David Ranta was the first among nearly 20 defendants to be exonerated of murder and other charges based on misconduct by New York Police Detective Louis Scarcella. The misconduct included coercing false identifications and false testimony from witnesses. The list of all exonerations linked to Scarcella’s misconduct is here.
Ranta was convicted of a murder that occurred on the morning of February 8, 1990, after 38-year-old Chaim Weinberger, a jewelry courier, left his apartment building in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
Weinberger was carrying a 50-pound suitcase full of diamonds and other valuables he was taking to the Dominican Republic. As he left his apartment building, Weinberger noticed a tall blond man eyeing him. When Weinberger got near his car, he saw the man following him. He tossed the suitcase into the trunk and got into his car to get away.
The blond man approached, putting a handkerchief over his face and drawing a pistol. Weinberger drove in reverse, knocked the robber down, and sped off.
The robber then noticed Chaskel Werzberger, a 56-year-old rabbi, warming up his car nearby. The gunman walked over, shot Werzberger in the head, yanked him out of the vehicle and drove off. Werzberger’s car was found in another Brooklyn neighborhood a day after the shooting, splashed with paint in an apparent attempt to cover fingerprints. Two days later, Werzberger died.
The murder of the rabbi shocked a city accustomed to murders and a $10,000 reward was offered for information.
A number of witnesses told police that they saw the events in full or in part. Weinberger described the gunman as being between 5 feet 11 inches and 6 feet tall, clean shaven and with blonde hair. Several other witnesses recalled that prior to the crime they saw two men in a station wagon parked nearby, one in the driver's seat and the other in the front passenger’s seat.
More than one hundred names surfaced as potential suspects, including Thomas Joseph Astin, whom police learned of through an anonymous telephone call. But, two months after the shooting, on April 2, 1990, Astin died in a car crash while being pursued by police. After his death, detectives brought Weinberger to the morgue to view Astin's body, but Weinberger was unable to identify Astin as the robber.
Beginning in June 1990, Detective Scarcella interviewed Dmitry Drikman, a convicted rapist facing robbery charges. Drikman pointed the detective to Alan Bloom, a convicted robber and drug addict, who was in jail facing charges that could send him to prison for life. After several conversations with Bloom, Scarcella said that Bloom had admitted that he attempted to rob Weinberger with 35-year-old David Ranta, an unemployed house painter with more than a dozen arrests for theft, robbery, and drug possession.
Drikman and Bloom were then housed in the same cell together and subsequently Drikman also implicated Ranta in the crime. Drikman’s girlfriend was then interviewed, and she told police she had seen Ranta and Bloom plotting how to cover up the attempted robbery and murder.
Bloom would ultimately testify against Ranta after being granted immunity for his involvement in the robbery and murder and a promise for a reduced sentence on his outstanding robbery charges. He told the police that he had helped to plan the robbery of Weinberger and said Ranta, whom he had known for a few years, was an accomplice, as was another man named Steve Shakir. Bloom said he left before anything happened and did not know who the gunman was, but he said that Shakir had a gun.
After he failed a polygraph test, Bloom changed his story to say that not only did he see the crimes, but that Ranta was the gunman. Bloom would later say that he lied about Shakir's involvement. He also said that on the night before the crimes, he had been with Drikman.
Bloom said that he had stolen a station wagon that several witnesses had observed at the crime scene prior to the crimes and that he had used the station wagon to drive himself and Ranta to the crime scene. He said Ranta approached Weinberger, pointed a gun at him, and attempted to rob him. Bloom told police that he was supposed to be the getaway driver, but that after Ranta left the car, a police car drove by, so he moved the car about 10 feet further away. As a result, Bloom said, Ranta didn't immediately spot the car after the botched robbery attempt and apparently decided to steal Werzberger's car.
Bloom said Ranta ran across the street, fired his gun twice, pulled the rabbi from his car, and fled.
Bloom said he met Ranta later that day, took Werzberger's car, and abandoned it in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. Bloom said that later he and Drikman returned to Werzberger’s car and splashed white paint on the interior to obscure any fingerprints. Bloom passed the polygraph test administered after his second statement.
