Some of his friends and teammates remember Anthony Wayne Smith as a strange and volatile guy, prone to paranoia and outrageous lies. Others recall a gentle giant who gave to charity and mentored kids. None would have predicted that he'd retire from football to a life of arson, torture, and murder—but that's exactly what prosecutors allege. As the former defensive end (57 1/2 career sacks) waits trial for four killings over a nine-year span, Kathy Dobie unravels a life that made his violence on the field seem like child's play
On a cool, drizzly February night in 2003, at one thirty or so in the morning, a police officer cruising down Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica spotted flames shooting horizontally out a window of the Simply Sofas furniture showroom. From overhead he could hear popping sounds as the fire leapt up to eat at the power lines in the street outside. Inside, the blaze spread quickly, engulfing upholstery and wood, roaring up through the roof and melting the metal skin right off the loading dock door.
The fire was almost immediately deemed suspicious. Firefighters reported the strong smell of gasoline, and when investigators were able to get inside the building the next day, they found three "firebombs"—five-gallon plastic water jugs cut off at the neck, stuffed with paper and filled with gasoline. The evidence was gathered and sent to the lab.
Five months later, Sergeant Robert Almada, the police investigator for Santa Monica's Arson Squad Task Force, walked into the interview room at the police station on Main Street with every reason to believe things were going his way. He had motive—revenge—and he had the kind of physical evidence almost never left behind in a fire: thirty pieces of gasoline-soaked mail, each addressed to the suspect or his wife. (In the heat of the blaze, the firebombs had caved in on themselves, preserving the magazines and catalogs and envelopes inside.) That suspect, one Anthony Smith, six feet four inches and over 320 pounds, a 36-year-old former defensive end for the L.A./Oakland Raiders, dwarfed the little table in the room.
"Okeydoke," Almada said as he settled himself into a chair and opened his case file. Almada was blue-eyed and brown-haired, with bland, boyish good looks. His eagerness (the whole case was ready to tumble into place; it was right there at his fingertips) and the slight discomfort he felt in the presence of Smith were camouflaged by an overly casual manner. He confirmed some phone numbers he had for Smith; he asked if he preferred the interview-room door open or closed. It was all cordial enough, Almada in control...so how did it happen that within minutes the sergeant was floundering, struggling for a foothold while his suspect was coldly telling him his case was a pile of shit?
"You know how stupid this is. This is stupid, this is stupid," Smith said. How would he even have the time to set a fire? "I'm a very busy man. I don't have time for that crap."
Who the hell was this guy? A half hour earlier, Almada would testify, while both men were sitting in the kitchen of Smith's condo in Marina del Rey, the sergeant had confronted him with the physical evidence and Smith had broken down and cried. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he'd said, weeping with his head in his hands. As Almada saw it, Smith was more or less confessing to the arson. (He and the store's owner had argued over money two weeks before the fire.) When Smith's wife, Teresa, had hurried into the kitchen, asking what was wrong, Smith had wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her body.
Now that broken guy, whoever he was, had morphed into this deadpan, assured guy...whoever he was.
Almada thought he'd try a side attack. He took a paper from his file—a record of Smith's gun ownership. "It says you own a .45 pistol, a .22 pistol, a .357 revolver, .44 revolver, .44 Desert Eagle, .44 Colt, Olympic .223, another .223 pistol from Rocky Mountain Arms, and a .22 derringer," Almada said.
"That's it?" Smith asked.
"What do you mean, 'That's it'? That's a lot of guns for one guy."
"You ran that list and that's what you came up with?"
"That's what's listed in the Automated Firearms System, yes," Almada said.
"I only own shotguns," Smith stated flatly.
"Who bought all these guns?"
"You go back into your records and you'll see."
"These aren't my records," Almada said. "This is the Department of Justice."
"I couldn't care less whose records they are," Smith retorted. "You go back and you check those records and you will find I was charged with domestic violence. You know when you are charged with domestic violence, you can't own any guns. I got rid of 'em.... Don't own the guns. What I do every year, I go every year to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile to go shoot. I'm a wing shooter. That's it. Don't need pistols. I don't own guns like that. I sold my guns."
"Okay, great," Almada said briskly. "Now back to the fire."
"Not a problem." And it really wasn't, as time would tell.
From a prosecutor's point of view, Anthony Smith is a dangerous, lucky person. Mesmerizing, seemingly untouchable. Absorbing and self-absorbed. He can do wrecking ball; he can do teddy bear. He's a man with a temper who believes in his own victimhood. And he's smart...enough. Any slipups, and there have been some whoppers, are countered by mind-numbing obfuscation during police interviews and charismatic appearances on the witness stand. ("He's a pretty good witness," one judge remarked. "The D.A. didn't shake him. He is able to handle pressure, possibly from playing sports.") To friends and family, he's sociable and generous, a family man with a dazzling smile and a loving heart. A man whose talent bought him a dream life—multimillion-dollar NFL contract, mansion on a hill, marriage to Denise Matthews, a.k.a. Vanity, the former lead singer of Prince's eponymous all-girl group—that somehow bled into the nightmare he now faces: a looming trial for the brutal murders of four men.
Certainly, Smith has always been ready to bewilder. During one of the many police searches done on his vehicles and residences over the years, detectives found badges and numerous identification cards—two were for Anthony Smith, "Intelligence Officer," one for Anthony Smith of "The Organized Crime Bureau," and the fourth was an American Press Association ID with Smith's address but bearing the slightly ridiculous name "Wayne Peartree," suggesting how he felt about reporters. Early on in his career, Smith told sportswriters incredible stories about his childhood. He said he'd been raised in New York and belonged to a street gang called the Black Spades. When he was 8, he said, he and three friends stole a car and crashed it, killing two of them. When it came to drug use, he really piled it on, telling a reporter that he'd started using heroin, cocaine, PCP, LSD, and speed when he was 9 years old and that his brother had died of a heroin overdose.
In fact, Anthony was raised in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, a small coastal and river town surrounded by farm and swampland, a place with the comforting or claustrophobic feel of everyone knowing you and your cousin's cousin. His mother, Naomi—a beautiful woman who drank too much, according to the old men in the neighborhood—died when he was about 3 years old. It's not clear who his father was. Naomi was living with a man named James Gallop at the time, who has been referred to as either his father or his stepfather. Gallop was a mean man, says a close family friend who has known Anthony since childhood; "he'd smile at you and cut you at the same time." (The family friend has requested anonymity; we will call him Bryan.) Once, when Gallop thought Naomi was stepping out on him, Bryan says, he decided to brand her by picking her up and setting her down on her wood-burning stove.
When Naomi died (they say her liver gave out), Anthony's much older half-brother Donald took over his care—after kicking James Gallop out of the house. Donald was in his early twenties at the time, so it says something about the will of the man, the cold hard certainty of him, that he could kick his mother's partner, and a violent man, to the curb. Hot-tempered and ill-humored, Donald was also industrious and respectable, Bryan says. He worked for UPS. He became a deputy sheriff, then a magistrate. Years later, Anthony told a friend that Donald used to hit him, but as Bryan puts it, they all did back then.
"That whole generation of men, they were all angry," he says. "For them, it was better to be mad than happy. They couldn't communicate, and they didn't know how to fix problems in a simple, civilized way. Oh, they liked to shine on each other, that's what we call it down south, acting like the good guy, like everything in their life was going well, even if they were coming home and beating their kids, which they were." Shining was an art, and one Anthony was learning at home.
Anthony's ticket out was football, though it took him a while to see it. He was the biggest kid at Northeastern High, but he wore glasses and was a bit of a nerd, and it was almost funny, the way he ran around with the other boys, eager to be just like them, Bryan says, not even aware that he was ten times more athletic than anyone else, whether he was wrestling or shooting hoops or playing football. He had no ego. He wasn't even that interested in football until his junior year, when he began to work out obsessively. Anthony was always fast, but now the coaches watched him get bigger and stronger and finally committed to playing.
All of his high school coaches use the same words to describe Anthony: enthusiastic, courteous, earnest, voluble. "I don't want to say the wrong thing. He was a super good guy," says David Brinson, his defensive-line coach. "He just did things a little differently. He did things Anthony Smith's way." He didn't really have any close friends, Brinson adds, but "I don't remember him not getting along with anyone. I mean, he'd walk up to you and start talking to you about anything. He just...he liked to be where he was."
And that seemed to be it, really, the standout quality about Anthony Smith at that point in his life—he was just glad to be there, out from under Donald's heavy hand and whatever loneliness lay at home. Anthony once told Sports Illustrated that his brother Donald "had his own life to live, but what I needed was to be a son to somebody." (Donald could not be reached for an interview.)
