“These aren’t my records,” Almada said. “This is the Department of Justice.”
“I couldn’t care less whose records they are,” Smith retorted. “You go back and you check those records and you will find I was charged with domestic violence. You know when you are charged with domestic violence, you can’t own any guns. I got rid of ’em . . . Don’t own the guns. What I do every year, I go every year to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile to go shoot. I’m a wing shooter. That’s it. Don’t need pistols. I don’t own guns like that. I sold my guns.”
“Okay, great,” Almada said briskly. “Now back to the fire.”
“Not a problem.” And it really wasn’t, as time would tell.
From a prosecutor’s point of view, Anthony Smith is a dangerous, lucky person. Mesmerizing, seemingly untouchable. Absorbing and self-absorbed. He can do wrecking ball; he can do teddy bear. He’s a man with a temper who believes in his own victimhood. And he’s smart . . . enough. Any slipups, and there have been some whoppers, are countered by mind-numbing obfuscation during police interviews and charismatic appearances on the witness stand. (“He’s a pretty good witness,” one judge remarked. “The DA didn’t shake him. He is able to handle pressure, possibly from playing sports.”) To friends and family, he’s sociable and generous, a family man with a dazzling smile and a loving heart. A man whose talent bought him a dream life—multimillion-dollar NFL contract, mansion on a hill, marriage to Denise Matthews, aka Vanity, the former lead singer of Prince’s eponymous all-girl group—that somehow bled into the nightmare he now faces: a looming trial for the brutal murders of four men.
Certainly, Smith has always been ready to bewilder. During one of the many police searches done on his vehicles and residences over the years, detectives found badges and numerous identification cards—two were for Anthony Smith, “Intelligence Officer,” one for Anthony Smith of “The Organized Crime Bureau,” and the fourth was an American Press Association ID with Smith’s address but bearing the slightly ridiculous name “Wayne Peartree,” suggesting how he felt about reporters. Early on in his career, Smith told sportswriters incredible stories about his childhood. He said he’d been raised in New York and belonged to a street gang called the Black Spades. When he was eight, he said, he and three friends stole a car and crashed it, killing two of them. When it came to drug use, he really piled it on, telling a reporter that he’d started using heroin, cocaine, PCP, LSD, and speed when he was nine years old and that his brother had died of a heroin overdose.
In fact, Anthony was raised in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, a small coastal and river town surrounded by farm- and swampland, a place with the comforting or claustrophobic feel of everyone knowing you and your cousin’s cousin. His mother, Naomi—a beautiful woman who drank too much, according to the old men in the neighborhood—died when he was about three years old. It’s not clear who his father was. Naomi was living with a man named James Gallop at the time, who has been referred to as either his father or his stepfather. Gallop was a mean man, says a close family friend who has known Anthony since childhood; “he’d smile at you and cut you at the same time.” (The family friend has requested anonymity; we will call him Bryan.) Once, when Gallop thought Naomi was stepping out on him, Bryan says, he decided to brand her by picking her up and setting her down on her wood-burning stove.
When Naomi died (they say her liver gave out), Anthony’s much older half-brother Donald took over his care—after kicking James Gallop out of the house. Donald was in his early twenties at the time, so it says something about the will of the man, the cold hard certainty of him, that he could kick his mother’s partner, and a violent man, to the curb. Hot-tempered and ill-humored, Donald was also industrious and respectable, Bryan says. He worked for UPS. He became a deputy sheriff, then a magistrate. Years later, Anthony told a friend that Donald used to hit him, but as Bryan puts it, they all did back then.
“That whole generation of men, they were all angry,” he says. “For them, it was better to be mad than happy. They couldn’t communicate, and they didn’t know how to fix problems in a simple, civilized way. Oh, they liked to shine on each other, that’s what we call it down south, acting like the good guy, like everything in their life was going well, even if they were coming home and beating their kids, which they were.” Shining was an art, and one Anthony was learning at home.