up in.
So different.
It was two different Americas.
I felt like saying,
"My God, this would never have happened
to my son Mark."
[kids laughing]
[Sean] At the time,
I lived with my older sister DeeDee,
my brother Joseph,
my sister Janelle,
and myself, and my mom.
I don't have any clear memories
of my dad living with us,
but I've some kind of vague,
faint memories of my dad living with us.
And then, you know, at some point,
my dad was out of the picture.
[sad music playing]
[seagulls squeal]
I need my brother here.
I miss him a lot.
I just need him.
He was born in '70. I was born in '74.
I was eight years old when he passed away.
[Mary Jackie Ellis]
It was, uh, June 13, in '83
and, uh, Joseph left school
and went over to his friend's house.
They was going to go in the pool.
They were playing,
and he jumped in the pool
and didn't come back up.
And so when they found him,
they called the Needham police
and ambulance and stuff.
They took him to the hospital,
and then they called me.
And so I didn't have no transportation
to get out there,
and they said, "Don't worry.
We'll come get you."
And so I said, "Okay, that's good,"
but in the back of the police cruiser,
they got the word that Joseph passed.
And I-- And they told me, and I freaked.
And I remember trying to open the door
of the police car to get out,
and I couldn't.
And they kept telling me to "calm down,
Mrs. Ellis. Calm down, Mrs. Ellis."
And they talked to me
till we got to the hospital.
[Sean] I don't remember
any more about that day,
but I do remember being told
that he wasn't coming home no more.
And I remember, you know,
crying and being in my room
and like, breaking stuff in my room…
and, uh, not being allowed
to go to school for the rest of the year.
When he passed,
it took a toll on my mom and…
I-- I mean, that was her first boy.
That was her first-born son.
And she just hasn't been
the same since then.
[Mary Jackie Ellis] It was a time
that it was very overwhelming,
and when I was introduced
to the crack,
that gave me a few minutes of escaping.
Things going on at home, um,
like my mom was experiencing,
you know, [stammers] the difficulties
of, like, [stammers] drug addiction.
So, as a young person, like,
I had all that weight on me.
[rap music playing]
I left Needham in, like, '89,
and then I transferred to Boston
in grade ten.
And I graduated '91, '92, I believe.
And so I started hanging out more.
Mostly because I was out of school.
The more I hung out,
the more that I became exposed
to the neighborhood
and the stuff
that was going on in the neighborhood.
It's the people in the surrounding area
he was hanging with.
I pretty much believe
that's how Sean got started with drugs.
He was nowhere near a kingpin,
but he was out there, uh, doing his thing
as far as selling drugs.
[Sean] It started out,
like, something, like, small.
We only have a couple of dollars,
so, like, you buy a 50-rock.
From a 50-rock, uh,
you can make a hundred.
You continue to do that
until you can go up
in the amount of weight that you can get.
The more weight you get,
the more money you make.
[indistinct chatter]
[sinister music playing]
If I had an older brother, man,
my belief is that
he'd have been able to straighten me out
when I needed to be straightened out.
[kisses]
During those years, uh,
the early 2000s, it was bleak.
There was nothing in the landscape.
And then Sean found out
that he was able to actually pursue
yet another step in the legal position
through something called Rule 30,
where he could do, uh,
post-conviction relief on his own,
but he'd have to actually, um,
fire his lawyers for ineffective counsel.
So, that was a hurdle
'cause he knew that Zalkind and Duncan
had his best interests at heart.
They really cared about him.
He had a wonderful relationship with them.
So, Sean wrote me
and said, "Godma, I'm 'attorneyless.'"
And he said how scared he was.
And he was trying like heck to get it all
together and to write motions and do that.
He was feeling extremely overwhelmed.
I'm still fighting, but, like,
it's getting harder and harder, um…
to hold on.
It's like--
it's kind of like you start losing hope.
And I-- I remember clearly,
um, fighting, fighting…
um…
not to lose all hope
and not to become entrenched
in the prison culture.
[helicopter whirring]
[police siren blaring]
[police talking on radio]
[indistinct chatter]
At some point,
um, around I want to say 2003,
I was in my cell
and, uh, I was watching the news.
And I see Rosemary on the news
dealing with Shawn Drumgold.
For nearly 15 years,
Shawn Drumgold
has been sitting behind bars
convicted of the random shooting death
of 12-year-old Tiffany Moore
back in the summer of 1988.
So, now,
Rosemary Scapicchio is seeking a new trial
while Suffolk County District Attorney
Dan Conley
has launched an internal investigation
into what happened
in the Tiffany Moore case.
We had filed 2 or 3 different motions
for a new trial. All got denied.
Um, and then The Boston Globe
started to do a story
on all of these witnesses
who were coming forward and recanting.
[Emily Rooney] An investigation
by Boston Globe reporter Dick Lehr
has cast serious doubt
on Drumgold's conviction.
Lehr reported that Drumgold
was nothing more
than a street-level drug-dealer
who was not near the area
at the time of the shooting
and was not a gang member.
But Dick Lehr's big news
concerned the witnesses
whose testimony put Drumgold away.
It was the media attention, I think,
that really, you know,
uh, catapulted this case
into, uh, something that people
had to sit down and take a look at.
Um, and so we were able to find a witness,
uh, by the name of… [stammers]
His name was Ricky.
We actually got
to sit down and talk to him,
and he was so nervous, and he said,
"Rosemary, can I talk to you?"
I said, "Absolutely."
So, we go out in the hall,
and he says, you know,
"I never saw Shawn do any of this."
[police siren blaring]
And he tells me the story
of the police basically paying him
to say what he said and feeding him
information about this crime
that he didn't know otherwise.
He was homeless.
He was sleeping on someone's couch.
Um, one of the detectives came by,
and said, uh, they would put him up
at the Howard Johnson's.