He found that figure in Alabama head coach Ray Perkins, who recruited Anthony to join the Crimson Tide. He kept mostly to himself at Alabama, not hanging around much with other players. He had better manners than the average 18-year-old, teammate and friend John Cassimus remembers, but some of the other guys found him intimidating, and it was hard to put a finger on exactly why. "If you looked at him, there was just something which didn't click right," Cassimus says. He would crack one of his dark little jokes that only a couple of guys found funny, and then he would fall silent. "He would create a significant amount of angst just sitting there and not saying anything. It was like going up to a dog and the dog is super beautiful, sweet looking, wagging its tail, and it's acting really friendly, but there's something about that dog.... You worry one day he's gonna bite your hand."
When Perkins left to coach the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after Anthony's junior year, Anthony transferred to the University of Arizona. He majored in social and behavioral sciences, won first-team All-Pac-10 honors, and was an unexpected first-round draft pick of the Los Angeles Raiders. Anthony was surprised to be taken so early, but not that he went to the Raiders. "The team fits my personality and fits my style of play," he said. "I like sort of roaming around in the field like a free spirit, sort of with a hard-core hell-bent-for-leather attitude."
It was 1990, the height of gangsta rap and crack cocaine, and the Raiders had become the beloved team of N.W.A and Ice Cube (who would later make an ESPN documentary on the team, Straight Outta L.A.) and every Blood and Crip who claimed the City of Angelz as his own. Anthony landed in L.A. as a kind of minor deity—to rich white sports fans and gangbangers alike—and still with everything to prove.
···
At first he seemed to thrive, despite missing his entire rookie year because of knee surgery. He spent some time volunteering for a mentor's program with the mayor's office, heading into South Central L.A., often staying overnight in Compton. "I was lonely, away from home, didn't have anybody to look after me," he told Sports Illustrated. "So maybe if I'm tired or don't feel well, I stay the night with a kid's family. Next day, I wake up, my car's washed...and my laundry's done."
Over the next three seasons, he missed only one game, racking up thirty-six sacks, and in 1994 the Raiders rewarded him with a four-year $7.6 million contract. He'd been enjoying his paychecks since the moment he entered the league, but now the money was really flowing. He bought Donald a new Corvette every year, according to Bryan; he bought several houses for himself, including a five-bedroom white-brick palace on a hill overlooking the Pacific in Playa del Rey. But something angry and aggrieved had started ticking in his brain. "The way I've seen people react to me, Anthony Smith the Raider, has been sickening," he told the Los Angeles Times, going on to complain about the women who loved his money and his fame, not him, and the friends who always had their hands out.
"He used to talk about his family asking for $30,000 like it was $300," says former running back Harvey Williams, Anthony's teammate and close friend. "Anthony always said he didn't want to be broke after football. He'd say, 'When I'm done, I want to be able to relax and chill for the rest of my life.' "
After reading an article about the young Raider, Denise Matthews, a.k.a. Vanity, now a born-again Christian, arranged a meeting with Anthony, eight years her junior. Three days later she proposed to him, and one month after they met, he made her his second wife. (He'd had a brief marriage to a young actress a few years earlier.) But this new marriage, too, quickly turned to dust, recalls Dwayne Simon, a friend of Anthony's from that time. Dwayne remembers one uncomfortable team-family breakfast before a Raiders game when Denise said or did something that made Anthony furious. "He grabbed her by the arm, made her sit down," says Dwayne, a producer with the L.A. Posse and Def Jam who arranged music for Raiders games. "She tried to get up, but he snatched her back down: 'Get down!' I was really scared for Vanity. I thought he was going to break her friggin' arm."
At the same time, Smith was telling one of his rich-white-businessman friends that he had helped Denise get a kidney. (Her body was hard hit from years of drug use before she swore off that life and turned to God.) What a good guy. What an angry one. Was one of those Anthonys more true than the other? Or had he just become a violent man who knew how to shine?
A year and a half after they married, Anthony and Denise were done. (Shortly after they separated, in 1997, Anthony was arrested for domestic violence involving another woman and sentenced to anger-management classes.) Finally, sometime in 1997 or '98, he started a relationship that would last. His third and current wife, Teresa Obello White, is a graduate of Stanford University and Pepperdine law school. She was working for a personal-injury firm when they met, and he told friends she would make a wonderful mother to their children.
He brought her to Elizabeth City to introduce her to his family, Bryan recalls. But what started as a Fourth of July barbecue quickly turned into a confrontation between Donald and Anthony, according to Bryan, with Donald becoming threatening enough that Anthony grabbed Teresa and they left for the airport. Anthony and Donald never talked again. "Anthony felt abandoned," Bryan says. "And that's his biggest issue."
After a mediocre 1997 season, he parted ways with the Raiders, spinning him into a panic until he signed with the Broncos in July 1998. But then, abruptly, he let it all go. While at training camp in Denver that August, Anthony called his personal assistant back in L.A. "Get the Hummer and come get me," he said. He had decided he was done with football. On the way back home, they stopped in Las Vegas, where Anthony and Teresa tied the knot.
So at 31 years old, Anthony Smith was retired. He had busted-up fingers and bad knees. He was newly married for the third time, but this time he felt he'd found the right woman. Soon he would be a father. There was plenty of adoration and goodwill out there still, though a lot less money. He stood at that cliff's edge familiar to every newly retired pro athlete.
When an athlete leaves the game, he goes from always being told what to do to freefalling through a world without structure. Now he has to find a way to survive. How does he put food on the table? His athletic talent, his pro experience, is not translatable to the civilian world. It's a terrifying moment. How does he find a new skill? Learning one takes time, patience, faith. For those who are used to making things happen by sheer will and force and power...how do they channel their frustration at this slower, craftier world? Those short on patience might object to starting at the bottom of the learning curve; they might start to look for shortcuts.
Soon after retiring from football, Anthony invested in at least one shady business—an online medical-billing scam that was later investigated by the FTC—and started spending more and more time with gangbangers and thugs. "He was bringing the edge around, and I didn't like it," Bryan says. When he asked Anthony why, Anthony told him, "These guys care about me. They're genuine dudes."
"I couldn't understand it," Bryan says. "You're married to a lawyer. You're living in Playa del Rey. Why would you be involved with these kinds of people?" He began to back away, unhappily, because he felt like now he was abandoning Anthony, too. Dwayne Simon didn't like Anthony's new friends, either. "That's when I stopped hanging around," he says. "That's when he started to change. He got that scowl, that ugly look."
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By March of 2003, Anthony had become the prime suspect in the Simply Sofas arson. After speaking to Marilyn Nelson, the owner of the store, Sergeant Almada discovered that two weeks before the fire, she and Anthony had argued over some items he had left on consignment. Anthony had come to the store to pick up a check for the items that had sold and to retrieve a few unsold things, including some framed swords and a marble obelisk. When Anthony noticed that the stand on the obelisk was broken, he insisted Marilyn pay for it. They argued a bit (she believed it was broken when he brought it in), but he was adamant: "You are going to pay for it." After years of dealing with customers, Marilyn knew when to hang tough, and this didn't seem like one of those times, so she agreed. She'd already given Anthony a $615 check for the items that had sold. He said he'd come back to pick up the unsold items and told her she should have another check ready for the broken obelisk.
But before he returned, according to Marilyn, a woman identifying herself as Anthony's personal assistant called Marilyn to say that Anthony had lost the $615 check and needed a replacement. Later, Anthony showed up at the store, and while he and two of Marilyn's workers loaded his unsold items into his truck, Marilyn made out a second check, left it on the counter, and returned to her desk. She was glad to be seeing the back of this particular customer, and she didn't even bother to look up when he came back into the store. But he didn't pick up the check and leave. He stood there at the counter waiting. She busied herself with paperwork, but she could feel his eyes on her. Finally she looked up at him and asked, "What?" According to Marilyn, he stared her down and then pointed a finger at her, shook it slowly, turned, and left.
A few days later, Marilyn discovered that the check that was supposedly lost had been cashed. She testified that when Wells Fargo called the store to say Anthony was in the branch trying to cash the second check, her daughter told them not to. Two weeks later, Simply Sofas was torched.
On July 7, Sergeant Almada headed over to the Smiths' condominium in Marina del Rey. He described the Simply Sofas fire to Anthony, how fiercely it raged, exaggerating how firefighters had to leap from one roof to the other to save their lives. Anthony asked him what Marilyn Nelson had said about him, and Almada replied that Marilyn hadn't pointed the finger at anybody. It was the thirty pieces of mail shoved inside the firebombs that had led him to Anthony.
"If there was a fire, how was anything left?" Anthony asked, according to Almada, who says that's when he began to cry. Almada suggested they go down to the police station and continue to talk there. Anthony asked for a few minutes alone with his wife, the lawyer, and then rode down to the precinct house with the sergeant. It was a quiet ride, Almada later testified. But when they got to the station, Almada felt a change had come over Anthony.
The sergeant laid out the evidence once again, asking Anthony to look at things from his point of view. Don't you think it's odd that all the mail in the firebombs is addressed to you? Almada asked. "Can you help me out on this?" "Well, I'm not dumb enough I'm going to firebomb a place and put my stuff in it. Help me with that. Help me with that."
