April 29, 2024 • 36 mins
The investigation into Billy's death takes Detective Smith and Investigative Journalist Scott Weinberger to the Apollo Gym—a stark, bare-bones facility managed by an ex-cop notorious for his unsavory past. Witnesses paint a picture of a criminal lifestyle embedded within the gym's culture. As Danny and Scott delve deeper, they begin to unravel its potential ties to another series of murders.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
All right, March from the second twenty twenty three, literally
twelve o'clock on the dot, I have taken that long
drive to f Daly, Orlando Lab. Start the clock on
this process of trying to solve the case through science.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
In October of nineteen eighty six, the body of twenty
eight year old Billy Halpern was discovered in his town
home in Miramar, Florida. Billy, who was a bodybuilder and
former firefighter, had been bound with electrical tape before being
strangled and nearly decapitated in what appeared to be a
brutal and bloody execution style murder. With no witnesses, no leads,
(00:56):
and little forensic evidence left at the scene, Billy's murder
went unsolved for months, but then there were four more
slayings in the span of eight days. Twenty six year
old Mitch Hall had gone to high school with Billy
Hawburn and was also a competitive bodybuilder. He and his
(01:22):
living girlfriend, twenty three year old shar Linda, were found
inside their town home just twenty minutes away, with their
throats slashed in a scene eerily similar to Billy's. A
week later, another fellow bodybuild a friend of Billy's named
Jimmy Hinoe, along with a man identified as a New
(01:42):
Jersey resident, Harry Collier, were found murdered in nearby Pembroke Pines,
each shot once in the back of the head, five
execution style homicides in less than eight months. Hectives from
Miramar and the Brower County Sheriff's Office were convinced they
(02:04):
were all connected. Not only did Billy, Mitch, and Jimmy
all know each other, they were all bodybuilders. They worked
out together, competed together, and police suspected were involved in
something that got them all killed was a drugs a
string of robberies. Police didn't know, but one thing had
(02:27):
become clear. The motive behind the killing spree, and more importantly,
who was behind it, would likely be found in one
place that Billy and the other victims had in common,
a bodybuilding mecca in Hollywood Beach called the Apollo Gym.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
It's difficult enough to go back in time and try
to investigate it one particular case, but if there's an
association with another homicide, I'm essentially working two homicide cases.
And then if that branches off to a third homicide,
now I've got that much more work to do, so
I think the complexity of this case is unique, and
(03:11):
I've actually never heard of any other cold case that
has this many complexities.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff, and
this is cold blooded. The Apollo Jim murders. Nearly forty
years after his murder, cold case Detective Danny Smith and
(03:38):
I knew that tracking down people that knew Billy Hauburn
and could shed light on why he was killed would
not be an easy task. But Billy's sister Laurie was
able to provide us with a couple of names of
friends that were still living in South Florida.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
I don't know. I wasn't.
Speaker 5 (04:02):
I was wondering when I was going to hear something
from somebody.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Yeah, it's been a long time and lots of answers
had not come fair to.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
Say, yeah, well, there's a lot of unsolved murders that
I think are all tied to the same people.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Day Fasano met Billy Hauburn when he was still a teenager,
it was clear from the beginning that the two aspiring
bodybuilders were cut from the same cloth, or more accurately,
from the same piece of granite.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
I was a bodybuilder and a competitive bodybuilder. I won
Mister Teenage Florida, Mister America third Place, Mister Hollywood, Mister
brit like a bunch of titles. I was a hardcore
teenage bodybuilder that was doing very well. Billy was a
little older than me, and he was bigger than me
(04:57):
and my friends that were teenagers that were starting out,
and we kind of became good friends with.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Billion Fasano is now in his early sixties, and while
he might not be as big as he was when
he was competing, he's still in great shape. He sports
a Goals Jym T shirt, a pair of flip flops,
and a deep South Florida tan. I ventured to guests
is year round.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Billy and I became very good friends.
Speaker 5 (05:26):
And we would go out and we would go He
would come to the swimming pool every day, hung out.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
With me, and then we went out a couple times.
Speaker 5 (05:33):
We'd go out partying together and picking up girls and
doing bodybuilding and partying basically is what we did.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Dave also reiterated something I had heard from more than
one person who knew Billy Hoppurn that despite looking like
a TV action hero who could take anyone out two
at a time. He was just really a nice guy.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
I mean, he'd give you the shirt up his back,
and he was handsome, and he had charisma, he was
good looking, he was built.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
He was just a nice, humble guy.
Speaker 5 (06:09):
And him and a bunch of the other guys we
kind of looked up to them, and they kind of
mentored us a little bit, and then we ended up
all ended up at Apollo Gym.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
In the end.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Bodybuilding and keeping fit was something of an obsession in
South Florida in the nineteen eighties. I was a young
deputy sheriff from Browere County back then, and it seemed
like new gyms were opening on every corner. But in
nineteen eighty six, for the serious muscleheads, there was really
just one place to go, a hole in the wall
(06:45):
on Route four forty one near the Seminole Indian Reservation.
It was called the Apollo Gym.
Speaker 5 (06:53):
When we went into Apollo Gym, it was the best
gym around and it had all the best bodybuilders.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Billy's friend Mark Lopez also worked out at the Apollo
and described it to me as a no frills, concrete
box dedicated to painting game.
Speaker 6 (07:14):
The Apollo was very unusual because it was a hardcore gym.
I try to tell people today, it's not like walking
into an La Fitness today.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
You know.
Speaker 6 (07:26):
It was very dungeon esque. The air conditioner wasn't always
working great in the place, The ceilings leaked, the equipment
a lot of it, you know, needed maintenance.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
Or was broken.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Safe to say, this was not a place for the
casual weekend warrior.
Speaker 6 (07:46):
There was a reputation about the place, and it was
if you were a little skittish, it wasn't the place
that you were going to go because you never knew
what was gonna happen there, like you know, fights in
the gym that ice, scrap and write in the gym.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
I also got the feeling from Dave and Mark that
kind of like the rest of South Florida, the Apollo
was in anything goes kind of place. How prevalent was
story t at the Jim that you remember.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
All over the place.
Speaker 5 (08:19):
You'd walk in the bathroom, you look in the trash
cannon be filled with syringes. You could buy anything you wanted,
and back then you didn't go to jail for you
could walk into gym'sa I need some testosterone.
Speaker 4 (08:28):
People would talk about it, Bam, you have it in
a week.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Along with the serious bodybuilders like David Mark, the Apollo
also attracted cops, firefighters, and a fair share of guys
who were probably using their bulk for less law abiding purposes.
I'm talking about the dealers, the hustlers, and the low
level gangsters that occupied the same South Florida streets and
(08:55):
at the Apollo the same bench presses as local law.
