60 Minutes (1968) s45e11 Episode Script
Confessing to Crimes They Did Not Commit | The Race to Save the Tortoise | Hugh Jackman
Why would anyone confess to a crime they did not commit? It happens so often in Chicago, defense attorneys call the city the false confession capital of the United States.
Chicago has twice as many documented false confession cases as any city in the country.
One reason may be the way police go about questioning suspects.
And 60 Minutes has learned the Chicago Police Department is now the subject of a Justice Department investigation into its interrogation practices.
Two cases we examined involve several teenage boys who were arrested and they say forced or tricked into confessing to violent crimes they never committed.
Each spent nearly half their lives in prison.
They are free now, and told us their story together for the first time.
Terrill Swift: We all of us got one thing in common.
We did an extensive amount of time in jail for something we didn't do.
And that's the bottom line.
They each would serve sentences that ranged from 15 years to life.
Terrill Swift, Michael Saunders, Vincent Thames, and Harold Richardson were convicted in one rape and murder.
James Harden, Robert Taylor and Jonathan Barr, in a different one.
All were found guilty based solely on confessions.
Byron Pitts: Jonathan, you went in as a 14-year-old boy? Jonathan Barr: Yes, sir.
Byron Pitts: What'd you come out as? Jonathan Barr: Came out as a 34-year-old man.
Michael Saunders: Yeah, we was young, little kids James Harden: To be honest with you man, I miss my mama, man.
I miss my mom and daddy, man.
I miss my mama.
It seemed like some days, I can't function.
Byron Pitts: She die while you were in prison? James Harden: Yeah.
Their troubles began in 1991 when Chicago was in the midst of a violent crime wave.
More than 900 homicides in 12 months.
Police were under enormous pressure to solve those crimes.
Terrill Swift was 17, was still in high school, had never been in serious trouble, when another teenager from his neighborhood implicated him, Vincent, Michael And Harold in the rape and murder of a 30-year-old prostitute named Nina Glover.
Byron Pitts: Did anyone ask you "Terrill Swift, did you murder this woman?" Terrill Swift: That was the first thing they said.
Whoa.
Raped and beat who? Nina, I don't know Nina Glover.
Can I get my mother in here so I can get a lawyer? And nothing.
Terrill voluntarily turned himself in to police and was placed in an interrogation room, surrounded by several detectives.
The questioning he said lasted for over 12 hours.
Byron Pitts: How close were they? Show me physically how close were they? Terrill Swift: Like right here.
"You're gonna die in jail.
You're never going home.
" Byron Pitts: Yelling at you? Terrill Swift: Yelling at me.
Byron Pitts: Were you scared? Did you cry? Terrill Swift: Absolutely, I was crying, but no one listened.
Terrill wanted to go home and says police told him if he admitted to the rape and murder he could leave.
So he signed a 21-page confession which gave specific details to how he and his co-defendants committed the crime.
Byron Pitts: I got to tell you, the first time I read it, all 21 pages, I said, "That man is guilty.
" Terrill Swift: Right.
Everything that's in that confession was fed to us, myself and my co-defendants by the police.
Byron Pitts: Did they force you to sign? Terrill Swift: No.
Byron Pitts: So why'd you sign it? Terrill Swift: I thought I was going home.
Byron Pitts: You were 17 years old, so you weren't a child.
Terrill Swift: I guess I was still a mama's boy.
Byron Pitts: Come on now.
You had to know if you admitted to raping and killing a woman, you weren't going home to mama.
Terrill Swift: I had no understanding of that, none.
Terrill Swift would later recant, but it was too late, at trial a judge believed the confession and sentenced him to 30 years.
Robert Taylor: That whole ordeal, it done something to every last one of us.
And with me, it'd made me numb.
In the other case, Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr and James Harden were arrested in high school for the rape and murder of their classmate taken into custody after a fellow student gave their names to police as possible suspects.
Robert was 15 when he says he was taken into an interrogation room and forced to sign a confession.
Robert Taylor: Man, you being cuffed up and beat on by the police.
Man, them people can get you to do-- do what they want you to do.
Byron Pitts: What did they make you do? Robert Taylor: Made me sign.
I mean, that murdered me.
It killed me inside.
His co-defendant James Harden says he was told by police if he signed the confession he'd be released immediately.
James Harden: They had the statement already wrote up and the man say, "Do you want to go home and sleep in your bed tonight?" So I said, "Hell, yeah.
" So that's how easy it is for a person to sign their life away just the thought-- just being taken away from your parents and say, "OK, I want to go home and sleep in my bed tonight.
Hell yeah, I fixing to sign it.
" But James never got home that night.
Instead, he and the others were tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Bob Milan: There's nothing worse as a prosecutor than playing a role in sending an innocent person or people to prison for many years.
There's nothing worse.
Bob Milan should know.
As a young prosecutor, he worked this case.
And would eventually rise to second in command in the Cook County State's Attorney's Office.
Now in private practice, he says publicly for the first time, he should have examined the confessions more closely.
Bob Milan: I never believed anybody would confess to a horrible crime they didn't commit.
I didn't believe it.
Bob Milan: I didn't believe people would confess to rape and murder of a woman.
You know, just didn't believe it.
But based on my experiences, I found it did happen.
Bob Milan: These young men lost a lot of good lives, I was part of it, I didn't mean it, I never would have done that intentionally, but it doesn't make it any easier.
Byron Pitts: Yeah.
Haunts you, still, it sounds like.
Bob Milan: Sure.
Always will.
Byron Pitts: Why would a detective push for a false confession? You think? Bob Milan: What happens is it's tunnel vision.
OK.
They get locked in on this individual.
So the anonymous phone call, the confidential informant, the well-meaning witness sends them in the wrong path.
Chicago has a long history of false confessions.
Two years ago, former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was convicted on federal charges related to torture.
Including, the use of electric shock during questioning and one where he gained a confession after he placed a gun to a suspect's head.
So far, more than since 1989, many as a result of police misconduct.
Peter Neufeld: Quite simply what Cooperstown is to Baseball, Chicago is to false confessions.
It is the Hall of Fame.
Peter Neufeld was one of the defense attorneys representing these men.
He is the co-founder of the Innocence Project, an organization that has helped exonerate 300 wrongfully convicted men nationwide, with the use of DNA testing.
Peter Neufeld: There are more juvenile false confessions in Chicago than any place in the United States.
What's happening? It's not because the kids are different that makes them more vulnerable to confessing.
It's because the way the police keep pounding and pounding and pounding away in those interrogation rooms.
You get innocent kids to confess to crimes they didn't commit.
Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez disagrees.
Responding to public pressure, she set up a new unit within her office, to re-examine questionable prosecutions.
But she defends the actions of the police in these two cases.
Anita Alvarez: We have not uncovered any evidence of any misconduct by the police officers or the State's Attorneys that took the statements in these cases.
Alvarez still believes the confession Terrill Swift gave in the Nina Glover case.
Despite the fact there was no DNA evidence linking him or the others to the crime.
Byron Pitts: Did you find any of the boys' DNA on the victim? Anita Alvarez: No, we didn't.
Byron Pitts: Did you find any of their DNA in the basement of the house? Anita Alvarez: No.
Byron Pitts: How do you explain that the boys would say they raped a woman, and there not be any DNA evidence? Doesn't that strike you as odd? Anita Alvarez: Well, we would love to have DNA on everything.
And every piece of evidence that we have, in every crime.
But it doesn't necessarily occur.
Last year, the Innocence Project retested the one DNA sample that was recovered inside the victim Nina Glover.
It was submitted to the National DNA Database and a match was made to Johnny Douglas, a serial rapist and convicted killer, who is now deceased.
But the new discovery did not change Anita Alvarez's mind.
Byron Pitts: You find out years later that, in fact, the DNA found inside the victim's body belonged to Johnny Douglas.
And Johnny Douglas is a convicted serial rapist and murderer.
That doesn't tell you that he most likely is the person who killed this woman? Anita Alvarez: No.
It doesn't.
Is he a bad guy? Absolutely, he is.
Absolutely.
But, can we prove, just by someone's bad background, that they committed this particular crime? It takes much more than that.
Michael Saunders: For her to just say DNA is not everything, well what else do you have if DNA don't matter? Terrill Swift: This was a rape and a murder.