He had his own room.
He had the ability
to charge everything to his room.
And so they basically
were feeding him the details of the crime
that he otherwise wouldn't have known,
um, and he was regurgitating
them to, um, the-- the-- the jury.
[reporter] For Shawn Drumgold, the
testimony in today's evidentiary hearing
is 15 years too late.
Only now are witnesses coming forward
to corroborate his alibi.
[Rosemary] There is no question
that you saw Shawn Drumgold
on 23 Sanoma Street, um,
on-- on August 19th, 1988?
Yes.
[reporter] Now, several witnesses say
Drumgold was several blocks away
when the shots rang out.
Drumgold's friend Olisa Graham
said on the stand today
that after the shooting, she was warned
not to testify on Drumgold's behalf
by a man claiming to be
a Boston police detective.
Well, the detectives told me
that I had a warrant,
so I wouldn't be able to testify.
If I was to testify,
I could be arrested
once I came off the stand.
[reporter] After that, Graham said,
she kept her mouth shut.
Fourteen years after his conviction
for the murder
of 12-year-old Tiffany Moore,
thirty-eight-year-old
Shawn Drumgold is free.
Shawn Drumgold smiled
when he finally learned he was a free man.
[man] All rise, please.
Shawn, how do you feel?
I feel great.
This is a great day for me and my family.
This is extraordinary. This is something
that I've been hoping for all my life.
The District Attorney's Office
needs to be held accountable.
The people who investigated it
need to be held accountable.
The Boston police
need to be held accountable.
If we don't hold those organizations
accountable, this will happen again.
She caught my interest
because she didn't mind…
[stammers]
It's like she wasn't scared of the police.
So, I sat down, and I wrote her a letter.
Um, I basically told her who I was.
Um, I basically told her
what I was convic-- convicted of,
how many trials that I had.
"I'm convicted of killing
Detective Mulligan. I didn't do it.
Is there any way you can
come and talk to me?" and da-da-da-da.
There was something about the letter.
I can't say what it was
off the top of my head,
um, but something about the letter
that I said, "I gotta go see this kid."
I couldn't do it right away.
So, I had too much going on.
I was too busy and I said, "I can't
get to this case for 18 months,"
and he said, "I'll wait,"
I said, "I can't guarantee you
that once I read it, I'm gonna take it."
He said, "I'll wait.
"I won't bother you, I won't call you.
I will wait," um, and so he did.
[sad music playing]
I grew up in Brighton
with my sisters and my mom.
And this is my old high school.
It used to be Mount Saint Joseph Academy.
It's now Saint Joseph Prep.
It was
an all-girls private Catholic high school
run by the sisters of Saint Joseph.
I worked in the summers
and after school
to pay the tuition at the Mount.
We didn't know that kids didn't work
to pay their tuition in high school.
My mother said, "Go do it,"
and you just did it, that's what you did.
[church bell rings]
So, this is the beginning
of the Faneuil projects up here.
We lived at 89 Faneuil,
which is almost one of the last buildings.
I always felt like when I got here,
I knew I was home.
[indistinct chatter]
There used to be kids that hung out front
on Faneuil Street.
Um, there were definitely drugs
in the projects.
There were definitely people
who were dealing drugs.
There were women who were trying
to support their families
by way of prostitution.
Um, there was all of that here,
and it was just sort of a way of life.
[indistinct chatter]
It's right there, the bedroom window.
They're both above the grate,
but that's where my bedroom used to be.
There was one and a half bathrooms.
We had literally seven kids,
so it went by rank, according to age.
My sister Kathy, who was the oldest,
got first shot at the bathroom,
and then Kathy, Julie, Trisha,
me, Margie, Jackie, Billy.
So, poor Billy was in the end.
[chuckles] And everyone got five minutes.
And there was not
a lot of hot water back then.
My dad wasn't around, uh,
so my mom was the one
who was here every day.
We watched her get up and go to work.
There was no such thing as being sick.
I remember in the second grade,
uh, I had appendicitis,
[laughs] and I was deathly ill,
and she was saying,
"No, you can go to school," and it wasn't
until the school nurse called and said,
"There's something going on here,"
that she's like, "All right."
And my mother
used to tell us all the time,
being successful, uh, is the best revenge,
you know, for what you do.
So, that's what we all tried to do.
We put ourselves
through high school and college
and myself through law school,
so that we could give back a little.
That's a lot of what I do now
in the cases that I take
is that most of the clients
that I take through CPCS
are through, you know,
poor, underdeveloped, um,
really, um,
low socioeconomic, um, settings,
like Sean.
[helicopter whirring]
[Sean]
I get called out to an attorney visit.
When I walked into the room,
Rosemary demanded, uh, attention,
and, uh, she wasn't nobody to play with.
Um, she was a-- a, uh, straight shooter,
she, you know, called it as she saw it.
Um, [stammers]
and it's like she was fearless.
I remember him coming in.
He was sweating. He was nervous,
um, and shook my hand
and started stuttering.
He's not bragging about it, he's not…
He's saying he didn't do it,
um, that this was a rush to judgment,
that all of the same things
that I was hearing from Shawn Drumgold.
She said…
[stammers] basically,
and I'm paraphrasing,
[stammers] "You got over one hurdle,
which was getting me here.
Now I need you to tell me,
um, like, why you?"
And like, I had never had anybody
to ask that question.
Um, and, like, the truth of the matter is
it's my position.
It's because I was young. I was Black,
and I admitted being there.
And she says,
"All right, I can-- I can go with that."
[somber music playing]
[Rosemary] If I'm involved,
I have to get to the truth of it.
To me, it's a puzzle.
I need to sort of solve the puzzle
and put all the pieces together
and make sure they fit.
A timeline is
a visual picture of what's happened.