Speaker 6 (08:59):
Enforcement at that time the Apollo, there are several Hollywood
cops that were members there, you know, generally the local cops,
the Hollywood cops, the Davy cops that I knew, they
knew the element that hung out there, and that they
were kind of outnumbered good guys the bad guys, so
to speak. So there was a lot of fear from
(09:20):
local law enforcement about the element there. I saw that firsthand.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
But there was kind of a don't ask, don't tell
policy at the Apollo, creating an environment where cops and
crooks could share a safe space to push iron. But
as we will learn, that would ultimately prove to be
a volatile and dangerous mix. The Apollogym had two owners
(09:53):
Bert Christy was originally from New Jersey and had moved
to Fort Lauderdale in the late nineteen sixties. Christy was
a former Mister Florida who in his fifties had become
kind of a mentor to young bodybuilders. This is Mark
Lopez describing Bert Christie.
Speaker 6 (10:14):
Bert at the time, I'm guessing was probably in his
early fifties. Not a big guy. Bert probably stood I'm
guessing about five to nine. And you know, it was
kind of a not a flashy guy, like not a
guy that was loud and brash or anything like that.
Pretty soft spoken. But you know, even though he wasn't
(10:35):
like a big scary looking guy, he probably wasn't the
guy you want to piss off.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Bert Christie's partner was a former Miami Dade Police officer
by the name of Gil Fernandez.
Speaker 6 (10:49):
When I first met Gil, I had no idea he
was a former cop, right, I didn't know anything about it.
I just know him some guy in the gym that
worked in the same gym I did.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
And you know, he's a.
Speaker 6 (11:00):
Big, scary looking guy with his physique and the tats
and the New York accent, and like I said, Gills's
voice was like a combination of West Side New York
with cut gravel, and when he walked in the room,
he got your attention, believe me, one way or the other.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
At one time, then officer Fernandez had been singled out
by the local paper from multiple complaints of excessive.
Speaker 6 (11:28):
Violence during the McDuffie riots. He basically built a reputation
there as Miami's meanest cop. And you know, I'm sure
the steroids didn't help.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
A Fasano was also well aware of Gil's reputation.
Speaker 5 (11:45):
I knew he was a cop, and I heard he
was a racist cop, and that he was a bad cop.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
That's what I heard.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Gil's famous temper, coupled with his enormous physique, earned him
an appropriate, if predictable name, the Hulk.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
People were afraid of Gil. He was very aggressive and
he was a bully.
Speaker 6 (12:08):
I knew from the beginning, like, this is not a
guy that you want to piss off. He's just not
I knew that within the first couple of days and
knowing the.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Guy at first glance. Burt and Gill were a couple
of older bodybuilders mentoring young guys and drumming up attention
for their business, which included sponsoring young bodybuilders like Dave
Farsano in local competitions.
Speaker 5 (12:32):
So when I went to Apollo Gym, they immediately took
me under their wing and they gave me free membership.
I didn't even have to pay. They gave me free
supplements and clothing. Because I was representing the gym and
I was winning pretty much everything, they gave me the
keys and we formed a team of bodybuilders, and Gil
and Bert were best friends, and Bert was my training partner.
(12:55):
When I won the Mister Florida, we all went and
Mister Florida together as a team.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
These competitions were pretty low stakes, prize money in the hundreds,
not thousands. It was all about the bragging rights, and
the guys from the Apollo Gym were in it to
win it.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
Billy didn't compete, but there was Guild Fernanders who was competing.
There was Tommy Felts who was competing. There was Bert
Christie who was competing.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
There was me a bunch of other guys.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
Now Billy wasn't part of that because he didn't compete,
but Billy was in the gym all the time training.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
And by Billy he means Billy Halpern, who a short
time later would end up dead, his throat slashed from
ear to ear. Tommy Felts he was murdered too, but
we'll get to that. And while on the surface, Christy
and Fernandez appeared to be running a first class gym,
(13:53):
there were rumors that the ex cop and the former
mister Florida were doing more than just mentoring young muscle.
Speaker 6 (14:02):
Like I would be in the gym sometimes and Gil
would be there with me, and Bert would show up.
Might be the middle of the afternoon while it's quiet,
there not a lot of people around, and they would
go out front and they would do a walk and
talk and they would walk up and down the plaza
the whole length of the plaza, the whole way back,
(14:22):
and then just keep turning around doing laps until they
were done with their conversation. And then they would come
back in the gym. So that was like an everyday occurrence.
That was street smart enough to know that when I
see certain things, I don't need anybody to tap me
on the shoulder and say, hey, this is what's happening.
I just put two and two together and I'm like, Okay,
this is what's up.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Dave Fasano had also heard the stories about Gil and Burt.
Speaker 5 (14:49):
So there was always rumors around the gym, and I
always thought it was people. People talk, and people think
they're cool when they talk. And I'm from New York
and I never thought it was cool when people sat, Oh,
my father's in the mafia or my uncle.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
And this they wear like a badge bond.
Speaker 5 (15:08):
There was rumors circulating in the gym all the time
that Bert and Dial were somehow connected and they were
drug dealers and they were bad people. But I never
believed it. I always thought it was just talk, you know.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
But the truth was that the Apollo Gym was not
just a clubhouse for like minded gym rats. The Apollo
Gym was a front for some of the most ruthless
criminals in South Florida.
Speaker 6 (15:34):
And there was a lot of craziness in the place.
And of course not when you first walk in and
see it from the surface, but won't just spend time
around the place and realize kind of what's going on
beneath the surface. It wasn't just a gym. It was
a criminal enterprise.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
The more Danny and I learned about the Apollo, the
more we were convinced that the truth behind Billy Halpern's
murder was hidden somewhere behind its doors and its many secrets.
But to better understand how a bodybuilding gym could double
as a headquarters for a criminal operation, we have to
(16:20):
go back a few years. Mark Lopez is a New
Jersey native, and he was able to give us a
little history lesson on the origins of the South Florida
criminal underground and how the mob came to Miami.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
The town that I grew up in is called South Amboy.
It's a little town right across from Staten Island, and
my family on both sides, my mother's side and my
dad's side, were both in the bar business. The house
that I grew up in was a normal ranch style
home in a residential zone in town. But when I
(17:02):
grew up there, the basement, the whole basement of the
house was a nightclub. A lounge was my dad's lounge
called the Hideaway, which at the time was, you know,
the most hop and spot in town.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Upstairs, Mark lived with his parents, four sisters, and his grandmother.
But downstairs the family speak easy attracted a colorful cast of.
Speaker 6 (17:27):
Characters, bikers, hell's angels, mob guys, you know, just miscellaneous craziness.
But my dad ran a very tight ship there, like
he didn't put up in any nonsense and if you
acted up, you were going to go out the front
door head first.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
But it wasn't just live music and booze flowing out
of the basement.
Speaker 6 (17:50):
My dad was in the cannabis smuggling business, like a
lot of guys were in those days, and you know,
guys were bringing in product from Mexico, from Columbia. At
that time, it was you know, it's cannabis is not
look the way it is today. It was very taboo
and if you were caught, you were going to get
probably some type of draconian sentence.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Safe to say that Mark was exposed to the inner
workings of the criminal underworld at a very early age.