How can you say DNA is nothing? Byron Pitts: Why would a confession trump DNA evidence? Saul Kassin: Because confessions are incredibly compelling.
Nobody can understand how they would ever be goaded into confessing to something they didn't do.
Saul Kassin is a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and has studied police interrogation practices and false confessions for 27 years.
Saul Kassin: One would think DNA is supposed to solve our problems.
It's supposed to identify the perpetrator and absolve the innocent.
Here you have cases where they absolve the innocent but we don't believe them because the innocent have confessed.
And so the DNA doesn't matter anymore.
In the case of Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr and James Harden, DNA found inside the 14-year-old victim Catteresa Matthews was also retested, and a match was made to Willie Randolph, a Peter Neufeld says prosecutors rejected the DNA evidence and instead came up with an unusual theory to explain it all away.
Peter Neufeld: They suggest perhaps after the kids killed her this man wandered by and committed an act of necrophilia.
Byron Pitts: Necrophilia.
A lot of our viewers won't know what that means.
Peter Neufeld: Having sex with a dead person.
Anita Alvarez: It's possible.
We have seen cases like that.
Byron Pitts: Possible? Anita Alvarez: It is.
We've seen it in other cases.
Byron Pitts: It's possible that this convicted rapist, wandered past an open field, and had sex with a 14-year-old girl who was dead? Anita Alvarez: Well, there's all kinds of possibilities out there, and what I'm saying is that I don't know what happened.
Bob Milan: People don't like to admit they made a mistake.
But we need to do that.
Our job as a prosecutor--isn't to win, our job is to get it right.
Former prosecutor Bob Milan says that prosecutors need to put the same sense of urgency into exonerations as they once did into prosecutions.
Bob Milan: When you have physical evidence, it doesn't lie.
So when you have the DNA on a girl from some guy with a history of sexual attacks that pretty much tells you where you're going.
Byron Pitts: Not the people who gave the confessions? Bob Milan: No.
By now 10 defense attorneys were focusing on the new DNA.
Working with them was a third-year Northwestern Law School student named Katie Marie Zouhary.
She was assigned to re-examine the original confessions and her research helped change the case.
Katie Marie Zouhary: I think when you look at a confession on a piece of paper, a court reported confession, a handwritten confession, it seems like all the pieces are in place.
Katie Marie Zouhary: But what you don't see is the 17-year-old in the room by himself with the police officers, what you don't see is that confession next to the other confessions.
So you're able to see that these things don't match up.
And it's not just a "one of these things is not like the others," it's "all of these things are not like the others.
" Zouhary discovered the boys' confessions contained different accounts of the crimes, from the chronology to their own nicknames.
Katie Marie Zouhary: They get the framework right, but they don't get the details right.
And if any two of them had gotten the details right that would be one thing, But when you look at each of these confession line-by-line in the way we did.
It's pretty glaring that there is no cohesive story here.
Last year, based on the new DNA evidence, and Katie Marie's work the courts vacated the convictions and granted all of them certificates of innocence which restored their full rights as U.
S.
citizens.
As for Anita Alvarez, she's still not convinced Terrill Swift and his co-defendants are innocent.
Anita Alvarez: I don't know whether he committed the crime or not.
There are still unanswered questions in both of these cases.
That I couldn't sit here today and tell you that they are all guilty or they are all innocent.
Byron Pitts: What would you say to her if you could? Terrill Swift: I was wrongfully incarcerated for 15 years and you're still fighting my innocence, not only mine but my co-defendants.
What else needs to be done? During our interview, Terrill's mother, who was in the room at the time, became emotional.
Byron Pitts: I could hear you crying over there.
Why are you still shedding tears? Mrs.
Swift: That was hard.
Actually have your child taken away from you.
And he was innocent.
And I knew this from the beginning, but what could I do? Not be able to get my child, my baby, my first born, that was hard and it still is.
We came through it with the grace of God.
Not since the dinosaurs disappeared, have animals been going extinct as fast as they are now.
Entire species vanish every year.
And while our hearts are moved by the plight of the biggest, whales or elephants, the fiercest, tigers, even sharks and certainly the cutest, like pandas, what about the slowest? The turtle, and its land-loving cousin the tortoise, have been plodding along, slow and steady, for more than 200 million years.
But their hard shells are little protection from human predators and a booming illegal animal trade.
It may be too late to save many of them, but they have found an unlikely protector in a man named Eric Goode.
Some of New York City's hottest hotels, restaurants and bars are owned by Eric Goode.
[Eric Goode: Hello, I need to say hello to people I haven't said hello toHi.
.]
That's made him rich and comfortable with the glitterati and fashionistas, but behind-the-scenes, he caters to a far less glamorous clientele, endangered turtles and tortoises.
Lesley Stahl: How did the whole interest, if not obsession, with turtles and tortoises begin? Eric Goode: As a child at six.
Lesley Stahl: At six? Eric Goode: I was given a small Hermann's tortoise.
And that created a budding interest in the natural world and in reptiles, and snakes and lizards, and in my hard-shelled friends that I just fell in love with.
And so it was a progression.
It's an obsession that takes him as far from the glitz of the New York scene as imaginable.
He wades through swamps, turns over rocks, wrangles exotic snakes and other reptiles, as he searches for his first love.
[Eric Goode: What a beautiful tortoise.
This is our first Psammobates tentorius trimeni.
.]
Turtles and tortoises trace back before the dinosaurs.
But now today, about half of the over 300 species are headed toward extinction, largely because of habitat loss and an insatiable market for them -- particularly in Asia -- as food, medicine, rare collectors items and pets.
Lesley Stahl: How big a business is the turtle, tortoise trade? Eric Goode: China alone is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
This trade flourishes because the payoff is huge and the chance of getting prosecuted and incarcerated are very low.
Lesley Stahl: If you're going to be in something illicit this is the safest or one of the safest.
Eric Goode: And that's a tragedy.
Eric Goode is spending a million dollars a year of his own money to fight the trade in places like Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa, that's vastly undeveloped.
Eric Goode: People are so poor, some of these villages make less than a dollar a day.
Or it's basically subsistence living.
And there just simply isn't the political will of the country to really enforce, you know, what's going on with their natural heritage.
Whether it's tortoises or other wildlife.
Fly over Madagascar and you can see why conservationists say it's bleeding to death: rivers run red with soil erosion from logging and slash-and-burn agriculture that have wiped-out animal habitats and 90 percent of the country's forests.
And yet because of its isolation, Madagascar is a paradise of plants and animals found nowhere else - like the wide-eyed lemurs, chameleons that sparkle with color, geckos that hide in plain sight, more than 200 kinds of frogs, and five species of rare turtles and tortoises.
Eric was taking us on a trek to find the fastest-disappearing animal in Madagascar -- the plowshare tortoise whose shrinking habitat is so deep in the wilderness it's only accessible by boat.
Eric Goode: This tortoise is one of the world's most endangered animals.
It is the world's most endangered tortoise.
And it has an incredibly high price on its head.
Asian countries love gold and this is a gold tortoise.
And so literally, these are like gold bricks that one can pick up and sell.
We were following the path the poachers take, landing on a deserted beach and off we went on a long hike.
We walked through scrub brush in blazing heat for almost an hour.
Eric Goode: If the sun gets too high up, they just disappear.
The once plentiful plowshare population here, he says, could be down to as few as 300 adults.
Eric Goode: And this is where the guards are based.
Goode has helped hire around 40 locals to go out and find the tortoises before the poachers do.
Angelo: We have to be on a team of many people.
Eric Goode: Different lines, 30 feet apart.
Angelo: Yeah Eric Goode: Alright, let's go.
We lined up the way police do when they search for a missing person and by midday, with a lot of help, we got lucky.
Angelo: They found one! Lesley Stahl: Oh, look at that.
Eric Goode: Wow.
Lesley Stahl: How did you ever find it? Eric Goode: Wow, oh, it's a beautiful female.
This is a just a perfect, perfect female.
This tortoise is a crown jewel.
This is a beautiful animal.
Lesley Stahl: Look at her.
Eric Goode: And you see this, this incredible domed shell that's unique with this tortoise.
Nothing has-- no turtle has this shell, like an army helmet.
This is a very, very valuable tortoise.
Based on his own research, Goode says a tortoise like this could sell for $60,000 in Asia.
