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We have dinner the day after his dive. The topic running through the evening is this: Why, Scarcella and his lawyers want to know, are people calling him disgraced? He has been charged with no crime nor found liable in any civil suit. More to the point—and this is a point they make repeatedly, as if repetition will make it less unseemly—none of the people Scarcella arrested have been officially exonerated. That is legally correct but the sort of parsing that gives lawyers a bad name: To be declared innocent, David Ranta, for example, would have to prove he didn’t do something—prove a negative—twenty-four years ago. As a legal matter, that’s not how American jurisprudence works. As a practical matter, as a commonsense matter, prosecutors asking a judge to toss a conviction and the city ponying up $6.4 million is as close as the system realistically can come to saying it locked up the wrong guy.

And what of Teresa Gomez? Is it really implausible, the lawyers ask, that a junkie prostitute would see six murders in a crack-infested, blood-soaked borough? Prosecutors chose to use her as a witness, and juries sometimes chose to believe her. And so what if confessions have similar phrasing? "Because my confessions, some of them, started the same way means I fabricated them?" Scarcella asks. "I don’t understand what that means, because number one, I didn’t do it—it just never happened." (Actually, what gives critics pause about those disputed confessions and statements are the little shout-outs to Scarcella’s investigatory prowess—"You got it right.")

The reason he is disgraced is that prosecutors are asking judges to vacate convictions. Ranta, Hill, and Jennette were released (and Austin was posthumously cleared) because prosecutors looked at the evidence and decided the men never should have been locked up, that those four men should not have collectively lost nearly a century to prison. It is difficult to overstate how uncommon that is, as district attorneys simply are not in the business of reviewing the decades-old work of their predecessors.

Yet that is not obvious to Scarcella. Disgraced? Only a monster would knowingly arrest innocent men, which leaves him a binary choice: Either he didn’t, or he is a monster. What man chooses to believe he’s a monster?

In early June, the D.A.’s Conviction Review Unit announced it stood by eleven of Scarcella’s cases, but it also asked a judge to release another convicted murderer Scarcella helped investigate, and it still had more than forty cases to go. A legion of attorneys are pressing claims on behalf of other convicts and ex-convicts who claim they were framed by Scarcella. Other cops and prosecutors are involved in other disputed cases, but Scarcella seems resigned to the fact that his name would be the one in the newspapers. It has indeed become a Louie Scarcella show.

It’s exhausting, having to explain those old cases, being singled out, a whipping boy for a different time, when New York was a different place. "I have the truth on my side, I have my father’s shield in my pocket…," Scarcella says at one point at Walker’s, seeming to slump a little under the weight of all those reporters and convicts and lawyers. "I don’t know how they get away with it."

Right about that moment, another retired cop walks past the table, a detective from the same era as Scarcella. Twenty-five years ago, that cop caught a rape in Manhattan. The victim, a young woman jogging through Central Park, was beaten nearly to death. Horrible crime. Huge story. Everyone remembers the Central Park Jogger. The cops arrested some kids for it, most black, one Hispanic, said they’d been roaming in a pack. Wilding, the cops called it, and the whole country started talking about sociopathic super-predators running amok in New York City and probably in Des Moines pretty soon, too, if something wasn’t done.

That detective in Walker’s was one of several who got five scared kids to confess to raping and beating that lady, and then those kids were convicted and sent to prison because they’d confessed. Except none of them had actually done it. In 2002, after all five had served their sentences, a serial rapist admitted he’d been the lone attacker. DNA evidence verified that he’d attacked the jogger, and in mid-June the City of New York paid the five $40 million to settle a long-running lawsuit.

But it was all so long ago. Bygones and all. Scarcella gets up, wraps the other detective in a quick hug. They talk quietly, privately, for a few minutes, then return to their separate seats.

When it’s time to leave, just as Scarcella reaches the door to Varick Street, that old detective calls to him from the bar. "Keep punching, Louie," he says. "It’s all bullshit."

*corrected from an earlier version

Sean Flynn_ is a GQ correspondent._