The most fascinating aspect of Anthony’s interview was his habit of sidestepping questions with long-winded descriptions, his tendency to prattle tediously on. This was a different Anthony from the bulletproof man aggressively facing down Sergeant Almada five years earlier. This Anthony was humble and trying hard, he insisted, to help out the detectives. He even cried a couple of times.
But he was remarkably forthcoming about his business with Maurilio. The two men, he said, dealt in stolen freight. Anthony said he didn’t know how Maurilio came by the stolen truckloads of merchandise, but that Maurilio paid him to unload the goods. Ten thousand dollars a job, Anthony said, adding that they fenced everything from electronic equipment to asthma inhalers, energy drinks to fireworks. Maurilio often carried a lot of cash on him, Anthony said. Tens of thousands, sometimes more than $100,000. The night of Maurilio’s murder, he had called Anthony about a new load, Anthony said.
He was, in his own way, endearing. Unfailingly polite, calling the sergeants “sir” throughout, expressing his gratitude to the detectives for “trying to work this thing out,” even praising his friend Maurilio: “He doesn’t play games with people’s money. He, he’s a good guy,” he stammered. At one point in the interview, Smith even hugged Rodriguez. “I appreciate you being honest and keeping it real with me 100 percent, I really do.”
When the three men went on trial before three separate juries in the spring of 2012, their defense attorneys attacked different aspects of the prosecution’s case. They brought in a bank loan officer to show that Angie had often missed payments on the Navigator, suggesting that maybe Maurilio did indeed want to get rid of the vehicle in an insurance scam. Smith’s lawyer Michael Evans pressed home the point that while phone records put Cheese and Dewann near the murder scene, the last transmission from Anthony’s cell was down in Sand Canyon, 45 miles south of Lancaster. Evans also pointed the jury to the five calls Anthony made to Maurilio’s phone on the morning after the murder. Why would he call a man he had allegedly murdered?
Still, the defense didn’t seem to raise enough smoke to obscure the fact that Smith had traveled north toward Lancaster that night, speaking with Maurilio all the while, had possession of the murdered man’s SUV and cell phone, and changed his story for how that came to be, offering two explanations, neither of them plausible. A dead man can’t deliver a truck, after all, and if someone else killed Maurilio, he would have had to have known about Maurilio’s insurance scam with Anthony and, after the murder, obligingly driven the Navigator down to LA. Even without a weapon, it seemed like the prosecution made a pretty solid case.
And yet. Cheese and Dewann were found guilty; Cheese is now serving 35 years to life and Dewann is awaiting sentencing. Smith’s jury deadlocked, eight to four in the prosecution’s favor. Mistrial. Anthony remains incarcerated as the prosecution prepares for a retrial, scheduled to begin sometime this summer.
On October 12, 2012, after a pretrial hearing in Lancaster—which Anthony Smith sat through expressionless in his jailhouse blues, his myopic gaze giving him a naked, just-roused-from-bed look—the man who had been described as both a “big old teddy bear” (by his friend Harvey Williams) and a guy who would “choke you out over 50 cents” (by his former friend Dwayne Simon) was ordered to stand trial again for the Maurilio Ponce murder—plus three more killings that took place all the way back in 1999 and 2001, barely after he’d hung up his cleats. Anthony has pled not guilty to all counts, and Evans characterizes the prosecution’s case as having no DNA evidence or fingerprints, no murder weapons, and eyewitness testimony that is anywhere from five to 14 years old.
Dennis “Denny Ray” Henderson’s body was found in the backseat of his red Chevy Impala on June 25, 2001. His head appeared to have been stomped on—he had a heel mark on his cheek, a fractured cheekbone, and a dislocated jaw. He was stabbed in his left eye, in his ear, and 11 times in his back. A cable tie encircled one wrist. It was his brother, Barry Henderson, who pointed police in Anthony’s direction. Barry was Anthony’s neighbor in Marina del Rey, and a friend. At the pretrial hearing, Detective Jay Moberly testified that Barry told him he’d introduced Anthony to his younger brother when Anthony wanted to buy some Ecstasy and weed. Anthony and Denny Ray started hanging out.
Barry knew Anthony as a man with a short fuse, according to Moberly, especially when it came to people owing him money. One day when the two men were heading out to lunch, Anthony made a stop at his storage locker and invited Barry to come in and take a look. Barry told Moberly he saw knives and bundles of zip ties there, police-raid jackets, machine guns, silencers, hand grenades, tons of ammunition, and a “book on how to assassinate someone.” According to Moberly’s testimony, Anthony told Barry that he and his associates used the police-raid jackets during robberies. He showed Barry some license plates and explained that they would rent Crown Victorias (the car of choice for police detectives at the time), exchanging the plates for these “cold” or untraceable ones. Finally, Moberly testified, Barry told him that Anthony had bragged about kidnapping and killing two brothers who ran a car wash.