Speaker 6 (18:20):
You know where I grew up, I know, knew guys
from the time I was in my early to mid
teens that were guys that what I would call, you know,
young and up and coming wanna be gangsters, right, And
they were guys that were from my neck of the
woods or Staten Island or Brooklyn. And these guys from
the time that they're like fifteen years old were out
(18:41):
committing crimes, selling drugs, doing collections. When they got in
their late teens, they were robbing banks, they were doing
home invasions, they were trying to impress the powers that be.
So they were brazen, and so I saw a side
of I guess adulthood at that point that I realized
that it's not all pieces and cream, Like there's some
(19:04):
rough stuff that you're going to encounter. And I was
always smart enough to keep my distance away from guys
that were just out of control. So, you know, before
I came to Florida, which was at nineteen, I had
already been exposed to a pretty rough element.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
But it was that experience and a few points from
his dad that would give him such a unique perspective
on the goings on in South Florida, or what he
called the life my dad.
Speaker 6 (19:36):
He would tell me my entire life, like, if you're
ever going to do anything illegal, you want to be invisible.
You want to blend into the background. You want to
look like an upstanding member of society. You want to
make sure you have the legitimate business running parallel to
your illegitimate business to show that you have legitimate income.
(20:00):
Don't drive a flashy car, don't wear flashy jewelry. You know,
the common mistakes that guys tied up in that element,
you know, get taken down from eventually, right.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Mark's family would eventually move to South Florida in the
mid nineteen eighties, opening the Steakhouse in the Hollywood Beach Hotel,
about twenty miles outside of Miami, which at that time
was already a playground and profit center for the organized
crime families from up north.
Speaker 6 (20:33):
Almost directly across the street from the Hollywood Beach Hotel
at the time was the Gold Coast Restaurant, which was
the most mobbed up joint in South Florida. I tell people,
like when you see that scene in Goodfellas where they
kind of tore you through the bar showing you all
the cast of characters, the Gold Coast on a Friday
or Saturday night in December or January back in the
(20:55):
day was exactly like that. I mean, they're all, you know,
mob guys from New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, New England, Chicago, Cleveland,
from all over the country. So it was kind of
like a mutual meeting ground, if you will, And there
was a lot of business done there all types of business.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
And along with some mafia specialties like bookmaking, prostitution, and extortion,
South Florida was becoming a hub for the most profitable
business of all.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
You know at South Florida, right, and at that time
it was kind of the cocaine cowboys era, if you will.
When I came here, I would say that, without exaggerating,
most of the guys that I met, probably seventy five
percent of them were in the cocaine business on some level.
You know, you'll hear frequently when mob guys are interviewed that, oh,
(21:51):
we don't sell drugs, it's against our rules to sell drugs. Well,
that might be against the rules, but most of them
are doing it.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
But of course this isn't just a movie. And along
with the crime and the drugs came the potential.
Speaker 6 (22:06):
For violence because you didn't just have the mob, right
in different factions of the mob, different families of the mob,
but you had cartel guys. And some of these guys
were scary too, because you know, all they know how
to do really is killed.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Not that Mark needed much help, by the way, a protection.
At nineteen, the aspiring bodybuilder was already pushing two hundred
and forty pounds of pure muscle.
Speaker 6 (22:35):
So you know, most guys really didn't want to mess
with me, just because I wasn't a small guy and
I was only a young kid. But I was full
of piss and vinegar, and at the time, I was
using steroids, and that doesn't help the matter, because you know,
you're basically pumping artificial testosterone into your body, and at
nineteen you're already really at peak levels naturally, So I
(22:57):
was probably at ten fifteen, twenty times a distosterone of
a natural guy my age, and that makes you very aggressive,
and you know, when you're big in ornery and kind
of have my background, you know, in that situation, I
probably wasn't the right guy who antagonized.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Which is probably why when he walked into Burton Gill's
stripped down shrine to piss in vinegar, the Apollo, Jim
Mark felt right at home, and for someone who had
grown up in the life, it was no secret that
its owners were in on the action.
Speaker 6 (23:35):
When those two were together, they were like John Gottie
and Sammy the Bull.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
He had a particularly memorable first encounter with Gil Fernandez.
Speaker 6 (23:47):
So he walks out of the aerobics room to the
men's room, which goes right in front of me where
I'm sitting behind the front desk. And you know, he's
a big, scary looking guy, you know, tat it up.
He's wearing a tank top. The first impression to me
in my mind was that guy is a fucking gangster.
(24:09):
He says, well, what the fuck is the matter with you?
He says, don't don't you ever check the fucking ben's room?
And I said, what are you talking about? I said,
I just cleaned the whole men's room a half hour ago.
So he said, well, somebody's got the goddamn toilet clogged.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Okay, a little warning here if you have a weak's stomach,
you might want to brace yourself for the next part.
Speaker 6 (24:30):
And it's almost filled to the top.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
It's almost overflowing.
Speaker 6 (24:34):
So he, without hesitation, kneels down in front of the
ball and jams his whole you know, arm up to
past his elbow into the bowl and he is reaching
around down there trying to see what's clogged.
Speaker 7 (24:48):
And then he looks at me and he says, now
you owe me one. And I said to myself, well,
what the hell just happened? I've been here for three hours,
I'm already into this maniac for a favor, you know.
Speaker 6 (25:00):
So that was my introduction to Gil.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
Right.
Speaker 6 (25:04):
It made an impression on me, like this guy's a
little nuts, right, Like.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
A lot of the guys that hung out at the Apollo.
Mark was there every day, and over that time he
heard some things and he saw some things.
Speaker 6 (25:22):
And it's just exposure over time that you kind of
see these little things and you start putting two and
two together. You know, it doesn't take long for somebody
that street smart to kind of figure out the big picture.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
And part of that big picture involved drugs. For one, steroids.
Speaker 6 (25:41):
I know Gil was selling steroids as well as I was.
It was you have to remember too, at that time.
I think the Antebout the Control Act passed in eighty eight,
so up until that point it wasn't even in controlled substance,
so getting it selling it was very commonplace. We saw
to everybody, including the local cops.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
And this being the go go eighties, there was also
a fair share of marijuana and cocaine moving through the Apollo.
But apparently an ex cop provided great protection against too
much scrutiny from local law enforcement.
Speaker 6 (26:19):
A lot of the local cops the Hollywood cops, the
Davy cops. They were friendly with them, right. I mean
they were scared of them, don't get me wrong, but
they were friendly with him.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
And Mark should know. He was Gill's partner pushing steroids
and other drugs to customers at the Apollo.
Speaker 6 (26:38):
So we didn't really fear law enforcement. I can remember
getting stopped on a traffic stop one time, having my
gym bag and the car and it was.
Speaker 4 (26:47):
Open and the cop had flight was at night.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
He stuck his flashlight in and saw that I had
some vials in there, and he said, watch in your bag,
and I showed him up was in there. He said, yeah, okay,
no problem. So I didn't say thing to me about it.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
But as you might imagine, selling steroids out of the
trunk of their cars was not the only stream of
illicit revenue. Some members of the Apollos team of star
bodybuilders were moonlighting as local muscle.
