Disgraced ex-NYPD detective Louis Scarcella calls murder of 22-year-old by his mobster uncle a ‘public service killing’

Disgraced former NYPD detective Louis Scarcella has bragged that the murder of a 22-year-old by his mobster uncle was a “public service killing.”

Scarcella made the outrageous comments on a true crime podcast, The Burden, in which he said he would have done the same thing as “Nicky Black” aka Nicholas Graciano, a captain in the Colombo crime family.

Despite being related to Graciano, Scarcella was assigned to the case — and he failed to make any arrests.

Murder victim John Aratico who was shot four times in the chest in 1982 near his home in Mapleton, Brooklyn.

On the podcast Scarcella said that by the time he was asked to investigate the case he had already been tipped off that his uncle was to blame.

“I’m interviewing my uncle as a suspect in this murder at his house. He said the kid was not a good kid,” Scarcella remarked.

When questioned if he asked his uncle if he killed Aratico, Scarcella said, “I don’t remember, maybe I don’t want to remember. I was prepared to go as far as I could go with the case and if Nicky killed him I had to lock him up. I don’t think Nicky would have a problem with that.”

“The motive was that he (Aratico) turned Nicky’s daughter onto drugs. I was never able to prove that but that was the scenario we were getting.”

The NYPD’s internal affairs bureau looked into the case and Scarcella claims that he came out of it “smelling like a rose.”

But the producers of the Burden, including veteran journalist and producer Steve Fishman, reviewed the internal report and key details were missing.

Scarcella even claimed he didn’t know his uncle was involved in organized crime.

Unsurprisingly, nobody was arrested in the end, not least because Scarcella was so sympathetic to his uncle.

“We had a phrase, unfortunately enough: public service murder. This fit the criteria,” Scarcella told the podcast.

Asked if the shooting of Aratico was a “public service murder,” Scarcella tried to walk it back.

“I’m not going to disrespect his family. I’m not going to disrespect him. But (with) regards to Nicky Black I’m sure he had that feeling. I’m sure he thinks he deserved to die,” he said.

But later in the episode, Scarcella says that he saw things from his uncle’s point of view.

If it was his daughter hooked on drugs, “I believe I would have probably did the same thing and just turned myself in,” he says.

Scarcella complains that “it’s very hard for me to call my uncle a murderer” — Graciano was shot dead in a mob killing in 1992.

“Alright he was a murderer, are you happy? It’s hard to do it,” Scarcella griped.

In his heyday in the 1980s and 90s, Scarcella was a cigar-smoking legend of the NYPD who was known as “The Closer” because he could get the confessions nobody else could.

By his count he solved at least 175 cases and helped with the same number again.

But in 2013 witnesses began to come forward to question his record and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office started reviewing his case history.

Since 2014 the DA’s Conviction Review Unit has vacated 37 convictions linked to Scarcella.

Eighteen cases have been overturned, the latest of which was Steven Ruffin, 45, who spent 14 years behind jail for a murder he didn’t commit.

New York City has been forced to pay out more than $110 million in settlements to more than a dozen people who were wrongly jailed.

This article was originally posted here