To try and stop the trafficking, he and his colleagues have begun doing the unthinkable.
Lesley Stahl: It's a drill.
Oh my god.
Eric Goode: He has to be very careful not to hit the bone 'cause then we'll draw blood.
So he's going just that very carefully, 16th of an inch into the shell.
They want to leave an indelible gash - a scar -- that makes the tortoises undesirable to collectors.
Lesley Stahl: I have to tell you, watching Angelo do this, it's painful.
It is painful to watch.
Eric Goode: Yeah.
No, it's very hard.
But I think we're at a point where we're down to so few animals.
There's so few of these tortoises left, that we have to really take extreme measures.
Lesley Stahl: Scarring the shells of these animals, defacing them, etching, is that working? Can you tell yet? Eric Goode: It is too soon to know if that's working.
It breaks your heart to have to do that to this beautiful, beautiful shell.
I mean you can compare it maybe to chain sawing off a rhinoceros' horn to save a rhino.
I mean, how horrible is that? To show us what he's up against, Eric took us to a market in a small city called Mahajunga - where we saw - with our hidden camera - shells of endangered tortoises out in the open on display for sale.
And soon we were being offered live tortoises.
Lesley Stahl: So what is this? Eric Goode: This is a spider tortoise from southern Madagascar.
This is critically endangered.
And the Chinese sometimes just puncture the shell, just to eat the liver out of this tortoise.
One of the vendors showed up with something in a plastic bag.
Lesley Stahl: What is it? Eric Goode: Wow.
It was a radiated tortoise, on the endangered species list.
Asking price? Just $400.
We were even offered a plowshare tortoise if we paid up front and waited several days.
But that would've meant breaking Madagascar and international laws against smuggling an endangered animal.
Lesley Stahl: How hard was it for you to not take that tortoise and save its life? If you leave it behind, who knows where it's going to end up.
Eric Goode: It's incredibly frustrating.
This animal is from such a tiny geography.
You'd think you could wall it in and protect it.
There is one place in Madagascar that is trying to wall them in and protect them behind locks and razor wire: this national park, deep in a forest.
Lesley Stahl: Are these automatic rifles? Richard Lewis: They certainly are, yep.
Richard Lewis is with the British conservation group Durrell, which runs this refuge and breeding center.
Richard Lewis: Be careful of the youngsters here.
Lesley Stahl: They're all over the place.
Richard Lewis: Yeah, just be careful-- Lesley Stahl: Oh, here's some.
Richard Lewis: Watch where you step and then come on over.
Lesley Stahl: Oh my word-- Richard Lewis: These are all adult males.
Lesley Stahl: Look at them.
Do you know how old they are? Richard Lewis: This could be 50 years old, Eric Goode: I mean, this is the longest-lived animal on the planet.
Their longevity is one of the reasons they're so valuable.
Asian collectors believe owning one confers long life on them.
The black market trade is now so lucrative that crime syndicates are involved.
The center was robbed in the late 1990s in what was called one of the heists of the century.
Lesley Stahl: So people actually broke into this compound, the breeding center with all the security, and stole-- Richard Lewis: Seventy-five youngsters and two adults.
They stole-- at that moment in time it was half of our-- half of the youngsters we'd ever bred.
Since then, with the help of Eric Goode, the population of plowshares here has rebounded.
Richard Lewis: This is the female enclosure.
Eric Goode: These girls are responsible for producing 300 offspring, 300 animals that you are looking at in this entire enclosure.
Very few people have ever seen them actually produce offspring, even here.
But as we were just about to leave, one of the females wandered off - and to everyone's surprise -- began to dig a nest for laying eggs.
Lesley Stahl: Richard, have you ever seen this before? Richard Lewis: No.
Lesley Stahl: You have never seen it? Richard Lewis: Me, personally, no.
It's the luck of the draw, as it were.
Being a tortoise, the work was very slow and very plodding.
Eric Goode: It's remarkable.
You think those legs are just these stubby, elephantine feet, but they're very good at cupping the soil and digging this incredible little hole.
Lesley Stahl: Yeah and she could be what, Eric Goode: Yeah, 100 years old.
It took her almost an hour and then! Eric Goode: Oh! There's the egg Lesley Stahl: Oh my god.
Eric Goode: Oh my god.
Lesley Stahl: Is she going to do another one? Eric Goode: Yup, yup! There it goes, there is goes.
Number two.
Eric Goode: This is what you work for.
And even more so when the little tortoise, when the hatchling comes out, it is-- you feel like you've broken a secret code.
Goode wants to emulate this kind of success back in the United States - with not just plowshares but dozens of other species.
He has his own breeding center in the mountains outside of Los Angeles that he began with safekeeping by the Bronx Zoo.
Eric Goode: They were trucked across the United States and they were the first guests in my tortoise hotel.
Each species is pampered like a guest at one of Goode's hotels with fresh cut flowers, salad greens and a tortoise smoothy blended with organic milk.
Eric Goode: Each species needs a different ecosystem.
Like this tortoise, for example, is from Burma.
And this is biologically extinct in the wild.
Eric Goode: And these guys need to be kept warm and-- very high humidity.
He now has 680 animals from 30 endangered species.
Eric Goode: This is a turtle from India and Bangladesh-- maybe a little bit into Pakistan.
And these turtles-- that elsewhere would be on the menu.
Eric Goode: It's called the golden coin turtle, probably one of the top 25 most endangered turtles in the world.
And young Galapagos tortoises that'll grow to 400 pounds.
Eric Goode: These were bred at a zoo in Texas and they've been raised here.
Lesley Stahl: Don't come for my toes.
But Eric Goode says he doesn't want any of his guests to stay too long! Eric Goode: Ideally, we'd like to send these animals back to the wild.
Lesley Stahl: Why would you send them back? There's no protection for them back in the wild.
Eric Goode: It may be too soon to send a lot of them back.
Lesley Stahl: And can you? I mean, let's be realistic.
Eric Goode: I don't know yet, but I think it's important to show that we're not just bringing animals into captivity and keeping them there forever.
For now, he's fulfilling his dream by protecting year he hatched 250 other tortoises and turtles.
Eric Goode is like Noah, building a safe haven for - in some cases - the last of these animals on earth.
"Les Miserables," among the greatest novels of the 19th century, became one of the most successful Broadway musicals of the 20th century.
And this month Hollywood gambles that this epic story has the power to revive the musical form on the screen.
Director Tom Hooper has spent $61 million recreating a Paris rebellion and filling scenes with actors including Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman.
No actor combines the talents of a Broadway song and dance man with the film presence of an action hero the way that Jackman does.
He won stardom playing a murderous mutant on film and then, won a Tony playing a gay entertainer on stage.
When we met him, in his native Australia, the 44-year-old actor told us that everything he has done in a wide-ranging career has led him to this, one, moment.
In "Les Miserables," Jackman plays one of the most heroic characters in literature, Jean Valjean, imprisoned for stealing bread for his sister's starving family, an angry brute of a man whose sentence extends to 19 years because of his hunger to escape.
His nemesis is Inspector Javert played by Russell Crowe.
["Les Miserables": Look down, look down, don't look him in the eye.
Look down, look down, you're here until you die.
.]
Hugh Jackman: Any movie musical is like Mount Everest.
I think it's the most difficult form ever to pull off in film.
When it works, it's spectacular.
When it doesn't, it stinks to high heaven.
Scott Pelley: This film is either going to be a hit or it's going to be a massive bust.
Hugh Jackman: Yup.
Scott Pelley: Why did you take the risk on it? Hugh Jackman: Jean Valjean is the holy grail for me.
It's, I know that it demands everything from me, as a singer, as an actor to pull it off.
It's the role of a lifetime.
The story, written by Victor Hugo in 1862, follows Valjean's redemption against the backdrop of a failed revolt against the monarchy.
["Les Miserables": He is young he's afraid.
.]
The film is unique in the way that the actors sang their roles.
Usually in musicals, they record songs in a sound studio and then lip sync when the camera rolls.
But in Les Miz, they sang in the moment.
["Les Miserables": Bring him home, bring him home, bring him home.
.]
Hugh Jackman: We would wear a little ear piece where someone off the set there was playing music.
And we would hear the live piano, and we would just sing.
Scott Pelley: What do you get from that? Hugh Jackman: You get an emotional truth.
