When the NYPD Gets Desperate

In the fall of 2017, I sat in a windowless back room in O’Neill’s bar in the Maspeth neighborhood of Queens and watched the Retired Detectives of New York (RDNY) honor two of their own.

The first was Louis Scarcella, whose record of high-profile arrests in Brooklyn in the 1990s had just crumbled under evidence that he’d coerced people into giving false confessions. The second was John Russo, who’d only recently become tabloid famous: He’d identified a Black man as a suspect in the murder of Karina Vetrano, a 30-year-old white woman who was killed in the summer of 2016 while jogging near her family’s home in Queens.

I was covering the event for New York magazine. Russo’s police work was a “true iteration of that cinematic ‘detective’s intuition’ that cops love to valorize,” I wrote. “It’s the same one Scarcella was so famous for before the allegations appeared to suggest he was just making all that shit up.”

The name of the man Russo ID’d is Chanel (pronounced “Tcha-nel”) Lewis. At Lewis’s trial Russo testified that...