"Who set you up?" Almada said. "Tell me who set you up so we can go get them." Anthony replied sarcastically, "Oh, it's the guy in there. I'm telling you right now, bring him in, I think it's him. That's how foolish that question is. I'm a professional—ex-professional—athlete. How would I know? I'm not sitting here trying to insult your intelligence any more than I want my intelligence insulted. But the thing I am asking you is, go do your homework. You haven't done your homework, man."
In frustration, Almada hit him with the fact that he had just wept and apologized when confronted with the evidence; he had even asked Almada to tell Marilyn Nelson he was sorry. But Smith had an answer for that, too. He had "shed a tear" because Almada had said some firemen got hurt fighting the fire. "You tell me someone got hurt, I'm gonna respond," Anthony said. "Somebody try to do something to me, someone try to do something to someone else, that still gonna hurt me. That's not right, man. You don't solve problems that way, and no $1,200 check is serious to Anthony Smith. It ain't worth it. You walk away. Situation like that, walk away. She'll get hers. Walk away. She'll get it."
A week later, Anthony returned for another go-round with Almada, at the end of which he was arrested and jailed.
At the arson trial, four gang members wearing Raiders jackets sat in the courtroom, staring down prosecution witnesses and staking out the corridors during breaks, according to the prosecutor, Jean Daly. Almada never left Daly's side, escorting her to her car at the end of each day. During the trial, the defense took Daly by surprise when they offered a whole new explanation for Anthony's tears in the condo. He was upset, he testified, because he had lost family members in a fire in Elizabeth City. (In 1996, James Gallop's longtime girlfriend, whom Anthony knew well, and her grown daughter were killed when their house burned down.) He testified that he told Almada about that fire during the drive to the police station—the ride Almada had described as virtually silent. And he offered a theory for how his mail ended up in the firebombs: He had boxes of old mail in his truck that day because he was emptying out a storage locker. He had hired a couple of day laborers to help him move his things from Simply Sofas. The workers must've put his mail in the Dumpsters behind Marilyn's store, and whoever made the firebombs found his mail and used it to set the fire. No one saw these day laborers, including Marilyn's employees who helped Anthony load his truck that day. Still, the jury deadlocked: seven to five in Smith's favor.
The D.A. took another crack at it, but the jury deadlocked again, this time even more weighted in Smith's favor: eleven to one. Anthony was, by all accounts, dynamite on the witness stand. He wept, he smiled; he radiated strength and humility; the jurors loved him. By the time the case was dismissed in December 2004, he had spent seventeen months in jail.
Many of his supporters attended both trials, including members of his Episcopalian church and a business consultant, Vito Rotunno, who is godfather to one of Anthony's three children. Vito visited him after the trials were over and he says he found a changed man.
"He was very paranoid," Vito says. "He was not reading things correctly. He thought I was talking to the police." Anthony would say and do strange things, Vito says, but didn't seem to realize they were strange. "I think he has a multifaceted personality," Vito says. "He's been in some really tough places, and he's been on the top of the food chain."
Vito says he ended the relationship. "Finally I said, 'If you can't talk straight to me, there's no reason for us to talk.' I guess I was around him during a good time, and then I saw his descent into not having fun."
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In the early-morning hours of October 7, 2008, Sergeants Marty Rodriguez and Robert Gray of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department found themselves driving north on the Antelope Valley Freeway to Lancaster, a city they had no fondness for because they only knew it through their jobs. They saw the streets of Lancaster as a series of murder scenes: this shooting, that witness, this meth deal gone wrong. Besides murder, it was sand. Miles and miles of sand and scrub, broken up by houses and little shops where people killed each other.
There, on an empty stretch of road outside the city limits, Rodriguez and Gray examined the body of a thirtyish Hispanic man slumped into a pool of his own blood. He had a black eye and bruises and cuts on his back, as if he had been punched and savagely kicked before being shot to death. (The murder weapon was later determined to be a nine-millimeter.) The identification in his pocket showed the man to be Maurilio Ponce, and soon the detectives were sitting with his widow, Angie, who told them he had left the night before, driving her white Lincoln Navigator, and that yes, of course he had his cell phone with him. The police had found no cell phone and no Navigator. But it didn't take long for them to get hold of Maurilio's phone records, which showed a series of calls to Anthony Smith in the hours before his death.
The week before Maurilio was murdered, he took off work from his diesel-mechanic business. He stayed home and played with the kids, reading them stories by the fireplace and dancing with the three of them in the living room of the ranch house he and Angie had just bought. It was almost like he knew... Angie says. Maurilio was 31 years old, with a wry sense of humor. Restless. A pusher and a driver. He and Angie had met when they were teenagers, both working at McDonald's, only Maurilio was also holding down jobs at Taco Bell and a little Mexican restaurant in town, sending money back to his family in Mexico, putting his younger brother through college and graduate school. After they married, they set up shop, starting the business in 2001 with one used tire. Now Piki's Truck Repair had three employees and contracts with national trucking companies like Mayflower and U-Haul.
Two nights before his murder, Maurilio woke abruptly, his heart careening inside his chest, frightened, though he couldn't remember his dream. "Just hold me," he said to Angie. On Monday evening, October 6, Maurilio told Angie he might have to go out that night. He had business with a buddy named Tony.
It was 9:30 p.m., and down in L.A., according to law-enforcement officers, Maurilio's death was already in motion. Through phone records, the detectives identified calls made between Maurilio, Anthony Smith, and two other men, Charles "Chucky Cheese" Honest and Dewann White, that enabled them to track their movements that night. Each time any of these men used his phone, the officers could see where he was, as the call bounced off nearby cell towers. It's not a precise homing technique—the activated phone could be down the block from the tower or a few miles away—but it puts the phone in an area. So at 9:14, there was Dewann's phone pinging off a tower near Cheese's place in south L.A. Thirty minutes later, that phone was moving west toward Marina del Rey, where Anthony lived. At 10:20, Maurilio called Anthony; both men seemed to be in or near their homes. Thirty-six minutes later, Maurilio called again, but now Anthony's phone was on the move—thirty miles north, using a tower alongside the 405.
Shortly after 11, Maurilio's cell rang at his home in Lancaster. "Hey, Tony," Angie heard him say before he walked the phone into their bedroom. When he came out, he had changed out of his shorts and T-shirt and into a brown sweater and jeans. These were not the clothes he wore when he was going out to change a trucker's flat, but Angie didn't ask any questions. He kissed Angie, said, "Wait up for me," and left.
At 11:44, Maurilio and Anthony spoke again. By now Anthony was in Santa Clarita, pinging off a tower at the Sand Canyon exit off the Antelope Valley Freeway; Maurilio was driving south on the same road. A little over an hour later, Maurilio made a call that showed he was heading back up the Antelope Freeway, north toward Lancaster. That call, the last one made from Maurilio's phone while he was still alive, went out to A&R Diesel Parts & Service, a business that closes at 5 p.m. Angie will always think he was trying to reach her, hitting the wrong entry in his contacts, A&R instead of Angie. "I picture him trying to get ahold of me," she says. "He was probably trying to scroll down his phone. That was really hard for me, just to keep thinking what did he feel right then."
At 1:03 a.m., Dewann called Cheese. Both men were in or near Lancaster. And then, for fifty-seven minutes, from 1:05 until 2:02 on the morning of October 7, all the phones went silent. What detectives believe happened during that hour would be pieced together from the crime-scene evidence, the autopsy report, and interviews with two security guards who heard a series of gunshots while making their rounds at a SoCal Edison substation nearby.
Out in the western, unincorporated area of Lancaster, along a lonely span of road surrounded by fields of electrical towers, Maurilio Ponce is forced to his knees. The wind is flowing from the distant mountains, rustling the creosote, whistling in the electrical wires high overhead. Maurilio's looking up now. He's not the wryly funny man, not the shrewd, self-starting immigrant. He's without anything but his fear and his desire not to leave his wife and three kids—without anything, finally, but his life, felt like a bright, stuttering flame. And then—he is shot twice in the head and, as he flops to the ground, three more times in the chest and back—that, too, is gone.
Then the phones move south, out and away from the desert. Down Antelope Valley Freeway, through Acton and Canyon Country, over to the 405, south to L.A....
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In the days after Maurilio's murder, Sergeants Rodriguez and Gray began to stake out Smith's address at the Marina City Club, a balconied condominium complex facing the harbor. On November 6, Maurilio Ponce's white Navigator appeared in one of Anthony Smith's allotted spaces in the condo garage. Parked next to it: Smith's green pickup truck and a stolen Nissan Xterra. One of the Xterra's plates had been transferred to the Navigator.
