An Interview with Steve Fishman, Host of ‘The Burden: Empire on Blood’

Key Art for ‘The Burden: Empire on Blood’ Courtesy of Orbit Media.

Steve Fishman is a highly accomplished journalist, that has been at the center of some critical stories. His current project is The Burden: Empire on Blood, a podcast that chronicles how Steve dove into an uneven and fascinating criminal case from the 1990s, and we had the distinct honor of sitting down with Steve to discuss this incredible journey.
 
John Betancourt: I'd love to start by getting to know what it was specifically that stood out about Calvin's case that really ignited the desire in you to pursue this truth.
 
Steve Fishman: What gets me started is somehow talking to Calvin through a guy I know in prison with him, calls me up cold, starts running off the facts of the case. You know, very emotional, and then, you know, expecting me to evaluate and jump on board, and I'm, frankly, kind of put off. But it gets to the moment. Maybe it's his energy, his aura, some kind of feeling he communicates. I know he's talking to me from a pay phone in the yard of a prison. I know he's desperate. He's like the only guy in his corner, and I just, in my way, imagined what it must be like to be that alone and that powerless. And I said, “Send me the transcripts.” And I read those transcripts, and it's just amazing when you get into the courtroom scene and maybe this was particular to the 90s, but the courtrooms in in the Bronx, you start to think, “Is this possible?” You know, there's all, all kinds of deals, and it's so obvious that the prosecutor’s running the courtroom and cheating and lying, and people walk in having gotten deals to walk free. And so, you know, but once I got in that door and sat down with the material, I was hooked. And frankly, I was hooked for seven years, which was not good, not good for my career. (Laughter) And you know, John, I really did not have an opinion on whether he was guilty or not. And there were times where I really thought, you know, six witnesses testify against you? I mean, how many of them are lying? Did you really do this?
 
John Betancourt: Something that I really noticed as I was listening, is that not only is this, you know, so emotional in some respects, because there are some parts that really are very deeply, deeply moving. But you present such an amazing two-sided piece here, because you really do point out the fact, correctly, that, Calvin did commit crimes, but he's still a person. But also, you know, the justice system has its laws, but it also has its flaws. And I'm very curious, how you manage to keep this so incredibly objective when you were so close to it.
 
Steve Fishman: That's a really good question. And, you know, I think some people might see it as a flaw frankly, you know, but I really go in and I find myself kind of exercising empathy, like the person I'm with, I'm trying to understand the world from their point of view. And I don't think it's like necessarily something I sit down to decide to do. It's almost like it's a weakness, you know, like some kind of lack of strength in my personality that somehow is, you know, kind of taken in by this person who's telling me something that, on one hand, I know may not be true. On the other hand, I believe that they believe it, which gives it some kind of interesting credibility. I mean, I'll give you an example. So, I'm with Turtle Man. You know, can you believe that the prosecutor's nickname is Turtle Man?
 
You know, it's a Law and Order topic, but, we're in Coen Brothers territory, so, you know, and there's literally 20 turtles in his two story house, and one of them clomping down stairs as we're talking. And so, you know, there's this guy whose life is rescuing turtles and, as he would say, putting bad guys away. Now I asked him, I said to him, “Well, have you ever been wrong? Have you ever had a conviction reversed?” And he said, “No, never.” I knew he had a conviction reversed. I read the decision a judge really did it, but I sat, and I thought about I said, you know, this is like part of his worldview that he saw. He’s a good guy going after bad guys, making the streets safer. And somehow for me, you know, I feel like that was what I wanted to communicate. It wasn't that this guy got caught in a lie, it was that this guy's conception of himself was as a good guy who was cleaning up the streets for decent citizens, you know. And it's the same with Father Frank. I mean, can you believe the detective has a nickname, Father Frank?
 
