May 6, 2024 • 54 mins
Detective Smith meticulously examines the forensic evidence from Billy Halpern's murder, uncovering crucial details. Meanwhile, Scott discusses the case with the prosecutor of a previous multiple-murder incident on Danger Road, exploring potential links to their current investigation. Witnesses reveal the criminal undertakings of Bert Christie and Gil Fernandez, shedding light on their dark dealings.
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 (00:00):
Before we get started with today's episode, I just wanted
to give you a heads up that I will begin
to post photos from this case on my Instagram account
which is at Weinberger Media, including some of the most
crucial evidence which sat untested for decades now on to
today's episode.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Maybe nine months or so after I moved to Florida,
there was a series of murders.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That's the voice of Mark Lopez, a friend of Billy
Halburn's and an ex employee of the Apollo Jim.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I didn't know exactly what was going on, if they
were selling dope or they were doing shakedowns or whatever
they were doing, but suddenly people started to get killed,
and a lot of them were two murders at a time.
They were either shot in the back of the head
roats cut.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Mark is talking about the nineteen eighty six murder of
Billy Helper and as well as the eighty seven murders
of Billy's friend Mitch Hall, Mitch's girlfriend char Linda, and
two more fellow members of the Apollo Jimmy high Note
and Harry.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Collier, and the Common Thread amongst them, where they were
members of the Apollo Gym Right and some of these guys,
you know, pad ties to gil.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Five murders, but even more unanswered questions like why were
they killed? Were all of the murders connected, and if so,
who was behind them.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
My brother came to me and he said, Billy Helpern
died and I'm going to find out who killed him.
And I said, Mitch, don't can involve with those type
of people. And then six months later, May sixth is
when he was killed.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Scott Weinberger, investigator, journalist, and former deputy sheriff. And this
is cold blooded. The Apollo Gym murders. Back in May
of nineteen eighty seven, local investigators from the Miramar Police
(02:20):
Department and the Brier County Sheriff's Office had their hands full.
They were sitting on five execution style murders at three
different crime scenes, no suspects, and very few leads. What
physical evidence found at one of the crime scenes was
about to pay some very big dividends, with the potential
(02:44):
to break all three cases wide open. Investigators were able
to pull a single partial fingerprint from the electrical tape
found wrapped around Mitch Hall's wrists, and lo and behold,
that print was a match with one of the victims
found shot eight days later in Pembroke Pines, Harry Collier.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
I never knew very Gollier, but apparently his fingerprints were
on the tape.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
They found the Collier's prints on the tape for his girl.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yes, this was huge. The discovery of Collier's partial print
at the scene of the earlier murders seemed to be
irrefutable proof that Harry Collier was at least one of
the people responsible for killing Mitch Hall and his girlfriend
Tarltonda Drought.
Speaker 6 (03:41):
They came to my work, I remember I was working
at over there by the airport, Kay Realtive.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
That's Mitch's sister Kim, who remembers how Broward detectives delivered
the news that they were making headway in her brother's case.
Speaker 6 (04:00):
Were basically saying that because they believe Collier and they
believed Jimmy was there and they killed him, and now
they're both dead, so we're going to close his murder case.
I'm like, okay, you know what am I going to say?
They're both dead, But they still believed there was other
(04:20):
individuals involved.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
And given the similarities to the helping crime scene investigators
were eager to conclude that Collier was a strong person
of interest in Billy's murder, but obviously so many questions remained,
like why was Billy killed in the first place, what
was the motive? And who killed Jimmy high Note and
(04:45):
Harry Collier. Those were the questions that haunted this case
and that Danny Smith and I were determined to answer
because Detective Smith wasn't willing to let sleeping dogs lie.
Someone was behind the execution of five people and they
had gone unidentified, unpunished for nearly forty years. It was
(05:09):
time to bring that person to justice.
Speaker 5 (05:16):
International assist Kayla, can I help you?
Speaker 7 (05:18):
Hey?
Speaker 5 (05:18):
Kayla is Cassie and by chance, this is Danny Smith
from Mirmarpiti.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
In April of twenty twenty three, Detective Danny Smith reached
out to a private DNA lab located in Deerfield Beach, Florida,
to request testing on some of the physical evidence that
was collected in nineteen eighty six by the original investigators
of Billy Halpern's murder. The evidence that seemed to have
(05:48):
the most promising potential pieces of black electrical tape that
were found around each of Billy's wrists. They had been
stored in an evidence locker at the Baro Kenny Sheriff's
office for nearly forty years, and before now, they had
never been tested for evidence of DNA.
Speaker 5 (06:10):
The first moment that I realized that we may have
something here is when we were able to locate the
bindings from Billy Hawpern's wrist, the electrical tape. When that
was found in evidence, unmolested, sealed, everything was good to
go with that evidence. That was the first turning point
for me where I actually said to myself, we have
(06:32):
a shot here. This has never been tested before. We
have it, we have a lab that's willing to test it,
we have the money to test it. Let's get it done.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Danny's on the phone with Cassie, a case manager at
DNA Labs International.
Speaker 8 (06:48):
I also wanted to confirm who if.
Speaker 9 (06:53):
The tape is all kind.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Of like jumbled up and you.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Know, as pretty much, and isn't okay if we kind
of like trying to easily take apart when it happened.
Speaker 5 (07:02):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it needs to get tested and
you know, let's be honest, it's almost forty years old.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
We do we have to do when Billy's body was
discovered the ribbon of thick black electrical tape wrapped around
his wrists were actually torn in two, which should give
you an idea just how strong Billy was. The two
hundred plus pound bodybuilder had apparently broken free of his
(07:33):
makeshift handcuffs in the struggle to save his own life,
a struggle that tragically ended with his throat being slashed
from ear to ear. But before he died, Billy had
also managed to grab a fistful of hair, presumably from
one of his attackers here that was recovered from the
(07:55):
crime scene and also had the potential to help identify
his killer.
Speaker 5 (08:03):
And regarding the hair, do you want me to go
back and get it and drop it off to you guys?
Speaker 7 (08:07):
Or wait, I.
Speaker 9 (08:10):
Hold off the world why and longer?
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Okay, see what we get off of the and then
we can kind of go from there.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Danny was feeling confident that the DNA from the tape
or the hair might finally reveal who is responsible for
Billy's murder and answer a question that had dogged law
enforcement for years. Was it connected to one of their own?
Former Miami Dade Police officer Gil Fernandez.
Speaker 8 (08:39):
Well, what I've read about it was he was very violent,
and he was in internal affairs a lot that he
had a reputation for roughing up suspects. They seemed like
a very violent individual, and he was like that as
a law enforcement officer and continued to.
Speaker 7 (08:58):
Be that way.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
That's Cindy and Parrada. Cindy had started her law enforcement
career as a police officer before putting herself through law
school and eventually joining the statewide Prosecutor's office in Florida.
And there may be no one who knows more about
gil Fernandez and his career as both a cop and
(09:21):
a criminal, which makes sense since she's ultimately the one
responsible for putting him in jail, but we'll get to
that later. Gilbert Fernandez Junior was born and raised in
the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York, which in the
(09:43):
fifties and sixties was a rough and tumble neighborhood of
working class immigrants, Puerto Rican gangs, and the Irish mob.
Street violence was commonplace and often fatal. It's no wonder
why his parents moved the family to Florida when gil
was just a teenager. The Fernandez family settled in Dade County,
(10:06):
just outside of Miami. Gill Junior played a little football
in high school, but skipped college instead entering the police
academy and joining the Miami Dade Police Department as a
patrolman in nineteen seventy six. In photographs, Fernandez looked like
the part of a perfect cop, cropped black hair, a
(10:29):
chin sculpted from granite, and a six foot two hundred
and twenty pound frame that filled out his crisp blue uniform.
But over the next six years, Fernandez was dogged by
internal affairs and a growing list of brutality complaints. After
(10:49):
the race riots broke out in Miami in nineteen eighty
after the death of Arthur McDuffie at the hands of
white Miami Dade cops, Fernandez was singled out in the
press for his brutal tactics. The reporter dubbed Fernandez the
meanest cop in Miami. Guys that new Gil from the
gym said he reveled in the notoriety. Here's Mark Lopez.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
When I met Gil, I never got the cop vibe
from Gil. Like it almost still is crazy to me
to think about it, because I just can't really picture
him as a cop in my mind, because when I
met Gil. The first impression to me in my mind
was that guy is a fucking gangster, right Like, there
was no Hey, this guy is law enforcement.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
But his days in law enforcement were numbered. The brass
pulled him from his beat and banished him to the
property room. He turned in his badge in nineteen eighty three.
After quitting the force, he turned his full attention to
bodybuilding and found a new home at Them.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
I know, Gil didn't have really tons of money at
that time. I mean he was driving around like a
five or six year old Camaro that the air conditioning
didn't work. You know, he was always kind of scraping
for money. He started, really the first guy that I
ever knew of that started doing personal training, and he
was selling steroids as well.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
The Apollo became his refuge, and within months he had
added forty pounds of pure muscle. The steroids helped, but
they also made him irritable and short fused. Mark Lopez
witnessed Gil's notorious temper firsthand.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
I'm in the gym working out. Gil was there behind
the front desk, and there's a guy in the gym
working out, another body builder by the name of Frank.
It was a firefighter, but there's some type of verbal
beef and all I heard Frank say.
Speaker 7 (13:02):
Was, well, fuck you, Gil.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
He says, no fuck me, just no fuck you, and
Gil basically picks him up by the seat of the pants,
in the back of the sweatshirt and ramrods his head
right into the plate glass windows in the front of
the gym.
Speaker 7 (13:18):
And I mean he.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Hit his head so hard against the windows that I
swear that the concrete slab shook that day when he
did that, And like I thought that he killed them,
like his next broke. You know, it just he's done,
and everybody was just really silent, and when all that
was over, everybody just went back to their business and
their workout.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Gil eventually became a co owner of the apologym with
his mentor and former mister Florida, Bert Christie, who was
twenty years Gil.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Senior, and I think he nurtured that relationship with Gil
when Gil was younger and became almost like a father
figure at the Gil and you know, they had a
very close relationship for a long time.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Together. Bert and Gil trained a new crop of young bodybuilders,
and their motto, if you're going to be dumb, you
better be tough, but eventually their partnership would go far
beyond bodybuilding.