A search warrant was issued for Anthony's condo and his cars, including the Navigator, and he was taken in for questioning. Police found an AR-15 with a flash suppressor and nine-millimeter ammunition in his condo, but no nine-millimeter weapon. In the trunk of the stolen Xterra, there were multiple California license plates, the kind used on government vehicles, a replica semiautomatic handgun that was actually a pellet gun, two sets of yellow rubber gloves, some rope that had been cut, zip ties or cable ties like the type used by police, four flex-cuffs, and several books, including one entitled Make 'Em Pay!: Ultimate Revenge Techniques from the Master Trickster. There were also six baseball caps stamped BAIL ENFORCEMENT or FUGITIVE RECOVERY AGENT. Searches of Cheese's and Dewann's residences and vehicles turned up more weapons, but again no nine-millimeter gun.
During questioning, Anthony admitted to having Maurilio's cell phone. He handed over the keys to the Navigator. Then he told the detectives that Maurilio was behind on his car payments and had asked Anthony to chop the vehicle up and sell it so that Maurilio could report it stolen. Maurilio met him at a tire yard on Redondo Beach Boulevard, Anthony said, where he handed over the Navigator and the keys. He wasn't sure of the day. And no, he wasn't anywhere near Lancaster on the night of October 6.
As the sergeants pressed and cajoled ("I like you, Tony, but you're a liar," Gray told him conversationally), Anthony changed his story. Okay, Maurilio wasn't there in person to hand over the Navigator; the vehicle was left at the tire yard (with Maurilio's cell phone, child's car seat, and wife's pocketbook still inside) for Anthony to pick up on the seventh. And then Anthony remembered...that's right, yeah, he was up north on the night of the sixth. Maurilio had a job for him, so Anthony drove up to the Sand Canyon exit, where Maurilio told him to wait for instructions. But then Maurilio never showed.
The most fascinating aspect of Anthony's interview was his habit of sidestepping questions with long-winded descriptions, his tendency to prattle tediously on. This was a different Anthony from the bulletproof man aggressively facing down Sergeant Almada five years earlier. This Anthony was humble and trying hard, he insisted, to help out the detectives. He even cried a couple of times.
But he was remarkably forthcoming about his business with Maurilio. The two men, he said, dealt in stolen freight. Anthony said he didn't know how Maurilio came by the stolen truckloads of merchandise, but that Maurilio paid him to unload the goods. Ten thousand dollars a job, Anthony said, adding that they fenced everything from electronic equipment to asthma inhalers, energy drinks to fireworks. Maurilio often carried a lot of cash on him, Anthony said. Tens of thousands, sometimes more than $100,000. The night of Maurilio's murder, he had called Anthony about a new load, Anthony said.
He was, in his own way, endearing. Unfailingly polite, calling the sergeants "sir" throughout, expressing his gratitude to the detectives for "trying to work this thing out," even praising his friend Maurilio: "He doesn't play games with people's money. He, he's a good guy," he stammered. At one point in the interview, Smith even hugged Rodriguez. "I appreciate you being honest and keeping it real with me 100 percent, I really do."
When the three men went on trial before three separate juries in the spring of 2012, their defense attorneys attacked different aspects of the prosecution's case. They brought in a bank-loan officer to show that Angie had often missed payments on the Navigator, suggesting that maybe Maurilio did indeed want to get rid of the vehicle in an insurance scam. Smith's lawyer Michael Evans pressed home the point that while phone records put Cheese and Dewann near the murder scene, the last transmission from Anthony's cell was down in Sand Canyon, forty-five miles south of Lancaster. Evans also pointed the jury to the five calls Anthony made to Maurilio's phone on the morning after the murder. Why would he call a man he had allegedly murdered?
Still, the defense didn't seem to raise enough smoke to obscure the fact that Smith had traveled north toward Lancaster that night, speaking with Maurilio all the while, had possession of the murdered man's SUV and cell phone, and changed his story for how that came to be, offering two explanations, neither of them plausible. A dead man can't deliver a truck, after all, and if someone else killed Maurilio, he would have had to have known about Maurilio's insurance scam with Anthony and, after the murder, obligingly driven the Navigator down to L.A. Even without a weapon, it seemed like the prosecution made a pretty solid case.
And yet. Cheese and Dewann were found guilty; Cheese is now serving thirty-five years to life and Dewann is awaiting sentencing. Smith's jury deadlocked, eight to four in the prosecution's favor. Mistrial. Anthony remains incarcerated as the prosecution prepares for a retrial, scheduled to begin sometime this summer.
···
On October 12, 2012, after a pretrial hearing in Lancaster—which Anthony Smith sat through expressionless in his jailhouse blues, his myopic gaze giving him a naked, just-roused-from-bed look—the man who had been described as both a "big old teddy bear" (by his friend Harvey Williams) and a guy who would "choke you out over fifty cents" (by his former friend Dwayne Simon) was ordered to stand trial again for the Maurilio Ponce murder—plus three more killings that took place all the way back in 1999 and 2001, barely after he'd hung up his cleats. Anthony has pled not guilty to all counts, and Evans characterizes the prosecution's case as having no DNA evidence or fingerprints, no murder weapons, and eyewitness testimony that is anywhere from five to fourteen years old.
The body of Dennis "Denny Ray" Henderson was found in the backseat of his red Chevy Impala on June 25, 2001. His head appeared to have been stomped on—he had a heel mark on his cheek, a fractured cheekbone, and a dislocated jaw. He was stabbed in his left eye, in his ear, and eleven times in his back. A cable tie encircled one wrist. It was Dennis's brother, Barry Henderson, who pointed the police in Anthony's direction. Barry was Anthony's neighbor in Marina del Rey, and a friend. At the pre-trial hearing, Detective Jay Moberly testified that Barry told him he'd introduced Anthony to his younger brother when Anthony wanted to buy some Ecstasy and weed. Anthony and Denny Ray started hanging out.
Barry knew Anthony as a man with a short fuse, according to Moberly, especially when it came to people owing him money. One day when the two men were heading out to lunch, Anthony made a stop at his storage locker and invited Barry to come in and take a look. Barry told Moberly he saw knives and bundles of zip ties there, police-raid jackets, machine guns, silencers, hand grenades, tons of ammunition, and a "book on how to assassinate someone." According to Moberly's testimony, Anthony told Barry that he and his associates used the police-raid jackets during robberies. He showed Barry some license plates and explained that they would rent Crown Victorias (the car of choice for police detectives at the time), exchanging the plates for these "cold" or untraceable ones. Finally, Moberly testified, Barry told him that Anthony had bragged about kidnapping and killing two brothers who ran a car wash.
Moberly dug around until he found a case that matched the description—the Nettles brothers. On November 11, 1999, Ricky Nettles's body was found on a street in Compton, and his brother Kevin's body was found dumped eight miles away. Their heads were wrapped in duct tape, and they had been shot multiple times. Among other signs of torture, Ricky had a burn mark on his stomach in the triangular shape of a clothing iron. Both had been handcuffed.
The evening before, according to police, Ricky and Kevin were closing up their businesses on Vernon Avenue—an auto-repair shop, a hand car wash, a cellular and beeper store, and a barbershop. Kevin was sitting in the small front office of the auto-repair shop with a friend, watching the Lakers game. A tall black man wearing a green police jacket, a metal badge clipped to his belt, came in the shop, gun drawn. He ordered Kevin outside.
Meanwhile, Ricky and an employee named Manny were across the street, closing up the barbershop. Ricky left the shop while Manny stayed behind to lock up. When Manny was through, he testified, he headed over to the auto shop. That's when he says he saw a large man dressed in a dark suit, with a badge fixed to his belt and a gun in a shoulder holster, putting Ricky into the backseat of the car. Ricky's hands were pulled behind him as if he'd been cuffed. Kevin was already in the back of the vehicle, a dark-color four-door sedan. "What are you guys doing?" Manny yelled.
"We're taking him down for questioning," the big man in the suit said. Then he got into the car on the passenger side, and the car slid out of the lot and down Vernon. The next time anyone saw the Nettles brothers, they were dead, and Ricky's apartment had been ransacked.
In the weeks following Denny Ray's murder, the police suspected Anthony Smith was involved in all three killings, but the cases went cold—and stayed that way until detectives Martin Mojarro and Jeffrey Allen from the LAPD's cold-case unit revived the investigation in 2011.
At the pre-trial hearing, Manny, now a wiry 68-year-old man with a few teeth left in his mouth, took the stand and said fiercely, "Ricky never made it to the garage. He was stopped by the so-called police. He was stopped by that guy right there—" And he pointed across the room at Anthony Smith. The D.A. showed him Ricky's autopsy photos. Tears flooded Manny's eyes. Looking straight at Anthony, he muttered, "You son of a bitch."
During the hearing, Anthony seemed particularly vulnerable. He sat close to his lawyer, tilted toward him, occasionally scanning Evans's profile as if he might read his fortune there. Whenever evidence was passed to the defense table, mostly photographs of crime scenes, Anthony would lean forward with squinted eyes and seem to be studying them. Except for his lawyer, no one was there for him in the courtroom. His wife, now a district attorney for San Bernardino County, was absent. (During his arson trials, she'd appeared almost every day.) When family members have tried to visit him in jail, he has refused them.