What I like to do
in the timelines that I put together
is find out what's happening
before the crime happens,
do a detailed timeline
of the night of the incident,
and then be able
to visually picture what the police did
in terms of the investigation.
[phone ringing]
No, not till… October 2nd.
Two different ideas in the very beginning,
one was there has to be
some investigation into the corruption
and the second one is
Mulligan, we believed, was a dirty cop.
And so that became my focus.
And I really believed that,
uh, we could prove
that Mulligan was involved
in, uh, the same corruption
that Acerra, Robinson, and Brazil
were involved in.
And they were trying to make sure
that this case was solved quickly,
the conviction happened efficiently,
and that it would withstand anything,
so that they wouldn't themselves
get exposed and indicted.
[melancholy music playing]
[dramatic music playing]
-[Sean] Hi, how are you?
-God, I've finally met you.
-[Sean] Yeah.
-[chuckles] Jesus Christ, man.
I've been looking forward
to meeting you for a while.
-[Sean] Yes.
-Yeah. [chuckles]
I am so sorry, man,
for what you went through.
It's one of those things that, you know…
[chuckles] …you only see that on TV
and then, the reality comes in.
Then you get to see
what's going on. It's crazy.
It's just, uh, 22 years, man,
that's-- that's insane.
[Sean] Yeah.
I was 19 years old when I got arrested
and so, once I got to my 20th year,
I started to reflect, like, "Damn.
Like, I-- I got more time in prison
than I have on the Earth."
[indistinct chatter]
[Jose De La Rosa] When I saw the video
of them pulling you out of a van…
-Yeah.
-…those are two faces I'll never forget.
Kenneth Acerra.
He was the one who tied me up with a rope.
[indistinct chatter]
And Walter Robinson.
Walter's face will never go away for me.
You know, he had this smile on him
all the time, and yeah.
[DeeDee] We love you, Sean!
The fact
that we went through the same situation,
similar stuff,
like, you know, by the same people,
doing the kind of, you know,
stuff that they did back in 1991,
it's just insane.
They wasn't doing this for one year.
They wasn't doing it for two years.
They was doing it,
I want to say, if I remember correctly,
for a decade or more.
For ten or more years.
Was it ever asked,
did it ever come up, like…
How was they allowed
to stay on the police force?
It sticks in my head.
It's like, "My God, what did they do?"
The city turned,
you know, a blind eye on this.
[upbeat music playing]
[Jose De La Rosa]
I was born in the Dominican Republic,
came to the U.S. in 1988,
and, uh, settled in the city
of Boston in 1989.
I used to be a baseball player, which is
like every Dominican, uh, kid's dream.
And I got scouted by one team
that they were interested in me,
so they, you know, hired me
to do some of the practices,
and just, you know,
so they actually got me in the U.S.
[crowd cheering]
But it didn't last.
I had to, uh,
find another way of-- of living.
So, um, I got a job at the airport.
Um, I was working at-- at Logan Airport,
and, uh, there was this…
I was working… You see those guys,
they, you know, park the plane?
America was great. I mean,
I always, you know, dreamed to be here.
It's been a good ride, until
an event that happened to me. [chuckles]
It was September 26, 1991.
I park in front of my apartment,
and when I leave my--
when I get out of my car,
all I see is a gun pointed to my head.
There were two guys.
I remember there were two of them.
Two guys wearing normal clothes.
One of them was Walter Robinson.
He said, "Give me your keys."
I'm shaking, hand him my keys,
and I told him, I point to my pocket,
I said, "I have $40."
I'm thinking I'm being robbed.
That's when they flashed the badge,
and they said, "We're police."
The other guy's telling me,
"Where do you live?"
"I live in that building."
They took the keys from my hand.
They put the gun away
and, you know, one of them
was pushing me towards the apartment.
[steps going up]
So, he opened the door with my key.
My girlfriend was there at the apartment,
and she panics.
She has no idea what's going on.
One of them grabbed me by the shirt
and-- and-- and sat me in a chair,
just like I'm sitting right now.
He said, "We're gonna find what
we're looking for." He pulls out a rope,
puts my hands on my back,
and he tied me with a rope.
My girlfriend is sitting,
and, uh, she was sobbing.
She had no idea
what the heck was happening.
[woman sobbing]
[rattling]
The guy comes back
and asks me, "Where is it?"
I say, "What are you looking for?"
I'm shaking, I'm crying.
And then I can hear one of them
in the back and in my bedroom,
just going through everything,
throwing stuff on the side,
and I'm really,
really getting really pissed off.
So, then they stood me up,
told my girlfriend,
you know, um, "We're gonna take him,"
and they sit me into the back of the car.
I'm really thinking
I am going to get shot.
They're gonna put me somewhere,
dump me somewhere into the woods.
[sinister music playing]
We drive for about 20, 25 minutes.
And then the door opens up,
and I see a police station.
I see a bunch of police officers
all over the place.
I still don't know what's going on.
[indistinct chatter]
[Dick Lehr] In 1995, '96, '97,
we spent a fair amount of time
looking at the Boston Police Department
and its practices.
We started hearing more about Area E
and in particular Walter Robinson,
Kenny Acerra, his partner,
and other officers there, John Brazil.
What we studied was their search warrants.
They were a very active, high-volume unit,
Uh, Robinson, Acerra and Brazil,
in terms of, uh, drug busts.
Before you execute a drug bust,
you have to get a judge to sign off
that you have, you know,
to override their privacy rights
with an authorized search warrant.
And most search warrants,
to be authorized,
have to be based
on some evidence and credibility.
And what we were able to show
by studying their practices
was they relied almost exclusively
on a single informant
for all their search warrants.
For 1992, for example,
we studied 47 busts that they did
relying on a single informant.
This was the mother lode
of underworld informants.