Speaker 6 (27:17):
Those guys, under the direction of Bert Christie, they were
doing shakedowns. It was well known a.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Shakedown for the uninitiated is another word for extortion, an
activity especially suited to men of a particular size and temperament.
Speaker 6 (27:37):
They were basically going to guys that were, you know,
in the drug business generally just you know, little crews
that banded together that were selling drugs, smuggling drugs, and
these guys knew that they could go step on their
neck more or less by saying, hey, listen, you're going
to pay us. You're going to pay us, or we're
going to kill you.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
And apparently Bert's crew wasn't afraid to make good on
their threats.
Speaker 6 (28:06):
If you didn't pay, like they were clicked to, you know,
shoot up your house, beat you down, like whatever it
took to make that impression like we're enough fucking around here,
like give me the money or you're going to end
up dead. They knew what their strong points were, which
was they were true muscle right, they were big, scary
(28:29):
guys that weren't afraid to be violent. Bert was like
the Batman villain, sending his goons out on the city
to wreck havoc.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Which begs a serious question. Could Billy Halpern have been
a target of one of Burt Christie's extortion crews or
was this all just a bunch of rumors.
Speaker 5 (28:52):
There was always talk about them being some type of
organized crime ring and that Burt was the head of
the crime.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
He was like the godfather.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
There was always talk about that in the gym, and
again I always thought it was bullshit until the end
when I realized it was all true.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Mark Lopez worked at the Apollo Gym, reporting directly to
its owners, Bert Christie and Gil Fernandez.
Speaker 6 (29:21):
I saw Bert basically every day, and that's because he
was around Gil Fernandez, who I saw every day. Bert
at the time, I'm guessing was probably in his early
fifties and he had had some issues with I don't
know if it was colitis or what it was, but
he had part of his culin removes who had a
colostomy bag.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
But colitis or not. Christie's reputation as a mafia tough
guy and a bag man preceded him.
Speaker 6 (29:50):
Bert was basically muscle for hire for many years for
the mob. But after he got sick, he couldn't do
the heavy work anymore. He couldn't do the beatdowns and
some of the other stuff he wented done when he
was younger and healthy. So to me, Gil became his sword.
I think he nurtured Gil when he met him when
he was younger and a cop and said, this guy
(30:12):
is going to be my tool.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
We heard the same thing from multiple people that either
worked for or worked out at the Apollo Gym that
its owners, Bert Christie and Gil Fernandez were suspected of
using cruise of young muscle to run a protection racket
in and around Hollywood Beach. So is it plausible that
Billy Halbert, someone that worked out alongside Bert and Gil
(30:38):
and all of the other guys at the Apollo, could
have found himself the target of one of Bert and
Gil's shakedown cruise and could that really be the motive
behind his brutal murder. It's possible, but Mark Lopez is skeptical.
Speaker 6 (30:54):
I know when he was killed that you know, I
created credit up war because he was well liked. I
knew that and just was a guy that I don't
think anybody thought was tied up. And you know, a
lot of craziness, right, It was like somebody came there
and essentially ambushed him in his own home and killed him,
(31:15):
and like he didn't fit the mold.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
In other words, as far as anyone knew, Billy was
not known to be in the life.
Speaker 6 (31:26):
It was obviously some type of gangland style killing, right.
I don't think anybody thought that Billy was dealing drugs,
So I think it was just shocked for most people,
like why would anybody kill this guy? The people that
I knew that I talked to were just like, who
would kill Billy?
Speaker 2 (31:46):
But Dave Fasano was also close to Burtngil and was
part of the Apollo in a circle. He has a
theory of his own that Billy might have run a
foul of one of those other small crews that were
dealing drugs around South Florida.
Speaker 5 (32:04):
The story I was told from the gym people talking
like why would they kill Billy?
Speaker 4 (32:09):
Why would they kill Billy?
Speaker 5 (32:11):
And the rumor that circulated again it's all here said
was that Billy had the best coke and that they
couldn't compete, that he had.
Speaker 4 (32:19):
The best coke around. That's the stories that circulated that
I heard.
Speaker 5 (32:25):
I never heard anything that it's because he was talking
about them. The story I heard was that he had
his coke was so good that they wanted to take
him out because he was in their territory.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Now, as a reminder, no drugs were ever found at
Billy's home, and most people we talked to did not
believe Billy was involved in the drug trade at all,
but his girlfriend did tell police that the contents of
the safe had been stolen from their town home. Could
a stash of drugs have been the target of a
fatal robbery? According to the forty year old police report,
(33:02):
as Danny reminded me, it was a lead police were
running down in the aftermath of his murder.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
There was mentioned in the lead detective Bell Rose's report
about home invasion crews that were hitting people and ripping
them for drugs, and there was mentioned about they thought
that Halpern came into a large quantity of cocaine and
(33:31):
they were going to rip him for that.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
But after interviewing so many friends of Billy and getting
to know the players in this scene, I just can't
see Billy Halpert as being the kind of person that
would have been moving the kind of weight that would
attract that kind of attention. For one thing, where would
he have gotten the money? Even in the eighties, it
(33:55):
took a bit of upfront investment to acquire a significant
amount of cocaine. Billy was making a little over minimum
wage as a paramedic for the Hollandale Fire Department, and
after he heard his back on the job he was
living on far less.
Speaker 6 (34:11):
I think Billy, like I said, just he never seemed
like the type of guy to me that would be
tied up in that kind of life, even on the
drug dealing side.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
But he certainly was exposed to it, which does raise
another possibility.
Speaker 6 (34:30):
I don't think Billy was necessarily tied up in anything specifically.
I think he may have just inadvertently been exposed to
some information that probably got him killed, right because somebody
thought that, hey, he may have been told something, or
whether it was secondhand information, or maybe he had overheard something,
(34:52):
and the powers that be thought, why take a chance, right,
It's just one more guy that's going to need to go.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
But what could Billy have known that might have put
his life at risk? Was it something about Christie or
Gil Fernandez? Or did it even go deeper than that
and deadlier?
Speaker 6 (35:16):
Maybe nine months or so after I moved to Florida,
there was a series of murders.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
They were out in the Everglade and their fingers were
chopped off.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
It was getting really dark.
Speaker 6 (35:27):
The three men would line we gagged and driven to
Jones Fish Camp.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Way out in the Everglade.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
One by one they were shot.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
In nineteen eighty three, three years before Billy was killed,
the bodies of three men were found on what was
the swampy Florida backstreet called Angel Road, and the main
suspect in those murders none other than the meanest cop
in Miami, Gil Fernandez. Could those killings be the key
(35:55):
to solving Billy's murder?
Speaker 3 (35:56):
And it's almost incestuous that everyone knew each other, everyone together,
and then ultimately almost vere was.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Killed cold blooded. The Apollo Jim Murders is a production
of iHeart Podcasts and Authentic Wave Media. Scott Weinberger, Kevin Bennett,
and Walker LeMond are executive producers. Sabrina Siree is our
(36:26):
line producer, scoring sound design and mixing by Mark lamar
j Z For iHeart Podcasts, Christina Everett is executive producer,
and David Wasserman is brand marketing manager. And with special
thanks to the Miramar Police Department, Chief del Rich Moss,
(36:46):
Pio Tanya Ardaz, and Detective Susie Smith.