"I spoke with him a few times in 2008," says Bryan. "He had changed his personality entirely." This wasn't the Anthony he'd grown up with, not even the Anthony he had known through his NFL years. "The dude is gone. I don't know who that dude is."
After Maurilio's murder, Angie lost their home and business. She went on public assistance for the first time in her life and got a job working as a cashier. Her youngest son's birthday falls on the day of Maurilio's death, and of all the children, this 6-year-old has had the most difficulty grappling with his father's death. She bears no hatred toward his murderers, she says. God has allowed her to forgive them. But she is haunted by knowing how afraid Maurilio must have been that night. She doesn't know that one theory of the case is that the killers expected Maurilio to have a wad of cash with him that night, and when he didn't, they tried to get him to lead them to his home in Lancaster. Thus the phones moving back north from Sand Canyon. Thus the kicks and the punches. When Maurilio refused, the theory goes, he was taken to the outskirts of the city and killed.
Family members of Denny Ray Henderson and the Nettles brothers were in the courtroom in October, too. Several of Ricky's relatives showed up each day of the hearing, including two of his children. They'd waited thirteen years to find out what had happened to their father. Ricky's son Dashan had the satisfaction of watching Anthony look straight across the courtroom at him—and wince. "He looked like he'd seen a ghost," Dashan said, adding proudly, "I look just like my dad." But Anthony Smith is nearsighted. It's doubtful he saw Ricky's son at all.
The fire was almost immediately deemed suspicious. Firefighters reported the strong smell of gasoline, and when investigators were able to get inside the building the next day, they found three "firebombs"—five-gallon plastic water jugs cut off at the neck, stuffed with paper and filled with gasoline. The evidence was gathered and sent to the lab.
Five months later, Sergeant Robert Almada, the police investigator for Santa Monica's Arson Squad Task Force, walked into the interview room at the police station on Main Street with every reason to believe things were going his way. He had motive—revenge—and he had the kind of physical evidence almost never left behind in a fire: thirty pieces of gasoline-soaked mail, each addressed to the suspect or his wife. (In the heat of the blaze, the firebombs had caved in on themselves, preserving the magazines and catalogs and envelopes inside.) That suspect, one Anthony Smith, six feet four inches and over 320 pounds, a 36-year-old former defensive end for the L.A./Oakland Raiders, dwarfed the little table in the room.
"Okeydoke," Almada said as he settled himself into a chair and opened his case file. Almada was blue-eyed and brown-haired, with bland, boyish good looks. His eagerness (the whole case was ready to tumble into place; it was right there at his fingertips) and the slight discomfort he felt in the presence of Smith were camouflaged by an overly casual manner. He confirmed some phone numbers he had for Smith; he asked if he preferred the interview-room door open or closed. It was all cordial enough, Almada in control...so how did it happen that within minutes the sergeant was floundering, struggling for a foothold while his suspect was coldly telling him his case was a pile of shit?
"You know how stupid this is. This is stupid, this is stupid," Smith said. How would he even have the time to set a fire? "I'm a very busy man. I don't have time for that crap."
Who the hell was this guy? A half hour earlier, Almada would testify, while both men were sitting in the kitchen of Smith's condo in Marina del Rey, the sergeant had confronted him with the physical evidence and Smith had broken down and cried. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he'd said, weeping with his head in his hands. As Almada saw it, Smith was more or less confessing to the arson. (He and the store's owner had argued over money two weeks before the fire.) When Smith's wife, Teresa, had hurried into the kitchen, asking what was wrong, Smith had wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her body.
Now that broken guy, whoever he was, had morphed into this deadpan, assured guy...whoever he was.
Almada thought he'd try a side attack. He took a paper from his file—a record of Smith's gun ownership. "It says you own a .45 pistol, a .22 pistol, a .357 revolver, .44 revolver, .44 Desert Eagle, .44 Colt, Olympic .223, another .223 pistol from Rocky Mountain Arms, and a .22 derringer," Almada said.
"That's it?" Smith asked.
"What do you mean, 'That's it'? That's a lot of guns for one guy."
"You ran that list and that's what you came up with?"
"That's what's listed in the Automated Firearms System, yes," Almada said.
"I only own shotguns," Smith stated flatly.
"Who bought all these guns?"
"You go back into your records and you'll see."
"These aren't my records," Almada said. "This is the Department of Justice."
"I couldn't care less whose records they are," Smith retorted. "You go back and you check those records and you will find I was charged with domestic violence. You know when you are charged with domestic violence, you can't own any guns. I got rid of 'em.... Don't own the guns. What I do every year, I go every year to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile to go shoot. I'm a wing shooter. That's it. Don't need pistols. I don't own guns like that. I sold my guns."
"Okay, great," Almada said briskly. "Now back to the fire."
"Not a problem." And it really wasn't, as time would tell.
Certainly, Smith has always been ready to bewilder. During one of the many police searches done on his vehicles and residences over the years, detectives found badges and numerous identification cards—two were for Anthony Smith, "Intelligence Officer," one for Anthony Smith of "The Organized Crime Bureau," and the fourth was an American Press Association ID with Smith's address but bearing the slightly ridiculous name "Wayne Peartree," suggesting how he felt about reporters. Early on in his career, Smith told sportswriters incredible stories about his childhood. He said he'd been raised in New York and belonged to a street gang called the Black Spades. When he was 8, he said, he and three friends stole a car and crashed it, killing two of them. When it came to drug use, he really piled it on, telling a reporter that he'd started using heroin, cocaine, PCP, LSD, and speed when he was 9 years old and that his brother had died of a heroin overdose.
When Naomi died (they say her liver gave out), Anthony's much older half-brother Donald took over his care—after kicking James Gallop out of the house. Donald was in his early twenties at the time, so it says something about the will of the man, the cold hard certainty of him, that he could kick his mother's partner, and a violent man, to the curb. Hot-tempered and ill-humored, Donald was also industrious and respectable, Bryan says. He worked for UPS. He became a deputy sheriff, then a magistrate. Years later, Anthony told a friend that Donald used to hit him, but as Bryan puts it, they all did back then.
"That whole generation of men, they were all angry," he says. "For them, it was better to be mad than happy. They couldn't communicate, and they didn't know how to fix problems in a simple, civilized way. Oh, they liked to shine on each other, that's what we call it down south, acting like the good guy, like everything in their life was going well, even if they were coming home and beating their kids, which they were." Shining was an art, and one Anthony was learning at home.
Anthony's ticket out was football, though it took him a while to see it. He was the biggest kid at Northeastern High, but he wore glasses and was a bit of a nerd, and it was almost funny, the way he ran around with the other boys, eager to be just like them, Bryan says, not even aware that he was ten times more athletic than anyone else, whether he was wrestling or shooting hoops or playing football. He had no ego. He wasn't even that interested in football until his junior year, when he began to work out obsessively. Anthony was always fast, but now the coaches watched him get bigger and stronger and finally committed to playing.
All of his high school coaches use the same words to describe Anthony: enthusiastic, courteous, earnest, voluble. "I don't want to say the wrong thing. He was a super good guy," says David Brinson, his defensive-line coach. "He just did things a little differently. He did things Anthony Smith's way." He didn't really have any close friends, Brinson adds, but "I don't remember him not getting along with anyone. I mean, he'd walk up to you and start talking to you about anything. He just...he liked to be where he was."
And that seemed to be it, really, the standout quality about Anthony Smith at that point in his life—he was just glad to be there, out from under Donald's heavy hand and whatever loneliness lay at home. Anthony once told Sports Illustrated that his brother Donald "had his own life to live, but what I needed was to be a son to somebody." (Donald could not be reached for an interview.)
When Perkins left to coach the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after Anthony's junior year, Anthony transferred to the University of Arizona. He majored in social and behavioral sciences, won first-team All-Pac-10 honors, and was an unexpected first-round draft pick of the Los Angeles Raiders. Anthony was surprised to be taken so early, but not that he went to the Raiders. "The team fits my personality and fits my style of play," he said. "I like sort of roaming around in the field like a free spirit, sort of with a hard-core hell-bent-for-leather attitude."
It was 1990, the height of gangsta rap and crack cocaine, and the Raiders had become the beloved team of N.W.A and Ice Cube (who would later make an ESPN documentary on the team, Straight Outta L.A.) and every Blood and Crip who claimed the City of Angelz as his own. Anthony landed in L.A. as a kind of minor deity—to rich white sports fans and gangbangers alike—and still with everything to prove.
···
At first he seemed to thrive, despite missing his entire rookie year because of knee surgery. He spent some time volunteering for a mentor's program with the mayor's office, heading into South Central L.A., often staying overnight in Compton. "I was lonely, away from home, didn't have anybody to look after me," he told Sports Illustrated. "So maybe if I'm tired or don't feel well, I stay the night with a kid's family. Next day, I wake up, my car's washed...and my laundry's done."