Uh, God's gift to,
uh, law enforcement, apparently.
And we're talking about busts
that made it all the more remarkable
that weren't in just West Roxbury
or in Area E,
but were all over the city.
It just defies credibility that there'd be
a single someone in the drug world
who would know about things going on
in Charlestown, in Southie.
You might know
something going on in your neighborhood,
uh, if you're plugged in.
It was beyond belief.
-[muffled yelling]
-Stop it! Ow!
[car honking]
[Dick Lehr] After cops execute a search
warrant, they have to file a return,
which is paperwork
that codifies what they seized,
what they found.
And again,
about Robinson and Acerra and Brazil,
only in 20% of their busts
did they record
that they seized money with the drugs.
It was kind of a laugh-out-loud result
because the rule of thumb is
when you find drugs, you find money.
They go hand in hand,
but they never seemed to find money.
So, that became
a recurring refrain of sorts
through-- through our investigation.
Where's the money?
What happened to the money?
[Jose] They sit me down.
The guy that grabbed me by the shirt,
he goes in front of me, and he slams,
puts his fist on the table
and he goes, um, uh, you know,
"You're in big trouble right now
unless you call someone, you know,
that can deliver something for you,
you know, someone big
that we can just go and pick him up."
I started crying again,
told them I don't know anyone,
you know, that deals drugs,
that's someone that can deliver this stuff
that you're asking right now.
The shorter of the two guys
came in and said, "You know what?
You're not gonna help us?
Here's what's going to happen to you."
He walks into a, um, mailbox.
He opens it,
and he pulls a big bag of white stuff.
And he said, "This is cocaine.
"This is going to be yours
in court tomorrow morning
when we take you to court."
[sinister music playing]
I just pee in my pants.
I just broke down.
I know what my fate was right now.
I just knew
that these people were gonna put me away.
And that's it,
so I went to this small little cell,
they put me in there, and, uh…
It was the longest night of my life.
I can tell you that.
[door closes]
Comes the morning,
and they ask me to come out
and, uh, I hear my name,
"Jose De La Rosa."
And, uh, I stand up,
and, you know, here's this guy,
this short guy, you know, in a suit.
And he said, "I'm the, uh,
I'm your court-appointed, uh, lawyer."
Then he's telling me, uh,
"Well, you've been charged
with trafficking in cocaine.
That is a mandatory 15-year,
you know, sentence,"
and my knees fail me.
Fifteen years?
I mean, what the heck?
Um, I hear the judge asking…
I guess was the prosecutor
like, you know,
"Who was behind this case?"
or "Who-- who are the arresting officers?"
or something like that.
Uh, my lawyer comes out and says,
"Well, you know. He doesn't have
a criminal record. Just go easy on him."
Some sort of that language.
I remember that the bail
was set at 2500, I think it was.
My girlfriend, you know,
actually paid that $2500.
Then, um, they call my name again,
and, you know, "Okay, you-- you go home."
So, I'm going home.
I came into the house.
A tornado had come in,
and just everything was upside down.
Everything. I mean,
there was nothing that was not unturned.
And the first thing I'm-- I'm looking for
is my jacket where I have $2300.
So, I had $2300 to buy a car,
and that was why the money
was in, you know, in my pocket.
When I go to the jacket,
there's no money there.
So, I am going, you know,
"Jesus Christ, they stole this money."
They took $2300 from me.
[sad music playing]
When I picked up my copy
of The Boston Globe,
and there was a spotlight series
on, uh, Detective Walter Robinson
and Detective Ken Acerra,
that was quite, uh…
quite eye-opening to us.
And then we can start to use
the investigative tools that we have
to, uh, sometimes go a lot deeper
than-- than the media can.
And we started pulling all the warrants
that, uh, Robinson and Acerra
had written and executed,
uh, over the past few years.
And from there,
starting with the paper,
we started actually going out
and knocking on doors
and talking to people
and, uh, trying to put some meat
on-- on the paper.
I was working at the airport.
I'm leaving work, go to the post office,
and there's this huge, tall guy.
And he goes, "Are you Jose De La Rosa?"
"Yeah, I'm Jose. What's going on?"
He said, "Well, I'm Detective Giovettio."
I'm like, "Gosh, here we go again."
Um, "You had a-- an incident back in 1991,
and I want to talk to you about that."
I said, "Sir, I'm done with that.
I don't want to talk about this anymore.
I mean, this is gone…"
He said, "No, I want you to understand
that I'm on your side this time.
"I'm doing an investigation,
and I need your help.
I need you to help me with this."
And I said, "If you're real,
if this is true what you're talking about,
I-- I-- I'm more than willing to help you
'cause this is a big deal in my life.
These people turned me upside down,
and I need to see
what, you know, what can be done."
So, we had some pretty strong suspicions
about what was going on.
And we have a tool that's called,
uh, immunity, statutory immunity,
that we can force people to-- to testify.
And then eventually,
we were able to, uh, get testimony
from one of their colleagues,
Detective John Brazil.
Brazil became a cooperating witness.
He, you know, he cut a deal.
[indistinct chatter]
[Merritt] Brazil testified
he had some real regrets
that he had been involved in this,
and he confirmed what we had suspected.
And that was
that they were fabricating the informants,
that they were fabricating that
they had conducted surveillance on places.
And, um, they pretty much
had it down to a routine
where Robinson would tell Brazil,
"Well, just put down someone
who you recently arrested
as giving you the information."
They did it by falsified warrants,
uh, to be able to get into a place
where they had some belief
that there would be money and/or drugs.
And once they were able
to fabricate these search warrants,
they would go in and seize
thousands and thousands of dollars.
And instead of doing
what they're supposed to do
and turn it back in to the Boston Police
Department, so it could be forfeited,
they kept it.
They kept it for themselves.
