When Your Crime Becomes a Dick Wolf Show

I
n the spring of 2024, while Andre Shariff Smith was leading the Ramadan community prayer, asking for forgiveness with his forehead planted in the prison mosque’s carpeted floor, Netflix was releasing the first episode of its new series Homicide: New York, “Carnegie Deli Massacre.” It was about the crime he had participated in 23 years ago. But that afternoon, Smith didn’t know the worst decision of his life, a robbery that left three people dead and two others wounded, was now being rehashed for millions. It would be the third-most-watched show on Netflix that week.

I’m a journalist in the joint, been locked up for more than 23 years, and in the past few I was with Smith in Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Back in 2019, when I appeared on a true-crime show that reenacted the murder I committed 18 years before, it left me feeling a certain way. I’ve since argued that telling tales of human darkness, especially dredging up decades-old crimes, creates a thirst for punishment.

The five-episode Homicide: New York showcases some of the city’s “most brutal” murders. It was created by Dick Wolf, the prolific TV producer known for his many scripted crime dramas, most famously Law & Order. He’s got around eight shows running right now — think One Chicago; think the FBI series — on different networks. In the past several years, as appetites for true crime have increased and murder rates in U.S. cities have decreased, Wolf has moved into the unscripted space, producing a bunch of true-crime shows for the likes of Oxygen and A&E. Today, his most prominent is arguably the Homicide series, which Netflix calls the “real-life Law & Order.”

This makes sense, since several of the cases on Homicide: New York were previously fictionalized on Law & Order. It’s one thing to read about crimes in the tabloids and change the names in a TV script, which is what Wolf’s scribes often do, but it’s quite another to use real cases and real names and real crime-scene photos, excavating real trauma to retell stories of murder for entertainment. Victims and their families have to relive the worst moments of their lives. And as for the people who caused the trauma in the first place — I see true crime, particularly this kind, as the antithesis to the idea that criminal-justice reformers espouse: We are more than the crimes we committed. There are subgenres of true crime, like true innocence, which investigates claims of wrongful conviction, that aren’t as lurid — but that’s not what Wolf is doing with Homicide. 

For more than 30 years, Wolf Entertainment has shaped the public’s understanding of crime and punishment arguably more than any other cultural force. Wolf’s shows follow a predictable narrative: “Bad guys” are identified and, after a couple of red herrings and unsuccessful interrogations, brought to “justice” by the “good guys” inside of an hour. It’s classic TV writing — unlike prestige TV, which offers a slow grind of character building, blurring the line between good guys and bad guys (think Ozark), ending stories on inconclusive and haunting notes (think The Sopranos) — and I imagine viewers, both fans and those who happen upon old reruns of these shows, find Wolf’s formula comforting: black, white, very little gray. It’s this formula that’s earned him the moniker “the king of broadcast television.”  

Wolf Entertainment is now using this formula for true-crime shows. Take the opening scene of “Carnegie Deli Massacre”: Gunshots pop, and ominous music chills. A stiff-lipped retired medical examiner named Barbara Butcher is a recurring guest on the series. (Wolf enjoyed her performance so much he gave Butcher her own show: The Death Investigator With Barbara Butcher, produced by Wolf Entertainment, premieres on the Oxygen True Crime network this fall.) “When I got the call,” she says to the camera, “they said, ‘You got a quintuple — five homicides.’”

It turned out to be a triple. Two people survived. 

In May 2001, Jennifer Stahl, 39, an artist, singer, and actor, who had a minor role in Dirty Dancing, was selling exotic weed to an artsy clientele out of her sixth-floor apartment above the famous Jewish deli across the street from Carnegie Hall. One evening, as she was entertaining company, someone she knew buzzed. Moments later, Stahl lay dying with a bullet in her forehead while her friends in the next room — Charles “Trey” Helliwell, Stephen King, Anthony Veader, and Rosemond Dane — were on the floor, faces in the carpet, wrists duct-taped, probably praying for their lives. Soon after Stahl, they were all shot in the back of their heads. Veader and Dane survived, flinching just before the blasts. 

The two men responsible were Smith and Sean Salley — though the prosecutor suggested that it was Salley who pulled the trigger.

“You never want a robbery to turn into a homicide. The guy panicked, shot everyone,” Smith tells me as we lap the perimeter of the prison yard counterclockwise. (Salley, for his part, continues to maintain his innocence.) Smith, 54, wishes he could turn back time. He sports a kufi cap and high-water green pants (what most Muslims wear in prison), an easy smile, and a powerful build from years of lifting weights.

I had listened to the Netflix show over the phone in the yard. The detectives called Smith “Dre.” Soon after, I started calling him that, too, even though everyone else called him Shariff, his middle name.

“Why do you call me Dre?” he asks during our walk. 