Speaker 8 (14:27):
And that was when Burt Christy came into the picture.
He was supposedly the organized crime connection.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Christy cut his teeth in racketeering by collecting debts for
Joey Flowers Rotano, who ran a gambling ring from a
string of flower shops in Browie County. According to one
federally protected witness, Christy may have also been responsible for
two contract killings in nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty two.
(14:58):
By the time he put Gil Fernandez under his wing,
he was putting together his own crew, hiring muscle straight
from the gym. It included Gil Fernandez and a handful
of local bodybuilders like Tommy Felts, Jimmy high Note, and
Harry Collier.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Gill and Tommy were the muscle, and Bert was basically
the guy given direction.
Speaker 8 (15:22):
I think that Burt trusted Gil but nobody else. So
he would go to Gil with potential targets, and then
Gil would get Tommy Felts or Collier, whoever it was,
to go with him to do the job.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
The work was simple but brutal. On Bert's direction, they
might shoot up a home of a local drug dealer
and then return to sell them protection under threat of
extreme violence. Another favorite scheme set up phony drug buys
with local dealers in order to steal their stash, money
(15:58):
or both.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
They were basically going to guys that Tommy Felts had
gone to high school when junior high school with in Hollywood,
that were guys now that were.
Speaker 7 (16:09):
You know, in the drug business.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Generally just you know, little crews that banded together that
were selling drugs, smuggling drugs.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
The drugs then flowed out of the Apollo gym with
impunity while Bert and Gil scoped out bigger and better scores.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
And they were doing that to a number of different
crews out there from all over the place.
Speaker 7 (16:33):
So you know, you're going to do that to the.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Wrong people and eventually somebody is going to come for you.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
In nineteen eighty five, Tommy Felts was first to fall
victim to a rival's violent retribution.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Eventually Felts, you know, did that to the wrong guy,
and they rolled up on him at a stop late
right at Stirling Road. I got a Sunday afternoon and
broad daylight and gunned them down.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
In nineteen eighty seven, Two more members of their crew,
Jimmy Heinot and Harry Collier, were also found dead, this
time with bullets to the back of the head. As
Mark Lopez remembers it, a rising body count was starting
to attract the wrong kind of attention.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
They started to notice that were, you know, a lot
of cop surveillance around the gym's right, And I didn't
know what it was initially at the time, and like
it could have been anybody, right, because there was one
hundred plus guys in the Jim DeLand dope. But then
when you start hearing about friends getting called in by
(17:42):
BSO and detectives spoking around asking questions, that's when you
kind of knew the shit had hit the fan.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
The BSO would be the brawer of Sheriff's office also
sniffing around the Apollo. The FBI.
Speaker 8 (18:02):
Defense were the ones that started the investigation because there
were all these homicides, all these drug ripoffs that were
in all different locations. But also I believe part of
their interest was because of Bert Christie's organized crime connections,
and I think that they were trying to make a
(18:24):
reco case against him.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
At that time, we knew that law enforcement was out
there poking around about Gil. They were starting to question
people that were close to him, including me, And when
it happened, I told Gil about it.
Speaker 7 (18:43):
I specifically told.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Him that BSO was trying to call me in and
that I said, listen, I said, I'm.
Speaker 7 (18:51):
Going to go in.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
I'm going on record with you now to tell you
I'm not saying nothing. I don't know nothing. And I said,
one word done, pawkin. I said, I'm gonna come right
back to you and tell you exactly what They asked, MA,
I'm gonna ta you exactly what I said.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Detectives were looking for someone willing to testify against Fernandez
and Christy.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I said, you guys honestly think that me or anybody
else like me is going to cooperate with you to
go after Gil Fernandez. I said, you're crazy, Like I'm
not that crazy. For one, I said, because if I
ever agreed to do something like that, you know my
(19:37):
fate is sealed.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
In other words, at the Apollo Jim, snitches get much
more than stitches. They might wind up dead. But as
the scrutiny from law enforcement increased, neither Gil nor Bert
were above doing a little polishing of their public image.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Well almost overnights, not just him, but him and Bert
Christie become born again Christians, okay, which is like a
black to white moment, right, And to me, I just
love from the surface this is a cleanup act, right.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
But given the litany of their past sins and victims,
there was little chance they could outrun their reputations.
Speaker 7 (20:25):
Bert just couldn't sell that act. He just couldn't, right,
He tried to, he couldn't.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
But according to Mark Gill's act was considerably more convincing.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Gil changed considerably and I didn't know if it was
an act or if it was genuine. He went off
all steroids, you know, so he lost a considerable amount
of size and weight.
Speaker 7 (20:52):
His attitude changed.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
He started putting pictures of Jesus or religious pictures in
the gym. He was going to church every week. And
I was again small enough never to ask is this
an act?
Speaker 1 (21:08):
But despite all the suspicions scrolling around him and his
potential involvement in multiple unsolved homicides, Jill Fernandez was never arrested,
never even brought in for questioning.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Do you have to realize something that people were very
afraid because you know, if he and he was the
one committing these murders. They knew not he was the
hardcore gangster, but he was an ex cop and he
had friends still on the force, not just in Miami
Metro where he was a cop, but you know, Hollywood, Davy,
(21:46):
Cooper City, Fort Lauderdale, North Miami Beach.
Speaker 7 (21:50):
We had cop friends all over.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
So it was like, well, if you runted a law
how do you know that one of his buddies, I'm
going to look it back to him and then you're
in trouble.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
But it would only be a matter of time before
someone close to Gil would be forced to take that gamble.
It would happen. In nineteen ninety, a member of Gill's
crew was popped in Alabama and was being held on
extortion charges, but rather than face federal time, he said
he was ready to make a deal and he had
(22:23):
the goods on Gill. He said, remember those three bodies
that were found out on Danger Road, Yeah, that was us.
(22:43):
Cindy and Parrado always wanted to be in law enforcement,
and after graduate school, she spent nine years as a
uniformed officer in Tallahassee.
Speaker 8 (22:54):
This was the early eighties, so there was a lot
of resistance with mal law enforcement officers for females to
be part of the crew. A lot of them only
had high school educations and I had a master's degree,
so they didn't like that, and you know, they could
have figured out why I was there.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
But she eventually earned her stripes and her props within
the force.
Speaker 8 (23:19):
I think the first time I got in a fight
and got punched out and didn't cry or quit or
anything else, then I became one of the boys and
they accepted me.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
In nineteen eighty nine, Cindy began working her way through
law school, eventually taking a job with the statewide Prosecutor's
office in Fort Lauderdale. She first became familiar with the
name gil Fernandez in nineteen ninety when she was a
brand new prosecutor assigned to a triple homicide case that
had gone unsolved for seven years.
Speaker 8 (23:54):
I worked homicide briefly when I was in Tallahassee, and
it was like, well, you know, you were thomis IDEs before,
and now you're a lawyer and you were a cop,
so we're putting you on this.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
In nineteen eighty three, three years before Billy Hoppin's murder,
the bodies of three men have been discovered on the
edge of a canal about ten miles inland from Hollywood Beach.
It was a stretch of Everglades backcountry that locals dubbed
Danger Road.
Speaker 10 (24:25):
Michael White took his entarrain vehicle to Jones Fish Camp
in the Everglades on a Sunday morning in April of
nineteen eighty three. He hasn't forgotten what he found that day.
Speaker 11 (24:34):
Oh, we were riding along and we thought it was
like a store dummy or something, and we stopped and
got off and looked down to make sure, and there
were three people dead there. I walked down there to
the closest victim to me and nudged him with my
foot to see, in fact, if he was dead, And
(24:54):
how's the positioned. He had his hands time behind his back,
laying face down.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
The crime scene suggested a professional execution. Three men had
been bound, blindfolded and shot point blank in the head.
The victims were identified as twenty six year old Walter Leahy,
twenty five year old Richard Robinson, and thirty one year
old Alfred Triingalli. Suspected low level cocaine dealers who had
(25:27):
all grown up in and around South Florida. At the time,
Brower County investigators had chalked up the murders to the
escalating violence surrounding the drug trade ravaging South Florida in
the early eighties. Their killers could have been Colombian suppliers,
local mobsters, or just another group of crooks in a
(25:48):
drug deal gone bad. With no witnesses or leads, their
cases went unsolved for years, just another triple homicide in
an never ending drug war. But in nineteen ninety that
all changed when a detective from the Broward Sheriff's office
(26:08):
responded to the Fort Lauter office of the FBI to
hear the proffered statement of a man named Michael Carbone.
I asked Mark Lopez what he knew about Carbone.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Michael worked for a local mobster by the name of
Joey Rotuno, who was a colombo guy. Joey everybody called
Joey Flowers because he owned flower shops around Hollywood and
Paramac and Allendale. Typical kind of strong arm mob guy
where they were running you know, shylock business, sportsbook doing extortion,
(26:48):
doing some drug dealing, some of the low level scams
and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
The stocky, blonde haired Carbone was also a fixture at
the Apollo Gym.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Michael was generally mister Shakedown as I used to call him.
But he was a dope because every time he tried
to extorte somebody, they ran to the FBI and he'd
get pinched. He was always in trouble, always was a liability.
He wasn't well liked by anybody.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
As they say in the movies. He also had a
rap sheet a mile long, including convictions in five separate felonies.
Speaker 8 (27:29):
Well, Michael Carbone got arrested again, so he knew he
was going to prison.
