Dateline NBC - Dan Slepian reads an excerpt from “The Sing Sing Files”

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Hear an exclusive audio excerpt from Dateline producer Dan Slepian’s new book “The Sing Sing Files” which chronicles his two-decade journey navigating the criminal justice system to help free six innocent men.  Warning: This excerpt contains explicit language. Available now wherever books and audiobooks are sold.  For more details and to purchase, follow this link:https://bit.ly/TheSingSingFilesShowcast

Hi, Dateline listeners. My name is Dan Slepian, and I've been a producer at Dateline for nearly 30 years. I'd like to share a story with you that I think you might find interesting. I've spent much of my career and my life diving deep into the criminal justice system. And along the way, I've uncovered what I've come to realize is a hidden epidemic, wrongful convictions. Now, you may have heard parts of this journey on episodes of Dateline or in the podcasts I've hosted, 13 Alibis and Letters from Sing Sing, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year. But there's so much more to these stories, and I've poured it all into my new book, The Sing Sing Files.

My book is so much bigger than the stories I told on those episodes and in those podcasts. In The Sing Sing Files, I'll introduce you to six innocent men, all wrongly imprisoned. From prison visits to court hearings to interviews with friends, families, lawyers, and witnesses, I investigated the ugly truth of how these men were condemned and then the Herculean struggle to bring the facts of their innocence to light. This project is deeply personal to me, and when you hear it, I hope it becomes deeply personal to you too. If you like what you hear in the excerpt and want to hear it, I hope it becomes deeply personal to you too. If you like what you hear in the excerpt and want to hear more,

click the link in the episode notes to order a copy of the book or audiobook. The Sing Sing Files is also available wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Today, I'll start from the beginning of The Sing Sing Files. Chapter One, Dateline Like so many of us, I was raised to believe that the people who took oaths to uphold the law fairly and impartially always made sure that the bad guys, and certainly only the bad guys, wound up behind bars. Even if the system did get it wrong sometimes, I trusted there were so many checks and balances – prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, juries, appeals – that someone staying in prison for a long time for something they didn't do was either highly unlikely or extraordinarily rare. Early in my career as a

producer for Dateline, my experiences only reinforced that view. I'd gotten to know and worked closely with some of the best in law enforcement, producing many hours of TV that focused on the legal system when it worked just the way it should. In the early 2000s, I was granted rare access to film Las Vegas homicide detectives as they investigated murders in real time for a Dateline series I created and produced, aptly named Vegas Homicide. It was my first immersive experience with law enforcement, and it helped me understand what these brave officers were up against. From breaking devastating news that someone's loved one had been murdered, to working around the clock to figure out who was responsible.

I talked my way into getting permission for this project by offering what, at the time at least, was a novel approach. I got a hold of an early handheld camera, this was before the iPhone and the digital era, and pitched Las Vegas police press that, in an effort to be as unobtrusive as possible during an unfolding investigation, it would just be me riding along with their detectives. My small footprint meant there would be no camera people and no audio engineer running around with headphones and a long stick-boom microphone. I would be serving as the producer, reporter, camera person,

and audio engineer all in one. While I was the first producer at Dateline to do this, I'd had a camera in my hand since I was big enough to hold one, which, I suppose, is how my road to Dateline began. I grew up in the suburbs of New York and made dinner, watching the Phil Donahue show, followed by WNBC's local news program Live at Five with Sue Simmons and Tony Guida on a 13-inch TV above the refrigerator. Those news anchors were A-list celebrities in my eyes. In 1990, during my junior year at SUNY Stony Brook, I eagerly applied for a summer internship with WNBC, but I was rejected. Twice.

Instead, I got an internship at a good government group across from City Hall called Common Cause. That internship was intensely boring. I spent most of my time making copies in a poorly lit hallway. The most exciting part of my day was eating my lunch, people watching, and soaking up the sunshine before returning to my lonely copier cave. One day, I saw a throng of reporters rushing into City Hall looking excited. I was curious, so I followed them in. Turned out there was a press conference going on, and as an aspiring journalist,

I thought I'd check it out. A security guard at the door said, who are you with? Independent media, I said, proud of my spontaneous fabrication. To my surprise, that security guard waved me through. Before I knew it, I was sitting in the back of what's called the Blue Room, waiting for the press conference to begin with my brown bag lunch in my lap. And then in walked Mayor David Dinkins. Cool, I thought. He was the first famous person I'd ever seen in the flesh. Seconds later, I saw my second famous person, Tony fucking Guida, sitting right there in the front row. With his snow-white hair, he looked just like he did on Live at Five.