Sometimes they kept all the money.
Sometimes they would record some of it
and keep some of it.
Sometimes they would record all of it
'cause they lost track.
And this happened
over the course of at least four years
in over 50 different search warrants
to the tune of, uh, over $250,000
that was unaccounted for
and in the defendants' possessions.
Part of the investigation
was that they were
putting the drugs back on the street
and, you know, earning [chuckling]
illegal profits that way as well.
[police siren blaring]
[car honks]
To them, the perfect victim
was someone who's got a lot of cash…
uh…
that there's some, uh,
level of criminal liability
because there were some drugs found.
And the equation is,
what do I care more about,
you know, my cash, or my liberty?
So, if, uh, essentially,
the offer's on the table,
we're gonna keep the cash.
Your case is gonna get dismissed.
Most of them were not gonna,
you know, complain about it.
The complaints
from drug dealers has no credibility.
Why should anyone
believe a drug dealer versus a cop?
Um…
And that's what corrupt cops,
uh, depend on
and rely on and invoke,
as Walter Robinson did when he said,
"You can't trust a whore
and a drug dealer."
[reporter] Detectives Kenneth Acerra
and Walter Robinson
pleaded guilty to conspiracy, theft,
and intimidation of witnesses,
and falsifying informants.
Well, nobody's happy about it.
I mean, obviously,
it makes everybody look bad.
I wouldn't have any idea
what they were doing.
I mean, all you know
is they were active cops,
they were arresting people.
If they were, you know,
executing search warrants,
whether they were stealing money or drugs,
we wouldn't have any knowledge.
There is a culture of lying and cover-up
that, uh, has affected
the Boston Police Department,
but police departments
everywhere across the country.
Even if you see,
and even if you're not corrupt,
but even if you see wrongdoing
by another officer,
um…
you stay silent.
We were ready to go to trial,
and there was then a movement
by the defense
that they were interested
in finding a plea.
We ended up agreeing
to an agreed-on sentence
of three years for each
and $100,000 restitution for each
and, um, at that time,
felt that it was an equitable result.
[Jose De La Rosa]
A few weeks later, I'm at work.
Someone comes with a newspaper,
you know, a piece of the newspaper,
and front page of the newspaper,
you know, I see Walter Robinson's face
and Kenneth Acerra on the other side.
Boston police corruption.
The headline was "Badge of Shame."
That was the best thing
that ever happened to me
in those seven years.
I'm like, "Oh, my God!" [laughs]
And I'm looking at my name,
like, you know, "They've been indicted."
You know,
"They did this to Jose De La Rosa."
It was the best day of my life.
It-It-- Just seeing those two guys
going to what they made me go through.
Now they're the ones going to jail.
[exhales]
[breathing audibly]
It just happened.
These guys,
they were just going to take me away
just because they felt like it.
They had the power to do so.
They could just put me away,
and-and I would have been gone
with no one knowing.
Who in the heck was going to believe me?
That's too bad, man, what happened,
but I'm just glad that you stayed free.
You know, I look back right now
and I say…
you know, "I could have been gone
for all that time."
I can only imagine what you went through.
I spent a few days in that,
you know, those cells.
But 22 years out of your life,
I really feel horrible for you,
whatever happened to you.
It's crazy.
-When is the trial?
-[Sean] Mm.
They haven't decided yet, right?
I last heard something about October,
um, but I'm not for certain.
-Yeah.
-I really wish you the best.
Hopefully, you know,
you're gonna be okay, man.
Hopefully,
everything's gonna be all right.
-All right.
-All righty.
I wish you the best, man.
Thank you.
Robinson and Acerra were--
were corrupt cops.
Any time their names came up in connection
with any case, I think it's tainted.
Their work is completely questionable
and, uh, the starting point
is that it can't be trusted.
How can there be anyone think
that an investigation that
they're a part of have any integrity?
It was in the paper. Um…
They were excited about it.
Um, I remember one of them saying that
they knew something was there.
They knew something was going on.
It gave me hope that now, the Commonwealth
would look-- look-- look into the case,
look into all the discrepancies.
Um, and I believed
that I'd be going home soon.
[reporter] Sean Ellis was convicted
of killing Boston Police Detective
John Mulligan after two mistrials.
His attorneys filed a motion
yesterday asking for a new trial.
They stated that several corrupt
detectives involved in the investigation
were in part responsible
for Ellis' conviction.
We have this massive body of evidence
that these two people, uh,
were habitual and consistent liars.
And that they did this
as a part of their official duties.
They basically, that's the way
they operated as police officers.
[reporter] Ellis' attorney David Duncan
believes Robinson and Acerra, who
are serving three-year prison sentences,
influenced the testimony of a key witness
who puts Ellis at the scene of the crime.
So, we filed a new trial motion.
And they had an MO.
They basically were,
like, busting drug dealers,
stealing their drugs.
I mean,
they were basically lining their pockets
and, you know,
making busts through criminal activities.
So, we said to the court… [chuckles]
"These are the people you're depending on.
The people who are criminals
are the ones who shepherded this woman
in to, uh, make an identification."
And they asked for an evidentiary hearing
in order to substantiate the motion,
and Judge McDaniels
denied the evidentiary hearing,
um, and denied the motion.
What Acerra and Robinson did or did not do
had absolutely nothing
to do with the Mulligan case.
Nothing whatsoever.
I'm not here to vouch
for Acerra and Robinson.
What they did, they did.
They gotta pay the price.
But as far at the Mulligan case,
you're not gonna find a cleaner case.
[police talking via radio]
[Sean] In 1999,
I left Walpole
and went
to Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center.
That was deemed the supermax.
At the time, I'm sure they were
just trying to get bodies there.
It was a drop down.
Everything was closed.
You're in your cell 21 hours a day.