Over the next three seasons, he missed only one game, racking up thirty-six sacks, and in 1994 the Raiders rewarded him with a four-year $7.6 million contract. He'd been enjoying his paychecks since the moment he entered the league, but now the money was really flowing. He bought Donald a new Corvette every year, according to Bryan; he bought several houses for himself, including a five-bedroom white-brick palace on a hill overlooking the Pacific in Playa del Rey. But something angry and aggrieved had started ticking in his brain. "The way I've seen people react to me, Anthony Smith the Raider, has been sickening," he told the Los Angeles Times, going on to complain about the women who loved his money and his fame, not him, and the friends who always had their hands out.
"He used to talk about his family asking for $30,000 like it was $300," says former running back Harvey Williams, Anthony's teammate and close friend. "Anthony always said he didn't want to be broke after football. He'd say, 'When I'm done, I want to be able to relax and chill for the rest of my life.' "
After reading an article about the young Raider, Denise Matthews, a.k.a. Vanity, now a born-again Christian, arranged a meeting with Anthony, eight years her junior. Three days later she proposed to him, and one month after they met, he made her his second wife. (He'd had a brief marriage to a young actress a few years earlier.) But this new marriage, too, quickly turned to dust, recalls Dwayne Simon, a friend of Anthony's from that time. Dwayne remembers one uncomfortable team-family breakfast before a Raiders game when Denise said or did something that made Anthony furious. "He grabbed her by the arm, made her sit down," says Dwayne, a producer with the L.A. Posse and Def Jam who arranged music for Raiders games. "She tried to get up, but he snatched her back down: 'Get down!' I was really scared for Vanity. I thought he was going to break her friggin' arm."
At the same time, Smith was telling one of his rich-white-businessman friends that he had helped Denise get a kidney. (Her body was hard hit from years of drug use before she swore off that life and turned to God.) What a good guy. What an angry one. Was one of those Anthonys more true than the other? Or had he just become a violent man who knew how to shine?
A year and a half after they married, Anthony and Denise were done. (Shortly after they separated, in 1997, Anthony was arrested for domestic violence involving another woman and sentenced to anger-management classes.) Finally, sometime in 1997 or '98, he started a relationship that would last. His third and current wife, Teresa Obello White, is a graduate of Stanford University and Pepperdine law school. She was working for a personal-injury firm when they met, and he told friends she would make a wonderful mother to their children.
He brought her to Elizabeth City to introduce her to his family, Bryan recalls. But what started as a Fourth of July barbecue quickly turned into a confrontation between Donald and Anthony, according to Bryan, with Donald becoming threatening enough that Anthony grabbed Teresa and they left for the airport. Anthony and Donald never talked again. "Anthony felt abandoned," Bryan says. "And that's his biggest issue."
After a mediocre 1997 season, he parted ways with the Raiders, spinning him into a panic until he signed with the Broncos in July 1998. But then, abruptly, he let it all go. While at training camp in Denver that August, Anthony called his personal assistant back in L.A. "Get the Hummer and come get me," he said. He had decided he was done with football. On the way back home, they stopped in Las Vegas, where Anthony and Teresa tied the knot.
So at 31 years old, Anthony Smith was retired. He had busted-up fingers and bad knees. He was newly married for the third time, but this time he felt he'd found the right woman. Soon he would be a father. There was plenty of adoration and goodwill out there still, though a lot less money. He stood at that cliff's edge familiar to every newly retired pro athlete.
When an athlete leaves the game, he goes from always being told what to do to freefalling through a world without structure. Now he has to find a way to survive. How does he put food on the table? His athletic talent, his pro experience, is not translatable to the civilian world. It's a terrifying moment. How does he find a new skill? Learning one takes time, patience, faith. For those who are used to making things happen by sheer will and force and power...how do they channel their frustration at this slower, craftier world? Those short on patience might object to starting at the bottom of the learning curve; they might start to look for shortcuts.
Soon after retiring from football, Anthony invested in at least one shady business—an online medical-billing scam that was later investigated by the FTC—and started spending more and more time with gangbangers and thugs. "He was bringing the edge around, and I didn't like it," Bryan says. When he asked Anthony why, Anthony told him, "These guys care about me. They're genuine dudes."
"I couldn't understand it," Bryan says. "You're married to a lawyer. You're living in Playa del Rey. Why would you be involved with these kinds of people?" He began to back away, unhappily, because he felt like now he was abandoning Anthony, too. Dwayne Simon didn't like Anthony's new friends, either. "That's when I stopped hanging around," he says. "That's when he started to change. He got that scowl, that ugly look."
···
By March of 2003, Anthony had become the prime suspect in the Simply Sofas arson. After speaking to Marilyn Nelson, the owner of the store, Sergeant Almada discovered that two weeks before the fire, she and Anthony had argued over some items he had left on consignment. Anthony had come to the store to pick up a check for the items that had sold and to retrieve a few unsold things, including some framed swords and a marble obelisk. When Anthony noticed that the stand on the obelisk was broken, he insisted Marilyn pay for it. They argued a bit (she believed it was broken when he brought it in), but he was adamant: "You are going to pay for it." After years of dealing with customers, Marilyn knew when to hang tough, and this didn't seem like one of those times, so she agreed. She'd already given Anthony a $615 check for the items that had sold. He said he'd come back to pick up the unsold items and told her she should have another check ready for the broken obelisk.
But before he returned, according to Marilyn, a woman identifying herself as Anthony's personal assistant called Marilyn to say that Anthony had lost the $615 check and needed a replacement. Later, Anthony showed up at the store, and while he and two of Marilyn's workers loaded his unsold items into his truck, Marilyn made out a second check, left it on the counter, and returned to her desk. She was glad to be seeing the back of this particular customer, and she didn't even bother to look up when he came back into the store. But he didn't pick up the check and leave. He stood there at the counter waiting. She busied herself with paperwork, but she could feel his eyes on her. Finally she looked up at him and asked, "What?" According to Marilyn, he stared her down and then pointed a finger at her, shook it slowly, turned, and left.
A few days later, Marilyn discovered that the check that was supposedly lost had been cashed. She testified that when Wells Fargo called the store to say Anthony was in the branch trying to cash the second check, her daughter told them not to. Two weeks later, Simply Sofas was torched.
On July 7, Sergeant Almada headed over to the Smiths' condominium in Marina del Rey. He described the Simply Sofas fire to Anthony, how fiercely it raged, exaggerating how firefighters had to leap from one roof to the other to save their lives. Anthony asked him what Marilyn Nelson had said about him, and Almada replied that Marilyn hadn't pointed the finger at anybody. It was the thirty pieces of mail shoved inside the firebombs that had led him to Anthony.
"If there was a fire, how was anything left?" Anthony asked, according to Almada, who says that's when he began to cry. Almada suggested they go down to the police station and continue to talk there. Anthony asked for a few minutes alone with his wife, the lawyer, and then rode down to the precinct house with the sergeant. It was a quiet ride, Almada later testified. But when they got to the station, Almada felt a change had come over Anthony.
The sergeant laid out the evidence once again, asking Anthony to look at things from his point of view. Don't you think it's odd that all the mail in the firebombs is addressed to you? Almada asked. "Can you help me out on this?" "Well, I'm not dumb enough I'm going to firebomb a place and put my stuff in it. Help me with that. Help me with that."
"Who set you up?" Almada said. "Tell me who set you up so we can go get them." Anthony replied sarcastically, "Oh, it's the guy in there. I'm telling you right now, bring him in, I think it's him. That's how foolish that question is. I'm a professional—ex-professional—athlete. How would I know? I'm not sitting here trying to insult your intelligence any more than I want my intelligence insulted. But the thing I am asking you is, go do your homework. You haven't done your homework, man."
In frustration, Almada hit him with the fact that he had just wept and apologized when confronted with the evidence; he had even asked Almada to tell Marilyn Nelson he was sorry. But Smith had an answer for that, too. He had "shed a tear" because Almada had said some firemen got hurt fighting the fire. "You tell me someone got hurt, I'm gonna respond," Anthony said. "Somebody try to do something to me, someone try to do something to someone else, that still gonna hurt me. That's not right, man. You don't solve problems that way, and no $1,200 check is serious to Anthony Smith. It ain't worth it. You walk away. Situation like that, walk away. She'll get hers. Walk away. She'll get it."
A week later, Anthony returned for another go-round with Almada, at the end of which he was arrested and jailed.