I hadn’t realized I started calling him Dre after listening to Homicide: New York. And this is what true crime did: It rooted me in Dre’s old identity, even though I was talking to Shariff, his new one.

“I had a newborn son,” Smith says. “It came out at trial that one of the people who died, I think Stephen King, had a newborn daughter.”

As we walk, Muslims greet Smith with “Assalamu alaikum,” a peace offering from God. Smith replies in kind, then finishes his thought. “His daughter is my son’s age. Over the years, I’ve thought about how it was for her to grow up without a father.”

Before He Was a TV Character

In 1952, Smith’s mother, Sharon, was born in jail. His grandmother, Freida, had her at 17 while she was serving time for “incorrigibility.” In 1971, Smith was born, but he would come to see his mother as more of a sister. His father wasn’t around. Freida was the one who took care of Smith and his older brother, Tyrone, raising them in Newark, New Jersey. Smith knew his mother struggled with heroin. To support her habit, she boosted clothing from department stores. After she got busted, Smith would visit her on Rikers Island. He remembers cartoon characters, Minnie and Mickey Mouse, painted on the walls of the visiting room and his mother greeting him by lifting him up off his feet and squeezing him in a tight hug. When Sharon got out, their routine consisted of daily walks to the methadone clinic. Soon, his mother, who was always beautiful, started looking frail, feeling sick. Sharon had AIDS. “She would scream for me to get her dope,” Smith tells me. “She was in pain. So, I did.”

In 1989, Sharon died. She was 37. Six weeks later, Smith’s grandmother Freida died of a heart attack at 55. Now, Smith was on his own. He was 19.

I grew up in a Brooklyn housing project with a single mom. My father left when I was one. Years later, Mom told me he killed himself. After that, I didn’t think too much of myself. In the late Eighties, Mom and I moved with my stepfather, George, a longshoreman, to his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, the west side of midtown Manhattan. I was captivated by George’s stories about the Westies, the Irish mob that reigned in the Kitchen. Just a few blocks from our rent-stabilized apartment was the Carnegie Deli, where Mom took me a few times. I ate big, fat brisket-on-rye sandwiches. This was around 1989.

The next year, Dick Wolf’s Law & Order premiered on NBC. The network loved the pilot episode but wondered where he’d find similarly gritty material. He told the NBC bosses that the bible of the show would be the front page of the New York Post. In 1990, there were 2,245 murders in New York City. He had plenty of material. (Through a representative, Wolf declined to be interviewed for this piece.)

Around this time, Smith and I were young criminals. Our own cases would eventually make headlines in the New York Post. After Smith’s grandmother and mother died, he was busted with cocaine and did a prison stint in New Jersey. Paroled in 1993, he was only out for a couple of months before he started robbing drug dealers. In Washington Heights one afternoon, he flashed cash — a few hundreds folded over a wad of singles. He told the dealer to bring an eighth of a kilo of cocaine (125 grams, which is the kind of order street dealers would request from weight dealers) and waited in a dimly lit restaurant, bachata music bumping in the background. When the dealer returned with the product, they went to the bathroom. Smith shoved the gun in the guy’s gut, took the blow, then left. The guy he robbed flagged down the cops, who busted Smith.

He wound up serving nearly three years in a New York prison (that’s when he converted to Islam), then he did four more years in New Jersey for violating parole on the previous drug case. Smith, at one prison, bunked with his brother, Tyrone, who was serving time for manslaughter. Then he landed in a prison with his stepfather, who was in a medical unit dying of AIDS. When Smith asked the prison administrator if he could walk to the next building to say goodbye, they said no. His stepfather soon died. While in prison, he also reconnected with his real father, who would keep apologizing to him over the phone for never being present. Soon after, his father also died of AIDS.

In early 2000, at 29, Smith got out. He already had four children with three different women. Smith tried to go straight. He had earned his high school equivalency in prison, enrolled in technical school, worked as a security guard at a homeless shelter, washed dishes at a retirement community, operated a forklift in a warehouse. He bought a hot-dog wagon, stood in line to get a permit, worked the cart on the weekend. He started dabbling in the streets. Someone shot him in his right leg; then weeks later, he slipped on some ice and broke it. He couldn’t work and provide for his young family. By February 2001, his girlfriend Keasha had Smith’s fifth son. Smith needed to make some money.

Around this time, a mutual friend introduced Smith to Salley, who told Smith he knew a woman who sold high-end weed out of her Manhattan apartment. Salley had worked as a roadie with George Clinton, and that’s how he got plugged into her circle. There should be several pounds of weed and cash. Smith, who’d robbed much more serious drug dealers, thought it sounded like an easy job. But he didn’t like doing jobs with guys he didn’t know. Had this guy ever robbed anyone?

It was Salley’s connect and Salley’s job, though, so Smith, desperate for money, went along. 

When they scoped out the place a day before, Smith saw the camera above the buzzer. Salley told him it was inoperable.