For example, there's one song and it's, literally, written like this: "What have I done, sweet Jesus? What have I done? Become a thief in the night, become a dog on the run.
Have I fallen so far and is the hour so late that nothing remains but the cry of my hate?" That's how it's written.
Now, I could "What have I done, sweet Jesus? What have I done? Become a thief in the night, become a dog on the run.
Have I fallen so far and is the hour so late that nothing remains but the cry of my hate?" I could mix it up, I could take a pause.
If I was emotional, I could be emotional.
[Jackman in "Les Miserables": I am reaching, but I fall and the night is closing in as I stare into the void to the whirlpool of my sin I'll escape now from that world from the world of Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean is nothing now, another story must begin!.]
The story of Hugh Jackman must begin in Australia.
His parents sailed from England into Sydney Harbor in the 1960s.
Hugh was the youngest of five, born to an accountant and a housewife.
They were all together until one morning, when he was eight.
And his mom did something that would shape his life.
Hugh Jackman: I can remember the morning she left.
It's weird the things you pick up.
I remember her being in a towel around her head and saying goodbye.
Must have been the way she said goodbye as I went off to school.
When I came back, there was no one there, in the house.
And the next day was a telegram from England.
Mum was there and then that was it.
Scott Pelley: She had left the family? Hugh Jackman: Yeah.
I don't think she thought for a second it would be forever when she went.
I think she thought it was, "I just need to get away, and I'll come back.
" Dad used to pray every night that mum would come back.
Scott Pelley: Did you ever worry that the family would just come apart? That your dad would go too? Hugh Jackman: Never, in a million years, could I imagine, my father is a rock.
My father is my rock.
It's where I learned everything about loyalty, dependability, about being there day-in, day-out, no matter what.
Jackman would see his mother about once a year.
Alone, Chris Jackman raised three boys and two girls.
He scraped together private school tuition.
And the boys went to Knox Grammar School, the conservative alma mater of Australian CEOs and prime ministers.
Hugh wanted us to see the place that set him on his course.
Hugh Jackman: This is the headmaster-- or was the headmaster's office.
This is the no cursing area just so you know.
Scott Pelley: You didn't spend any time in the headmaster's office, did you? Hugh Jackman: I'll tell you a story, I was the captain of the school.
I don't know if you have that kind of title.
So-- Scott Pelley: It's like class president.
Hugh Jackman: Right, so the headmaster brought me in.
"I want you to be class president.
" And I was like, "Wow, fantastic, great.
" And I went back to class, was mucking around in class.
And the teacher said, "Go straight to the headmaster's office.
" I was like, "This is gonna be really awkward.
" 'Cause-- Scott Pelley: "I just came from there.
" Hugh Jackman: Literally an hour before he just made me class president.
So I knocked on the door and he says, "Hugh?" And I said, "Yes, headmaster, I've just been thinking a little bit about next year.
" And we had a bit of a chat, it was perfect.
Scott Pelley: You didn't tell him why you'd been sent back-- Hugh Jackman: No, no, I-- I thought he might rescind the offer.
That bit of acting got him out of a jam but it was in here that he first felt a stage beneath his feet and applause in the air.
Hugh Jackman: Up here was probably the highlight of my childhood.
Scott Pelley: Up on the stage? Hugh Jackman: Yea.
Hugh Jackman: Oh my gosh.
Scott Pelley: Look at you.
Is that you? Hugh Jackman: That is me.
Scott Pelley: Do you remember this night? Hugh Jackman: I absolutely remember every bit of it.
Scott Pelley: Look at this.
I mean, you're-- you're into it.
You're lovin' this.
Hugh Jackman: I was so happy and felt so at home.
And I just loved it.
It was a love that drew him off the traditional path.
With $3,500 he inherited from his grandmother, he went to acting school and was hired in his first audition after graduation.
Hugh Jackman: My very first job.
It was a TV series called "Correlli.
" And it was lust between the bars.
Lust for leading lady, Deborra Lee Furness, to whom he proposed four months into the job.
Hugh Jackman: I just had an absolute certainty that she was the person I was gonna be with for the rest of my life.
Even when Deb tried to break up with me, which she did.
I said-- "Don't worry, I get it.
I'm your worst nightmare.
A young actor in his first job, but don't worry.
We're gonna be together.
This is it.
" And it was.
Hugh Jackman: We're going on a date night tonight.
Married 16 years, they've adopted a boy and a girl who are now 12 and 7.
Scott Pelley: One of the things that he says is, "Happy wife, happy life.
" Deborra Lee Furness: See how smart he is? Good looking and smart.
He's very good at making me a happy wife.
And the key to happiness? Jackman turns down the jobs that would separate them.
Deborra Lee Furness: We never have more than two weeks apart.
Scott Pelley: Is that a family rule, two weeks is the max? A lot of families these days are separated by much more than that.
Deborra Lee Furness: We choose not to.
We don't like it.
And then you make the choice, why are you doing the job? If you're away from your family what's the point? Hugh Jackman: Yes, my man.
But he was away this year for that "role of a lifetime" in Les Miz.
His family lives in New York, but he was shooting in Britain.
The memory of that absence was fresh when we asked him about his father's experience.
Scott Pelley: What advice does he give you today? Jackman: It's always about the family.
Ah, ah, it's all-- sorry, mate.
It's always, "How's Deb?" It's not about work.
And I think that's him living with, probably, some of his regrets and feelings of maybe he-- you know, at the wrong time, put too much into his career.
And he doesn't want me to make that mistake.
And so, in his gentle way, he always reminds me this is the most important thing.
Scott Pelley: Beautiful house, but not your house.
Hugh Jackman: No.
Deborra Lee Furness: We're always living in someone else's house.
Jackman wasn't making the same mistake again when we met him in Sydney.
He was spending six months here shooting an action film so he moved the family too.
He was returning, for the fifth time, to the character, Wolverine, from the X-Men comic books.
Jackman told us that the only time he didn't listen to his wife was when she urged him to refuse the role.
These films made him wealthy and he emerged an international star.
It's a physical part for which Jackman sculpts both beard and body.
And he invited us to his two-a-day workouts.
Hugh Jackman: That didn't feel easy this morning.
Scott Pelley: Impressive.
Impressive.
Hugh Jackman: I always say when I lift something heavy, I remember that is Wolverine.
The little bit to where you're going to want to drop it and then you go, "No way," that little bit is Wolverine.
Scott Pelley: You change bodies the way other actors change costumes.
Hugh Jackman: Well this is your tool as much as your voice, as much as your emotions, and so I've always taken that very seriously and I love playing Wolverine.
It's a great character, but I want it to be better than the last time.
I want to be physically in better shape, otherwise, there's no point doing it.
Scott Pelley: But look, you're a successful guy.
You don't have anything to prove to anyone.
You have this little voice in your head telling you to do more, do better? Hugh Jackman: If I didn't have that, I wouldn't be sitting here opposite you.
At the same time, for the sake of people around me, it'd be nice to be able to, "Whew," you know, put it down for a while.
It might also be nice for the people around him if he didn't take the risks that he seems to relish.
He won one of the first of his two Tony's on Broadway, playing Peter Allen the gay Australian songwriter.
Scott Pelley: Did you think for a minute, "Man, this could be career limiting? I don't know if I want to take this chance?" Hugh Jackman: Never thought it for a second.
What sexuality you are is not the most interesting thing about you.
It's the kind of person you are.
And that role, just, had, first of all, it was naughty.
[Jackman at the Tony Awards: How are we doing downstairs? There's a few nervous people in the front row all of a sudden.
.]
Hugh Jackman: I would never give myself permission to do the things I did as Peter Allen.
And his sexuality, for me, w-- is another costume.
It's a personality trait, it's not who you really are.
However, when I was doing Peter Allen, there's a scene where I kiss my boyfriend, who's dying of AIDS.
And I go in for the kiss, and I heard this, "Don't do it, Wolverine.
" Scott Pelley: From the audience? Hugh Jackman: From the audience.
Obviously some, some kid's going, "Yeah, let's go and see Wolverine in that show, Mum.
Let's go and see it.
" He's like, "What?" As I come out with my maracas and pineapple shirt, you know? ["Les Miserables": Who am I? I'm Jean Valjean.
.]