After the news conference concluded, I stationed myself outside City Hall, watching everyone as they streamed out. And there he was, Tony Guida. I went up to him and said, no doubt with the energy of a puppy off the leash, Mr. Guida, my name is Dan Selepian. I watch you all the time. I applied to be an intern at WNBC, but I got rejected. I'll do anything. I'll get you coffee, whatever you want. Tony gazed at me for a moment. Here I was, this painfully earnest 19-year-old vibrating with enthusiasm and hope. And then he reached into his shirt pocket, took out a napkin, and scribbled the number on it. He handed it to me with three words,

Call Mike Callahan. Tony probably thought nothing of it, but those few seconds of kindness would forever change my professional trajectory and my life. The very next day, I dialed the number Tony had given me and spoke with Mike Callahan, the chain smoking managing editor at WNBC. Excitement brimming in my voice, I said, I met Tony Guida. He said to call you because I'd love to be an intern. And he cut me off and said, come on in. And so the next day,

I found myself at the WNBC office in iconic 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Callahan wasted no time and said, you want to be an intern? Help out the assignment editors on the desk. Simple as that. I never went back to Common Cause. In fact, I've stayed in that very building for more than 30 years now. The internship coordinator would see me and say, who are you? An intern, I'd confidently reply. No, you have to be part of the program, she'd respond. Mike said I could come in. That's not the way it works, she'd say.

We would have that conversation on a few occasions. As many times as she tried to get rid of me, though, I just kept coming in every day, pulling faxes, answering phones, and cheerfully fetching sugar for assignment editor Harry Rittenberg's Slim Fest. I was kind of like the guy from Office Space who didn't have a job and just kept showing up. I'd cross paths with that internship director in the hallways for years, and she'd always have a silence there like, you're still here? That unorthodox internship eventually paved the way for me to be accepted into the NBC Page program, a highly competitive opportunity for

college graduates looking to get into the TV business. Among my responsibilities was giving tours of the studios and seating audiences for shows like Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. My first real job was working for the man I grew up watching after school every day, the OG, the original, pre-Oprah daytime talk show host, Phil Donahue. For the kids who don't know his name, he invented running around a studio audience holding a microphone in random people's faces, and he totally revolutionized television. When Donahue went off the air in 1996, I started working at Dateline, my dream job, and never left.

Dateline, NBC's longest-running primetime series, has been on the air for more than 30 years and has become part of mainstream American culture. When I began there, the show was anchored by Stone Phillips and Jane Pauley and aired two nights per week. Within a couple of years, under the leadership of executive producer Neil Shapiro, it was on as many as five nights per week. Back then, the show was broken into several segments covering various topics, from celebrity profiles to undercover investigations to breaking news reports.

Producing stories during that time was like drinking from several fire hoses at once. My first role at Dateline was what's called a booker, meaning it was my job to convince people embroiled in the biggest breaking stories of the day to talk exclusively to Dateline. About 15 young staffers, mostly news nerds, were told to keep an overnight bag under our desks at work because you never knew when news would break and you'd be headed to the airport. When the Columbine shooting happened, I was off to Colorado with Stone Phillips. After Waco burned, I headed to Texas. When JFK Jr.'s plane went down, I was on the next flight to Martha's Vineyard A few years later, Dateline began to focus on murder mysteries

Launching a new era as the true crime original For its captivating yarns with twists and turns that keep viewers on the edge of their seats. By September 10, 2001, I was 31 and had been working at Dateline for five years. I'd been filming with the Vegas detectives that Monday and happened to take the last flight back from Las Vegas to New York City, where I lived at the time. I landed at about 1 in the morning on 9-11 and headed home to my wife, Jocelyn. Hours later, when the first plane struck the World Trade Center, I grabbed my camera, headed down to St. Vincent's Hospital,

and began interviewing people who were searching for their missing family members. Looking up 7th Avenue, I could see police cars and fire engines driving at top speed toward the bottom of the island, and I watched in awe as these men and women in uniform rushed to those buildings. In that moment, more than any other, and I'd spent a lot of time with police officers and been impressed by what they did, I thought, these are men and women who have different blood than I do. I'd never, not in a million years, rush into a building in flames unless my daughter was inside it.

The strength that takes to be like them, I thought. I'll never forget it. My heart flooded with gratitude. The cops of the NYPD were the heroes of America and the rock stars of the city, and I wanted to embed with them, much like I had in Las Vegas. So I contacted Michael Oluni, an unusually generous Deputy Commissioner of Public Information for the NYPD, and set up a meeting to pitch my idea.