This is what Smith tells me all these years later: When Salley rang Jennifer Stahl’s bell, she buzzed him in. They climbed six flights. Upon entering, Smith held the gun on Stahl as Salley wrapped her guests’ wrists behind their backs. Smith felt Salley was going overboard, taking too long. He set the gun down, snatched the tape and finished the job. Salley picked up the gun and led Stahl into the next room with the weed. Smith was headed for the door when he heard a gunshot. Smith says Salley then came back in and shot the four others in the backs of their heads as they lay face down on the carpet. Salley and Smith both fled, taking a duffel bag filled with money and weed, and leaving five people for dead. Smith’s story lines up with what the prosecutor suggested at trial. (After the shootings, Salley told police he accidentally shot Stahl and then Smith shot the four others. At the trial, he and Smith blamed the other for the shootings. In 2010, in an interview on a true-crime show called I (Almost) Got Away With It, full of cheesy reenactments, Salley claims he didn’t shoot anyone.)

Days later, after seeing the footage of him and Salley leaving Stahl’s apartment on the news — the camera worked after all — and learning that the cops were looking for him, Smith turned himself in. At first, he tried to persuade the detectives it wasn’t him. Then he confessed, explaining he was only there for the weed. He claims he didn’t know Salley was going to shoot everyone. A couple of months later, after he appeared on America’s Most Wanted, Salley was captured fleeing a homeless shelter in Miami. 

The Crime Behind True Crime

Months later, in December 2001, when I was a 24-year-old drug dealer and drug addict, I shot and killed a man in Brooklyn. Between 2002 and 2004, while Smith, Salley, and I were on Rikers Island awaiting our murder trials, Dick Wolf made his first foray into true crime with a show called Crime & Punishment. The execs at NBC loved it, so did Wolf, but one of the interrogators did this thing where he broke the fourth wall. After three seasons, it got canceled. Wolf stuck with his scripted crime dramas. At this point, the original Law & Order had a couple of spinoffs, SVU and Criminal Intent.

At Salley and Smith’s trial, in 2002, where each had separate juries, the prosecutor relied on forensic evidence and the testimony of Rosemond Dane and Anthony Veader, the two survivors, who couldn’t definitively say who fired the shots. In his closing arguments, the assistant district attorney suggested that Salley was the lone shooter. Yet, according to the law, Smith’s participation in the robbery made him just as guilty of the murders. That’s how the complicated doctrine of felony murder works: Plenty of people are locked up in America for being present or even waiting outside in the getaway car, serving the same time as the ones who pull the trigger, and these massive sentences contribute to mass incarceration. To at least one juror, this didn’t seem fair. 

Lynne Harriton was the foreperson on Smith’s jury. She had voted guilty, but when she learned Smith faced forever in prison like Salley, she felt duped by the system. She believed 25 to 30 years was fair for his participation. Harriton wrote the judge a letter, which later ran in The Village Voice: 

Dear Judge Berkman,
I write to beg you to show leniency in your sentencing of Mr. Smith…. Information revealed by the state during trial indicates that he was shocked and horrified by the actions of the gunman, that he felt remorse, sadness and shame. Please, Judge Berkman, you consistently showed such kindness and warmth to us. Could you afford this person some years of light at the end of his life?

The judge served Salley and Smith with more than 110 years apiece.

In July 2004, a jury found me guilty of murder. I received 25 years to life. On top of three more I was serving for selling drugs, 28 years to life was more time than I’d been alive. I landed in Clinton Correctional Facility, in Dannemora, New York. We had 13-inch black-and-white TVs in our cells, and I’d watch Law & Order marathons on TNT, the original version with Sam Waterston as Jack McCoy. Every hour, the same iconic voiceover would play: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups …” Then, “dun-dun” echoed down the tier. Sometimes a voice would tumble out of a cell: “Ay, yo, who the fuck watching that cop show?”

Wolf wasn’t kidding about mining the tabloids for material. Plenty of Law & Order episodes, I’d realize, were about guys I knew. One was loosely based on my boy Dupree Harris’ case. We were on trial in Brooklyn at the same time, me for murder, him for witness tampering and bribery. Harris was connected to a few cases — in one involving his half-brother, an eyewitness was set to testify but was murdered before he took the stand. Harris was not charged with that murder, but the Law & Order writers implied he was involved with the crime and used nicknames similar to Harris’ case. The episode was called “Can I Get a Witness?” and it aired during his trial. Among other episodes was “Tragedy on Rye,” the one based on Smith’s crime, about “three suspects who are arrested when a tourist’s home video shows them leaving the victim’s apartment with some stolen property.”

Changing the names and facts of these cases at least mitigated reliving the real-life pain for those involved, but the show still had problems. My fellow prisoners were the first people to point out to me that Law & Order depicted criminal defendants as one-dimensional characters, while the detectives and prosecutors and judges were rendered as fuller ones, with desires and ideals and vulnerabilities. 