Speaker 9 (27:35):
So that's when he said, well, I have something.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Something was an understatement in exchange for immunity. Carbone was
ready to confess to his role in the Everglades triple slaying,
a crime he claimed was ordered by Burt Christie and
carried out by his protege, Gil Fernandez, who in April
nineteen eighty three, when the murders took place, was still
(28:03):
a uniformed member of the Miami Dade Police Department. According
to his sworn statement, Carbone had agreed to meet Fernandez
and Tommy Feltz and a department in Hollywood Beach, where
Gil had set up a drug buy with a trio
of local dealers. When Danny Smith got his hands on
(28:25):
Carbone's statement, it read like a scene out of a
gangster movie.
Speaker 5 (28:32):
The plan that was given by Gil Fernandez was to
have Carbone waiting or hiding into a nearby bedroom. They
would show the drugs, and then Fernandez would give Carbone
the signal he would call to him. Carbone would come
out with his machine gun and essentially take charge of
that room and make sure that nobody leaves or does
(28:54):
anything that Fernandez doesn't want them to do well.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Carbone claimed that when he entered the room wielding a
vintage Tommy gun, he saw three men on their knees
and Gil wearing latex gloves, holding a chrome plated revolver
in the mouth of one of the victims.
Speaker 8 (29:15):
And then Carbone comes out of the other room with
the Tommy gun and they all get gagged and blindfolded.
Speaker 5 (29:27):
They were there for quite some time, sitting there, blindfolded,
bound with some kind of rope and held at gunpoint.
They were contained and isolated, and they were essentially neutralized.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Gil's crew would eventually relieve their victims of a cooler
filled with eight kilos of cocaine worth close to one
million dollars. But Fernandez had another much darker plan. This
is actual audio from Michael Carbones's later court testimony.
Speaker 12 (30:07):
And I just feel that it's more than just going
to be a rip off right here and then. And then,
you know, they were yelling out that they were going
to see the boss and different things like that. But
I just knew deep down inside that there was more
than this.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
The men were transported to Carbones car. Then they drove
them in west out Highway twenty seven and pulled off
the pavement just past a ramshackle tavern called Jones's Fish Camp.
When he cut the engine in headlights, they were engulfed
in the impenetrable darkness of the Florida Everglades.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
The Everglades are a place that's in addition to all
the rumors and speculation and almost infamy of that area
where quote unquote bodies have been left and never found
over years and years, the Everglades is desolate, not very
(31:16):
well lit, and the only time that anyone goes out
there is either for hunting and vision or for something nefarious.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
In his statement and in court, Carbone went on to
describe how Gil removed each of the men from the
car and made them kneel at the edge of the
Miami Canal.
Speaker 12 (31:39):
All I saw was him getting in the water with
the individual, told the individual to kneel, and I heard
a gunshot and then I heard the water splash.
Speaker 8 (31:49):
So you can imagine how terrified they must have been
when they're telling you to walk down this shirt road
into the water, and especially once you hear the first
person get shot and dropped into the water. You know
what's coming, You're next. It's not what You're never going
to walk away. So the terror that they must have
lived through from the time they were tied up until
(32:11):
the time they were actually murdered, it's actually it's hard
to conceive.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Ultimately, Gil fires twice more, killing the other two men
with bullets to the back of their heads.
Speaker 12 (32:26):
There's no doubt in my mind who shot the m
three individuals there was Gil Fernandez.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Carbone also clearly recalled what Fernandez said next.
Speaker 9 (32:38):
Says, if you ever opened your mouth, he says, I
will kill your family.
Speaker 12 (32:41):
He says your kids, and he says, I o'kay, how far
you go to China or whatever? He was going to
kill my family.
Speaker 8 (32:48):
You get the feeling that he was supposed to be
killed that night, because Gil was so frantic, telling him,
if you ever say anything, I'm going to kill you,
I'm going to kill your family.
Speaker 9 (32:59):
I'm coming, I'll come for you. And it just sounded like.
Speaker 8 (33:03):
Carbone probably was supposed to be taken out too, but
it didn't happen.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Ultimately, Carbone netted fifty thousand dollars for his cut of
the robbery. Bill received one hundred and fifty thousand, and
the rest of the loot trickles upstream to Burt Christy
and beyond.
Speaker 8 (33:26):
I know it was a lot of money for all
of them, And of course they were instructed, according to Carbone,
to not go and buy anything fancy, do anything silly
that would bring law enforcement attention, and I think everybody
did just the opposite. These guys are going out buying
new cars and doing silly things, which of course gets
(33:49):
law enforcement's attention.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
But incredibly, Bill and his Apollo crew were not only
able to avoid arrest, we'll continue to operate their criminal
enterprise for years with little to no interference from the police.
But as some members of the crew would find out
the police were not the only threat they had to
worry about. Two years after the danger Road murders, Tommy
(34:18):
Felts would be gunned down in his car.
Speaker 8 (34:23):
Originally, the theory was that Gil had killed Tommy Felts
because Tommy was there at the triple.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Over the next year, Jimmy high Note and Harry Collier
would also meet their fate. Was guild cleaning house or
was it payback from his growing list of dangerous enemies.
Either way, the chickens were certainly coming home to roost.
Speaker 8 (34:49):
The basic premise was that his mo was to rip
off drug dealers and then kill them, and then kill
whoever was with him when he did it, so there
would never be any witnesses, and that's why Michael Carbone
the fact that he was still alive was a lucky
(35:10):
thing for us. But everybody else that he was involved
with was murdered.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
And when Carbone turned state's witness, it seemed that Gil
Fernandez and Burt Christie might finally face the music. But
one thing remained uncertain. As law enforcement untangled the bloody
web of ripoffs, shakedowns, and murder, would they ever uncover
the evidence necessary to connect the murder of Billy Halpering
(35:40):
or was there someone out there determined to keep it
buried deep behind the thin blue line. According to Cindi
(36:00):
and Perrado, the young prosecutor assigned to the case, Michael
Carbone's cooperation against Gil Fernandez and Bert Christi was never guaranteed.
Speaker 8 (36:11):
I think he was afraid before of Gil, that Gil
would kill him if he ever gave him up. Everybody
was afraid, so Carbone was reluctant. But then when he
was looking at significant time and this was federal time,
That's how he ended up becoming a witness for the
statewide prosecutor.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Another real risk someone tipping off their suspects and Fernandez
and Christie going on the run incredibly. Mark Lopez discussed
this possibility with Fernandez himself.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
And I told him more than a couple of times,
But I said, Gil, you know is how this is
going to end, right, Like, why don't you just grown
like going to lamp And I just think that he
wasn't going to do that, right And his wife was
pregnant by the time with their second kid, and he
was like, well, he didn't say this to me, but
I just thought he had the attitude like, if this
(37:06):
is gonna come, I'm going to take it on the
chin and I'm going to do what I can do.
But I don't think he ever had any intentions in
trying to run.
Speaker 8 (37:14):
Law enforcement was snooping around at the gym. They were
going to Apollo. They were talking to people that he knew,
and I think Gil definitely knew, because that was the
theory is that's why he left the police department, that
he knew that it was just a matter of time,
and especially once we had carbone.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Finally, in July of nineteen ninety, law enforcement made their move.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
We didn't know exactly when it was coming, but we
knew it was coming. They knew he left early in
the morning to go to the Apollo to open a gym.
He would get there at five to work out. So
I think, to my understanding, that they called the house
right at like four o'clock or four thirty, and he
entered the phone, they hung up. He was an ex cop, right,
He's like, yeah, that's the all the strick in the book.
(38:04):
They're trying to see if I'm here. He gets in
this car driver to the gym and they pull him
over on the road on the way to the gym,
and they take him down right there.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Thirty seven year old Gil Fernandez and fifty seven year
old Bert Christie were both arrested and charged with three
counts of first degree murder. Before their trial, each man
was offered a chance to avoid the maximum penalty on
the law by testifying against their alleged accomplice.
Speaker 8 (38:32):
I believe they were both offered life to cooperate against
the other one.
Speaker 9 (38:38):
So Christy was offered.
Speaker 8 (38:40):
Life to testify and skill and Gil was offered life
to testify against Christie, but they both rejected it, which
is pretty normal for organized crime types the wise guy mentality.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Both men would stand trial for the three homicides in
nineteen eighty three, but there was also pressure to hang
more charges on Fernandez and Christy for their suspected involvement
in many other crimes, including other murders.
Speaker 8 (39:16):
There was talk about if we had enough information to
try to do a Williams rule when you have similar
type crimes, that you can bring evidence of the other
crimes in to prove the crime that you're trying.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Even with several unsolved murders on the books, that strategy
carried significant risk.
Speaker 8 (39:39):
In Florida, almost every case that prosecutes used Williams rule evidence,
it seems to get reversed because it's just cumulative and
kind of overwhelming for the jury. You're looking at this
triple homicide, but now you're going to talk about five
other homicides or how many other homicides that they allegedly
occurred that you don't have enough to charge them.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Charging Christine Fernandez in a federal reco case could have
also allowed prosecutors to include other past homicides, possibly even
the murders of Apollo Jim members, Jimmy high Note and
Harry Collier, and if the evidence led them there, Mitch
Hall and Billy Halpern.
Speaker 8 (40:21):
I had all those reports about all the different homicides
and all the different players, so I was definitely familiar
with it all. But it ended up being the focus
on the triple, and the judge was very clear that
we couldn't.
Speaker 9 (40:33):
Talk about anything else.
Speaker 8 (40:35):
But there just wasn't enough evidence in other cases at
the time.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
CHRISTI and Fernandez's trial would be limited to the Danger
Road murders.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
I never saw him post arrests. I was given in
strict instructions from my father, do not go to County
to see him.
Speaker 7 (40:55):
Do not go to trial.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
When he goes to trial, do not go to trial
and go in the courtroom, stay away from the trial.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
With the brutal details of the triple homicide and they're
alleged ties to organized crime, the trial did attract a
considerable amount of attention from the press.
Speaker 10 (41:17):
Today, a Gilbert Fernandez, the ex com sits in court
charged with killing the three men White found eight years ago.