And Jean Valjean may be another surprise for an audience that can never be sure what it will see when the camera rolls or the curtain rises on the characters of Hugh Jackman.
["Les Miserables": Who am I? 24601.
.]
Chicago has twice as many documented false confession cases as any city in the country.
One reason may be the way police go about questioning suspects.
And 60 Minutes has learned the Chicago Police Department is now the subject of a Justice Department investigation into its interrogation practices.
Two cases we examined involve several teenage boys who were arrested and they say forced or tricked into confessing to violent crimes they never committed.
Each spent nearly half their lives in prison.
They are free now, and told us their story together for the first time.
Terrill Swift: We all of us got one thing in common.
We did an extensive amount of time in jail for something we didn't do.
And that's the bottom line.
They each would serve sentences that ranged from 15 years to life.
Terrill Swift, Michael Saunders, Vincent Thames, and Harold Richardson were convicted in one rape and murder.
James Harden, Robert Taylor and Jonathan Barr, in a different one.
All were found guilty based solely on confessions.
Byron Pitts: Jonathan, you went in as a 14-year-old boy? Jonathan Barr: Yes, sir.
Byron Pitts: What'd you come out as? Jonathan Barr: Came out as a 34-year-old man.
Michael Saunders: Yeah, we was young, little kids James Harden: To be honest with you man, I miss my mama, man.
I miss my mom and daddy, man.
I miss my mama.
It seemed like some days, I can't function.
Byron Pitts: She die while you were in prison? James Harden: Yeah.
Their troubles began in 1991 when Chicago was in the midst of a violent crime wave.
More than 900 homicides in 12 months.
Police were under enormous pressure to solve those crimes.
Terrill Swift was 17, was still in high school, had never been in serious trouble, when another teenager from his neighborhood implicated him, Vincent, Michael And Harold in the rape and murder of a 30-year-old prostitute named Nina Glover.
Byron Pitts: Did anyone ask you "Terrill Swift, did you murder this woman?" Terrill Swift: That was the first thing they said.
Whoa.
Raped and beat who? Nina, I don't know Nina Glover.
Can I get my mother in here so I can get a lawyer? And nothing.
Terrill voluntarily turned himself in to police and was placed in an interrogation room, surrounded by several detectives.
The questioning he said lasted for over 12 hours.
Byron Pitts: How close were they? Show me physically how close were they? Terrill Swift: Like right here.
"You're gonna die in jail.
You're never going home.
" Byron Pitts: Yelling at you? Terrill Swift: Yelling at me.
Byron Pitts: Were you scared? Did you cry? Terrill Swift: Absolutely, I was crying, but no one listened.
Terrill wanted to go home and says police told him if he admitted to the rape and murder he could leave.
So he signed a 21-page confession which gave specific details to how he and his co-defendants committed the crime.
Byron Pitts: I got to tell you, the first time I read it, all 21 pages, I said, "That man is guilty.
" Terrill Swift: Right.
Everything that's in that confession was fed to us, myself and my co-defendants by the police.
Byron Pitts: Did they force you to sign? Terrill Swift: No.
Byron Pitts: So why'd you sign it? Terrill Swift: I thought I was going home.
Byron Pitts: You were 17 years old, so you weren't a child.
Terrill Swift: I guess I was still a mama's boy.
Byron Pitts: Come on now.
You had to know if you admitted to raping and killing a woman, you weren't going home to mama.
Terrill Swift: I had no understanding of that, none.
Terrill Swift would later recant, but it was too late, at trial a judge believed the confession and sentenced him to 30 years.
Robert Taylor: That whole ordeal, it done something to every last one of us.
And with me, it'd made me numb.
In the other case, Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr and James Harden were arrested in high school for the rape and murder of their classmate taken into custody after a fellow student gave their names to police as possible suspects.
Robert was 15 when he says he was taken into an interrogation room and forced to sign a confession.
Robert Taylor: Man, you being cuffed up and beat on by the police.
Man, them people can get you to do-- do what they want you to do.
Byron Pitts: What did they make you do? Robert Taylor: Made me sign.
I mean, that murdered me.
It killed me inside.
His co-defendant James Harden says he was told by police if he signed the confession he'd be released immediately.
James Harden: They had the statement already wrote up and the man say, "Do you want to go home and sleep in your bed tonight?" So I said, "Hell, yeah.
" So that's how easy it is for a person to sign their life away just the thought-- just being taken away from your parents and say, "OK, I want to go home and sleep in my bed tonight.
Hell yeah, I fixing to sign it.
" But James never got home that night.
Instead, he and the others were tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Bob Milan: There's nothing worse as a prosecutor than playing a role in sending an innocent person or people to prison for many years.
There's nothing worse.
Bob Milan should know.
As a young prosecutor, he worked this case.
And would eventually rise to second in command in the Cook County State's Attorney's Office.
Now in private practice, he says publicly for the first time, he should have examined the confessions more closely.
Bob Milan: I never believed anybody would confess to a horrible crime they didn't commit.
I didn't believe it.
Bob Milan: I didn't believe people would confess to rape and murder of a woman.
You know, just didn't believe it.
But based on my experiences, I found it did happen.
Bob Milan: These young men lost a lot of good lives, I was part of it, I didn't mean it, I never would have done that intentionally, but it doesn't make it any easier.
Byron Pitts: Yeah.
Haunts you, still, it sounds like.
Bob Milan: Sure.
Always will.
Byron Pitts: Why would a detective push for a false confession? You think? Bob Milan: What happens is it's tunnel vision.
OK.
They get locked in on this individual.
So the anonymous phone call, the confidential informant, the well-meaning witness sends them in the wrong path.
Chicago has a long history of false confessions.
Two years ago, former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was convicted on federal charges related to torture.
Including, the use of electric shock during questioning and one where he gained a confession after he placed a gun to a suspect's head.
So far, more than since 1989, many as a result of police misconduct.
Peter Neufeld: Quite simply what Cooperstown is to Baseball, Chicago is to false confessions.
It is the Hall of Fame.
Peter Neufeld was one of the defense attorneys representing these men.
He is the co-founder of the Innocence Project, an organization that has helped exonerate 300 wrongfully convicted men nationwide, with the use of DNA testing.
Peter Neufeld: There are more juvenile false confessions in Chicago than any place in the United States.
What's happening? It's not because the kids are different that makes them more vulnerable to confessing.
It's because the way the police keep pounding and pounding and pounding away in those interrogation rooms.
You get innocent kids to confess to crimes they didn't commit.
Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez disagrees.
Responding to public pressure, she set up a new unit within her office, to re-examine questionable prosecutions.
But she defends the actions of the police in these two cases.
Anita Alvarez: We have not uncovered any evidence of any misconduct by the police officers or the State's Attorneys that took the statements in these cases.
Alvarez still believes the confession Terrill Swift gave in the Nina Glover case.
Despite the fact there was no DNA evidence linking him or the others to the crime.
Byron Pitts: Did you find any of the boys' DNA on the victim? Anita Alvarez: No, we didn't.
Byron Pitts: Did you find any of their DNA in the basement of the house? Anita Alvarez: No.
Byron Pitts: How do you explain that the boys would say they raped a woman, and there not be any DNA evidence? Doesn't that strike you as odd? Anita Alvarez: Well, we would love to have DNA on everything.
And every piece of evidence that we have, in every crime.
But it doesn't necessarily occur.
Last year, the Innocence Project retested the one DNA sample that was recovered inside the victim Nina Glover.
It was submitted to the National DNA Database and a match was made to Johnny Douglas, a serial rapist and convicted killer, who is now deceased.
But the new discovery did not change Anita Alvarez's mind.
Byron Pitts: You find out years later that, in fact, the DNA found inside the victim's body belonged to Johnny Douglas.
And Johnny Douglas is a convicted serial rapist and murderer.
That doesn't tell you that he most likely is the person who killed this woman? Anita Alvarez: No.
It doesn't.
Is he a bad guy? Absolutely, he is.
Absolutely.
But, can we prove, just by someone's bad background, that they committed this particular crime? It takes much more than that.
Michael Saunders: For her to just say DNA is not everything, well what else do you have if DNA don't matter? Terrill Swift: This was a rape and a murder.
How can you say DNA is nothing? Byron Pitts: Why would a confession trump DNA evidence? Saul Kassin: Because confessions are incredibly compelling.
