The five young Harlem men convicted of attacking and nearly killing a Manhattan woman became causes celebres earlier this year, after an incarcerated serial rapist said that he alone, and not those five, had attacked the jogger. DNA evidence backed up the claim. And the "Central Park Five" became known as victims of a problem presumed to be much bigger than them: the New York City Police Department forcing false confessions from criminal suspects.
Esposito avers that it happens. It started in the summer of 2000 when he was a 17 year old in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn who liked to hang out with friends--"my boys," he calls them--and smoke marijuana. Late one August afternoon, Esposito remembers, "Some guy in a suit came up to me and said, 'We want to question you.'" The guy turned out to be a cop. Esposito had an overnight bag with him. When the police opened it, they "saw the weed. They arrested me like they got John Gotti or something."
The cops were less interested in marijuana than that Esposito was the prime suspect in connection with a fire that had killed 21 horses and destroyed a century-old Bergen Beach stable just blocks from his home. When he admitted guilt, the tabloids had a field day--particularly with his videotaped confession.
The tape, made a day after his arrest and after many hours of untaped questioning, begins with Assistant District Attorney David Holland reading Esposito his Miranda rights. (He had waived his right to an attorney, but Esposito later claimed that his repeated requests to have his mother present were ignored by detectives.) The videotape shows a small, windowless room. Esposito, visibly terrified, sits a few feet away from Holland, whose calm demeanor makes him seem more like a psychotherapist than an interrogator. The two are joined by another assistant D.A. and by Detective William Wagner, who had thoroughly interrogated Esposito the night before.
"Can you tell me where you were that night?" Holland starts. In a trembling voice, Esposito replies: "I was hanging out, drinking, smoking--doing what I usually do. At around 11, I got out of my friends' car and started walking home. I stopped by the Bergen Beach stable. I started smoking pot. I was already drunk. Then I smoked a cigarette. After[ward] I smoked marijuana, then I was playing with my lighter [and] lighted the hay on fire. I kept lighting it...I seen pieces glowing." Toward the end of the tape, Esposito, amid tears, looks squarely into the camera and says, "I want to apologize to everyone for what I did."
With such a dramatic confession on tape, further court proceedings seemed destined to be mere formalities. But one problem remained--Esposito apparently didn't burn down the stables, accidentally or otherwise. He tells City Limits he was in a different neighborhood when the fire took place. "My friend's little cousin was going to her prom. So we followed them to Bay Ridge to make sure it didn't get out of control," he says. At his trial, crucial phone records and eyewitnesses supported this alibi. The jury voted for acquittal.
So why did Esposito confess? Because the police "messed with my head all night," he says. "They put me in a room that was freezing. I was chained to a little metal bench." Esposito's attorney, Nick Gravante, notes that his client was interrogated for 18 hours without any sleep or food. All the while, Gravante says, detectives were urging Esposito to say he'd set the fire by accident.