All right, March from the second twenty twenty three, literally
twelve o'clock on the dot, I have taken that long
drive to f Daly, Orlando Lab. Start the clock on
this process of trying to solve the case through science.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
In October of nineteen eighty six, the body of twenty
eight year old Billy Halpern was discovered in his town
home in Miramar, Florida. Billy, who was a bodybuilder and
former firefighter, had been bound with electrical tape before being
strangled and nearly decapitated in what appeared to be a
brutal and bloody execution style murder. With no witnesses, no leads,
(00:56):
and little forensic evidence left at the scene, Billy's murder
went unsolved for months, but then there were four more
slayings in the span of eight days. Twenty six year
old Mitch Hall had gone to high school with Billy
Hawburn and was also a competitive bodybuilder. He and his
(01:22):
living girlfriend, twenty three year old shar Linda, were found
inside their town home just twenty minutes away, with their
throats slashed in a scene eerily similar to Billy's. A
week later, another fellow bodybuild a friend of Billy's named
Jimmy Hinoe, along with a man identified as a New
(01:42):
Jersey resident, Harry Collier, were found murdered in nearby Pembroke Pines,
each shot once in the back of the head, five
execution style homicides in less than eight months. Hectives from
Miramar and the Brower County Sheriff's Office were convinced they
(02:04):
were all connected. Not only did Billy, Mitch, and Jimmy
all know each other, they were all bodybuilders. They worked
out together, competed together, and police suspected were involved in
something that got them all killed was a drugs a
string of robberies. Police didn't know, but one thing had
(02:27):
become clear. The motive behind the killing spree, and more importantly,
who was behind it, would likely be found in one
place that Billy and the other victims had in common,
a bodybuilding mecca in Hollywood Beach called the Apollo Gym.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
It's difficult enough to go back in time and try
to investigate it one particular case, but if there's an
association with another homicide, I'm essentially working two homicide cases.
And then if that branches off to a third homicide,
now I've got that much more work to do, so
I think the complexity of this case is unique, and
(03:11):
I've actually never heard of any other cold case that
has this many complexities.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff, and
this is cold blooded. The Apollo Jim murders. Nearly forty
years after his murder, cold case Detective Danny Smith and
(03:38):
I knew that tracking down people that knew Billy Hauburn
and could shed light on why he was killed would
not be an easy task. But Billy's sister Laurie was
able to provide us with a couple of names of
friends that were still living in South Florida.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
I don't know. I wasn't.
Speaker 5 (04:02):
I was wondering when I was going to hear something
from somebody.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Yeah, it's been a long time and lots of answers
had not come fair to.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
Say, yeah, well, there's a lot of unsolved murders that
I think are all tied to the same people.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Day Fasano met Billy Hauburn when he was still a teenager,
it was clear from the beginning that the two aspiring
bodybuilders were cut from the same cloth, or more accurately,
from the same piece of granite.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
I was a bodybuilder and a competitive bodybuilder. I won
Mister Teenage Florida, Mister America third Place, Mister Hollywood, Mister
brit like a bunch of titles. I was a hardcore
teenage bodybuilder that was doing very well. Billy was a
little older than me, and he was bigger than me
(04:57):
and my friends that were teenagers that were starting out,
and we kind of became good friends with.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Billion Fasano is now in his early sixties, and while
he might not be as big as he was when
he was competing, he's still in great shape. He sports
a Goals Jym T shirt, a pair of flip flops,
and a deep South Florida tan. I ventured to guests
is year round.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Billy and I became very good friends.
Speaker 5 (05:26):
And we would go out and we would go He
would come to the swimming pool every day, hung out.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
With me, and then we went out a couple times.
Speaker 5 (05:33):
We'd go out partying together and picking up girls and
doing bodybuilding and partying basically is what we did.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Dave also reiterated something I had heard from more than
one person who knew Billy Hoppurn that despite looking like
a TV action hero who could take anyone out two
at a time. He was just really a nice guy.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
I mean, he'd give you the shirt up his back,
and he was handsome, and he had charisma, he was
good looking, he was built.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
He was just a nice, humble guy.
Speaker 5 (06:09):
And him and a bunch of the other guys we
kind of looked up to them, and they kind of
mentored us a little bit, and then we ended up
all ended up at Apollo Gym.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
In the end.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Bodybuilding and keeping fit was something of an obsession in
South Florida in the nineteen eighties. I was a young
deputy sheriff from Browere County back then, and it seemed
like new gyms were opening on every corner. But in
nineteen eighty six, for the serious muscleheads, there was really
just one place to go, a hole in the wall
(06:45):
on Route four forty one near the Seminole Indian Reservation.
It was called the Apollo Gym.
Speaker 5 (06:53):
When we went into Apollo Gym, it was the best
gym around and it had all the best bodybuilders.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Billy's friend Mark Lopez also worked out at the Apollo
and described it to me as a no frills, concrete
box dedicated to painting game.
Speaker 6 (07:14):
The Apollo was very unusual because it was a hardcore gym.
I try to tell people today, it's not like walking
into an La Fitness today.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
You know.
Speaker 6 (07:26):
It was very dungeon esque. The air conditioner wasn't always
working great in the place, The ceilings leaked, the equipment
a lot of it, you know, needed maintenance.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
Or was broken.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Safe to say, this was not a place for the
casual weekend warrior.
Speaker 6 (07:46):
There was a reputation about the place, and it was
if you were a little skittish, it wasn't the place
that you were going to go because you never knew
what was gonna happen there, like you know, fights in
the gym that ice, scrap and write in the gym.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
I also got the feeling from Dave and Mark that
kind of like the rest of South Florida, the Apollo
was in anything goes kind of place. How prevalent was
story t at the Jim that you remember.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
All over the place.
Speaker 5 (08:19):
You'd walk in the bathroom, you look in the trash
cannon be filled with syringes. You could buy anything you wanted,
and back then you didn't go to jail for you
could walk into gym'sa I need some testosterone.
Speaker 4 (08:28):
People would talk about it, Bam, you have it in
a week.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Along with the serious bodybuilders like David Mark, the Apollo
also attracted cops, firefighters, and a fair share of guys
who were probably using their bulk for less law abiding purposes.
I'm talking about the dealers, the hustlers, and the low
level gangsters that occupied the same South Florida streets and
(08:55):
at the Apollo the same bench presses as local law.
Speaker 6 (08:59):
Enforcement at that time the Apollo, there are several Hollywood
cops that were members there, you know, generally the local cops,
the Hollywood cops, the Davy cops that I knew, they
knew the element that hung out there, and that they
were kind of outnumbered good guys the bad guys, so
to speak. So there was a lot of fear from
(09:20):
local law enforcement about the element there. I saw that firsthand.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
But there was kind of a don't ask, don't tell
policy at the Apollo, creating an environment where cops and
crooks could share a safe space to push iron. But
as we will learn, that would ultimately prove to be
a volatile and dangerous mix. The Apollogym had two owners
(09:53):
Bert Christy was originally from New Jersey and had moved
to Fort Lauderdale in the late nineteen sixties. Christy was
a former Mister Florida who in his fifties had become
kind of a mentor to young bodybuilders. This is Mark
Lopez describing Bert Christie.