Nobody can understand how they would ever be goaded into confessing to something they didn't do.
Saul Kassin is a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and has studied police interrogation practices and false confessions for 27 years.
Saul Kassin: One would think DNA is supposed to solve our problems.
It's supposed to identify the perpetrator and absolve the innocent.
Here you have cases where they absolve the innocent but we don't believe them because the innocent have confessed.
And so the DNA doesn't matter anymore.
In the case of Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr and James Harden, DNA found inside the 14-year-old victim Catteresa Matthews was also retested, and a match was made to Willie Randolph, a Peter Neufeld says prosecutors rejected the DNA evidence and instead came up with an unusual theory to explain it all away.
Peter Neufeld: They suggest perhaps after the kids killed her this man wandered by and committed an act of necrophilia.
Byron Pitts: Necrophilia.
A lot of our viewers won't know what that means.
Peter Neufeld: Having sex with a dead person.
Anita Alvarez: It's possible.
We have seen cases like that.
Byron Pitts: Possible? Anita Alvarez: It is.
We've seen it in other cases.
Byron Pitts: It's possible that this convicted rapist, wandered past an open field, and had sex with a 14-year-old girl who was dead? Anita Alvarez: Well, there's all kinds of possibilities out there, and what I'm saying is that I don't know what happened.
Bob Milan: People don't like to admit they made a mistake.
But we need to do that.
Our job as a prosecutor--isn't to win, our job is to get it right.
Former prosecutor Bob Milan says that prosecutors need to put the same sense of urgency into exonerations as they once did into prosecutions.
Bob Milan: When you have physical evidence, it doesn't lie.
So when you have the DNA on a girl from some guy with a history of sexual attacks that pretty much tells you where you're going.
Byron Pitts: Not the people who gave the confessions? Bob Milan: No.
By now 10 defense attorneys were focusing on the new DNA.
Working with them was a third-year Northwestern Law School student named Katie Marie Zouhary.
She was assigned to re-examine the original confessions and her research helped change the case.
Katie Marie Zouhary: I think when you look at a confession on a piece of paper, a court reported confession, a handwritten confession, it seems like all the pieces are in place.
Katie Marie Zouhary: But what you don't see is the 17-year-old in the room by himself with the police officers, what you don't see is that confession next to the other confessions.
So you're able to see that these things don't match up.
And it's not just a "one of these things is not like the others," it's "all of these things are not like the others.
" Zouhary discovered the boys' confessions contained different accounts of the crimes, from the chronology to their own nicknames.
Katie Marie Zouhary: They get the framework right, but they don't get the details right.
And if any two of them had gotten the details right that would be one thing, But when you look at each of these confession line-by-line in the way we did.
It's pretty glaring that there is no cohesive story here.
Last year, based on the new DNA evidence, and Katie Marie's work the courts vacated the convictions and granted all of them certificates of innocence which restored their full rights as U.
S.
citizens.
As for Anita Alvarez, she's still not convinced Terrill Swift and his co-defendants are innocent.
Anita Alvarez: I don't know whether he committed the crime or not.
There are still unanswered questions in both of these cases.
That I couldn't sit here today and tell you that they are all guilty or they are all innocent.
Byron Pitts: What would you say to her if you could? Terrill Swift: I was wrongfully incarcerated for 15 years and you're still fighting my innocence, not only mine but my co-defendants.
What else needs to be done? During our interview, Terrill's mother, who was in the room at the time, became emotional.
Byron Pitts: I could hear you crying over there.
Why are you still shedding tears? Mrs.
Swift: That was hard.
Actually have your child taken away from you.
And he was innocent.
And I knew this from the beginning, but what could I do? Not be able to get my child, my baby, my first born, that was hard and it still is.
We came through it with the grace of God.
Not since the dinosaurs disappeared, have animals been going extinct as fast as they are now.
Entire species vanish every year.
And while our hearts are moved by the plight of the biggest, whales or elephants, the fiercest, tigers, even sharks and certainly the cutest, like pandas, what about the slowest? The turtle, and its land-loving cousin the tortoise, have been plodding along, slow and steady, for more than 200 million years.
But their hard shells are little protection from human predators and a booming illegal animal trade.
It may be too late to save many of them, but they have found an unlikely protector in a man named Eric Goode.
Some of New York City's hottest hotels, restaurants and bars are owned by Eric Goode.
[Eric Goode: Hello, I need to say hello to people I haven't said hello toHi.
.]
That's made him rich and comfortable with the glitterati and fashionistas, but behind-the-scenes, he caters to a far less glamorous clientele, endangered turtles and tortoises.
Lesley Stahl: How did the whole interest, if not obsession, with turtles and tortoises begin? Eric Goode: As a child at six.
Lesley Stahl: At six? Eric Goode: I was given a small Hermann's tortoise.
And that created a budding interest in the natural world and in reptiles, and snakes and lizards, and in my hard-shelled friends that I just fell in love with.
And so it was a progression.
It's an obsession that takes him as far from the glitz of the New York scene as imaginable.
He wades through swamps, turns over rocks, wrangles exotic snakes and other reptiles, as he searches for his first love.
[Eric Goode: What a beautiful tortoise.
This is our first Psammobates tentorius trimeni.
.]
Turtles and tortoises trace back before the dinosaurs.
But now today, about half of the over 300 species are headed toward extinction, largely because of habitat loss and an insatiable market for them -- particularly in Asia -- as food, medicine, rare collectors items and pets.
Lesley Stahl: How big a business is the turtle, tortoise trade? Eric Goode: China alone is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
This trade flourishes because the payoff is huge and the chance of getting prosecuted and incarcerated are very low.
Lesley Stahl: If you're going to be in something illicit this is the safest or one of the safest.
Eric Goode: And that's a tragedy.
Eric Goode is spending a million dollars a year of his own money to fight the trade in places like Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa, that's vastly undeveloped.
Eric Goode: People are so poor, some of these villages make less than a dollar a day.
Or it's basically subsistence living.
And there just simply isn't the political will of the country to really enforce, you know, what's going on with their natural heritage.
Whether it's tortoises or other wildlife.
Fly over Madagascar and you can see why conservationists say it's bleeding to death: rivers run red with soil erosion from logging and slash-and-burn agriculture that have wiped-out animal habitats and 90 percent of the country's forests.
And yet because of its isolation, Madagascar is a paradise of plants and animals found nowhere else - like the wide-eyed lemurs, chameleons that sparkle with color, geckos that hide in plain sight, more than 200 kinds of frogs, and five species of rare turtles and tortoises.
Eric was taking us on a trek to find the fastest-disappearing animal in Madagascar -- the plowshare tortoise whose shrinking habitat is so deep in the wilderness it's only accessible by boat.
Eric Goode: This tortoise is one of the world's most endangered animals.
It is the world's most endangered tortoise.
And it has an incredibly high price on its head.
Asian countries love gold and this is a gold tortoise.
And so literally, these are like gold bricks that one can pick up and sell.
We were following the path the poachers take, landing on a deserted beach and off we went on a long hike.
We walked through scrub brush in blazing heat for almost an hour.
Eric Goode: If the sun gets too high up, they just disappear.
The once plentiful plowshare population here, he says, could be down to as few as 300 adults.
Eric Goode: And this is where the guards are based.
Goode has helped hire around 40 locals to go out and find the tortoises before the poachers do.
Angelo: We have to be on a team of many people.
Eric Goode: Different lines, 30 feet apart.
Angelo: Yeah Eric Goode: Alright, let's go.
We lined up the way police do when they search for a missing person and by midday, with a lot of help, we got lucky.
Angelo: They found one! Lesley Stahl: Oh, look at that.
Eric Goode: Wow.
Lesley Stahl: How did you ever find it? Eric Goode: Wow, oh, it's a beautiful female.
This is a just a perfect, perfect female.
This tortoise is a crown jewel.
This is a beautiful animal.
Lesley Stahl: Look at her.
Eric Goode: And you see this, this incredible domed shell that's unique with this tortoise.
Nothing has-- no turtle has this shell, like an army helmet.
This is a very, very valuable tortoise.
Based on his own research, Goode says a tortoise like this could sell for $60,000 in Asia.
To try and stop the trafficking, he and his colleagues have begun doing the unthinkable.
Lesley Stahl: It's a drill.
Oh my god.