Prosecutors say Fernandez tied the victim's hands and shot them
in the head. Investigators say the triple murder was the
end result of a million dollar drug ripoff. The alleged
mastermind is co defendant Hubert Christie.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
The trial's high profile put not a small amount of
pressure on the young state prosecutor.
Speaker 8 (41:46):
I don't know if it was because it was such
a high profile case.
Speaker 9 (41:49):
It's a triple homicide.
Speaker 8 (41:50):
You've got every newspaper, every camera on you twenty four
to seven, so it can definitely make or break somebody's career,
to your years out of law school doing a triple homicide,
death penalty case, doing the opening statement, So it was
very intimidating.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Given the defendant's reputations for violence, and retribution against those
that betray them. There was also considerable concern about the
safety of their star witness.
Speaker 10 (42:22):
Carbone is the state's star witness, and he's expected to
take the stand later this week. Carbone's testimony against Gilbert
Fernandez and Hubert Christie will keep him from going to
jail on unrelated charges.
Speaker 8 (42:35):
We had a battle at the judge because we wanted
the marshals to be in the courtroom when Carbone was testifying,
and he didn't want them there. The chances of somebody
taking somebody out in court with all the security that
we had for that child would be hard to imagine,
but you never know what's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
As the trial got going, the challenges for the prosecution
became readily apparent.
Speaker 8 (43:03):
There were no angels in this trial because even the
victims were drug dealers, but certainly no one deserves what
happened to them.
Speaker 9 (43:14):
Fernandez took his victim, who was gagged.
Speaker 8 (43:17):
Blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, to the bank
of the canal. He instructed him to kneel down, and
with the coldness of an executioner, shot him twice in
the head and killed him.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
Prosecutors painted a compelling picture of events, but they also
had no murder weapon, no forensic evidence tying the accused
to the crime scene, and no one able or willing
to corroborate Carbone's story.
Speaker 8 (43:47):
One big concern was is jury going to believe Carbone?
Obviously for him to be able to hold three people
at gunpoint for multiple hours and be there for a
triple homicide and be involved in other things, obviously he
wasn't a good guy. We're out there on sketchy grounds
(44:08):
relying on his testimony. I mean, if the jury didn't
believe him, I think, you know, we would have been
in big trouble. You know, it's not like we had
fingerprints or DNA or something that you go to the
jury and say, absolutely, this is what happens.
Speaker 9 (44:23):
So it's Carbone was basically the case.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Neither Christi or Fernandez testified in their own defense, much
to the dismay of the press and the trial audience,
many of whom were giving the benefit of doubt to
the Bible toting X cop and former mister Florida.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
There are people in there that were now coming in
that only new Gill is born again Christian Gil, right,
So these are people that are like, how I can't
believe this? You know, I can't. He's such a good
guy and so, you know, a sweetheart. I'm thinking I
might go, well, you know, he might be a sweetheart
in the hell. But believe me, a year ago, who
you wouldn't have had.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Fernandez and Christie sat there stoically as Carbone offered testimony
that could put them both in the electric chair.
Speaker 10 (45:18):
Carbone, who's under the Federal Witness Protection Program, told the
jury he was hired as a surveillance man to help
in the drug scam. Since coming forward, Carbone has told
his story half a dozen times. Each time details of
his testimony changed.
Speaker 8 (45:34):
The problem with Carbone was he had given a statement
to the Feds, he'd given a statement to the grand jury.
Speaker 9 (45:41):
He had given a deposition.
Speaker 8 (45:43):
So again, as you know from being a law enforcement officer,
when you get a person on the witness stand and
their subjects to cross examination, and now you've got four
or five different statements and you can make a big
deal out of small inconsistencies, it would be hard for
me to fathom the jury not believing he was there.
Speaker 9 (46:05):
No one knew the details like he did. I mean,
you knew that these people were ripped off. You knew
they were murdered.
Speaker 8 (46:10):
You suspected Gil and Bert were involved, because that's how
they operated. And Carbone there, you just couldn't make up
all those details that he had about it.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
His story was also bolstered by the testimony of his wife,
who also took the stand to say that Carbone had
confessed to witnessing the triple murder.
Speaker 13 (46:38):
He told me that they got into the car, and
that they took them out to some place somewhere out
west by some water, and that they got out of
the car, and that Gil took the one man into
the water and then he shot him.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
The defense rested its case on one simple premise that
the testimony of a career criminal purchased with a promise
of immunity wasn't worth the paper it was written on.
Speaker 8 (47:15):
They didn't put on a real I mean, it was
mostly just a tear apart our case, and be like,
we'd improve it beyond a reasonable doubt, And how can
you believe Carbone?
Speaker 9 (47:23):
And he's getting this sweet deal.
Speaker 8 (47:25):
He'll say whatever they want him to say.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
Now, there are many other lines that you'll find out,
he says.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
The law enforcement on other cases, You're going to find.
Speaker 9 (47:34):
Out that he's a five time convicted.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
Felt Mark Lopez, the former Apollo employee, had no love
for Michael Carbone, but he thought relying solely on Carbone's
testimony made the state's case against his former boss flimsy
at best.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Look, he was a three time loser basing fifteen to
life if this third extortion beef, and he would have
gave up his own mother.
Speaker 7 (48:04):
To walk right.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
So I think that they thought that John was going
to be able to break Carbone down on the stand,
and that the jury would see that and think that
he was allying a three time loser scumbag trying to
save his own ass, which he was.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
It would be up to the jury to decide who
to trust.
Speaker 7 (48:26):
The highly publicized murder trial of a former Metro Dad
police officer and his business partner is in the hands
of a brower jury at this hour.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
The men are accused of killing three drug dealers in
the Everglades.
Speaker 8 (48:38):
Usually in a criminal case, the longer the jury's out,
it's usually better for the defense. So when they were
coming back with questions about different degrees of murder and
everything else, we were believing we were sweating it out
that they were going to come back with a lesser
(48:58):
or do something else, or that they were going to
be a hung jury.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
Instead, the jury found both men guilty.
Speaker 14 (49:09):
As to the defendant Gilbert Fernandez, as to count one
of the indictment, the defendant is guilty of first degree
murder without a firearm. To defendant Hubert Christie, as to
count one of the indictment, the defendant is guilty of
first felony murder.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
Eight years after the triple homicide on Danger Road, Fernandez
and Christy were convicted of three counts of first degree
murder in the commission of a felony and were handed
down heavy sentences.
Speaker 8 (49:38):
Judge Tyson gave them consecutive life sentences, so there's no
chance of him getting out, which was the idea.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
I was a little surprised, to be honest with you, because,
like I said, I knew that you know beyond character witnesses,
So I thought, wow, man, you can they can send
you away for triple life on one guy's testimony like
it was.
Speaker 7 (50:06):
That to me was a little surprising.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
As for Michael Carbone, he hasn't been seen in Florida since,
and speculation is that for the last thirty four years
has been a guest of a witness relocation program.
Speaker 2 (50:22):
I just talked to a regular friend of mine here
that's local in Palm Beach County that was an' a
member of the Apollo Gym too, And he had just
asked me like a week ago. He said, Hey, whatever
happened to Michael Carbone? We don't know you know where
he is or anything. And I said, well, he's not
Michael Carbone anymore, right, I said, he's Joe Smith in
(50:43):
you know, Idaho. They said he's in witness protection.
Speaker 7 (50:46):
They got a new identity.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
So if he's still alive, which Michael would have to
be pushing in like seventy now, you know, he's not
Michael Carbone anymore.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
But despite justice being served for their role in the
Danger Road murders, investigators believe there are still multiple unsolved
homicides that they have good reason to believe were ordered
and carried out by Bert Christi and Gil Fernandez. They
include the brutal slayings of Mitch Hall, his girlfriend char Linda,
(51:20):
and of course Lori Halpern's brother Billy.
Speaker 4 (51:30):
They had pretty much told me that Gil committed the murder,
so I just figured which I'd be grateful if they
can prove it. But Mike Hallman did not thought. You know,
they didn't want to spend the money. They kind of
knew that he did it. We really need to go
any farther. Do you want to go through a trial?
We kind of know we did it. I said, well,
(51:51):
I don't want my parents to go through that. And
if you know, I don't want them to. You know,
they're going to make Billy look bad. And if if
you think Gil killed Billy, then look, leave it alone.
Speaker 9 (52:01):
Bill kill Billy.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
But something in her heart told her that this wasn't
the full story.
Speaker 8 (52:10):
I have sent, you know, feelers out to see if
at some point Gil would be willing to confess to
the rest of the murders to give the family member's
peace of mind, if nothing else, for just pleading him
out to concurrent time. And I do believe that the
(52:32):
state's attitude was, like we can exceptionally clear these cases.
You know, he's already serving life. He's not calling it,
but he's lost all his appeals. It's not like he's
going to walk out. But his attitude has been from
the beginning that he's not saying anything. He's got two sons,
I believe, and he never wants them to know what
(52:54):
he did.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
But maybe would the emergence of more evidence, Jill Fernandez
could be convinced to.
Speaker 5 (53:02):
Talk Calassie, say, what's going on?
Speaker 14 (53:08):
I just wanted to touch base with you, so we
got some.
Speaker 7 (53:12):
Quant and go back.
Speaker 9 (53:14):
There is DNA there.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
Maybe with the new DNA evidence, he would have to.
Speaker 7 (53:22):
Did you go him?
Speaker 1 (53:25):
Now? Whatever you show me, I'll try to help you.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
But other than that, you know, really I'm on to
hell out of respect.
Speaker 9 (53:32):
Of course, you know, I will just stay see you later.
Speaker 1 (53:35):
Man, if you ain't got a warn and you ain't
gonna take me to jail or whatever, because I already
a jail so you know, but yeah, go ahead, cold Blooded.
The Apollo Jim Murders is a production of iHeart Podcasts
(53:55):
and Authentic Wave Media. Scott Weinberger, Kevin be and Walker
LeMond are executive producers. Sabrina Sire is our line producer,
scoring sound design and mixing by Mark lamarg Z for
iHeart Podcasts, Christina Everett is executive producer, and David Wasserman
(54:19):
is brand marketing manager and with special thanks to the
Miramar Police Department Chief del Rich Moss, Pio Tanya Ardaz,
and Detective Susie Smith.