You get let out
for, like, an hour in the morning,
an hour in the afternoon,
and an hour at night.
[somber music playing]
That was hard.
I was feeling, um…
"Damn, is this how
I'm gonna spend the rest of my life,
you know, locked in a fucking cell?"
[yelling]
[Elaine Murphy] I learned about
Sean's conviction in the most uncanny way.
We were living in Montreal at that time.
We had old friends from New England
coming up to visit us.
They came in with their suitcases,
and they tossed that day's Boston Globe
on my kitchen counter.
I remember looking at it, thinking,
"The Globe, I haven't seen The Globe
in ever so long."
And then I looked a little more closely,
and I saw a very large photo of a boy,
and I saw the headline,
and it said, "Ellis convicted
in third trial of murder of detective."
All of a sudden, I realized this was Sean.
I was just dumbstruck.
I was just stunned.
Completely shattered.
Because this was a kid I knew.
And I knew what he was.
He was a sweet, shy, gentle boy.
And I thought,
"Oh, my God, this kid is not a killer."
[soft music playing]
I met Sean Ellis back in the 1980s
in Needham, Massachusetts.
We were living there at the time.
And, uh, my son was in elementary school
at the Mitchell Elementary School,
and Sean was his classmate,
and they became fast friends.
He was the Black kid in the class,
and everybody else was lily white.
Sean was there
because he was bused every day
through a program called METCO.
It was a voluntary
school integration program.
And kids were selected very carefully
to be part of the program
and then sent
to suburban schools around Boston
for a so-called better-chance education.
In fact, it worked both ways
because the receiving community
benefited greatly by the integration.
[talking, laughing]
[Mary Jackie Ellis] The METCO program
basically took children out of the ghetto,
and took them to the, uh, suburbs
to get an education.
And that was, like, the best thing
that could happen to me
because I didn't, at the time,
feel that when I was coming up
that I got the best education possible.
And so, Sean went to first
and second grade in the METCO program.
[laughing]
We would get up,
I want to say around five in the morning.
Um, my mom always made sure
that we had breakfast
before leaving the house.
We was dressed and presentable for school.
She would drop us off at our bus stop.
When the weather was cold or whatever,
she would wait for the bus to come.
[sad music playing]
Don't look at me. Don't look at me.
[Elaine Murphy] METCO proved to be
a huge thing in his life.
The education, of course,
that came with it year over year,
had to have a hugely formative effect
on him and his growing up.
Use your pencil.
[Sean] We had host families in METCO
that lived in Needham.
And so Mark Murphy, um,
and his family became my host family.
That's how that relationship began
to happen and his parents met my mom.
You know…
[seagulls squeal]
[Shar'day Taylor]
It's amazing. I love the house.
[indistinct chatter]
-[woman 1] How are you?
-[woman 2] I'm good. How are you?
-Good to see you.
-[Elaine] Good to see you too.
-Hi.
-Hi.
-Welcome.
-Good to see you.
And you. [chuckles]
How are you?
Good to see you.
That landscape, it's just so beautiful.
We've been working.
I can't wait to see pictures.
[sad music intensifies]
We were a little behavioral--
behaviorally challenged.
Yeah.
-We were the two bad kids in class.
-Yeah.
Probably because
we were friends with each other,
we-- we caused trouble together.
And Ms. Santoro took us under her wing
and gave us stickers
or prizes for good behavior,
and we filled out a book,
and she got us in line, I would say.
She was a great…
-[Sean] In her own way.
-[Mark] In her way.
-[Sean] She was gorgeous.
-[Elaine] Like Sandra Bullock.
[Mark]
She did look like Sandra Bullock, really.
How do you not behave for her?
You know?
[laughing]
[Shar'day]
How was it for you when you found out
that something like this has happened
to someone you went to school with,
and you were so close to?
How was that for you?
To hear it was Sean, I was shocked.
I mean, it, uh, as my mom
was with the newspaper, that whole story.
Um, and as soon as we found out,
as soon as we could, uh, I visited him
and, uh, and it was surreal to see him
on the other side of the glass.
-[Shar'day] Yeah.
-It was surreal.
[Elaine] Of course, we'd never been
to prison before. We were nervous.
We didn't know what to do. They were
saying this and that. Then the lady looks
at Mark and says,
"You can't go in there dressed in those."
And she's pointing at his jeans.
And-- and she says, "No jeans allowed."
And Mark says, "What is this, the Ritz?"
[laughing]
[soft music playing]
When I felt for sure that he was innocent
and was likely railroaded,
I thought I'm a writer,
and I've done so much research and writing
and that's been my career.
I think I can help. I think
I have the skills to help this kid.
I wrote my op-ed article
that came out in The Globe that week,
just reminiscing about Sean
and what a tragedy this was.
It got favorable feedback
from people I knew around Boston,
and I thought at that time,
"Wow, the power of the pen."
I just realized Sean
and the world that he really lived in
and the-- the environment
that he grew up with,
that he came of age in-- in Dorchester,
was so very different from my own kids,
that his former friend Mark, grew up in.
So different.
It was two different Americas.
I felt like saying,
"My God, this would never have happened
to my son Mark."
[kids laughing]
[Sean] At the time,
I lived with my older sister DeeDee,
my brother Joseph,
my sister Janelle,
and myself, and my mom.
I don't have any clear memories
of my dad living with us,
but I've some kind of vague,
faint memories of my dad living with us.
And then, you know, at some point,
my dad was out of the picture.
[sad music playing]
[seagulls squeal]
I need my brother here.
I miss him a lot.
I just need him.
He was born in '70. I was born in '74.
I was eight years old when he passed away.
[Mary Jackie Ellis]
It was, uh, June 13, in '83
and, uh, Joseph left school
and went over to his friend's house.
They was going to go in the pool.