Eric Goode: He has to be very careful not to hit the bone 'cause then we'll draw blood.
So he's going just that very carefully, 16th of an inch into the shell.
They want to leave an indelible gash - a scar -- that makes the tortoises undesirable to collectors.
Lesley Stahl: I have to tell you, watching Angelo do this, it's painful.
It is painful to watch.
Eric Goode: Yeah.
No, it's very hard.
But I think we're at a point where we're down to so few animals.
There's so few of these tortoises left, that we have to really take extreme measures.
Lesley Stahl: Scarring the shells of these animals, defacing them, etching, is that working? Can you tell yet? Eric Goode: It is too soon to know if that's working.
It breaks your heart to have to do that to this beautiful, beautiful shell.
I mean you can compare it maybe to chain sawing off a rhinoceros' horn to save a rhino.
I mean, how horrible is that? To show us what he's up against, Eric took us to a market in a small city called Mahajunga - where we saw - with our hidden camera - shells of endangered tortoises out in the open on display for sale.
And soon we were being offered live tortoises.
Lesley Stahl: So what is this? Eric Goode: This is a spider tortoise from southern Madagascar.
This is critically endangered.
And the Chinese sometimes just puncture the shell, just to eat the liver out of this tortoise.
One of the vendors showed up with something in a plastic bag.
Lesley Stahl: What is it? Eric Goode: Wow.
It was a radiated tortoise, on the endangered species list.
Asking price? Just $400.
We were even offered a plowshare tortoise if we paid up front and waited several days.
But that would've meant breaking Madagascar and international laws against smuggling an endangered animal.
Lesley Stahl: How hard was it for you to not take that tortoise and save its life? If you leave it behind, who knows where it's going to end up.
Eric Goode: It's incredibly frustrating.
This animal is from such a tiny geography.
You'd think you could wall it in and protect it.
There is one place in Madagascar that is trying to wall them in and protect them behind locks and razor wire: this national park, deep in a forest.
Lesley Stahl: Are these automatic rifles? Richard Lewis: They certainly are, yep.
Richard Lewis is with the British conservation group Durrell, which runs this refuge and breeding center.
Richard Lewis: Be careful of the youngsters here.
Lesley Stahl: They're all over the place.
Richard Lewis: Yeah, just be careful-- Lesley Stahl: Oh, here's some.
Richard Lewis: Watch where you step and then come on over.
Lesley Stahl: Oh my word-- Richard Lewis: These are all adult males.
Lesley Stahl: Look at them.
Do you know how old they are? Richard Lewis: This could be 50 years old, Eric Goode: I mean, this is the longest-lived animal on the planet.
Their longevity is one of the reasons they're so valuable.
Asian collectors believe owning one confers long life on them.
The black market trade is now so lucrative that crime syndicates are involved.
The center was robbed in the late 1990s in what was called one of the heists of the century.
Lesley Stahl: So people actually broke into this compound, the breeding center with all the security, and stole-- Richard Lewis: Seventy-five youngsters and two adults.
They stole-- at that moment in time it was half of our-- half of the youngsters we'd ever bred.
Since then, with the help of Eric Goode, the population of plowshares here has rebounded.
Richard Lewis: This is the female enclosure.
Eric Goode: These girls are responsible for producing 300 offspring, 300 animals that you are looking at in this entire enclosure.
Very few people have ever seen them actually produce offspring, even here.
But as we were just about to leave, one of the females wandered off - and to everyone's surprise -- began to dig a nest for laying eggs.
Lesley Stahl: Richard, have you ever seen this before? Richard Lewis: No.
Lesley Stahl: You have never seen it? Richard Lewis: Me, personally, no.
It's the luck of the draw, as it were.
Being a tortoise, the work was very slow and very plodding.
Eric Goode: It's remarkable.
You think those legs are just these stubby, elephantine feet, but they're very good at cupping the soil and digging this incredible little hole.
Lesley Stahl: Yeah and she could be what, Eric Goode: Yeah, 100 years old.
It took her almost an hour and then! Eric Goode: Oh! There's the egg Lesley Stahl: Oh my god.
Eric Goode: Oh my god.
Lesley Stahl: Is she going to do another one? Eric Goode: Yup, yup! There it goes, there is goes.
Number two.
Eric Goode: This is what you work for.
And even more so when the little tortoise, when the hatchling comes out, it is-- you feel like you've broken a secret code.
Goode wants to emulate this kind of success back in the United States - with not just plowshares but dozens of other species.
He has his own breeding center in the mountains outside of Los Angeles that he began with safekeeping by the Bronx Zoo.
Eric Goode: They were trucked across the United States and they were the first guests in my tortoise hotel.
Each species is pampered like a guest at one of Goode's hotels with fresh cut flowers, salad greens and a tortoise smoothy blended with organic milk.
Eric Goode: Each species needs a different ecosystem.
Like this tortoise, for example, is from Burma.
And this is biologically extinct in the wild.
Eric Goode: And these guys need to be kept warm and-- very high humidity.
He now has 680 animals from 30 endangered species.
Eric Goode: This is a turtle from India and Bangladesh-- maybe a little bit into Pakistan.
And these turtles-- that elsewhere would be on the menu.
Eric Goode: It's called the golden coin turtle, probably one of the top 25 most endangered turtles in the world.
And young Galapagos tortoises that'll grow to 400 pounds.
Eric Goode: These were bred at a zoo in Texas and they've been raised here.
Lesley Stahl: Don't come for my toes.
But Eric Goode says he doesn't want any of his guests to stay too long! Eric Goode: Ideally, we'd like to send these animals back to the wild.
Lesley Stahl: Why would you send them back? There's no protection for them back in the wild.
Eric Goode: It may be too soon to send a lot of them back.
Lesley Stahl: And can you? I mean, let's be realistic.
Eric Goode: I don't know yet, but I think it's important to show that we're not just bringing animals into captivity and keeping them there forever.
For now, he's fulfilling his dream by protecting year he hatched 250 other tortoises and turtles.
Eric Goode is like Noah, building a safe haven for - in some cases - the last of these animals on earth.
"Les Miserables," among the greatest novels of the 19th century, became one of the most successful Broadway musicals of the 20th century.
And this month Hollywood gambles that this epic story has the power to revive the musical form on the screen.
Director Tom Hooper has spent $61 million recreating a Paris rebellion and filling scenes with actors including Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman.
No actor combines the talents of a Broadway song and dance man with the film presence of an action hero the way that Jackman does.
He won stardom playing a murderous mutant on film and then, won a Tony playing a gay entertainer on stage.
When we met him, in his native Australia, the 44-year-old actor told us that everything he has done in a wide-ranging career has led him to this, one, moment.
In "Les Miserables," Jackman plays one of the most heroic characters in literature, Jean Valjean, imprisoned for stealing bread for his sister's starving family, an angry brute of a man whose sentence extends to 19 years because of his hunger to escape.
His nemesis is Inspector Javert played by Russell Crowe.
["Les Miserables": Look down, look down, don't look him in the eye.
Look down, look down, you're here until you die.
.]
Hugh Jackman: Any movie musical is like Mount Everest.
I think it's the most difficult form ever to pull off in film.
When it works, it's spectacular.
When it doesn't, it stinks to high heaven.
Scott Pelley: This film is either going to be a hit or it's going to be a massive bust.
Hugh Jackman: Yup.
Scott Pelley: Why did you take the risk on it? Hugh Jackman: Jean Valjean is the holy grail for me.
It's, I know that it demands everything from me, as a singer, as an actor to pull it off.
It's the role of a lifetime.
The story, written by Victor Hugo in 1862, follows Valjean's redemption against the backdrop of a failed revolt against the monarchy.
["Les Miserables": He is young he's afraid.
.]
The film is unique in the way that the actors sang their roles.
Usually in musicals, they record songs in a sound studio and then lip sync when the camera rolls.
But in Les Miz, they sang in the moment.
["Les Miserables": Bring him home, bring him home, bring him home.
.]
Hugh Jackman: We would wear a little ear piece where someone off the set there was playing music.
And we would hear the live piano, and we would just sing.
Scott Pelley: What do you get from that? Hugh Jackman: You get an emotional truth.
For example, there's one song and it's, literally, written like this: "What have I done, sweet Jesus? What have I done? Become a thief in the night, become a dog on the run.