At the arson trial, four gang members wearing Raiders jackets sat in the courtroom, staring down prosecution witnesses and staking out the corridors during breaks, according to the prosecutor, Jean Daly. Almada never left Daly's side, escorting her to her car at the end of each day. During the trial, the defense took Daly by surprise when they offered a whole new explanation for Anthony's tears in the condo. He was upset, he testified, because he had lost family members in a fire in Elizabeth City. (In 1996, James Gallop's longtime girlfriend, whom Anthony knew well, and her grown daughter were killed when their house burned down.) He testified that he told Almada about that fire during the drive to the police station—the ride Almada had described as virtually silent. And he offered a theory for how his mail ended up in the firebombs: He had boxes of old mail in his truck that day because he was emptying out a storage locker. He had hired a couple of day laborers to help him move his things from Simply Sofas. The workers must've put his mail in the Dumpsters behind Marilyn's store, and whoever made the firebombs found his mail and used it to set the fire. No one saw these day laborers, including Marilyn's employees who helped Anthony load his truck that day. Still, the jury deadlocked: seven to five in Smith's favor.
The D.A. took another crack at it, but the jury deadlocked again, this time even more weighted in Smith's favor: eleven to one. Anthony was, by all accounts, dynamite on the witness stand. He wept, he smiled; he radiated strength and humility; the jurors loved him. By the time the case was dismissed in December 2004, he had spent seventeen months in jail.
Many of his supporters attended both trials, including members of his Episcopalian church and a business consultant, Vito Rotunno, who is godfather to one of Anthony's three children. Vito visited him after the trials were over and he says he found a changed man.
"He was very paranoid," Vito says. "He was not reading things correctly. He thought I was talking to the police." Anthony would say and do strange things, Vito says, but didn't seem to realize they were strange. "I think he has a multifaceted personality," Vito says. "He's been in some really tough places, and he's been on the top of the food chain."
Vito says he ended the relationship. "Finally I said, 'If you can't talk straight to me, there's no reason for us to talk.' I guess I was around him during a good time, and then I saw his descent into not having fun."
···
In the early-morning hours of October 7, 2008, Sergeants Marty Rodriguez and Robert Gray of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department found themselves driving north on the Antelope Valley Freeway to Lancaster, a city they had no fondness for because they only knew it through their jobs. They saw the streets of Lancaster as a series of murder scenes: this shooting, that witness, this meth deal gone wrong. Besides murder, it was sand. Miles and miles of sand and scrub, broken up by houses and little shops where people killed each other.
There, on an empty stretch of road outside the city limits, Rodriguez and Gray examined the body of a thirtyish Hispanic man slumped into a pool of his own blood. He had a black eye and bruises and cuts on his back, as if he had been punched and savagely kicked before being shot to death. (The murder weapon was later determined to be a nine-millimeter.) The identification in his pocket showed the man to be Maurilio Ponce, and soon the detectives were sitting with his widow, Angie, who told them he had left the night before, driving her white Lincoln Navigator, and that yes, of course he had his cell phone with him. The police had found no cell phone and no Navigator. But it didn't take long for them to get hold of Maurilio's phone records, which showed a series of calls to Anthony Smith in the hours before his death.
The week before Maurilio was murdered, he took off work from his diesel-mechanic business. He stayed home and played with the kids, reading them stories by the fireplace and dancing with the three of them in the living room of the ranch house he and Angie had just bought. It was almost like he knew... Angie says. Maurilio was 31 years old, with a wry sense of humor. Restless. A pusher and a driver. He and Angie had met when they were teenagers, both working at McDonald's, only Maurilio was also holding down jobs at Taco Bell and a little Mexican restaurant in town, sending money back to his family in Mexico, putting his younger brother through college and graduate school. After they married, they set up shop, starting the business in 2001 with one used tire. Now Piki's Truck Repair had three employees and contracts with national trucking companies like Mayflower and U-Haul.
Two nights before his murder, Maurilio woke abruptly, his heart careening inside his chest, frightened, though he couldn't remember his dream. "Just hold me," he said to Angie. On Monday evening, October 6, Maurilio told Angie he might have to go out that night. He had business with a buddy named Tony.
It was 9:30 p.m., and down in L.A., according to law-enforcement officers, Maurilio's death was already in motion. Through phone records, the detectives identified calls made between Maurilio, Anthony Smith, and two other men, Charles "Chucky Cheese" Honest and Dewann White, that enabled them to track their movements that night. Each time any of these men used his phone, the officers could see where he was, as the call bounced off nearby cell towers. It's not a precise homing technique—the activated phone could be down the block from the tower or a few miles away—but it puts the phone in an area. So at 9:14, there was Dewann's phone pinging off a tower near Cheese's place in south L.A. Thirty minutes later, that phone was moving west toward Marina del Rey, where Anthony lived. At 10:20, Maurilio called Anthony; both men seemed to be in or near their homes. Thirty-six minutes later, Maurilio called again, but now Anthony's phone was on the move—thirty miles north, using a tower alongside the 405.
Shortly after 11, Maurilio's cell rang at his home in Lancaster. "Hey, Tony," Angie heard him say before he walked the phone into their bedroom. When he came out, he had changed out of his shorts and T-shirt and into a brown sweater and jeans. These were not the clothes he wore when he was going out to change a trucker's flat, but Angie didn't ask any questions. He kissed Angie, said, "Wait up for me," and left.
At 11:44, Maurilio and Anthony spoke again. By now Anthony was in Santa Clarita, pinging off a tower at the Sand Canyon exit off the Antelope Valley Freeway; Maurilio was driving south on the same road. A little over an hour later, Maurilio made a call that showed he was heading back up the Antelope Freeway, north toward Lancaster. That call, the last one made from Maurilio's phone while he was still alive, went out to A&R Diesel Parts & Service, a business that closes at 5 p.m. Angie will always think he was trying to reach her, hitting the wrong entry in his contacts, A&R instead of Angie. "I picture him trying to get ahold of me," she says. "He was probably trying to scroll down his phone. That was really hard for me, just to keep thinking what did he feel right then."
At 1:03 a.m., Dewann called Cheese. Both men were in or near Lancaster. And then, for fifty-seven minutes, from 1:05 until 2:02 on the morning of October 7, all the phones went silent. What detectives believe happened during that hour would be pieced together from the crime-scene evidence, the autopsy report, and interviews with two security guards who heard a series of gunshots while making their rounds at a SoCal Edison substation nearby.
Out in the western, unincorporated area of Lancaster, along a lonely span of road surrounded by fields of electrical towers, Maurilio Ponce is forced to his knees. The wind is flowing from the distant mountains, rustling the creosote, whistling in the electrical wires high overhead. Maurilio's looking up now. He's not the wryly funny man, not the shrewd, self-starting immigrant. He's without anything but his fear and his desire not to leave his wife and three kids—without anything, finally, but his life, felt like a bright, stuttering flame. And then—he is shot twice in the head and, as he flops to the ground, three more times in the chest and back—that, too, is gone.
Then the phones move south, out and away from the desert. Down Antelope Valley Freeway, through Acton and Canyon Country, over to the 405, south to L.A....
···
In the days after Maurilio's murder, Sergeants Rodriguez and Gray began to stake out Smith's address at the Marina City Club, a balconied condominium complex facing the harbor. On November 6, Maurilio Ponce's white Navigator appeared in one of Anthony Smith's allotted spaces in the condo garage. Parked next to it: Smith's green pickup truck and a stolen Nissan Xterra. One of the Xterra's plates had been transferred to the Navigator.
A search warrant was issued for Anthony's condo and his cars, including the Navigator, and he was taken in for questioning. Police found an AR-15 with a flash suppressor and nine-millimeter ammunition in his condo, but no nine-millimeter weapon. In the trunk of the stolen Xterra, there were multiple California license plates, the kind used on government vehicles, a replica semiautomatic handgun that was actually a pellet gun, two sets of yellow rubber gloves, some rope that had been cut, zip ties or cable ties like the type used by police, four flex-cuffs, and several books, including one entitled Make 'Em Pay!: Ultimate Revenge Techniques from the Master Trickster. There were also six baseball caps stamped BAIL ENFORCEMENT or FUGITIVE RECOVERY AGENT. Searches of Cheese's and Dewann's residences and vehicles turned up more weapons, but again no nine-millimeter gun.
During questioning, Anthony admitted to having Maurilio's cell phone. He handed over the keys to the Navigator. Then he told the detectives that Maurilio was behind on his car payments and had asked Anthony to chop the vehicle up and sell it so that Maurilio could report it stolen. Maurilio met him at a tire yard on Redondo Beach Boulevard, Anthony said, where he handed over the Navigator and the keys. He wasn't sure of the day. And no, he wasn't anywhere near Lancaster on the night of October 6.
As the sergeants pressed and cajoled ("I like you, Tony, but you're a liar," Gray told him conversationally), Anthony changed his story. Okay, Maurilio wasn't there in person to hand over the Navigator; the vehicle was left at the tire yard (with Maurilio's cell phone, child's car seat, and wife's pocketbook still inside) for Anthony to pick up on the seventh. And then Anthony remembered...that's right, yeah, he was up north on the night of the sixth. Maurilio had a job for him, so Anthony drove up to the Sand Canyon exit, where Maurilio told him to wait for instructions. But then Maurilio never showed.