Speaker 6 (10:14):
Bert at the time, I'm guessing was probably in his
early fifties. Not a big guy. Bert probably stood I'm
guessing about five to nine. And you know, it was
kind of a not a flashy guy, like not a
guy that was loud and brash or anything like that.
Pretty soft spoken. But you know, even though he wasn't
(10:35):
like a big scary looking guy, he probably wasn't the
guy you want to piss off.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Bert Christie's partner was a former Miami Dade Police officer
by the name of Gil Fernandez.
Speaker 6 (10:49):
When I first met Gil, I had no idea he
was a former cop, right, I didn't know anything about it.
I just know him some guy in the gym that
worked in the same gym I did.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
And you know, he's a.
Speaker 6 (11:00):
Big, scary looking guy with his physique and the tats
and the New York accent, and like I said, Gills's
voice was like a combination of West Side New York
with cut gravel, and when he walked in the room,
he got your attention, believe me, one way or the other.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
At one time, then officer Fernandez had been singled out
by the local paper from multiple complaints of excessive.
Speaker 6 (11:28):
Violence during the McDuffie riots. He basically built a reputation
there as Miami's meanest cop. And you know, I'm sure
the steroids didn't help.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
A Fasano was also well aware of Gil's reputation.
Speaker 5 (11:45):
I knew he was a cop, and I heard he
was a racist cop, and that he was a bad cop.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
That's what I heard.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Gil's famous temper, coupled with his enormous physique, earned him
an appropriate, if predictable name, the Hulk.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
People were afraid of Gil. He was very aggressive and
he was a bully.
Speaker 6 (12:08):
I knew from the beginning, like, this is not a
guy that you want to piss off. He's just not
I knew that within the first couple of days and
knowing the.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Guy at first glance. Burt and Gill were a couple
of older bodybuilders mentoring young guys and drumming up attention
for their business, which included sponsoring young bodybuilders like Dave
Farsano in local competitions.
Speaker 5 (12:32):
So when I went to Apollo Gym, they immediately took
me under their wing and they gave me free membership.
I didn't even have to pay. They gave me free
supplements and clothing. Because I was representing the gym and
I was winning pretty much everything, they gave me the
keys and we formed a team of bodybuilders, and Gil
and Bert were best friends, and Bert was my training partner.
(12:55):
When I won the Mister Florida, we all went and
Mister Florida together as a team.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
These competitions were pretty low stakes, prize money in the hundreds,
not thousands. It was all about the bragging rights, and
the guys from the Apollo Gym were in it to
win it.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
Billy didn't compete, but there was Guild Fernanders who was competing.
There was Tommy Felts who was competing. There was Bert
Christie who was competing.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
There was me a bunch of other guys.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
Now Billy wasn't part of that because he didn't compete,
but Billy was in the gym all the time training.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
And by Billy he means Billy Halpern, who a short
time later would end up dead, his throat slashed from
ear to ear. Tommy Felts he was murdered too, but
we'll get to that. And while on the surface, Christy
and Fernandez appeared to be running a first class gym,
(13:53):
there were rumors that the ex cop and the former
mister Florida were doing more than just mentoring young muscle.
Speaker 6 (14:02):
Like I would be in the gym sometimes and Gil
would be there with me, and Bert would show up.
Might be the middle of the afternoon while it's quiet,
there not a lot of people around, and they would
go out front and they would do a walk and
talk and they would walk up and down the plaza
the whole length of the plaza, the whole way back,
(14:22):
and then just keep turning around doing laps until they
were done with their conversation. And then they would come
back in the gym. So that was like an everyday occurrence.
That was street smart enough to know that when I
see certain things, I don't need anybody to tap me
on the shoulder and say, hey, this is what's happening.
I just put two and two together and I'm like, Okay,
this is what's up.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Dave Fasano had also heard the stories about Gil and Burt.
Speaker 5 (14:49):
So there was always rumors around the gym, and I
always thought it was people. People talk, and people think
they're cool when they talk. And I'm from New York
and I never thought it was cool when people sat, Oh,
my father's in the mafia or my uncle.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
And this they wear like a badge bond.
Speaker 5 (15:08):
There was rumors circulating in the gym all the time
that Bert and Dial were somehow connected and they were
drug dealers and they were bad people. But I never
believed it. I always thought it was just talk, you know.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
But the truth was that the Apollo Gym was not
just a clubhouse for like minded gym rats. The Apollo
Gym was a front for some of the most ruthless
criminals in South Florida.
Speaker 6 (15:34):
And there was a lot of craziness in the place.
And of course not when you first walk in and
see it from the surface, but won't just spend time
around the place and realize kind of what's going on
beneath the surface. It wasn't just a gym. It was
a criminal enterprise.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
The more Danny and I learned about the Apollo, the
more we were convinced that the truth behind Billy Halpern's
murder was hidden somewhere behind its doors and its many secrets.
But to better understand how a bodybuilding gym could double
as a headquarters for a criminal operation, we have to
(16:20):
go back a few years. Mark Lopez is a New
Jersey native, and he was able to give us a
little history lesson on the origins of the South Florida
criminal underground and how the mob came to Miami.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
The town that I grew up in is called South Amboy.
It's a little town right across from Staten Island, and
my family on both sides, my mother's side and my
dad's side, were both in the bar business. The house
that I grew up in was a normal ranch style
home in a residential zone in town. But when I
(17:02):
grew up there, the basement, the whole basement of the
house was a nightclub. A lounge was my dad's lounge
called the Hideaway, which at the time was, you know,
the most hop and spot in town.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Upstairs, Mark lived with his parents, four sisters, and his grandmother.
But downstairs the family speak easy attracted a colorful cast of.
Speaker 6 (17:27):
Characters, bikers, hell's angels, mob guys, you know, just miscellaneous craziness.
But my dad ran a very tight ship there, like
he didn't put up in any nonsense and if you
acted up, you were going to go out the front
door head first.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
But it wasn't just live music and booze flowing out
of the basement.
Speaker 6 (17:50):
My dad was in the cannabis smuggling business, like a
lot of guys were in those days, and you know,
guys were bringing in product from Mexico, from Columbia. At
that time, it was you know, it's cannabis is not
look the way it is today. It was very taboo
and if you were caught, you were going to get
probably some type of draconian sentence.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Safe to say that Mark was exposed to the inner
workings of the criminal underworld at a very early age.
Speaker 6 (18:20):
You know where I grew up, I know, knew guys
from the time I was in my early to mid
teens that were guys that what I would call, you know,
young and up and coming wanna be gangsters, right, And
they were guys that were from my neck of the
woods or Staten Island or Brooklyn. And these guys from
the time that they're like fifteen years old were out
(18:41):
committing crimes, selling drugs, doing collections. When they got in
their late teens, they were robbing banks, they were doing
home invasions, they were trying to impress the powers that be.