Have I fallen so far and is the hour so late that nothing remains but the cry of my hate?" That's how it's written.
Now, I could "What have I done, sweet Jesus? What have I done? Become a thief in the night, become a dog on the run.
Have I fallen so far and is the hour so late that nothing remains but the cry of my hate?" I could mix it up, I could take a pause.
If I was emotional, I could be emotional.
[Jackman in "Les Miserables": I am reaching, but I fall and the night is closing in as I stare into the void to the whirlpool of my sin I'll escape now from that world from the world of Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean is nothing now, another story must begin!.]
The story of Hugh Jackman must begin in Australia.
His parents sailed from England into Sydney Harbor in the 1960s.
Hugh was the youngest of five, born to an accountant and a housewife.
They were all together until one morning, when he was eight.
And his mom did something that would shape his life.
Hugh Jackman: I can remember the morning she left.
It's weird the things you pick up.
I remember her being in a towel around her head and saying goodbye.
Must have been the way she said goodbye as I went off to school.
When I came back, there was no one there, in the house.
And the next day was a telegram from England.
Mum was there and then that was it.
Scott Pelley: She had left the family? Hugh Jackman: Yeah.
I don't think she thought for a second it would be forever when she went.
I think she thought it was, "I just need to get away, and I'll come back.
" Dad used to pray every night that mum would come back.
Scott Pelley: Did you ever worry that the family would just come apart? That your dad would go too? Hugh Jackman: Never, in a million years, could I imagine, my father is a rock.
My father is my rock.
It's where I learned everything about loyalty, dependability, about being there day-in, day-out, no matter what.
Jackman would see his mother about once a year.
Alone, Chris Jackman raised three boys and two girls.
He scraped together private school tuition.
And the boys went to Knox Grammar School, the conservative alma mater of Australian CEOs and prime ministers.
Hugh wanted us to see the place that set him on his course.
Hugh Jackman: This is the headmaster-- or was the headmaster's office.
This is the no cursing area just so you know.
Scott Pelley: You didn't spend any time in the headmaster's office, did you? Hugh Jackman: I'll tell you a story, I was the captain of the school.
I don't know if you have that kind of title.
So-- Scott Pelley: It's like class president.
Hugh Jackman: Right, so the headmaster brought me in.
"I want you to be class president.
" And I was like, "Wow, fantastic, great.
" And I went back to class, was mucking around in class.
And the teacher said, "Go straight to the headmaster's office.
" I was like, "This is gonna be really awkward.
" 'Cause-- Scott Pelley: "I just came from there.
" Hugh Jackman: Literally an hour before he just made me class president.
So I knocked on the door and he says, "Hugh?" And I said, "Yes, headmaster, I've just been thinking a little bit about next year.
" And we had a bit of a chat, it was perfect.
Scott Pelley: You didn't tell him why you'd been sent back-- Hugh Jackman: No, no, I-- I thought he might rescind the offer.
That bit of acting got him out of a jam but it was in here that he first felt a stage beneath his feet and applause in the air.
Hugh Jackman: Up here was probably the highlight of my childhood.
Scott Pelley: Up on the stage? Hugh Jackman: Yea.
Hugh Jackman: Oh my gosh.
Scott Pelley: Look at you.
Is that you? Hugh Jackman: That is me.
Scott Pelley: Do you remember this night? Hugh Jackman: I absolutely remember every bit of it.
Scott Pelley: Look at this.
I mean, you're-- you're into it.
You're lovin' this.
Hugh Jackman: I was so happy and felt so at home.
And I just loved it.
It was a love that drew him off the traditional path.
With $3,500 he inherited from his grandmother, he went to acting school and was hired in his first audition after graduation.
Hugh Jackman: My very first job.
It was a TV series called "Correlli.
" And it was lust between the bars.
Lust for leading lady, Deborra Lee Furness, to whom he proposed four months into the job.
Hugh Jackman: I just had an absolute certainty that she was the person I was gonna be with for the rest of my life.
Even when Deb tried to break up with me, which she did.
I said-- "Don't worry, I get it.
I'm your worst nightmare.
A young actor in his first job, but don't worry.
We're gonna be together.
This is it.
" And it was.
Hugh Jackman: We're going on a date night tonight.
Married 16 years, they've adopted a boy and a girl who are now 12 and 7.
Scott Pelley: One of the things that he says is, "Happy wife, happy life.
" Deborra Lee Furness: See how smart he is? Good looking and smart.
He's very good at making me a happy wife.
And the key to happiness? Jackman turns down the jobs that would separate them.
Deborra Lee Furness: We never have more than two weeks apart.
Scott Pelley: Is that a family rule, two weeks is the max? A lot of families these days are separated by much more than that.
Deborra Lee Furness: We choose not to.
We don't like it.
And then you make the choice, why are you doing the job? If you're away from your family what's the point? Hugh Jackman: Yes, my man.
But he was away this year for that "role of a lifetime" in Les Miz.
His family lives in New York, but he was shooting in Britain.
The memory of that absence was fresh when we asked him about his father's experience.
Scott Pelley: What advice does he give you today? Jackman: It's always about the family.
Ah, ah, it's all-- sorry, mate.
It's always, "How's Deb?" It's not about work.
And I think that's him living with, probably, some of his regrets and feelings of maybe he-- you know, at the wrong time, put too much into his career.
And he doesn't want me to make that mistake.
And so, in his gentle way, he always reminds me this is the most important thing.
Scott Pelley: Beautiful house, but not your house.
Hugh Jackman: No.
Deborra Lee Furness: We're always living in someone else's house.
Jackman wasn't making the same mistake again when we met him in Sydney.
He was spending six months here shooting an action film so he moved the family too.
He was returning, for the fifth time, to the character, Wolverine, from the X-Men comic books.
Jackman told us that the only time he didn't listen to his wife was when she urged him to refuse the role.
These films made him wealthy and he emerged an international star.
It's a physical part for which Jackman sculpts both beard and body.
And he invited us to his two-a-day workouts.
Hugh Jackman: That didn't feel easy this morning.
Scott Pelley: Impressive.
Impressive.
Hugh Jackman: I always say when I lift something heavy, I remember that is Wolverine.
The little bit to where you're going to want to drop it and then you go, "No way," that little bit is Wolverine.
Scott Pelley: You change bodies the way other actors change costumes.
Hugh Jackman: Well this is your tool as much as your voice, as much as your emotions, and so I've always taken that very seriously and I love playing Wolverine.
It's a great character, but I want it to be better than the last time.
I want to be physically in better shape, otherwise, there's no point doing it.
Scott Pelley: But look, you're a successful guy.
You don't have anything to prove to anyone.
You have this little voice in your head telling you to do more, do better? Hugh Jackman: If I didn't have that, I wouldn't be sitting here opposite you.
At the same time, for the sake of people around me, it'd be nice to be able to, "Whew," you know, put it down for a while.
It might also be nice for the people around him if he didn't take the risks that he seems to relish.
He won one of the first of his two Tony's on Broadway, playing Peter Allen the gay Australian songwriter.
Scott Pelley: Did you think for a minute, "Man, this could be career limiting? I don't know if I want to take this chance?" Hugh Jackman: Never thought it for a second.
What sexuality you are is not the most interesting thing about you.
It's the kind of person you are.
And that role, just, had, first of all, it was naughty.
[Jackman at the Tony Awards: How are we doing downstairs? There's a few nervous people in the front row all of a sudden.
.]
Hugh Jackman: I would never give myself permission to do the things I did as Peter Allen.
And his sexuality, for me, w-- is another costume.
It's a personality trait, it's not who you really are.
However, when I was doing Peter Allen, there's a scene where I kiss my boyfriend, who's dying of AIDS.
And I go in for the kiss, and I heard this, "Don't do it, Wolverine.
" Scott Pelley: From the audience? Hugh Jackman: From the audience.
Obviously some, some kid's going, "Yeah, let's go and see Wolverine in that show, Mum.
Let's go and see it.
" He's like, "What?" As I come out with my maracas and pineapple shirt, you know? ["Les Miserables": Who am I? I'm Jean Valjean.
.]
And Jean Valjean may be another surprise for an audience that can never be sure what it will see when the camera rolls or the curtain rises on the characters of Hugh Jackman.
["Les Miserables": Who am I? 24601.
.]