I mean, he, you know, is a guy who didn't know who Martin Luther King was, in 1965, I mean, you could get stuck on that and start to think, you know, who is this guy to go out and police neighborhoods that are largely filled with black people? I mean, but you know, like for me it was, you know, this is New York. This is this guy. This is a cop who also thinks he wants to do good. But I think, and I've covered cops enough, and, you know, done another series recently about cops, but the trap that they seem to fall into is that they feel like somehow, in their gut, they know how the world works, and they know who's lying, and they know who's not lying. And so, the kind of cognitive dissonance of coming from a background, in this case of, you know, Italian kids growing up, all of them going into civil service, and, you know, dealing with people from a rougher background who you think you can understand, you know, that doesn't, that doesn't necessarily register for them. And you know, I'm just going to pre associate here a minute. But one of the things, one of the reasons that we did this director's cut, this re-release, is that the lives of our characters in six years had just moved on, and they moved on in, like, real ways, substantive ways. I mean, Cal gets out and he starts a business. He starts a business called Ryderz Van Service.
 
He's researched, like, seven business plans in prison, right? He actually takes one of them. And, you know, don't forget, like the guy's a drug kingpin, that's essentially a businessman. So, you know, he was running a pretty successful street level business, and he gets out and he applies it. He figures, you know, all these families need transportation to their loved ones in prison. So, he says, “I'm starting the Uber of prison transport.” Now it's not like Uber says I'm starting the “Prison Riders”, Van commuting, but Cal does start this business that takes off. And I mean, I talked to him the other day, he's got like five Mercedes busses that are running passengers back and forth. And then he's actually got a really nice, big house in Houston too, but, but then you know, to get back to Father Frank. Father Frank is, you may remember in the series, moves in and gets Dwight Robinson not to confess which is his specialty, but to unconfess, a related skill, clearly, Dwight unconfessess, Cal goes back to Prison. Fast forward five years, Father Frank's comportment, his behavior with people he's trying to get, confessed or unconfessed, is called in question, and in fact, three of the people who he solicited elicited confessions from have their convictions overturned because of the techniques he used.
 
So, Father Frank, who kind of emerges as this unblemished detective with, in some ways, a golden gut, you know, rescues the case for the prosecution, but of course, who, in the end, gets the Calvin case wrong, or certainly at odds with the judge, he becomes a guy who is suspected kind of at the most fundamental level. He believes his skill is talking to people and getting them to confess and District Attorney investigates it and says, “I'm reopening 31 of your cases where you got confessions, because I really don't know if they're going to stand up.” So, here's a guy who's, like famous within his police corps, and really moves to a public infamy. So anyhow, the re-release kind of is able to kind of capture these lives after these, this kind of very concentrated, moment in their lives, you know, peak moment, headline moment. But, you know, lives go on.
 
John Betancourt: You know, you spent seven years on this. What kind of challenges did you run into and putting this whole sweeping story together?
 
Steve Fishman: Well, one of the challenges was, I was working at New York Magazine as a staff writer at the time, and I, I couldn't get them to do a story, you know? I kept thinking, “Oh, my God, I got this great story.” And they kept saying, “Drug dealer might be a murderer. Come on.” (Laughter) So I, you know, I spent time with this on an ongoing basis, and, you know, it wasn't helping New York Magazine. So, in kind of, just in terms of a challenge, you know, the challenge was finding the time and the motivation to do it when it was definitely against my self-interest to pursue this. I mean, reporting wise, you know, it was, it was really, finally, finally getting to that person who was an eyewitness to the crime. I mean, it was, you know… I went down with the private investigator. And so, with him, I was the first person to talk to this woman who, as a pregnant, 16-year-old, sat on the stoop a few feet away from the actual shooting and saw who did it. And for me, that was just, I mean, it was momentous. I'd spent at that point… I'd probably spent six years thinking about this crime, going back and forth. You know, Cal’s story about himself was that he was never violent, but, you know, he carried a gun. He lived in an extraordinarily violent world, in an extraordinarily kind of like -- alongside all kinds of perpetrators of violence, some of that violence directed at him.
 
So, it became a little hard to believe that Cal was not a guy who would use a gun. So, I kind of was contending with that on one hand and on the other hand, this idea that the judicial system, the justice system, had kind of rammed through a conviction of this guy in an unfair way. And then finally, you know, I get to sit down, sit down with this woman, Nakia, nicknamed Evelina, if you can believe that. There's one for Law and Order. They ripped off my stories before. (Laughter) Evelina sits down and she tells me in detail how she saw and then who she saw commit the crime, which actually sends a shiver on my spine, because this is a guy that I've been talking to now for years. He's in prison for a different murder. But the guy she names is somebody that I've become quite friendly with. I mean, he's somebody that, you know, I send stuff to in prison. He wants Sudoku, because he tells me that it's going to keep him sharp in old age. He's dying to get Timberlands because that is apparently the most sought-after shoe in prison, though we later learned, the problem with getting Tim's in prison is that they're two tone, and because of gang activity, you're not allowed to wear anything two tone in prison. So, he shut down.
 