They were playing,
and he jumped in the pool
and didn't come back up.
And so when they found him,
they called the Needham police
and ambulance and stuff.
They took him to the hospital,
and then they called me.
And so I didn't have no transportation
to get out there,
and they said, "Don't worry.
We'll come get you."
And so I said, "Okay, that's good,"
but in the back of the police cruiser,
they got the word that Joseph passed.
And I-- And they told me, and I freaked.
And I remember trying to open the door
of the police car to get out,
and I couldn't.
And they kept telling me to "calm down,
Mrs. Ellis. Calm down, Mrs. Ellis."
And they talked to me
till we got to the hospital.
[Sean] I don't remember
any more about that day,
but I do remember being told
that he wasn't coming home no more.
And I remember, you know,
crying and being in my room
and like, breaking stuff in my room…
and, uh, not being allowed
to go to school for the rest of the year.
When he passed,
it took a toll on my mom and…
I-- I mean, that was her first boy.
That was her first-born son.
And she just hasn't been
the same since then.
[Mary Jackie Ellis] It was a time
that it was very overwhelming,
and when I was introduced
to the crack,
that gave me a few minutes of escaping.
Things going on at home, um,
like my mom was experiencing,
you know, [stammers] the difficulties
of, like, [stammers] drug addiction.
So, as a young person, like,
I had all that weight on me.
[rap music playing]
I left Needham in, like, '89,
and then I transferred to Boston
in grade ten.
And I graduated '91, '92, I believe.
And so I started hanging out more.
Mostly because I was out of school.
The more I hung out,
the more that I became exposed
to the neighborhood
and the stuff
that was going on in the neighborhood.
It's the people in the surrounding area
he was hanging with.
I pretty much believe
that's how Sean got started with drugs.
He was nowhere near a kingpin,
but he was out there, uh, doing his thing
as far as selling drugs.
[Sean] It started out,
like, something, like, small.
We only have a couple of dollars,
so, like, you buy a 50-rock.
From a 50-rock, uh,
you can make a hundred.
You continue to do that
until you can go up
in the amount of weight that you can get.
The more weight you get,
the more money you make.
[indistinct chatter]
[sinister music playing]
If I had an older brother, man,
my belief is that
he'd have been able to straighten me out
when I needed to be straightened out.
[kisses]
During those years, uh,
the early 2000s, it was bleak.
There was nothing in the landscape.
And then Sean found out
that he was able to actually pursue
yet another step in the legal position
through something called Rule 30,
where he could do, uh,
post-conviction relief on his own,
but he'd have to actually, um,
fire his lawyers for ineffective counsel.
So, that was a hurdle
'cause he knew that Zalkind and Duncan
had his best interests at heart.
They really cared about him.
He had a wonderful relationship with them.
So, Sean wrote me
and said, "Godma, I'm 'attorneyless.'"
And he said how scared he was.
And he was trying like heck to get it all
together and to write motions and do that.
He was feeling extremely overwhelmed.
I'm still fighting, but, like,
it's getting harder and harder, um…
to hold on.
It's like--
it's kind of like you start losing hope.
And I-- I remember clearly,
um, fighting, fighting…
um…
not to lose all hope
and not to become entrenched
in the prison culture.
[helicopter whirring]
[police siren blaring]
[police talking on radio]
[indistinct chatter]
At some point,
um, around I want to say 2003,
I was in my cell
and, uh, I was watching the news.
And I see Rosemary on the news
dealing with Shawn Drumgold.
For nearly 15 years,
Shawn Drumgold
has been sitting behind bars
convicted of the random shooting death
of 12-year-old Tiffany Moore
back in the summer of 1988.
So, now,
Rosemary Scapicchio is seeking a new trial
while Suffolk County District Attorney
Dan Conley
has launched an internal investigation
into what happened
in the Tiffany Moore case.
We had filed 2 or 3 different motions
for a new trial. All got denied.
Um, and then The Boston Globe
started to do a story
on all of these witnesses
who were coming forward and recanting.
[Emily Rooney] An investigation
by Boston Globe reporter Dick Lehr
has cast serious doubt
on Drumgold's conviction.
Lehr reported that Drumgold
was nothing more
than a street-level drug-dealer
who was not near the area
at the time of the shooting
and was not a gang member.
But Dick Lehr's big news
concerned the witnesses
whose testimony put Drumgold away.
It was the media attention, I think,
that really, you know,
uh, catapulted this case
into, uh, something that people
had to sit down and take a look at.
Um, and so we were able to find a witness,
uh, by the name of… [stammers]
His name was Ricky.
We actually got
to sit down and talk to him,
and he was so nervous, and he said,
"Rosemary, can I talk to you?"
I said, "Absolutely."
So, we go out in the hall,
and he says, you know,
"I never saw Shawn do any of this."
[police siren blaring]
And he tells me the story
of the police basically paying him
to say what he said and feeding him
information about this crime
that he didn't know otherwise.
He was homeless.
He was sleeping on someone's couch.
Um, one of the detectives came by,
and said, uh, they would put him up
at the Howard Johnson's.
He had his own room.
He had the ability
to charge everything to his room.
And so they basically
were feeding him the details of the crime
that he otherwise wouldn't have known,
um, and he was regurgitating
them to, um, the-- the-- the jury.
[reporter] For Shawn Drumgold, the
testimony in today's evidentiary hearing
is 15 years too late.
Only now are witnesses coming forward
to corroborate his alibi.
[Rosemary] There is no question
that you saw Shawn Drumgold
on 23 Sanoma Street, um,
on-- on August 19th, 1988?
Yes.
[reporter] Now, several witnesses say
Drumgold was several blocks away
when the shots rang out.
Drumgold's friend Olisa Graham
said on the stand today
that after the shooting, she was warned
not to testify on Drumgold's behalf
by a man claiming to be
a Boston police detective.