So they were brazen, and so I saw a side
of I guess adulthood at that point that I realized
that it's not all pieces and cream, Like there's some
(19:04):
rough stuff that you're going to encounter. And I was
always smart enough to keep my distance away from guys
that were just out of control. So, you know, before
I came to Florida, which was at nineteen, I had
already been exposed to a pretty rough element.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
But it was that experience and a few points from
his dad that would give him such a unique perspective
on the goings on in South Florida, or what he
called the life my dad.
Speaker 6 (19:36):
He would tell me my entire life, like, if you're
ever going to do anything illegal, you want to be invisible.
You want to blend into the background. You want to
look like an upstanding member of society. You want to
make sure you have the legitimate business running parallel to
your illegitimate business to show that you have legitimate income.
(20:00):
Don't drive a flashy car, don't wear flashy jewelry. You know,
the common mistakes that guys tied up in that element,
you know, get taken down from eventually, right.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Mark's family would eventually move to South Florida in the
mid nineteen eighties, opening the Steakhouse in the Hollywood Beach Hotel,
about twenty miles outside of Miami, which at that time
was already a playground and profit center for the organized
crime families from up north.
Speaker 6 (20:33):
Almost directly across the street from the Hollywood Beach Hotel
at the time was the Gold Coast Restaurant, which was
the most mobbed up joint in South Florida. I tell people,
like when you see that scene in Goodfellas where they
kind of tore you through the bar showing you all
the cast of characters, the Gold Coast on a Friday
or Saturday night in December or January back in the
(20:55):
day was exactly like that. I mean, they're all, you know,
mob guys from New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, New England, Chicago, Cleveland,
from all over the country. So it was kind of
like a mutual meeting ground, if you will, And there
was a lot of business done there all types of business.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
And along with some mafia specialties like bookmaking, prostitution, and extortion,
South Florida was becoming a hub for the most profitable
business of all.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
You know at South Florida, right, and at that time
it was kind of the cocaine cowboys era, if you will.
When I came here, I would say that, without exaggerating,
most of the guys that I met, probably seventy five
percent of them were in the cocaine business on some level.
You know, you'll hear frequently when mob guys are interviewed that, oh,
(21:51):
we don't sell drugs, it's against our rules to sell drugs. Well,
that might be against the rules, but most of them
are doing it.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
But of course this isn't just a movie. And along
with the crime and the drugs came the potential.
Speaker 6 (22:06):
For violence because you didn't just have the mob, right
in different factions of the mob, different families of the mob,
but you had cartel guys. And some of these guys
were scary too, because you know, all they know how
to do really is killed.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Not that Mark needed much help, by the way, a protection.
At nineteen, the aspiring bodybuilder was already pushing two hundred
and forty pounds of pure muscle.
Speaker 6 (22:35):
So you know, most guys really didn't want to mess
with me, just because I wasn't a small guy and
I was only a young kid. But I was full
of piss and vinegar, and at the time, I was
using steroids, and that doesn't help the matter, because you know,
you're basically pumping artificial testosterone into your body, and at
nineteen you're already really at peak levels naturally, So I
(22:57):
was probably at ten fifteen, twenty times a distosterone of
a natural guy my age, and that makes you very aggressive,
and you know, when you're big in ornery and kind
of have my background, you know, in that situation, I
probably wasn't the right guy who antagonized.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Which is probably why when he walked into Burton Gill's
stripped down shrine to piss in vinegar, the Apollo, Jim
Mark felt right at home, and for someone who had
grown up in the life, it was no secret that
its owners were in on the action.
Speaker 6 (23:35):
When those two were together, they were like John Gottie
and Sammy the Bull.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
He had a particularly memorable first encounter with Gil Fernandez.
Speaker 6 (23:47):
So he walks out of the aerobics room to the
men's room, which goes right in front of me where
I'm sitting behind the front desk. And you know, he's
a big, scary looking guy, you know, tat it up.
He's wearing a tank top. The first impression to me
in my mind was that guy is a fucking gangster.
(24:09):
He says, well, what the fuck is the matter with you?
He says, don't don't you ever check the fucking ben's room?
And I said, what are you talking about? I said,
I just cleaned the whole men's room a half hour ago.
So he said, well, somebody's got the goddamn toilet clogged.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Okay, a little warning here if you have a weak's stomach,
you might want to brace yourself for the next part.
Speaker 6 (24:30):
And it's almost filled to the top.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
It's almost overflowing.
Speaker 6 (24:34):
So he, without hesitation, kneels down in front of the
ball and jams his whole you know, arm up to
past his elbow into the bowl and he is reaching
around down there trying to see what's clogged.
Speaker 7 (24:48):
And then he looks at me and he says, now
you owe me one. And I said to myself, well,
what the hell just happened? I've been here for three hours,
I'm already into this maniac for a favor, you know.
Speaker 6 (25:00):
So that was my introduction to Gil.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
Right.
Speaker 6 (25:04):
It made an impression on me, like this guy's a
little nuts, right, Like.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
A lot of the guys that hung out at the Apollo.
Mark was there every day, and over that time he
heard some things and he saw some things.
Speaker 6 (25:22):
And it's just exposure over time that you kind of
see these little things and you start putting two and
two together. You know, it doesn't take long for somebody
that street smart to kind of figure out the big picture.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
And part of that big picture involved drugs. For one, steroids.
Speaker 6 (25:41):
I know Gil was selling steroids as well as I was.
It was you have to remember too, at that time.
I think the Antebout the Control Act passed in eighty eight,
so up until that point it wasn't even in controlled substance,
so getting it selling it was very commonplace. We saw
to everybody, including the local cops.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
And this being the go go eighties, there was also
a fair share of marijuana and cocaine moving through the Apollo.
But apparently an ex cop provided great protection against too
much scrutiny from local law enforcement.
Speaker 6 (26:19):
A lot of the local cops the Hollywood cops, the
Davy cops. They were friendly with them, right. I mean
they were scared of them, don't get me wrong, but
they were friendly with him.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
And Mark should know. He was Gill's partner pushing steroids
and other drugs to customers at the Apollo.
Speaker 6 (26:38):
So we didn't really fear law enforcement. I can remember
getting stopped on a traffic stop one time, having my
gym bag and the car and it was.
Speaker 4 (26:47):
Open and the cop had flight was at night.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
He stuck his flashlight in and saw that I had
some vials in there, and he said, watch in your bag,
and I showed him up was in there. He said, yeah, okay,
no problem. So I didn't say thing to me about it.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
But as you might imagine, selling steroids out of the
trunk of their cars was not the only stream of
illicit revenue. Some members of the Apollos team of star
bodybuilders were moonlighting as local muscle.
Speaker 6 (27:17):
Those guys, under the direction of Bert Christie, they were
doing shakedowns. It was well known a.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Shakedown for the uninitiated is another word for extortion, an
activity especially suited to men of a particular size and temperament.