Before we get started with today's episode, I just wanted
to give you a heads up that I will begin
to post photos from this case on my Instagram account
which is at Weinberger Media, including some of the most
crucial evidence which sat untested for decades now on to
today's episode.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Maybe nine months or so after I moved to Florida,
there was a series of murders.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That's the voice of Mark Lopez, a friend of Billy
Halburn's and an ex employee of the Apollo Jim.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I didn't know exactly what was going on, if they
were selling dope or they were doing shakedowns or whatever
they were doing, but suddenly people started to get killed,
and a lot of them were two murders at a time.
They were either shot in the back of the head
roats cut.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Mark is talking about the nineteen eighty six murder of
Billy Helper and as well as the eighty seven murders
of Billy's friend Mitch Hall, Mitch's girlfriend char Linda, and
two more fellow members of the Apollo Jimmy high Note
and Harry.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Collier, and the Common Thread amongst them, where they were
members of the Apollo Gym Right and some of these guys,
you know, pad ties to gil.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Five murders, but even more unanswered questions like why were
they killed? Were all of the murders connected, and if so,
who was behind them.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
My brother came to me and he said, Billy Helpern
died and I'm going to find out who killed him.
And I said, Mitch, don't can involve with those type
of people. And then six months later, May sixth is
when he was killed.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Scott Weinberger, investigator, journalist, and former deputy sheriff. And this
is cold blooded. The Apollo Gym murders. Back in May
of nineteen eighty seven, local investigators from the Miramar Police
(02:20):
Department and the Brier County Sheriff's Office had their hands full.
They were sitting on five execution style murders at three
different crime scenes, no suspects, and very few leads. What
physical evidence found at one of the crime scenes was
about to pay some very big dividends, with the potential
(02:44):
to break all three cases wide open. Investigators were able
to pull a single partial fingerprint from the electrical tape
found wrapped around Mitch Hall's wrists, and lo and behold,
that print was a match with one of the victims
found shot eight days later in Pembroke Pines, Harry Collier.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
I never knew very Gollier, but apparently his fingerprints were
on the tape.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
They found the Collier's prints on the tape for his girl.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yes, this was huge. The discovery of Collier's partial print
at the scene of the earlier murders seemed to be
irrefutable proof that Harry Collier was at least one of
the people responsible for killing Mitch Hall and his girlfriend
Tarltonda Drought.
Speaker 6 (03:41):
They came to my work, I remember I was working
at over there by the airport, Kay Realtive.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
That's Mitch's sister Kim, who remembers how Broward detectives delivered
the news that they were making headway in her brother's case.
Speaker 6 (04:00):
Were basically saying that because they believe Collier and they
believed Jimmy was there and they killed him, and now
they're both dead, so we're going to close his murder case.
I'm like, okay, you know what am I going to say?
They're both dead, But they still believed there was other
(04:20):
individuals involved.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
And given the similarities to the helping crime scene investigators
were eager to conclude that Collier was a strong person
of interest in Billy's murder, but obviously so many questions remained,
like why was Billy killed in the first place, what
was the motive? And who killed Jimmy high Note and
(04:45):
Harry Collier. Those were the questions that haunted this case
and that Danny Smith and I were determined to answer
because Detective Smith wasn't willing to let sleeping dogs lie.
Someone was behind the execution of five people and they
had gone unidentified, unpunished for nearly forty years. It was
(05:09):
time to bring that person to justice.
Speaker 5 (05:16):
International assist Kayla, can I help you?
Speaker 7 (05:18):
Hey?
Speaker 5 (05:18):
Kayla is Cassie and by chance, this is Danny Smith
from Mirmarpiti.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
In April of twenty twenty three, Detective Danny Smith reached
out to a private DNA lab located in Deerfield Beach, Florida,
to request testing on some of the physical evidence that
was collected in nineteen eighty six by the original investigators
of Billy Halpern's murder. The evidence that seemed to have
(05:48):
the most promising potential pieces of black electrical tape that
were found around each of Billy's wrists. They had been
stored in an evidence locker at the Baro Kenny Sheriff's
office for nearly forty years, and before now, they had
never been tested for evidence of DNA.
Speaker 5 (06:10):
The first moment that I realized that we may have
something here is when we were able to locate the
bindings from Billy Hawpern's wrist, the electrical tape. When that
was found in evidence, unmolested, sealed, everything was good to
go with that evidence. That was the first turning point
for me where I actually said to myself, we have
(06:32):
a shot here. This has never been tested before. We
have it, we have a lab that's willing to test it,
we have the money to test it. Let's get it done.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Danny's on the phone with Cassie, a case manager at
DNA Labs International.
Speaker 8 (06:48):
I also wanted to confirm who if.
Speaker 9 (06:53):
The tape is all kind.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Of like jumbled up and you.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Know, as pretty much, and isn't okay if we kind
of like trying to easily take apart when it happened.
Speaker 5 (07:02):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it needs to get tested and
you know, let's be honest, it's almost forty years old.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
We do we have to do when Billy's body was
discovered the ribbon of thick black electrical tape wrapped around
his wrists were actually torn in two, which should give
you an idea just how strong Billy was. The two
hundred plus pound bodybuilder had apparently broken free of his
(07:33):
makeshift handcuffs in the struggle to save his own life,
a struggle that tragically ended with his throat being slashed
from ear to ear. But before he died, Billy had
also managed to grab a fistful of hair, presumably from
one of his attackers here that was recovered from the
(07:55):
crime scene and also had the potential to help identify
his killer.
Speaker 5 (08:03):
And regarding the hair, do you want me to go
back and get it and drop it off to you guys?
Speaker 7 (08:07):
Or wait, I.
Speaker 9 (08:10):
Hold off the world why and longer?
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Okay, see what we get off of the and then
we can kind of go from there.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Danny was feeling confident that the DNA from the tape
or the hair might finally reveal who is responsible for
Billy's murder and answer a question that had dogged law
enforcement for years. Was it connected to one of their own?
Former Miami Dade Police officer Gil Fernandez.
Speaker 8 (08:39):
Well, what I've read about it was he was very violent,
and he was in internal affairs a lot that he
had a reputation for roughing up suspects. They seemed like
a very violent individual, and he was like that as
a law enforcement officer and continued to.
Speaker 7 (08:58):
Be that way.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
That's Cindy and Parrada. Cindy had started her law enforcement
career as a police officer before putting herself through law
school and eventually joining the statewide Prosecutor's office in Florida.
And there may be no one who knows more about
gil Fernandez and his career as both a cop and
(09:21):
a criminal, which makes sense since she's ultimately the one
responsible for putting him in jail, but we'll get to
that later. Gilbert Fernandez Junior was born and raised in
the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York, which in the
(09:43):
fifties and sixties was a rough and tumble neighborhood of
working class immigrants, Puerto Rican gangs, and the Irish mob.
Street violence was commonplace and often fatal. It's no wonder
why his parents moved the family to Florida when gil
was just a teenager. The Fernandez family settled in Dade County,
(10:06):
just outside of Miami. Gill Junior played a little football
in high school, but skipped college instead entering the police
academy and joining the Miami Dade Police Department as a
patrolman in nineteen seventy six. In photographs, Fernandez looked like
the part of a perfect cop, cropped black hair, a
(10:29):
chin sculpted from granite, and a six foot two hundred
and twenty pound frame that filled out his crisp blue uniform.
But over the next six years, Fernandez was dogged by
internal affairs and a growing list of brutality complaints. After
(10:49):
the race riots broke out in Miami in nineteen eighty
after the death of Arthur McDuffie at the hands of
white Miami Dade cops, Fernandez was singled out in the
press for his brutal tactics. The reporter dubbed Fernandez the
meanest cop in Miami. Guys that new Gil from the
gym said he reveled in the notoriety. Here's Mark Lopez.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
When I met Gil, I never got the cop vibe
from Gil. Like it almost still is crazy to me
to think about it, because I just can't really picture
him as a cop in my mind, because when I
met Gil. The first impression to me in my mind
was that guy is a fucking gangster, right Like, there
was no Hey, this guy is law enforcement.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
But his days in law enforcement were numbered. The brass
pulled him from his beat and banished him to the
property room. He turned in his badge in nineteen eighty three.
After quitting the force, he turned his full attention to
bodybuilding and found a new home at Them.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
I know, Gil didn't have really tons of money at
that time. I mean he was driving around like a
five or six year old Camaro that the air conditioning
didn't work. You know, he was always kind of scraping
for money. He started, really the first guy that I
ever knew of that started doing personal training, and he
was selling steroids as well.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
The Apollo became his refuge, and within months he had
added forty pounds of pure muscle. The steroids helped, but
they also made him irritable and short fused. Mark Lopez
witnessed Gil's notorious temper firsthand.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
I'm in the gym working out. Gil was there behind
the front desk, and there's a guy in the gym
working out, another body builder by the name of Frank.
It was a firefighter, but there's some type of verbal
beef and all I heard Frank say.
Speaker 7 (13:02):
Was, well, fuck you, Gil.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
He says, no fuck me, just no fuck you, and
Gil basically picks him up by the seat of the pants,
in the back of the sweatshirt and ramrods his head
right into the plate glass windows in the front of
the gym.
Speaker 7 (13:18):
And I mean he.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Hit his head so hard against the windows that I
swear that the concrete slab shook that day when he
did that, And like I thought that he killed them,
like his next broke. You know, it just he's done,
and everybody was just really silent, and when all that
was over, everybody just went back to their business and
their workout.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Gil eventually became a co owner of the apologym with
his mentor and former mister Florida, Bert Christie, who was
twenty years Gil.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Senior, and I think he nurtured that relationship with Gil
when Gil was younger and became almost like a father
figure at the Gil and you know, they had a
very close relationship for a long time.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Together. Bert and Gil trained a new crop of young bodybuilders,
and their motto, if you're going to be dumb, you
better be tough, but eventually their partnership would go far
beyond bodybuilding.