Well, the detectives told me
that I had a warrant,
so I wouldn't be able to testify.
If I was to testify,
I could be arrested
once I came off the stand.
[reporter] After that, Graham said,
she kept her mouth shut.
Fourteen years after his conviction
for the murder
of 12-year-old Tiffany Moore,
thirty-eight-year-old
Shawn Drumgold is free.
Shawn Drumgold smiled
when he finally learned he was a free man.
[man] All rise, please.
Shawn, how do you feel?
I feel great.
This is a great day for me and my family.
This is extraordinary. This is something
that I've been hoping for all my life.
The District Attorney's Office
needs to be held accountable.
The people who investigated it
need to be held accountable.
The Boston police
need to be held accountable.
If we don't hold those organizations
accountable, this will happen again.
She caught my interest
because she didn't mind…
[stammers]
It's like she wasn't scared of the police.
So, I sat down, and I wrote her a letter.
Um, I basically told her who I was.
Um, I basically told her
what I was convic-- convicted of,
how many trials that I had.
"I'm convicted of killing
Detective Mulligan. I didn't do it.
Is there any way you can
come and talk to me?" and da-da-da-da.
There was something about the letter.
I can't say what it was
off the top of my head,
um, but something about the letter
that I said, "I gotta go see this kid."
I couldn't do it right away.
So, I had too much going on.
I was too busy and I said, "I can't
get to this case for 18 months,"
and he said, "I'll wait,"
I said, "I can't guarantee you
that once I read it, I'm gonna take it."
He said, "I'll wait.
"I won't bother you, I won't call you.
I will wait," um, and so he did.
[sad music playing]
I grew up in Brighton
with my sisters and my mom.
And this is my old high school.
It used to be Mount Saint Joseph Academy.
It's now Saint Joseph Prep.
It was
an all-girls private Catholic high school
run by the sisters of Saint Joseph.
I worked in the summers
and after school
to pay the tuition at the Mount.
We didn't know that kids didn't work
to pay their tuition in high school.
My mother said, "Go do it,"
and you just did it, that's what you did.
[church bell rings]
So, this is the beginning
of the Faneuil projects up here.
We lived at 89 Faneuil,
which is almost one of the last buildings.
I always felt like when I got here,
I knew I was home.
[indistinct chatter]
There used to be kids that hung out front
on Faneuil Street.
Um, there were definitely drugs
in the projects.
There were definitely people
who were dealing drugs.
There were women who were trying
to support their families
by way of prostitution.
Um, there was all of that here,
and it was just sort of a way of life.
[indistinct chatter]
It's right there, the bedroom window.
They're both above the grate,
but that's where my bedroom used to be.
There was one and a half bathrooms.
We had literally seven kids,
so it went by rank, according to age.
My sister Kathy, who was the oldest,
got first shot at the bathroom,
and then Kathy, Julie, Trisha,
me, Margie, Jackie, Billy.
So, poor Billy was in the end.
[chuckles] And everyone got five minutes.
And there was not
a lot of hot water back then.
My dad wasn't around, uh,
so my mom was the one
who was here every day.
We watched her get up and go to work.
There was no such thing as being sick.
I remember in the second grade,
uh, I had appendicitis,
[laughs] and I was deathly ill,
and she was saying,
"No, you can go to school," and it wasn't
until the school nurse called and said,
"There's something going on here,"
that she's like, "All right."
And my mother
used to tell us all the time,
being successful, uh, is the best revenge,
you know, for what you do.
So, that's what we all tried to do.
We put ourselves
through high school and college
and myself through law school,
so that we could give back a little.
That's a lot of what I do now
in the cases that I take
is that most of the clients
that I take through CPCS
are through, you know,
poor, underdeveloped, um,
really, um,
low socioeconomic, um, settings,
like Sean.
[helicopter whirring]
[Sean]
I get called out to an attorney visit.
When I walked into the room,
Rosemary demanded, uh, attention,
and, uh, she wasn't nobody to play with.
Um, she was a-- a, uh, straight shooter,
she, you know, called it as she saw it.
Um, [stammers]
and it's like she was fearless.
I remember him coming in.
He was sweating. He was nervous,
um, and shook my hand
and started stuttering.
He's not bragging about it, he's not…
He's saying he didn't do it,
um, that this was a rush to judgment,
that all of the same things
that I was hearing from Shawn Drumgold.
She said…
[stammers] basically,
and I'm paraphrasing,
[stammers] "You got over one hurdle,
which was getting me here.
Now I need you to tell me,
um, like, why you?"
And like, I had never had anybody
to ask that question.
Um, and, like, the truth of the matter is
it's my position.
It's because I was young. I was Black,
and I admitted being there.
And she says,
"All right, I can-- I can go with that."
[somber music playing]
[Rosemary] If I'm involved,
I have to get to the truth of it.
To me, it's a puzzle.
I need to sort of solve the puzzle
and put all the pieces together
and make sure they fit.
A timeline is
a visual picture of what's happened.
What I like to do
in the timelines that I put together
is find out what's happening
before the crime happens,
do a detailed timeline
of the night of the incident,
and then be able
to visually picture what the police did
in terms of the investigation.
[phone ringing]
No, not till… October 2nd.
Two different ideas in the very beginning,
one was there has to be
some investigation into the corruption
and the second one is
Mulligan, we believed, was a dirty cop.
And so that became my focus.
And I really believed that,
uh, we could prove
that Mulligan was involved
in, uh, the same corruption
that Acerra, Robinson, and Brazil
were involved in.
And they were trying to make sure
that this case was solved quickly,
the conviction happened efficiently,
and that it would withstand anything,
so that they wouldn't themselves
get exposed and indicted.
[melancholy music playing]
[dramatic music playing]