But before he returned, according to Marilyn, a woman identifying herself as Anthony’s personal assistant called Marilyn to say that Anthony had lost the $615 check and needed a replacement. Later, Anthony showed up at the store, and while he and two of Marilyn’s workers loaded his unsold items into his truck, Marilyn made out a second check, left it on the counter, and returned to her desk. She was glad to be seeing the back of this particular customer, and she didn’t even bother to look up when he came back into the store. But he didn’t pick up the check and leave. He stood there at the counter waiting. She busied herself with paperwork, but she could feel his eyes on her. Finally she looked up at him and asked, “What?” According to Marilyn, he stared her down and then pointed a finger at her, shook it slowly, turned, and left.
A few days later, Marilyn discovered that the check that was supposedly lost had been cashed. She testified that when Wells Fargo called the store to say Anthony was in the branch trying to cash the second check, her daughter told them not to. Two weeks later, Simply Sofas was torched.
On July 7, Sergeant Almada headed over to the Smiths’ condominium in Marina del Rey. He described the Simply Sofas fire to Anthony, how fiercely it raged, exaggerating how firefighters had to leap from one roof to the other to save their lives. Anthony asked him what Marilyn Nelson had said about him, and Almada replied that Marilyn hadn’t pointed the finger at anybody. It was the 30 pieces of mail shoved inside the firebombs that had led him to Anthony.
“If there was a fire, how was anything left?” Anthony asked, according to Almada, who says that’s when he began to cry. Almada suggested they go down to the police station and continue to talk there. Anthony asked for a few minutes alone with his wife, the lawyer, and then rode down to the precinct house with the sergeant. It was a quiet ride, Almada later testified. But when they got to the station, Almada felt a change had come over Anthony.
The sergeant laid out the evidence once again, asking Anthony to look at things from his point of view. Don’t you think it’s odd that all the mail in the firebombs is addressed to you? Almada asked. “Can you help me out on this?”
“Well, I’m not dumb enough I’m going to firebomb a place and put my stuff in it. Help me with that. Help me with that.”
“Who set you up?” Almada said. “Tell me who set you up so we can go get them.”
Anthony replied sarcastically, “Oh, it’s the guy in there. I’m telling you right now, bring him in, I think it’s him. That’s how foolish that question is. I’m a professional—ex-professional—athlete. How would I know? I’m not sitting here trying to insult your intelligence any more than I want my intelligence insulted. But the thing I am asking you is, go do your homework. You haven’t done your homework, man.”
In frustration, Almada hit him with the fact that he had just wept and apologized when confronted with the evidence; he had even asked Almada to tell Marilyn Nelson he was sorry. But Smith had an answer for that too. He had “shed a tear” because Almada had said some firemen got hurt fighting the fire. “You tell me someone got hurt, I’m gonna respond,” Anthony said. “Somebody try to do something to me, someone try to do something to someone else, that still gonna hurt me. That’s not right, man. You don’t solve problems that way, and no $1,200 check is serious to Anthony Smith. It ain’t worth it. You walk away. Situation like that, walk away. She’ll get hers. Walk away. She’ll get it.”
A week later, Anthony returned for another go-round with Almada, at the end of which he was arrested and jailed.
At the arson trial, four gang members wearing Raiders jackets sat in the courtroom, staring down prosecution witnesses and staking out the corridors during breaks, according to the prosecutor, Jean Daly. Almada never left Daly’s side, escorting her to her car at the end of each day. During the trial, the defense took Daly by surprise when they offered a whole new explanation for Anthony’s tears in the condo. He was upset, he testified, because he had lost family members in a fire in Elizabeth City. (In 1996, James Gallop’s longtime girlfriend, whom Anthony knew well, and her grown daughter were killed when their house burned down.) He testified that he told Almada about that fire during the drive to the police station—the ride Almada had described as virtually silent. And he offered a theory for how his mail ended up in the firebombs: He had boxes of old mail in his truck that day because he was emptying out a storage locker. He had hired a couple of day laborers to help him move his things from Simply Sofas. The workers must’ve put his mail in the Dumpsters behind Marilyn’s store, and whoever made the firebombs found his mail and used it to set the fire. No one saw these day laborers, including Marilyn’s employees who helped Anthony load his truck that day. Still, the jury deadlocked: seven to five in Smith’s favor.