Speaker 6 (27:37):
They were basically going to guys that were, you know,
in the drug business generally just you know, little crews
that banded together that were selling drugs, smuggling drugs, and
these guys knew that they could go step on their
neck more or less by saying, hey, listen, you're going
to pay us. You're going to pay us, or we're
going to kill you.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
And apparently Bert's crew wasn't afraid to make good on
their threats.
Speaker 6 (28:06):
If you didn't pay, like they were clicked to, you know,
shoot up your house, beat you down, like whatever it
took to make that impression like we're enough fucking around here,
like give me the money or you're going to end
up dead. They knew what their strong points were, which
was they were true muscle right, they were big, scary
(28:29):
guys that weren't afraid to be violent. Bert was like
the Batman villain, sending his goons out on the city
to wreck havoc.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Which begs a serious question. Could Billy Halpern have been
a target of one of Burt Christie's extortion crews or
was this all just a bunch of rumors.
Speaker 5 (28:52):
There was always talk about them being some type of
organized crime ring and that Burt was the head of
the crime.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
He was like the godfather.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
There was always talk about that in the gym, and
again I always thought it was bullshit until the end
when I realized it was all true.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Mark Lopez worked at the Apollo Gym, reporting directly to
its owners, Bert Christie and Gil Fernandez.
Speaker 6 (29:21):
I saw Bert basically every day, and that's because he
was around Gil Fernandez, who I saw every day. Bert
at the time, I'm guessing was probably in his early
fifties and he had had some issues with I don't
know if it was colitis or what it was, but
he had part of his culin removes who had a
colostomy bag.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
But colitis or not. Christie's reputation as a mafia tough
guy and a bag man preceded him.
Speaker 6 (29:50):
Bert was basically muscle for hire for many years for
the mob. But after he got sick, he couldn't do
the heavy work anymore. He couldn't do the beatdowns and
some of the other stuff he wented done when he
was younger and healthy. So to me, Gil became his sword.
I think he nurtured Gil when he met him when
he was younger and a cop and said, this guy
(30:12):
is going to be my tool.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
We heard the same thing from multiple people that either
worked for or worked out at the Apollo Gym that
its owners, Bert Christie and Gil Fernandez were suspected of
using cruise of young muscle to run a protection racket
in and around Hollywood Beach. So is it plausible that
Billy Halbert, someone that worked out alongside Bert and Gil
(30:38):
and all of the other guys at the Apollo, could
have found himself the target of one of Bert and
Gil's shakedown cruise and could that really be the motive
behind his brutal murder. It's possible, but Mark Lopez is skeptical.
Speaker 6 (30:54):
I know when he was killed that you know, I
created credit up war because he was well liked. I
knew that and just was a guy that I don't
think anybody thought was tied up. And you know, a
lot of craziness, right, It was like somebody came there
and essentially ambushed him in his own home and killed him,
(31:15):
and like he didn't fit the mold.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
In other words, as far as anyone knew, Billy was
not known to be in the life.
Speaker 6 (31:26):
It was obviously some type of gangland style killing, right.
I don't think anybody thought that Billy was dealing drugs,
So I think it was just shocked for most people,
like why would anybody kill this guy? The people that
I knew that I talked to were just like, who
would kill Billy?
Speaker 2 (31:46):
But Dave Fasano was also close to Burtngil and was
part of the Apollo in a circle. He has a
theory of his own that Billy might have run a
foul of one of those other small crews that were
dealing drugs around South Florida.
Speaker 5 (32:04):
The story I was told from the gym people talking
like why would they kill Billy?
Speaker 4 (32:09):
Why would they kill Billy?
Speaker 5 (32:11):
And the rumor that circulated again it's all here said
was that Billy had the best coke and that they
couldn't compete, that he had.
Speaker 4 (32:19):
The best coke around. That's the stories that circulated that
I heard.
Speaker 5 (32:25):
I never heard anything that it's because he was talking
about them. The story I heard was that he had
his coke was so good that they wanted to take
him out because he was in their territory.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Now, as a reminder, no drugs were ever found at
Billy's home, and most people we talked to did not
believe Billy was involved in the drug trade at all,
but his girlfriend did tell police that the contents of
the safe had been stolen from their town home. Could
a stash of drugs have been the target of a
fatal robbery? According to the forty year old police report,
(33:02):
as Danny reminded me, it was a lead police were
running down in the aftermath of his murder.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
There was mentioned in the lead detective Bell Rose's report
about home invasion crews that were hitting people and ripping
them for drugs, and there was mentioned about they thought
that Halpern came into a large quantity of cocaine and
(33:31):
they were going to rip him for that.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
But after interviewing so many friends of Billy and getting
to know the players in this scene, I just can't
see Billy Halpert as being the kind of person that
would have been moving the kind of weight that would
attract that kind of attention. For one thing, where would
he have gotten the money? Even in the eighties, it
(33:55):
took a bit of upfront investment to acquire a significant
amount of cocaine. Billy was making a little over minimum
wage as a paramedic for the Hollandale Fire Department, and
after he heard his back on the job he was
living on far less.
Speaker 6 (34:11):
I think Billy, like I said, just he never seemed
like the type of guy to me that would be
tied up in that kind of life, even on the
drug dealing side.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
But he certainly was exposed to it, which does raise
another possibility.
Speaker 6 (34:30):
I don't think Billy was necessarily tied up in anything specifically.
I think he may have just inadvertently been exposed to
some information that probably got him killed, right because somebody
thought that, hey, he may have been told something, or
whether it was secondhand information, or maybe he had overheard something,
(34:52):
and the powers that be thought, why take a chance, right,
It's just one more guy that's going to need to go.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
But what could Billy have known that might have put
his life at risk? Was it something about Christie or
Gil Fernandez? Or did it even go deeper than that
and deadlier?
Speaker 6 (35:16):
Maybe nine months or so after I moved to Florida,
there was a series of murders.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
They were out in the Everglade and their fingers were
chopped off.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
It was getting really dark.
Speaker 6 (35:27):
The three men would line we gagged and driven to
Jones Fish Camp.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Way out in the Everglade.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
One by one they were shot.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
In nineteen eighty three, three years before Billy was killed,
the bodies of three men were found on what was
the swampy Florida backstreet called Angel Road, and the main
suspect in those murders none other than the meanest cop
in Miami, Gil Fernandez. Could those killings be the key
(35:55):
to solving Billy's murder?
Speaker 3 (35:56):
And it's almost incestuous that everyone knew each other, everyone together,
and then ultimately almost vere was.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Killed cold blooded. The Apollo Jim Murders is a production
of iHeart Podcasts and Authentic Wave Media. Scott Weinberger, Kevin Bennett,
and Walker LeMond are executive producers. Sabrina Siree is our
(36:26):
line producer, scoring sound design and mixing by Mark lamar
j Z For iHeart Podcasts, Christina Everett is executive producer,
and David Wasserman is brand marketing manager. And with special
thanks to the Miramar Police Department, Chief del Rich Moss,
(36:46):
Pio Tanya Ardaz, and Detective Susie Smith.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.