About a month later, I got the green light and was told I'd be following detectives in the Bronx. So, on a sunny morning in April 2002, I arrived at the headquarters of the Bronx Homicide Task Force, camera in hand, eager, and looking back, unbelievably naive. Located on Simpson Street in the South Bronx, the wood-paneled building immortalized in the Paul Newman movie Fort Apache the Bronx two decades earlier, had the faded glamour of a palace in the middle of Baghdad. I walked up a large curved staircase to the second floor where I saw a thin gold plate that said Bronx Homicide fastened to a wood door. Walking into that office was like walking back in time. There was flypaper hanging from the ceilings and the sound of officers clicking away at typewriters using carbon paper to write police reports. The place reeked of cigarettes, even though that was the year Mayor Michael Bloomberg had outlawed indoor smoking. I was taken to see

Lieutenant Sean O'Toole, the unit's boss, and he introduced me to the two detectives the NYPD had chosen for me to follow, a legendary Bronx homicide detective named Bobby Adelarado and his equally formidable partner, John Schwartz. They were friendly, kind of, but I quickly got the sense they were not exactly thrilled to have a Dateline producer tagging along after them. They made it clear that they didn't particularly want to be on TV and saw my presence as more of an order than an opportunity. But they did as they were told. They were nothing if not dutiful, and eventually they got used to me and my camera. Bobby Adelarado, a son of the Bronx, had the swagger of a man who knew he was

where he belonged, doing the work he was meant to do. He told me that from a young age, his parents taught him and his brother that honest public service was the measure of success, and that the Adelarado brothers always had their hearts set on the action-packed version honest public service was the measure of success and that the Adelarado brothers always had their hearts set on the action-packed version of public service promised by police work. And the main lesson his father, a city sanitation worker, stressed for this exciting way of fighting for those who can't fight for themselves? Stay true. The cornerstone of Bobby's upbringing and career had been the quaint notion that the truth will win out, that facts are king. Bobby's partner, John Schwartz, was also part of a police family. John's father, uncle, brother, and brother-in-law were all in the NYPD. John took

and passed the police exam when he was still a teenager, and he joined the family business at his first chance when he turned 20. Linebacker-sized, his hair snow-white, John looked older than his years, and he was all business. It didn't take long for me to learn that being a detective in New York City was much different than it was in Vegas. The Vegas cops, for starters, had way more institutional support. They had department-issued cell phones. New York cops had to use their own cell phones, and there was no policy of reimbursing them for the hundreds of calls made during an investigation.

Vegas detectives each had their own department-issued car. In the Bronx, detectives shared old junkers that, in some cases, were so beat up they needed a milk crate to support the seats. Bobby and John didn't even have official email addresses. They had to print their own business cards to hand out when asking people to contact them with tips. As for their hours, you'd need an MBA to understand how the department is organized, but basically it works like this. All detectives are assigned to one of four teams, lettered from A to D. For each team, there's a four-day rotation of shifts,

starting at 4 p.m. on the first day. So detectives work 4 p.m. to 1 a.m., then 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. again the next day. Then comes what's called the turnaround. The next two days, their shifts begin at 8 a.m. So if it takes them an hour to get home to bed on the first day of the turnaround, that leaves time for only about four hours of sleep at most before they have to be back at the precinct. Homicide cops never really get much rest. It's part of the job. But this ABCD system ensured it. Even veteran detectives worked this schedule, and so did I. Despite it all, this was Bobby Adelarado's dream job. He was happy as long as he had his coffee, but good coffee, French vanilla from the automatic machine at the Texaco

station on 182nd Street. At age 41, Bobby was at the top of his game. He would soon be promoted to the highest rank for a detective, first grade, earned by roughly 300 of more than 5,000 detectives in the NYPD who carry the coveted gold shield, an achievement his partner, John, had recently earned. Bobby loved working at Bronx Homicide, where he could parachute as needed into fresh homicides, and the boss was a tolerant lieutenant who would let him blast his Bruce Springsteen CDs in the squad room. By the time I met him, Bobby had been on the job for 18 years and had made around 1,500 arrests.

He'd taken down some of the most violent killers the city had ever seen. He'd walked countless miles through dangerous back alleys, always trying to figure out the same things. What happened? Who did it? How? Where are they? And when can I pick them up? I worked Bobby and John's hours, ate at their hangouts, and saw the grisly crime scenes they worked, so we spent a lot of time together. Bobby and I soon formed a special bond. Perhaps that's why he decided to tell me about something that had nothing to do with the idea that I had pitched. It was about two weeks into our project.

You see some terrible things, I said to Bobby. You must bring this job home. You know, I really don't, he told me. Then he paused. Except this one case keeps me up at night. What happened in that case, Bobby explained, was that two men were serving 25 years to life for a 1990 murder he believed they did not commit. How do you know they didn't do it? I asked. Because, he said, I know who the real killers are. It's Dan Slepian. Thank you so much for listening to an excerpt from The Sing Sing Files,

written and read by me. Hope you enjoyed it. The Sing Sing Files is available wherever books and audiobooks are sold. For more information, follow the link in the show notes.