The most fascinating aspect of Anthony's interview was his habit of sidestepping questions with long-winded descriptions, his tendency to prattle tediously on. This was a different Anthony from the bulletproof man aggressively facing down Sergeant Almada five years earlier. This Anthony was humble and trying hard, he insisted, to help out the detectives. He even cried a couple of times.
But he was remarkably forthcoming about his business with Maurilio. The two men, he said, dealt in stolen freight. Anthony said he didn't know how Maurilio came by the stolen truckloads of merchandise, but that Maurilio paid him to unload the goods. Ten thousand dollars a job, Anthony said, adding that they fenced everything from electronic equipment to asthma inhalers, energy drinks to fireworks. Maurilio often carried a lot of cash on him, Anthony said. Tens of thousands, sometimes more than $100,000. The night of Maurilio's murder, he had called Anthony about a new load, Anthony said.
He was, in his own way, endearing. Unfailingly polite, calling the sergeants "sir" throughout, expressing his gratitude to the detectives for "trying to work this thing out," even praising his friend Maurilio: "He doesn't play games with people's money. He, he's a good guy," he stammered. At one point in the interview, Smith even hugged Rodriguez. "I appreciate you being honest and keeping it real with me 100 percent, I really do."
When the three men went on trial before three separate juries in the spring of 2012, their defense attorneys attacked different aspects of the prosecution's case. They brought in a bank-loan officer to show that Angie had often missed payments on the Navigator, suggesting that maybe Maurilio did indeed want to get rid of the vehicle in an insurance scam. Smith's lawyer Michael Evans pressed home the point that while phone records put Cheese and Dewann near the murder scene, the last transmission from Anthony's cell was down in Sand Canyon, forty-five miles south of Lancaster. Evans also pointed the jury to the five calls Anthony made to Maurilio's phone on the morning after the murder. Why would he call a man he had allegedly murdered?
Still, the defense didn't seem to raise enough smoke to obscure the fact that Smith had traveled north toward Lancaster that night, speaking with Maurilio all the while, had possession of the murdered man's SUV and cell phone, and changed his story for how that came to be, offering two explanations, neither of them plausible. A dead man can't deliver a truck, after all, and if someone else killed Maurilio, he would have had to have known about Maurilio's insurance scam with Anthony and, after the murder, obligingly driven the Navigator down to L.A. Even without a weapon, it seemed like the prosecution made a pretty solid case.
And yet. Cheese and Dewann were found guilty; Cheese is now serving thirty-five years to life and Dewann is awaiting sentencing. Smith's jury deadlocked, eight to four in the prosecution's favor. Mistrial. Anthony remains incarcerated as the prosecution prepares for a retrial, scheduled to begin sometime this summer.
···
On October 12, 2012, after a pretrial hearing in Lancaster—which Anthony Smith sat through expressionless in his jailhouse blues, his myopic gaze giving him a naked, just-roused-from-bed look—the man who had been described as both a "big old teddy bear" (by his friend Harvey Williams) and a guy who would "choke you out over fifty cents" (by his former friend Dwayne Simon) was ordered to stand trial again for the Maurilio Ponce murder—plus three more killings that took place all the way back in 1999 and 2001, barely after he'd hung up his cleats. Anthony has pled not guilty to all counts, and Evans characterizes the prosecution's case as having no DNA evidence or fingerprints, no murder weapons, and eyewitness testimony that is anywhere from five to fourteen years old.
The body of Dennis "Denny Ray" Henderson was found in the backseat of his red Chevy Impala on June 25, 2001. His head appeared to have been stomped on—he had a heel mark on his cheek, a fractured cheekbone, and a dislocated jaw. He was stabbed in his left eye, in his ear, and eleven times in his back. A cable tie encircled one wrist. It was Dennis's brother, Barry Henderson, who pointed the police in Anthony's direction. Barry was Anthony's neighbor in Marina del Rey, and a friend. At the pre-trial hearing, Detective Jay Moberly testified that Barry told him he'd introduced Anthony to his younger brother when Anthony wanted to buy some Ecstasy and weed. Anthony and Denny Ray started hanging out.
Barry knew Anthony as a man with a short fuse, according to Moberly, especially when it came to people owing him money. One day when the two men were heading out to lunch, Anthony made a stop at his storage locker and invited Barry to come in and take a look. Barry told Moberly he saw knives and bundles of zip ties there, police-raid jackets, machine guns, silencers, hand grenades, tons of ammunition, and a "book on how to assassinate someone." According to Moberly's testimony, Anthony told Barry that he and his associates used the police-raid jackets during robberies. He showed Barry some license plates and explained that they would rent Crown Victorias (the car of choice for police detectives at the time), exchanging the plates for these "cold" or untraceable ones. Finally, Moberly testified, Barry told him that Anthony had bragged about kidnapping and killing two brothers who ran a car wash.
Moberly dug around until he found a case that matched the description—the Nettles brothers. On November 11, 1999, Ricky Nettles's body was found on a street in Compton, and his brother Kevin's body was found dumped eight miles away. Their heads were wrapped in duct tape, and they had been shot multiple times. Among other signs of torture, Ricky had a burn mark on his stomach in the triangular shape of a clothing iron. Both had been handcuffed.
The evening before, according to police, Ricky and Kevin were closing up their businesses on Vernon Avenue—an auto-repair shop, a hand car wash, a cellular and beeper store, and a barbershop. Kevin was sitting in the small front office of the auto-repair shop with a friend, watching the Lakers game. A tall black man wearing a green police jacket, a metal badge clipped to his belt, came in the shop, gun drawn. He ordered Kevin outside.
Meanwhile, Ricky and an employee named Manny were across the street, closing up the barbershop. Ricky left the shop while Manny stayed behind to lock up. When Manny was through, he testified, he headed over to the auto shop. That's when he says he saw a large man dressed in a dark suit, with a badge fixed to his belt and a gun in a shoulder holster, putting Ricky into the backseat of the car. Ricky's hands were pulled behind him as if he'd been cuffed. Kevin was already in the back of the vehicle, a dark-color four-door sedan. "What are you guys doing?" Manny yelled.
"We're taking him down for questioning," the big man in the suit said. Then he got into the car on the passenger side, and the car slid out of the lot and down Vernon. The next time anyone saw the Nettles brothers, they were dead, and Ricky's apartment had been ransacked.
In the weeks following Denny Ray's murder, the police suspected Anthony Smith was involved in all three killings, but the cases went cold—and stayed that way until detectives Martin Mojarro and Jeffrey Allen from the LAPD's cold-case unit revived the investigation in 2011.
At the pre-trial hearing, Manny, now a wiry 68-year-old man with a few teeth left in his mouth, took the stand and said fiercely, "Ricky never made it to the garage. He was stopped by the so-called police. He was stopped by that guy right there—" And he pointed across the room at Anthony Smith. The D.A. showed him Ricky's autopsy photos. Tears flooded Manny's eyes. Looking straight at Anthony, he muttered, "You son of a bitch."
During the hearing, Anthony seemed particularly vulnerable. He sat close to his lawyer, tilted toward him, occasionally scanning Evans's profile as if he might read his fortune there. Whenever evidence was passed to the defense table, mostly photographs of crime scenes, Anthony would lean forward with squinted eyes and seem to be studying them. Except for his lawyer, no one was there for him in the courtroom. His wife, now a district attorney for San Bernardino County, was absent. (During his arson trials, she'd appeared almost every day.) When family members have tried to visit him in jail, he has refused them.
"I spoke with him a few times in 2008," says Bryan. "He had changed his personality entirely." This wasn't the Anthony he'd grown up with, not even the Anthony he had known through his NFL years. "The dude is gone. I don't know who that dude is."
After Maurilio's murder, Angie lost their home and business. She went on public assistance for the first time in her life and got a job working as a cashier. Her youngest son's birthday falls on the day of Maurilio's death, and of all the children, this 6-year-old has had the most difficulty grappling with his father's death. She bears no hatred toward his murderers, she says. God has allowed her to forgive them. But she is haunted by knowing how afraid Maurilio must have been that night. She doesn't know that one theory of the case is that the killers expected Maurilio to have a wad of cash with him that night, and when he didn't, they tried to get him to lead them to his home in Lancaster. Thus the phones moving back north from Sand Canyon. Thus the kicks and the punches. When Maurilio refused, the theory goes, he was taken to the outskirts of the city and killed.
Family members of Denny Ray Henderson and the Nettles brothers were in the courtroom in October, too. Several of Ricky's relatives showed up each day of the hearing, including two of his children. They'd waited thirteen years to find out what had happened to their father. Ricky's son Dashan had the satisfaction of watching Anthony look straight across the courtroom at him—and wince. "He looked like he'd seen a ghost," Dashan said, adding proudly, "I look just like my dad." But Anthony Smith is nearsighted. It's doubtful he saw Ricky's son at all.
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