Speaker 8 (14:27):
And that was when Burt Christy came into the picture.
He was supposedly the organized crime connection.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Christy cut his teeth in racketeering by collecting debts for
Joey Flowers Rotano, who ran a gambling ring from a
string of flower shops in Browie County. According to one
federally protected witness, Christy may have also been responsible for
two contract killings in nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty two.
(14:58):
By the time he put Gil Fernandez under his wing,
he was putting together his own crew, hiring muscle straight
from the gym. It included Gil Fernandez and a handful
of local bodybuilders like Tommy Felts, Jimmy high Note, and
Harry Collier.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Gill and Tommy were the muscle, and Bert was basically
the guy given direction.
Speaker 8 (15:22):
I think that Burt trusted Gil but nobody else. So
he would go to Gil with potential targets, and then
Gil would get Tommy Felts or Collier, whoever it was,
to go with him to do the job.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
The work was simple but brutal. On Bert's direction, they
might shoot up a home of a local drug dealer
and then return to sell them protection under threat of
extreme violence. Another favorite scheme set up phony drug buys
with local dealers in order to steal their stash, money
(15:58):
or both.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
They were basically going to guys that Tommy Felts had
gone to high school when junior high school with in Hollywood,
that were guys now that were.
Speaker 7 (16:09):
You know, in the drug business.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Generally just you know, little crews that banded together that
were selling drugs, smuggling drugs.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
The drugs then flowed out of the Apollo gym with
impunity while Bert and Gil scoped out bigger and better scores.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
And they were doing that to a number of different
crews out there from all over the place.
Speaker 7 (16:33):
So you know, you're going to do that to the.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Wrong people and eventually somebody is going to come for you.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
In nineteen eighty five, Tommy Felts was first to fall
victim to a rival's violent retribution.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Eventually Felts, you know, did that to the wrong guy,
and they rolled up on him at a stop late
right at Stirling Road. I got a Sunday afternoon and
broad daylight and gunned them down.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
In nineteen eighty seven, Two more members of their crew,
Jimmy Heinot and Harry Collier, were also found dead, this
time with bullets to the back of the head. As
Mark Lopez remembers it, a rising body count was starting
to attract the wrong kind of attention.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
They started to notice that were, you know, a lot
of cop surveillance around the gym's right, And I didn't
know what it was initially at the time, and like
it could have been anybody, right, because there was one
hundred plus guys in the Jim DeLand dope. But then
when you start hearing about friends getting called in by
(17:42):
BSO and detectives spoking around asking questions, that's when you
kind of knew the shit had hit the fan.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
The BSO would be the brawer of Sheriff's office also
sniffing around the Apollo. The FBI.
Speaker 8 (18:02):
Defense were the ones that started the investigation because there
were all these homicides, all these drug ripoffs that were
in all different locations. But also I believe part of
their interest was because of Bert Christie's organized crime connections,
and I think that they were trying to make a
(18:24):
reco case against him.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
At that time, we knew that law enforcement was out
there poking around about Gil. They were starting to question
people that were close to him, including me, And when
it happened, I told Gil about it.
Speaker 7 (18:43):
I specifically told.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Him that BSO was trying to call me in and
that I said, listen, I said, I'm.
Speaker 7 (18:51):
Going to go in.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
I'm going on record with you now to tell you
I'm not saying nothing. I don't know nothing. And I said,
one word done, pawkin. I said, I'm gonna come right
back to you and tell you exactly what They asked, MA,
I'm gonna ta you exactly what I said.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Detectives were looking for someone willing to testify against Fernandez
and Christy.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I said, you guys honestly think that me or anybody
else like me is going to cooperate with you to
go after Gil Fernandez. I said, you're crazy, Like I'm
not that crazy. For one, I said, because if I
ever agreed to do something like that, you know my
(19:37):
fate is sealed.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
In other words, at the Apollo Jim, snitches get much
more than stitches. They might wind up dead. But as
the scrutiny from law enforcement increased, neither Gil nor Bert
were above doing a little polishing of their public image.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Well almost overnights, not just him, but him and Bert
Christie become born again Christians, okay, which is like a
black to white moment, right, And to me, I just
love from the surface this is a cleanup act, right.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
But given the litany of their past sins and victims,
there was little chance they could outrun their reputations.
Speaker 7 (20:25):
Bert just couldn't sell that act. He just couldn't, right,
He tried to, he couldn't.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
But according to Mark Gill's act was considerably more convincing.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Gil changed considerably and I didn't know if it was
an act or if it was genuine. He went off
all steroids, you know, so he lost a considerable amount
of size and weight.
Speaker 7 (20:52):
His attitude changed.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
He started putting pictures of Jesus or religious pictures in
the gym. He was going to church every week. And
I was again small enough never to ask is this
an act?
Speaker 1 (21:08):
But despite all the suspicions scrolling around him and his
potential involvement in multiple unsolved homicides, Jill Fernandez was never arrested,
never even brought in for questioning.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Do you have to realize something that people were very
afraid because you know, if he and he was the
one committing these murders. They knew not he was the
hardcore gangster, but he was an ex cop and he
had friends still on the force, not just in Miami
Metro where he was a cop, but you know, Hollywood, Davy,
(21:46):
Cooper City, Fort Lauderdale, North Miami Beach.
Speaker 7 (21:50):
We had cop friends all over.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
So it was like, well, if you runted a law
how do you know that one of his buddies, I'm
going to look it back to him and then you're
in trouble.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
But it would only be a matter of time before
someone close to Gil would be forced to take that gamble.
It would happen. In nineteen ninety, a member of Gill's
crew was popped in Alabama and was being held on
extortion charges, but rather than face federal time, he said
he was ready to make a deal and he had
(22:23):
the goods on Gill. He said, remember those three bodies
that were found out on Danger Road, Yeah, that was us.
(22:43):
Cindy and Parrado always wanted to be in law enforcement,
and after graduate school, she spent nine years as a
uniformed officer in Tallahassee.
Speaker 8 (22:54):
This was the early eighties, so there was a lot
of resistance with mal law enforcement officers for females to
be part of the crew. A lot of them only
had high school educations and I had a master's degree,
so they didn't like that, and you know, they could
have figured out why I was there.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
But she eventually earned her stripes and her props within
the force.
Speaker 8 (23:19):
I think the first time I got in a fight
and got punched out and didn't cry or quit or
anything else, then I became one of the boys and
they accepted me.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
In nineteen eighty nine, Cindy began working her way through
law school, eventually taking a job with the statewide Prosecutor's
office in Fort Lauderdale. She first became familiar with the
name gil Fernandez in nineteen ninety when she was a
brand new prosecutor assigned to a triple homicide case that
had gone unsolved for seven years.
Speaker 8 (23:54):
I worked homicide briefly when I was in Tallahassee, and
it was like, well, you know, you were thomis IDEs before,
and now you're a lawyer and you were a cop,
so we're putting you on this.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
In nineteen eighty three, three years before Billy Hoppin's murder,
the bodies of three men have been discovered on the
edge of a canal about ten miles inland from Hollywood Beach.
It was a stretch of Everglades backcountry that locals dubbed
Danger Road.
Speaker 10 (24:25):
Michael White took his entarrain vehicle to Jones Fish Camp
in the Everglades on a Sunday morning in April of
nineteen eighty three. He hasn't forgotten what he found that day.
Speaker 11 (24:34):
Oh, we were riding along and we thought it was
like a store dummy or something, and we stopped and
got off and looked down to make sure, and there
were three people dead there. I walked down there to
the closest victim to me and nudged him with my
foot to see, in fact, if he was dead, And
(24:54):
how's the positioned. He had his hands time behind his back,
laying face down.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
The crime scene suggested a professional execution. Three men had
been bound, blindfolded and shot point blank in the head.
The victims were identified as twenty six year old Walter Leahy,
twenty five year old Richard Robinson, and thirty one year
old Alfred Triingalli. Suspected low level cocaine dealers who had
(25:27):
all grown up in and around South Florida. At the time,
Brower County investigators had chalked up the murders to the
escalating violence surrounding the drug trade ravaging South Florida in
the early eighties. Their killers could have been Colombian suppliers,
local mobsters, or just another group of crooks in a
(25:48):
drug deal gone bad. With no witnesses or leads, their
cases went unsolved for years, just another triple homicide in
an never ending drug war. But in nineteen ninety that
all changed when a detective from the Broward Sheriff's office
(26:08):
responded to the Fort Lauter office of the FBI to
hear the proffered statement of a man named Michael Carbone.
I asked Mark Lopez what he knew about Carbone.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Michael worked for a local mobster by the name of
Joey Rotuno, who was a colombo guy. Joey everybody called
Joey Flowers because he owned flower shops around Hollywood and
Paramac and Allendale. Typical kind of strong arm mob guy
where they were running you know, shylock business, sportsbook doing extortion,
(26:48):
doing some drug dealing, some of the low level scams
and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
The stocky, blonde haired Carbone was also a fixture at
the Apollo Gym.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Michael was generally mister Shakedown as I used to call him.
But he was a dope because every time he tried
to extorte somebody, they ran to the FBI and he'd
get pinched. He was always in trouble, always was a liability.
He wasn't well liked by anybody.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
As they say in the movies. He also had a
rap sheet a mile long, including convictions in five separate felonies.
Speaker 8 (27:29):
Well, Michael Carbone got arrested again, so he knew he
was going to prison.
Speaker 9 (27:35):
So that's when he said, well, I have something.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Something was an understatement in exchange for immunity. Carbone was
ready to confess to his role in the Everglades triple slaying,
a crime he claimed was ordered by Burt Christie and
carried out by his protege, Gil Fernandez, who in April
nineteen eighty three, when the murders took place, was still
(28:03):
a uniformed member of the Miami Dade Police Department. According
to his sworn statement, Carbone had agreed to meet Fernandez
and Tommy Feltz and a department in Hollywood Beach, where
Gil had set up a drug buy with a trio
of local dealers. When Danny Smith got his hands on
(28:25):
Carbone's statement, it read like a scene out of a
gangster movie.