Two others corroborated Bloom. Cheryl Herbert told the police that she had been in a relationship with Ranta and that, prior to her birthday in February, he told her he was expecting to come into possession of some nice jewelry. Herbert told police Ranta later told her that he was in a lot of trouble because he had participated in a robbery with two others, that they had abandoned him, and, as a result, he had to kill someone.
Alison Picciano told the police that Ranta had admitted to her that he had pulled Werzberger from his car and shot him while he was on the ground.
Ranta was arrested on August 13, 1990, and taken to a police station where detectives said that, after initial denials, Ranta eventually admitted that he had been at the crime scene with Bloom and Drikman in a station wagon, which he believed Bloom had stolen. Police said Ranta said that he had known about a plan to rob a Jewish jewel courier and that he was to have been the “lookout” during the robbery. The detectives said Ranta said he saw Bloom and Drikman exchange a gun in the station wagon and that, before any of the crimes occurred, he had left the scene when Bloom and Drikman began arguing about which one of them was going to commit the actual robbery.
Ranta was placed in a lineup the following day. Scarcella reached out to a rabbi who came to the station with six witnesses. The first witness, Weinberger–who had been the initial target of the robbery–didn't recognize anyone. The next two witnesses identified someone other than Ranta.
The fourth witness, who spoke only Yiddish and required an interpreter, initially said he didn't recognize anyone. The witness was then escorted to a nearby room with Detective Scarcella, a prosecutor, and the interpreter. A tape recorder which was recording the lineup conversation was turned off and then turned back on as the witness said that, in fact, he had identified the man in position six–who was Ranta.
The fifth witness identified Ranta, and the sixth witness identified another man in the lineup.
A second lineup was held later that day. Three more witnesses came in and all three identified Ranta.
Despite what police said Ranta had admitted, Ranta took and passed a polygraph examination.
Ranta went on trial in New York Supreme Court in May 1991.
Bloom testified, as did Herbert and Picciano, portraying Ranta as the gunman. Bloom told the jury that when he and Ranta met later in the day after the crime, Ranta said, “Why did you leave me? I had to kill someone.”
Picciano testified that Ranta told her, “I had to do what I had to do. I shot him.”
Ranta’s statement to police was presented to the jury as well–though it portrayed him as an accomplice instead of the gunman. The trial judge was critical of Detective Scarcella for failing to tape-record Ranta’s statement or take any notes and for failing to take any notes of his conversations with Drikman and Bloom.
The defense tried to suggest that Drikman was the gunman and that Ranta was innocent. Weinberger testified that Ranta was not the gunman.
On May 22, 1991, a jury convicted Ranta of murder, robbery, and attempted robbery. He was sentenced to 37 ½ years to life in prison.
His initial appeal was denied, but in 1996, Astin’s wife signed a sworn affidavit saying that her husband, before he was killed in a car crash, had admitted that he killed Werzberger. She said that Astin left their home at 4 a.m. on the day of the crime and returned later in tears, saying he had robbed someone carrying jewelry and that someone had been hurt.
Ranta filed a motion for a new trial. Despite the affidavit, the motion was denied. The judge said that Astin’s wife's credibility was damaged because she was facing a drug charge at the time she made the claim.
In 2011, Kings County District Attorney Charles Hynes created a Conviction Integrity Unit and invited defense lawyers to present cases where they believed innocent defendants had been convicted. One of the cases proffered was Ranta’s.
The case, which consisted of 13 boxes of files, was assigned to Deputy District Attorney Taylor Koss. Not long after he began reviewing the case, Koss received a call from Menachem Lieberman.
Lieberman revealed that he was one of the witnesses who had identified Ranta and that he had not known who the shooter was. However, Lieberman said, Detective Scarcella had told him to pick “the guy with the big nose,” so he had picked Ranta because he had the biggest nose. He said he picked Ranta only after each person in the lineup was told to step up to the one-way viewing window and turn sideways so that Lieberman could get a closer look at their profile.
Lieberman said that on the day of the crime, he was 13 years old and was with other boys walking to summer camp. Although they were near the shooting, he said that he was unable to identify the shooter. However, as the case dragged on for months without an arrest, Lieberman said, a rabbi rounded up the boys and brought them to the police station.
