Cold BloodedDetective 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.
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.
Maybe nine months or so after I moved to Florida, there was a series of murders.
That's the voice of Mark Lopez, a friend of Billy Halburn's and an ex employee of the Apollo Jim.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
I never knew very Gollier, but apparently his fingerprints were on the tape.
They found the Collier's prints on the tape for his girl.
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.
They came to my work, I remember I was working at over there by the airport, Kay Realtive.
That's Mitch's sister Kim, who remembers how Broward detectives delivered the news that they were making headway in her brother's case.
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 individuals involved.
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 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 time to bring that person to justice.
International assist Kayla, can I help you?
Hey?
Kayla is Cassie and by chance, this is Danny Smith from Mirmarpiti.
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 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.
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 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.
Danny's on the phone with Cassie, a case manager at DNA Labs International.
I also wanted to confirm who if.
The tape is all kind.
Of like jumbled up and you.
Know, as pretty much, and isn't okay if we kind of like trying to easily take apart when it happened.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it needs to get tested and you know, let's be honest, it's almost forty years old.
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 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 crime scene and also had the potential to help identify his killer.
And regarding the hair, do you want me to go back and get it and drop it off to you guys?
Or wait, I.
Hold off the world why and longer?
Okay, see what we get off of the and then we can kind of go from there.
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.
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.
Be that way.
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 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 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, 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Was, well, fuck you, Gil.
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.
And I mean he.
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.
Gil eventually became a co owner of the apologym with his mentor and former mister Florida, Bert Christie, who was twenty years Gil.
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.
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.
And that was when Burt Christy came into the picture. He was supposedly the organized crime connection.
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. 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.
Gill and Tommy were the muscle, and Bert was basically the guy given direction.
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.
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 or both.
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.
You know, in the drug business.
Generally just you know, little crews that banded together that were selling drugs, smuggling drugs.
The drugs then flowed out of the Apollo gym with impunity while Bert and Gil scoped out bigger and better scores.
And they were doing that to a number of different crews out there from all over the place.
So you know, you're going to do that to the.
Wrong people and eventually somebody is going to come for you.
In nineteen eighty five, Tommy Felts was first to fall victim to a rival's violent retribution.
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.
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.
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 BSO and detectives spoking around asking questions, that's when you kind of knew the shit had hit the fan.
The BSO would be the brawer of Sheriff's office also sniffing around the Apollo. The FBI.
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 reco case against him.
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.
I specifically told.
Him that BSO was trying to call me in and that I said, listen, I said, I'm.
Going to go in.
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.
Detectives were looking for someone willing to testify against Fernandez and Christy.
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 fate is sealed.
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.
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.
But given the litany of their past sins and victims, there was little chance they could outrun their reputations.
Bert just couldn't sell that act. He just couldn't, right, He tried to, he couldn't.
But according to Mark Gill's act was considerably more convincing.
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.
His attitude changed.
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?
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.
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, Cooper City, Fort Lauderdale, North Miami Beach.
We had cop friends all over.
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.
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 the goods on Gill. He said, remember those three bodies that were found out on Danger Road, Yeah, that was us. Cindy and Parrado always wanted to be in law enforcement, and after graduate school, she spent nine years as a uniformed officer in Tallahassee.
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.
But she eventually earned her stripes and her props within the force.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 how's the positioned. He had his hands time behind his back, laying face down.
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 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 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 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.
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, doing some drug dealing, some of the low level scams and stuff like that.
The stocky, blonde haired Carbone was also a fixture at the Apollo Gym.
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.
As they say in the movies. He also had a rap sheet a mile long, including convictions in five separate felonies.
Well, Michael Carbone got arrested again, so he knew he was going to prison.
So that's when he said, well, I have something.
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 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 Carbone's statement, it read like a scene out of a gangster movie.
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 anything that Fernandez doesn't want them to do well.
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.