Speaker 5 (28:32):
The plan that was given by Gil Fernandez was to
have Carbone waiting or hiding into a nearby bedroom. They
would show the drugs, and then Fernandez would give Carbone
the signal he would call to him. Carbone would come
out with his machine gun and essentially take charge of
that room and make sure that nobody leaves or does
(28:54):
anything that Fernandez doesn't want them to do well.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Carbone claimed that when he entered the room wielding a
vintage Tommy gun, he saw three men on their knees
and Gil wearing latex gloves, holding a chrome plated revolver
in the mouth of one of the victims.
Speaker 8 (29:15):
And then Carbone comes out of the other room with
the Tommy gun and they all get gagged and blindfolded.
Speaker 5 (29:27):
They were there for quite some time, sitting there, blindfolded,
bound with some kind of rope and held at gunpoint.
They were contained and isolated, and they were essentially neutralized.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Gil's crew would eventually relieve their victims of a cooler
filled with eight kilos of cocaine worth close to one
million dollars. But Fernandez had another much darker plan. This
is actual audio from Michael Carbones's later court testimony.
Speaker 12 (30:07):
And I just feel that it's more than just going
to be a rip off right here and then. And then,
you know, they were yelling out that they were going
to see the boss and different things like that. But
I just knew deep down inside that there was more
than this.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
The men were transported to Carbones car. Then they drove
them in west out Highway twenty seven and pulled off
the pavement just past a ramshackle tavern called Jones's Fish Camp.
When he cut the engine in headlights, they were engulfed
in the impenetrable darkness of the Florida Everglades.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
The Everglades are a place that's in addition to all
the rumors and speculation and almost infamy of that area
where quote unquote bodies have been left and never found
over years and years, the Everglades is desolate, not very
(31:16):
well lit, and the only time that anyone goes out
there is either for hunting and vision or for something nefarious.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
In his statement and in court, Carbone went on to
describe how Gil removed each of the men from the
car and made them kneel at the edge of the
Miami Canal.
Speaker 12 (31:39):
All I saw was him getting in the water with
the individual, told the individual to kneel, and I heard
a gunshot and then I heard the water splash.
Speaker 8 (31:49):
So you can imagine how terrified they must have been
when they're telling you to walk down this shirt road
into the water, and especially once you hear the first
person get shot and dropped into the water. You know
what's coming, You're next. It's not what You're never going
to walk away. So the terror that they must have
lived through from the time they were tied up until
(32:11):
the time they were actually murdered, it's actually it's hard
to conceive.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Ultimately, Gil fires twice more, killing the other two men
with bullets to the back of their heads.
Speaker 12 (32:26):
There's no doubt in my mind who shot the m
three individuals there was Gil Fernandez.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Carbone also clearly recalled what Fernandez said next.
Speaker 9 (32:38):
Says, if you ever opened your mouth, he says, I
will kill your family.
Speaker 12 (32:41):
He says your kids, and he says, I o'kay, how far
you go to China or whatever? He was going to
kill my family.
Speaker 8 (32:48):
You get the feeling that he was supposed to be
killed that night, because Gil was so frantic, telling him,
if you ever say anything, I'm going to kill you,
I'm going to kill your family.
Speaker 9 (32:59):
I'm coming, I'll come for you. And it just sounded like.
Speaker 8 (33:03):
Carbone probably was supposed to be taken out too, but
it didn't happen.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Ultimately, Carbone netted fifty thousand dollars for his cut of
the robbery. Bill received one hundred and fifty thousand, and
the rest of the loot trickles upstream to Burt Christy
and beyond.
Speaker 8 (33:26):
I know it was a lot of money for all
of them, And of course they were instructed, according to Carbone,
to not go and buy anything fancy, do anything silly
that would bring law enforcement attention, and I think everybody
did just the opposite. These guys are going out buying
new cars and doing silly things, which of course gets
(33:49):
law enforcement's attention.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
But incredibly, Bill and his Apollo crew were not only
able to avoid arrest, we'll continue to operate their criminal
enterprise for years with little to no interference from the police.
But as some members of the crew would find out
the police were not the only threat they had to
worry about. Two years after the danger Road murders, Tommy
(34:18):
Felts would be gunned down in his car.
Speaker 8 (34:23):
Originally, the theory was that Gil had killed Tommy Felts
because Tommy was there at the triple.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Over the next year, Jimmy high Note and Harry Collier
would also meet their fate. Was guild cleaning house or
was it payback from his growing list of dangerous enemies.
Either way, the chickens were certainly coming home to roost.
Speaker 8 (34:49):
The basic premise was that his mo was to rip
off drug dealers and then kill them, and then kill
whoever was with him when he did it, so there
would never be any witnesses, and that's why Michael Carbone
the fact that he was still alive was a lucky
(35:10):
thing for us. But everybody else that he was involved
with was murdered.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
And when Carbone turned state's witness, it seemed that Gil
Fernandez and Burt Christie might finally face the music. But
one thing remained uncertain. As law enforcement untangled the bloody
web of ripoffs, shakedowns, and murder, would they ever uncover
the evidence necessary to connect the murder of Billy Halpering
(35:40):
or was there someone out there determined to keep it
buried deep behind the thin blue line. According to Cindi
(36:00):
and Perrado, the young prosecutor assigned to the case, Michael
Carbone's cooperation against Gil Fernandez and Bert Christi was never guaranteed.
Speaker 8 (36:11):
I think he was afraid before of Gil, that Gil
would kill him if he ever gave him up. Everybody
was afraid, so Carbone was reluctant. But then when he
was looking at significant time and this was federal time,
That's how he ended up becoming a witness for the
statewide prosecutor.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Another real risk someone tipping off their suspects and Fernandez
and Christie going on the run incredibly. Mark Lopez discussed
this possibility with Fernandez himself.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
And I told him more than a couple of times,
But I said, Gil, you know is how this is
going to end, right, Like, why don't you just grown
like going to lamp And I just think that he
wasn't going to do that, right And his wife was
pregnant by the time with their second kid, and he
was like, well, he didn't say this to me, but
I just thought he had the attitude like, if this
(37:06):
is gonna come, I'm going to take it on the
chin and I'm going to do what I can do.
But I don't think he ever had any intentions in
trying to run.
Speaker 8 (37:14):
Law enforcement was snooping around at the gym. They were
going to Apollo. They were talking to people that he knew,
and I think Gil definitely knew, because that was the
theory is that's why he left the police department, that
he knew that it was just a matter of time,
and especially once we had carbone.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Finally, in July of nineteen ninety, law enforcement made their move.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
We didn't know exactly when it was coming, but we
knew it was coming. They knew he left early in
the morning to go to the Apollo to open a gym.
He would get there at five to work out. So
I think, to my understanding, that they called the house
right at like four o'clock or four thirty, and he
entered the phone, they hung up. He was an ex cop, right,
He's like, yeah, that's the all the strick in the book.
(38:04):
They're trying to see if I'm here. He gets in
this car driver to the gym and they pull him
over on the road on the way to the gym,
and they take him down right there.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Thirty seven year old Gil Fernandez and fifty seven year
old Bert Christie were both arrested and charged with three
counts of first degree murder. Before their trial, each man
was offered a chance to avoid the maximum penalty on
the law by testifying against their alleged accomplice.
Speaker 8 (38:32):
I believe they were both offered life to cooperate against
the other one.
Speaker 9 (38:38):
So Christy was offered.
Speaker 8 (38:40):
Life to testify and skill and Gil was offered life
to testify against Christie, but they both rejected it, which
is pretty normal for organized crime types the wise guy mentality.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Both men would stand trial for the three homicides in
nineteen eighty three, but there was also pressure to hang
more charges on Fernandez and Christy for their suspected involvement
in many other crimes, including other murders.
Speaker 8 (39:16):
There was talk about if we had enough information to
try to do a Williams rule when you have similar
type crimes, that you can bring evidence of the other
crimes in to prove the crime that you're trying.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Even with several unsolved murders on the books, that strategy
carried significant risk.
Speaker 8 (39:39):
In Florida, almost every case that prosecutes used Williams rule evidence,
it seems to get reversed because it's just cumulative and
kind of overwhelming for the jury. You're looking at this
triple homicide, but now you're going to talk about five
other homicides or how many other homicides that they allegedly
occurred that you don't have enough to charge them.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Charging Christine Fernandez in a federal reco case could have
also allowed prosecutors to include other past homicides, possibly even
the murders of Apollo Jim members, Jimmy high Note and
Harry Collier, and if the evidence led them there, Mitch
Hall and Billy Halpern.
Speaker 8 (40:21):
I had all those reports about all the different homicides
and all the different players, so I was definitely familiar
with it all. But it ended up being the focus
on the triple, and the judge was very clear that
we couldn't.
Speaker 9 (40:33):
Talk about anything else.
Speaker 8 (40:35):
But there just wasn't enough evidence in other cases at
the time.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
CHRISTI and Fernandez's trial would be limited to the Danger
Road murders.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
I never saw him post arrests. I was given in
strict instructions from my father, do not go to County
to see him.
Speaker 7 (40:55):
Do not go to trial.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
When he goes to trial, do not go to trial
and go in the courtroom, stay away from the trial.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
With the brutal details of the triple homicide and they're
alleged ties to organized crime, the trial did attract a
considerable amount of attention from the press.
Speaker 10 (41:17):
Today, a Gilbert Fernandez, the ex com sits in court
charged with killing the three men White found eight years ago.
Prosecutors say Fernandez tied the victim's hands and shot them
in the head. Investigators say the triple murder was the
end result of a million dollar drug ripoff. The alleged
mastermind is co defendant Hubert Christie.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
The trial's high profile put not a small amount of
pressure on the young state prosecutor.