Wolf would gradually build out the interiority of the show’s heroes like Detective Lennie Briscoe, played by Jerry Orbach. Wolf once told writer Jim Longworth that he dispenses personal information with “an eyedropper instead of a soup ladle,” because that’s how people get to know one another in real life. Yet Law & Order never had intimate scenes with murderers like me, like when my mom and aunt Mary Ann came up for extended visits as part of the family-reunion program. We’d stay in a modular home for 48 hours within the walls of Dannemora. In the living room, sitting on the couch, we’d channel surf, and Mom would always ask me to go back to Law & Order, her favorite show. I hadn’t yet learned to think critically about the stories I consumed. She’d look over at me during a commercial. “At least we can be together,” Mom once said. “That boy you killed can’t be with his mother.”

The Stories on the Screen

In 2010, the same year Michelle Alexander published her New York Times-bestselling takedown of the criminal-justice system, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Wolf’s original Law & Order was canceled. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit continued on — Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson was busting rapists. In the next few years, Wolf cranked out three thriller novels with main character Detective Jeremy Fisk: In 2012, The Intercept came out; in 2014, The Execution; and in 2015, The Ultimatum. Sales were disappointing. Wolf returned to true crime — the genre had exploded in popularity since his first attempt, Crime & Punishment, ended in the early 2000s. 

“If we could do these shows 20 to 25 percent better than what’s out there, we could be a significant presence in five years,” Wolf told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. When asked if his new interest in true crime was about money, Wolf acknowledged that “this is always a dangerous area, because anybody who says it’s not about the money is lying. Obviously, it’s always about the money.” Today, Wolf’s net worth is reportedly $1.2 billion, and as he once said, he’s “never earned a dollar that wasn’t somehow writing-related.”

It was my own writing career that led true-crime producers to me in 2018. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about who gets to tell our stories (it’s the subject of my book, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us, out in September). That’s why, when Homicide: New York came out, my book publicist, Megan Posco, explained the tone of the show to me and described some of the crimes featured. When I realized one installment was about Smith’s crime, I wanted to talk to him and his loved ones about it. 

“I didn’t understand how they could make this show about him and not even reach out to him,” Smith’s wife, Yvonne, tells me.

While the ethics of true crime are often criticized nowadays, the First Amendment makes retelling these stories legal. That freedom of speech is also why I can be a journalist from the joint. But the simple reason these tragedies are constantly retold is that there is a demand for them.

Some shows do depict incarcerated people as more than that terrible thing that landed us in prison. I recently read a transcript of HBO’s Nature of the Crime, which came out in December of last year and follows three men in New York grappling with their remorse as they are repeatedly denied parole. 

Instead of a sensational re-creation of the tragic events that led to their arrests decades prior, the feature-length documentary explores remorse and asks how much time in prison is enough.

But what about the victims? While Anthony Veader, who was shot in the head and survived, did agree to participate in “Carnegie Deli Massacre,” the other survivor, Rosemond Dane, did not. (Dane declined to participate in this piece.)

A 2024 survey by the online polling organization YouGov revealed that most Americans think true-crime creators should get permission from the victims or their families, and even a quarter of respondents believe they should get consent from the alleged criminal. 

When I think about this golden era of true crime, I wonder what’s lost when these shows and podcasts and books don’t include the trauma that so many of us endure before we do what we did. 

And when producers and writers re-create old crimes as full-blown entertainment productions so the violence is fresh for a new generation, they should consider how it will affect all of the parties involved, including the perpetrators who are paying for their crimes in prison. To understand the inner logic and layers that lead to violence, we should welcome the voices of those who are responsible for it — not as subjects to exploit, but as narrators to explain. Of course, anyone who’s hurt people and attempts to explore their motivations must do so thoughtfully, with empathy and self-reflection. But our stories shouldn’t simply start at the crime and end at the conviction, because any true insight can only be discovered in the before and after, reflecting on it all these years later in prison.

I wondered how it felt for Smith to learn about this Netflix show rehashing his crime. In the hallway one evening, Smith tells me, he saw his psychology professor. He’d earned a B in her class the year before. The professor mentioned that she’d seen his show. He didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t his show. 

“If I had the opportunity to watch it, I’d check it out,” Smith tells me that cloudy September day in the yard. 

I tell him it’s probably best he didn’t. I explain the scene — the gunshots, the bloody crime-scene photos, their duct-taped wrists.

“They showed that?” Smith asks.

The show wasn’t too concerned with making it clear who the shooter was, though the prosecutor did explain at the end of the episode that the law held both Salley and Smith equally responsible. 

We walked the rest of the way in silence, around and around the perimeter of the prison yard, always counterclockwise.