The Reverse Cop Swagger

In 1989, when Darcel Clark was a line assistant in the Bronx District Attorney’s working narcotics, 16-year-old Huwe Burton was coerced into falsely confessing he killed his mother.

It was Jan. 3, 1989. Her son, Huwe Burton, then 16, said he found his mother murdered when he came home that evening, after having spent the day at school and then at his girlfriend’s house.

But two days later, after detectives had interrogated him for hours, Mr. Burton confessed to the police that he had stabbed his mother while high on crack during an argument. Police arrested him for murder.

Mr. Burton quickly recanted his statement, which was inconsistent with evidence at the scene. But a jury believed the confession and convicted him of murder. He served nearly 20 years in prison before being paroled in 2009.

Judge Steven Barrett exonerated Burton for the murder, but he’ll never get back the 20 years in prison or the life he lost to the system.

Justice Barrett said he dismissed the idea at the time that the confessions were erroneous.

It’s not that such arguments weren’t made, but that was a time before DNA exonerations or videos of cops lying and cheating. It’s not that it was unknown such things happened, but it couldn’t be proven. On the side of the defendant, the obvious question is why would anyone confess to a crime they didn’t commit? Even then, it was well known that confessions could be coerced, but that only raised a question as to half a problem. Even so, why would a cop want to coerce a confession from an innocent person?

There was a pat response: why would the cops lie? Why would the cops want to hurt this random person rather than the real killer? It made no sense. As the late, great Murray Kempton wrote, “there they go again, framing the guilty.’

Clark, now the Bronx District Attorney, is no stranger to lying.

Ms. Clark defended the detectives but said her office would still review other cases they had worked on. “What they did was not necessarily wrong — that is the way things were done then,” she said. “For 1989 that was standard practice for the N.Y.P.D., but now we know better.”

One might wonder whether a prosecutor’s argument that it was “standard practice” to coerce false confessions from innocent kids, so it wasn’t “necessarily wrong,” is astoundingly wrong. But Clark’s no stranger to astoundingly wrong, either. How can one help but be confident when Clark says “now we know better”?

We do know better, of course, but that doesn’t mean anything better happens.

But as I followed Gomez over the course of a year and a half and multiple investigations, watching him attack the credibility of cops and prosecutors in New York, it became clear that Gomez had credibility issues of his own.

Manny Gomez is now a private investigator. He was once a cop.

He says he offers his services only to people who are truly innocent — something the former Army intelligence officer insists he can suss out within moments of meeting someone. “I learned to pick up on their tell signs,” he said. “Their idiosyncrasies.”

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s the same lie cops tell themselves when they believe in their magical ability to know when someone is guilty, when someone is lying. It’s the lie that emboldens cops to coerce false confessions, because they know, they just know, that some perp is “truly guilty.” Now that he’s working the other side of the street, Gomez says he knows “within moments of meeting someone” who is “truly innocent.”

His single-mindedness, though clearly an asset to his clients, could also be a liability. He could be rash to the point of recklessness. He had a history of aggression and violence. And he sometimes overlooked facts that didn’t conform to his preconceived ideas of justice and injustice. Some cases his clients have brought against the city and the police have been dismissed with prejudice by the courts. [Criminal defense lawyer Marty] Goldberg told me that even if his clients were out of options, he’d advise against hiring Gomez. “I am loath to believe anything the man says,” he told me.

It’s that “single-mindedness” that compels cops to lie, to coerce a confession, to “frame the guilty,” in the first place. It causes them to ignore facts that show the target wasn’t the perp, like the fact in Burton’s case that the only thing taken from his deceased mother was the key to her Honda Accord, and the downstairs neighbor was caught running a red light in the stolen Honda within a week of the false confession.

But now we know better.

He thrives on the attention. At 51, he’s built like a safe, strong and square, and he dresses like the detectives he grew up watching on TV, in shiny shoes, double-breasted pinstripe suits and shirts with his initials stitched into the cuffs. At times he talks like a hard-boiled action hero. “I see myself as a punisher for the wicked and a bringer of justice to the innocent,” he told me. “I protect the weak.”

Full of swagger and bravado, claiming magical powers, Manny Gomez says he protects the weak.

His aim, in every case, is to pressure prosecutors into conceding defeat before they can persuade the defendant to take a plea. “I jam the evidence so far down their throat,” he told me, “that they have to say ‘dismissed.’ ”

Sounds painful. Sounds remarkably like what a cop would say when eliciting a confession from a perp.

Most PIs are ex-cops and look nothing at all like Magnum, PI. Most are better at making noise than doing the hard legwork of investigations. They subscribe to a few databases, do a search that takes a few minutes, then quadruple bill. Some have inside contacts. Some lie about having inside contacts. Few do much to help.

If Manny Gomez, despite his schtick, actually works the streets for real, then maybe he can be forgiven some of his bravado. But he could just as easily have been the cop who coerced the confession from 16-year-old Huwe Burton, and rationalized it with the same words. And Darcel Clark would have defended him if he was working her side of the street, as if now we know better.

4 thoughts on “The Reverse Cop Swagger

  1. B. McLeod

    This has been a great week for stories about magic. First, magic boxes, and now, magic detectives! Considering all that magic has done for Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, this should be an easy road to criminal justice reform. Somebody should have pulled this option out of the Sorting Hat a long time ago.

    1. Hunting Guy

      No link, because rules, but search engines work.

      The Magical Mysteries Of Don Diavolo

      “Who better to solve an “impossible crime” than someone who does the impossible for a living? The Magician Detective is a Stage Magician who uses his skills with illusion to solve crimes.”

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