The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (57 page)

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, 45 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 LA. 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 35 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 50 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 14 years old.

Dennis “Denny Ray” Henderson's body 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 11 times in his back. A cable tie encircled one wrist. It was his brother, Barry Henderson, who pointed police in Anthony's direction. Barry was Anthony's neighbor in Marina del Rey, and a friend. At the pretrial 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 matching 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 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 pretrial 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 DA 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 six-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 13 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.

FROM RUNNER'S WORLD

 

F
OR THE PAST
16 years Tom Walsh has spent every Independence Day on a mountaintop above Seward, Alaska, tallying the agony. Walsh is the lead midcourse timekeeper for the Mount Marathon Race, the second-oldest mountain footrace in the world and, after the Iditarod sled-dog race, the most famous race in the 49th State.

Contrary to its name, the Mount Marathon Race isn't a legend for how far it stretches through the vastness of Alaska, but rather for how much unpleasantness it crams into so small a package. Starting in downtown Seward, racers run a half-mile to the foot of Mount Marathon, then scrabble about 2,900 vertical feet straight up cliffs and mud and shale before finally staggering to Race Point. There, Walsh and others note their time and bib number, hand them water, and send them hurtling back downhill in what more resembles free fall than running—over snowfields and rock fields and waterfalls and crags—until they reach the finish line back on the streets of Seward.

All of this occurs in 3.1 to 3.5 miles, depending on your route, and on trails so close to town that spectators waiting at the finish line can follow nearly every tortured step high on the mountain. By yardstick the contest is briefer than a postwork jog around Central Park. By every other count—sheer adrenaline, lung-bleeding exhaustion, potential for disaster per mile—there may be no other run like it in the world. Blood flows freely. Bones break frequently—arms, shoulders, cheekbones, legs. Sometimes, worse happens. The race has been run 85 times, and it is wildly popular. As an isolated people who long ago learned to make their own fun, Alaskans will tell you without much hyperbole that Mount Marathon is their Olympics.

Independence Day under the undying Arctic sun can be warm and lingering and nectarine-sweet. Last July 4 wasn't one of those days. By afternoon the weather was as bad as Walsh could ever recall—windy and rainy, high 40s. He and coworkers had been on the mountain since morning, first to work the women's race, then the men's race that began at three o'clock.

A bit after five o'clock a longtime racer straggled to Race Point, a false summit marked by a large rock. The racer said he was the last guy. Walsh and his shivering comrades waited about 45 more minutes, then headed down the empty peak.

The Mount Marathon course roughly describes a treble clef—runners don't descend the same route they ascend—and as Walsh hiked down that afternoon, he saw another man slowly climbing, about 100 yards away, and dressed lightly as racers do, in black shorts, black T-shirt, black headband. It was more than two hours since the winner had broken the tape down in town. “How far am I from the top?” the racer called out.

“About 200 feet,” Walsh yelled back.

The man asked if he could still “get a finish.” Walsh told him to loop the rock atop Race Point and go down via the descent trail. Scarves of fog slid past them. But Race Point was still visible just above, as was Seward below, so close-seeming that the music and firecrackers of the impending party drifted up on the winds.

What happened next Walsh has replayed untold times in his head. Did he miss something? Was the man sick? Was he injured? Should he have made him turn around immediately on the sketchy up-trail? “There didn't seem to be any red flags,” Walsh told me weeks later. The man was plodding, sure—but otherwise he seemed fine. So Walsh let him go.

“What's your bib number?” Walsh called out before they parted.

“Five-four-eight,” the man said, and he immediately started upward.

Walsh headed down, but first texted race officials: bib number 548 would be home in about an hour and a half.

But the man wearing bib number 548 didn't return in an hour and a half. Michael LeMaitre has never come down the mountain. Mountain rescue experts, firemen, state troopers, search dogs, helicopter pilots, volunteers, and LeMaitre's family spent thousands of hours scouring the mountain for him. They have yet to find even a single clue to his fate.

Think about that for a moment: 1.5 miles up. Roughly 1.6 miles down. Hundreds of runners within view of thousands of fans, and a man simply vanished. How the hell is that even possible?