And then Carbone comes out of the other room with the Tommy gun and they all get gagged and blindfolded.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 well lit, and the only time that anyone goes out there is either for hunting and vision or for something nefarious.
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.
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.
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 the time they were actually murdered, it's actually it's hard to conceive.
Ultimately, Gil fires twice more, killing the other two men with bullets to the back of their heads.
There's no doubt in my mind who shot the m three individuals there was Gil Fernandez.
Carbone also clearly recalled what Fernandez said next.
Says, if you ever opened your mouth, he says, I will kill your family.
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.
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.
I'm coming, I'll come for you. And it just sounded like.
Carbone probably was supposed to be taken out too, but it didn't happen.
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.
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 law enforcement's attention.
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 Felts would be gunned down in his car.
Originally, the theory was that Gil had killed Tommy Felts because Tommy was there at the triple.
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.
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 thing for us. But everybody else that he was involved with was murdered.
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 or was there someone out there determined to keep it buried deep behind the thin blue line. According to Cindi and Perrado, the young prosecutor assigned to the case, Michael Carbone's cooperation against Gil Fernandez and Bert Christi was never guaranteed.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Finally, in July of nineteen ninety, law enforcement made their move.
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. 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.
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.
I believe they were both offered life to cooperate against the other one.
So Christy was offered.
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.
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.
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.
Even with several unsolved murders on the books, that strategy carried significant risk.
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.
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.
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.
Talk about anything else.
But there just wasn't enough evidence in other cases at the time.
CHRISTI and Fernandez's trial would be limited to the Danger Road murders.
I never saw him post arrests. I was given in strict instructions from my father, do not go to County to see him.
Do not go to trial.
When he goes to trial, do not go to trial and go in the courtroom, stay away from the trial.
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.
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.
The trial's high profile put not a small amount of pressure on the young state prosecutor.
I don't know if it was because it was such a high profile case.
It's a triple homicide.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As the trial got going, the challenges for the prosecution became readily apparent.
There were no angels in this trial because even the victims were drug dealers, but certainly no one deserves what happened to them.
Fernandez took his victim, who was gagged.
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.
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.
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 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.
So it's Carbone was basically the case.
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.
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.
Fernandez and Christie sat there stoically as Carbone offered testimony that could put them both in the electric chair.
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.
The problem with Carbone was he had given a statement to the Feds, he'd given a statement to the grand jury.
He had given a deposition.
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.
No one knew the details like he did. I mean, you knew that these people were ripped off. You knew they were murdered.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
And he's getting this sweet deal.
He'll say whatever they want him to say.
Now, there are many other lines that you'll find out, he says.
The law enforcement on other cases, You're going to find.
Out that he's a five time convicted.
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.
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.
To walk right.
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.
It would be up to the jury to decide who to trust.
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.
The men are accused of killing three drug dealers in the Everglades.
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 or do something else, or that they were going to be a hung jury.
Instead, the jury found both men guilty.
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.
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.
Judge Tyson gave them consecutive life sentences, so there's no chance of him getting out, which was the idea.
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.
That to me was a little surprising.
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.
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 you know, Idaho. They said he's in witness protection.
They got a new identity.
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.
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, and of course Lori Halpern's brother Billy.
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, 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.
Bill kill Billy.
But something in her heart told her that this wasn't the full story.
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 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 he did.
But maybe would the emergence of more evidence, Jill Fernandez could be convinced to.
Talk Calassie, say, what's going on?
I just wanted to touch base with you, so we got some.
Quant and go back.
There is DNA there.
Maybe with the new DNA evidence, he would have to.
Did you go him?
Now? Whatever you show me, I'll try to help you.
But other than that, you know, really I'm on to hell out of respect.
Of course, you know, I will just stay see you later.
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 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 is brand marketing manager and with special thanks to the Miramar Police Department Chief del Rich Moss, Pio Tanya Ardaz, and Detective Susie Smith.