Koss would later say that Lieberman had expressed how much pressure the boys had felt. “The weight of the community was on their young shoulders,” Koss recounted. There was pressure on the police and prosecution as well. By the time of the lineup, the prosecution had informed Scarcella that if there were no identifications during the lineups viewed by the boys, an arrest warrant for Ranta would not be approved.
Lieberman told Koss that after he became an adult, he began splitting his time between Brooklyn and Montreal. While traveling to and from Brooklyn, Lieberman passed by New York prisons. At some point, Lieberman had begun to visit Hasidic prisoners whose families were unable to visit. Lieberman told Koss that he began to learn about the difficulty of day-to-day life in prisons. And consequently, his false identification of Ranta began to weigh heavily, growing in intensity as two decades passed.
During that time, spurred by his personal experience visiting the prisons, Lieberman founded a group that organized visits to Hasidic prisoners whose families were unable to visit them.
Lieberman told Koss that on the day he went to the police station, he didn’t recognize any of the men in the lineup. But he believed that Scarcella knew something that he didn’t and that he should follow Scarcella’s directions. Lieberman said that he believed that perhaps it was his memory that was at fault and that the police were doing the right thing.
Koss subsequently confirmed Lieberman’s account of viewing the lineup participants up close by reviewing an audio recording of the lineup that included the verbal instructions to the participants to come close to the glass and turn sideways to provide a view of their profiles.
Koss also determined that some other boys from the summer camp also separately had identified Ranta that day and had testified at Ranta’s trial. Koss spent months tracking down the other boys–now adults–but none of them would discuss the case. Of the witnesses, only Lieberman came forward.
Lieberman said he had struggled over whether to come forward and after years of thought and guidance from a rabbi in Montreal, he had decided to reach out, although he feared being ostracized by the Hasidic community. His decision coincided with the news media accounts of the creation of the Conviction Integrity Unit.
As Koss continued to re-investigate the case, he discovered that during the weeks when police were interrogating Bloom and Drikman, both were allowed to leave jail, smoke crack cocaine, and have sex with prostitutes in return for implicating Ranta.
Drikman and his girlfriend recanted their accounts that implicated Bloom and Ranta. Bloom had since died.
After Koss completed his review of the case, he recommended that District Attorney Charles Hynes consent to Ranta’s exoneration. Koss would later describe Lieberman’s decision to come forward as the “gateway to freedom” for Ranta and the trigger for the eventual reopening of Scarcella’s many cases.
Ranta’s lawyer, armed with the new evidence, filed a motion to vacate Ranta’s conviction. The motion was not opposed by Hynes, who had been the District Attorney when Ranta was arrested 23 years earlier.
On March 21, 2013, Ranta was flown from prison to a Brooklyn courtroom where his convictions were vacated, and the charges were dismissed. He was then released. Two days later, he had a massive heart attack, but survived.
In May 2013, Ranta filed a $150 million wrongful conviction claim against the city of New York. In February 2014, the city settled the claim for $6.4 million. Ranta also received $2 million in compensation from the New York Court of Claims.
A few months after Ranta was released, The New York Times published an article accusing Scarcella, who retired in 1999, of misconduct in many investigations: fabricating evidence, coercing witnesses, and concealing evidence of defendants' innocence. The article reported that one witness, Teresa Gomez, a crack addict, had somehow testified as an eyewitness in six separate murder cases. The report prompted the Brooklyn Conviction Integrity Unit to begin to re-investigate 57 cases in which Scarcella was involved.
On May 6, 2014, Kings County District Attorney Ken Thompson, who had defeated Hynes in his bid for re-election in the fall of 2013, announced that as a result of the Conviction Integrity Unit’s investigation, the murder convictions of Darryl Austin, Alvena Jennette, and Robert Hill should be vacated and the charges dismissed.
"Based on a comprehensive review of these cases, it is clear that testimony from the same problematic witness undermined the integrity of these convictions, and resulted in an unfair trial for each of these defendants," Thompson said in a statement.
By 2026, 17 convictions had been set aside based on misconduct by Scarcella.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 03-21-2013
Last Update Date: 08-24-2026