Speaker 8 (41:46):
I don't know if it was because it was such
a high profile case.
Speaker 9 (41:49):
It's a triple homicide.
Speaker 8 (41:50):
You've got every newspaper, every camera on you twenty four
to seven, so it can definitely make or break somebody's career,
to your years out of law school doing a triple homicide,
death penalty case, doing the opening statement, So it was
very intimidating.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Given the defendant's reputations for violence, and retribution against those
that betray them. There was also considerable concern about the
safety of their star witness.
Speaker 10 (42:22):
Carbone is the state's star witness, and he's expected to
take the stand later this week. Carbone's testimony against Gilbert
Fernandez and Hubert Christie will keep him from going to
jail on unrelated charges.
Speaker 8 (42:35):
We had a battle at the judge because we wanted
the marshals to be in the courtroom when Carbone was testifying,
and he didn't want them there. The chances of somebody
taking somebody out in court with all the security that
we had for that child would be hard to imagine,
but you never know what's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
As the trial got going, the challenges for the prosecution
became readily apparent.
Speaker 8 (43:03):
There were no angels in this trial because even the
victims were drug dealers, but certainly no one deserves what
happened to them.
Speaker 9 (43:14):
Fernandez took his victim, who was gagged.
Speaker 8 (43:17):
Blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, to the bank
of the canal. He instructed him to kneel down, and
with the coldness of an executioner, shot him twice in
the head and killed him.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
Prosecutors painted a compelling picture of events, but they also
had no murder weapon, no forensic evidence tying the accused
to the crime scene, and no one able or willing
to corroborate Carbone's story.
Speaker 8 (43:47):
One big concern was is jury going to believe Carbone?
Obviously for him to be able to hold three people
at gunpoint for multiple hours and be there for a
triple homicide and be involved in other things, obviously he
wasn't a good guy. We're out there on sketchy grounds
(44:08):
relying on his testimony. I mean, if the jury didn't
believe him, I think, you know, we would have been
in big trouble. You know, it's not like we had
fingerprints or DNA or something that you go to the
jury and say, absolutely, this is what happens.
Speaker 9 (44:23):
So it's Carbone was basically the case.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Neither Christi or Fernandez testified in their own defense, much
to the dismay of the press and the trial audience,
many of whom were giving the benefit of doubt to
the Bible toting X cop and former mister Florida.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
There are people in there that were now coming in
that only new Gill is born again Christian Gil, right,
So these are people that are like, how I can't
believe this? You know, I can't. He's such a good
guy and so, you know, a sweetheart. I'm thinking I
might go, well, you know, he might be a sweetheart
in the hell. But believe me, a year ago, who
you wouldn't have had.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Fernandez and Christie sat there stoically as Carbone offered testimony
that could put them both in the electric chair.
Speaker 10 (45:18):
Carbone, who's under the Federal Witness Protection Program, told the
jury he was hired as a surveillance man to help
in the drug scam. Since coming forward, Carbone has told
his story half a dozen times. Each time details of
his testimony changed.
Speaker 8 (45:34):
The problem with Carbone was he had given a statement
to the Feds, he'd given a statement to the grand jury.
Speaker 9 (45:41):
He had given a deposition.
Speaker 8 (45:43):
So again, as you know from being a law enforcement officer,
when you get a person on the witness stand and
their subjects to cross examination, and now you've got four
or five different statements and you can make a big
deal out of small inconsistencies, it would be hard for
me to fathom the jury not believing he was there.
Speaker 9 (46:05):
No one knew the details like he did. I mean,
you knew that these people were ripped off. You knew
they were murdered.
Speaker 8 (46:10):
You suspected Gil and Bert were involved, because that's how
they operated. And Carbone there, you just couldn't make up
all those details that he had about it.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
His story was also bolstered by the testimony of his wife,
who also took the stand to say that Carbone had
confessed to witnessing the triple murder.
Speaker 13 (46:38):
He told me that they got into the car, and
that they took them out to some place somewhere out
west by some water, and that they got out of
the car, and that Gil took the one man into
the water and then he shot him.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
The defense rested its case on one simple premise that
the testimony of a career criminal purchased with a promise
of immunity wasn't worth the paper it was written on.
Speaker 8 (47:15):
They didn't put on a real I mean, it was
mostly just a tear apart our case, and be like,
we'd improve it beyond a reasonable doubt, And how can
you believe Carbone?
Speaker 9 (47:23):
And he's getting this sweet deal.
Speaker 8 (47:25):
He'll say whatever they want him to say.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
Now, there are many other lines that you'll find out,
he says.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
The law enforcement on other cases, You're going to find.
Speaker 9 (47:34):
Out that he's a five time convicted.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
Felt Mark Lopez, the former Apollo employee, had no love
for Michael Carbone, but he thought relying solely on Carbone's
testimony made the state's case against his former boss flimsy
at best.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Look, he was a three time loser basing fifteen to
life if this third extortion beef, and he would have
gave up his own mother.
Speaker 7 (48:04):
To walk right.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
So I think that they thought that John was going
to be able to break Carbone down on the stand,
and that the jury would see that and think that
he was allying a three time loser scumbag trying to
save his own ass, which he was.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
It would be up to the jury to decide who
to trust.
Speaker 7 (48:26):
The highly publicized murder trial of a former Metro Dad
police officer and his business partner is in the hands
of a brower jury at this hour.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
The men are accused of killing three drug dealers in
the Everglades.
Speaker 8 (48:38):
Usually in a criminal case, the longer the jury's out,
it's usually better for the defense. So when they were
coming back with questions about different degrees of murder and
everything else, we were believing we were sweating it out
that they were going to come back with a lesser
(48:58):
or do something else, or that they were going to
be a hung jury.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
Instead, the jury found both men guilty.
Speaker 14 (49:09):
As to the defendant Gilbert Fernandez, as to count one
of the indictment, the defendant is guilty of first degree
murder without a firearm. To defendant Hubert Christie, as to
count one of the indictment, the defendant is guilty of
first felony murder.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
Eight years after the triple homicide on Danger Road, Fernandez
and Christy were convicted of three counts of first degree
murder in the commission of a felony and were handed
down heavy sentences.
Speaker 8 (49:38):
Judge Tyson gave them consecutive life sentences, so there's no
chance of him getting out, which was the idea.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
I was a little surprised, to be honest with you, because,
like I said, I knew that you know beyond character witnesses,
So I thought, wow, man, you can they can send
you away for triple life on one guy's testimony like
it was.
Speaker 7 (50:06):
That to me was a little surprising.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
As for Michael Carbone, he hasn't been seen in Florida since,
and speculation is that for the last thirty four years
has been a guest of a witness relocation program.
Speaker 2 (50:22):
I just talked to a regular friend of mine here
that's local in Palm Beach County that was an' a
member of the Apollo Gym too, And he had just
asked me like a week ago. He said, Hey, whatever
happened to Michael Carbone? We don't know you know where
he is or anything. And I said, well, he's not
Michael Carbone anymore, right, I said, he's Joe Smith in
(50:43):
you know, Idaho. They said he's in witness protection.
Speaker 7 (50:46):
They got a new identity.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
So if he's still alive, which Michael would have to
be pushing in like seventy now, you know, he's not
Michael Carbone anymore.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
But despite justice being served for their role in the
Danger Road murders, investigators believe there are still multiple unsolved
homicides that they have good reason to believe were ordered
and carried out by Bert Christi and Gil Fernandez. They
include the brutal slayings of Mitch Hall, his girlfriend char Linda,
(51:20):
and of course Lori Halpern's brother Billy.
Speaker 4 (51:30):
They had pretty much told me that Gil committed the murder,
so I just figured which I'd be grateful if they
can prove it. But Mike Hallman did not thought. You know,
they didn't want to spend the money. They kind of
knew that he did it. We really need to go
any farther. Do you want to go through a trial?
We kind of know we did it. I said, well,
(51:51):
I don't want my parents to go through that. And
if you know, I don't want them to. You know,
they're going to make Billy look bad. And if if
you think Gil killed Billy, then look, leave it alone.
Speaker 9 (52:01):
Bill kill Billy.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
But something in her heart told her that this wasn't
the full story.
Speaker 8 (52:10):
I have sent, you know, feelers out to see if
at some point Gil would be willing to confess to
the rest of the murders to give the family member's
peace of mind, if nothing else, for just pleading him
out to concurrent time. And I do believe that the
(52:32):
state's attitude was, like we can exceptionally clear these cases.
You know, he's already serving life. He's not calling it,
but he's lost all his appeals. It's not like he's
going to walk out. But his attitude has been from
the beginning that he's not saying anything. He's got two sons,
I believe, and he never wants them to know what
(52:54):
he did.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
But maybe would the emergence of more evidence, Jill Fernandez
could be convinced to.
Speaker 5 (53:02):
Talk Calassie, say, what's going on?
Speaker 14 (53:08):
I just wanted to touch base with you, so we
got some.
Speaker 7 (53:12):
Quant and go back.
Speaker 9 (53:14):
There is DNA there.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
Maybe with the new DNA evidence, he would have to.
Speaker 7 (53:22):
Did you go him?
Speaker 1 (53:25):
Now? Whatever you show me, I'll try to help you.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
But other than that, you know, really I'm on to
hell out of respect.
Speaker 9 (53:32):
Of course, you know, I will just stay see you later.
Speaker 1 (53:35):
Man, if you ain't got a warn and you ain't
gonna take me to jail or whatever, because I already
a jail so you know, but yeah, go ahead, cold Blooded.
The Apollo Jim Murders is a production of iHeart Podcasts
(53:55):
and Authentic Wave Media. Scott Weinberger, Kevin be and Walker
LeMond are executive producers. Sabrina Sire is our line producer,
scoring sound design and mixing by Mark lamarg Z for
iHeart Podcasts, Christina Everett is executive producer, and David Wasserman
(54:19):
is brand marketing manager and with special thanks to the
Miramar Police Department Chief del Rich Moss, 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.