Anyhow, the point of this, being that this is the guy who's named, and I then need to go to prison, and I need to tell him that he's been named as a killer. And I remember that moment really well, because in prison, they let me sit -- it's almost a conference room, you know, with bars on the windows, beat up chairs, beat up table. But he and I are sitting across from one another, so about four feet from one another, and I got my little favorite tape recorder running. For some reason they forgot to put a guard in there that day. So, it was just me, and, you know, I know him, and I kind of like him, but you know, I've also heard him, even on the phone, go into like, another mode where, he'll say something like, “I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna beat that guy up. I just got to do it,” so I'm not entirely, you know, convinced that this is like interview protocol here entirely, and I'm about to tell the guy, listen, I know you killed this guy because this eyewitness said so. I… a Lieutenant comes into the room, notices that there's nobody there, no guard is there, no corrections officer, and says, “What the hell's going on? “And puts one in there, which point I go to the restroom for a few minutes, and I leave my tape recorder on. I always use my tape recorder, and I catch the conversation that Dwight has with the corrections officer, where they start joking about how… Dwight could have killed me.
 
“I could have killed him.” “Yeah, right.” “He's not dead, is he?” And, like, for me, that was, like, a very big moment, because, you know, I entered into this as like a reporter, you know, college educated, all those kind of typical things. Unlike these guys who seem very much, you know, conversational, relatable, and at some level, you know, you get brought up against the fact that they come from a different world. They would say that to me, “I come from a different world than you.” But in terms of, like, the hardest challenge, I think it was, it was getting the information that finally relieved me of the burden of “is he or isn't he,” I finally was able to feel wholeheartedly he didn't do this, and that just made me feel fantastic because independently, I liked Cal and wanted to believe he wasn't guilty. And finally, I'd gotten to this woman in North Carolina, 800 miles away, who'd seen this incident in the Bronx, 30 years earlier.
 
John Betancourt: Last question that I have for you today, obviously, this couldn't have come out at a better time, I think, with the climate as it as it stands, with how we feel about the justice system and how people feel about wrongful incarceration. And I'm very curious, what you hope audiences take away from this story of flaws and wins and sorrow.
 
Steve Fishman: You know, the first thing that I want people to experience is, I want them to be immersed in the experience of the criminal justice system. I mean, I want them to be entertained, but I want them to be enthralled. I want them to feel like after they listen to this, that they know how things work. You know, not in every case, but certainly in some cases. I want them to understand the power relationships and the loneliness and what it takes to win against the system. I mean, one of the things that I came away with was this incredible respect for the unbelievable determination of a guy like Calvin over a period of 20 years. And as you know, his lawyer that he believes in and loves dies, and Calvin has two weeks, and then he recovers. But you know, like in a grander way, I think, you know, we wrestle, we being society, voters, citizens. We wrestle with what we should do with people who commit crimes or people who are accused of crimes. And you know, we go up and down right, like in the Giuliani era, even in Dinkins era.
 
So, this is the early 90s when crime was off the charts. We, I mean, the taxpayers, the voters. We wanted crime solved. We didn't care how it got done. So, I want... I want people to understand that we can't let the wrong people go to prison, but I want them to understand too, that this isn't a distant story about what some cops did and what some prosecutors did. This is a story about who you put in office, what you expect from them, and how you treat the public dialogue around punishment. I mean, you know, as you said, Cal was a bad dude. Yeah, I mean, there's, it's possible to say, especially in 1995 when he goes to prison, when there's 2000 murders a year, and when a lot of them are around the crack trade. It's possible to say, you know, “The guy's a drug dealer, who cares,” you know, throw him in prison, let someone else sort it out. And that's kind of a rational view in the midst of a crime wave. But you can't then, 20 or 30 years later, say, “Oh, my God. How did this happen? Who are these rogue cops, who are these delinquent prosecutors who go out and do this, you know?”
 
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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