The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (56 page)

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 30 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 DA took another crack at it, but the jury deadlocked again, this time even more weighted in Smith's favor: 11 to 1. 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 17 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 LA, 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 LA. 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—30 miles north, using a tower alongside the 405.

Shortly after 11:00, 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 5:00
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 57 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 the Antelope Valley Freeway, through Acton and Canyon Country, over to the 405, south to LA . . .

 

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.