Michael Connelly - Crime Beat - A Decade Of Covering Cops And Killers

Defense attorneys said the cost of the trial should not be criticized because the defendants are constitutionally guaranteed competent counsel and a fair trial. They said the prosecution has set the stage for the lengthy and expensive battle by alleging complicated conspiracy charges.

“Millions have been spent on their investigation,” Flanagan said. “I don’t think anybody can quibble over the money” spent on defense attorneys.

Novotney said that if the prosecution dropped some of the “garbage charges” against the defendants, such as the allegation that the organization was involved in a drug conspiracy, the trial and costs would be greatly trimmed.

“The cost of justice sometimes is expensive,” Novotney said. “This is a megacase. I have a client who faces a possible death penalty. I have an obligation to prepare the best defense possible. It’s an expensive proposition.”

Citing confidentiality, he declined to say what his defense team has been paid in the 1 1⁄2 years he has been on the case.

Maurizi said the length of the case works to the advantage of the defendants as well as their attorneys. As a case drags on, the prosecution’s evidence can unravel.

“Memories fade to a certain extent, evidence can be lost or destroyed,” she said. “In this case, there has always been a great danger factor to our witnesses.”

Vojtecky said one of the case’s defendants, Nash Newbil, 56, had been free on bail awaiting trial but was then jailed in September when he allegedly directed an assault against a witness in the case. Newbil was charged with assault for allegedly ordering two men to hold down the witness and inject a hallucinogenic drug into her tongue with a hypodermic needle. During the alleged attack, Newbil called her a “snitch,” police said.

Defense attorney Flanagan countered that the slow movement of the case causes defendants an enormous hardship.

“It’s a nightmare for those individuals,” he said. “There is a presumption of innocence, but they languish in jail.

“I don’t think it is anybody’s fault. There is an investigation that has been done by both sides. I don’t think anybody is trying to hold it up.”

note: The sheer size of the prosecution spawned by the quadruple murder in Lake View Terrace proved to be unmanageable. The case was eventually pared down and split. Still, over the next five years there were several prosecutions and convictions of members of the Bryant Family Organization for crimes ranging from murder to drug dealing and money laundering. Stanley Bryant and two others were eventually sent to death row for the killings. His brother, Jeffrey Bryant, was returned to prison as well after being convicted of drug-related crimes. By 1997, the organization most responsible for bringing rock cocaine to the northeast Valley was completely dismantled and irrelevant, according to police and federal authorities.

BILLY THE BURGLAR

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

June 7, 1987

Billy Schroeder is 24 years old. But he looks, at his best, like 24 going on 40. Put him up next to his boyish mug shot of just a few years ago and the boy is long gone. The bleached blond hair has turned to brown and shows signs of thinning. The body, too, is thin, having been tapered by its addictions. Sometimes the eyes, set in a ruddy face, are glassy and have a thousand-yard stare in a six-by-six room.

Permanent blue ink wraps around both his arms. The lion, the hawk, the skull. He wears his philosophy – his former philosophy, mind you – forever beneath his sleeve: the man with a dope pipe, the inscription “Get High” on his biceps. All of it the work of jailhouse tattoo artists.

Looking at Billy Schroeder, it is easy to imagine what a nightmare it would have been for someone to have come home to find this stranger inside. Though on occasion that did occur, hundreds of times in the last year Schroeder was in and out of homes without being seen. He was a burglar, one of the most prolific that local police have known about in recent years.

For a time, it seemed as though nothing could stop him. He cruised through the streets of South Broward and North Dade, through the back doors and windows of up to five homes a day. Fueled by cocaine or the craving for it, he broke into at least 350homes in a year’s time and stole an estimated $2million worth of property.

Despite the big numbers he posted, Schroeder was no master burglar. He lived high and blew every dollar he got. He was just another crack addict, who in actuality was not as good as he was lucky. Locked up now, even he will tell you that. And he’ll tell you that his luck worked against him as much as it worked for him.

“I guess I was a good burglar, but it seemed like I was lucky more than anything,” he says. “I was sloppy. It seems if they really wanted me, they could have gotten me sooner. I wish now that they would have. My good luck was really bad luck, I guess.”

Burglary is a mid-level crime, meaning that on a seriousness scale it is far below murder, somewhere above petty theft. Also meaning it inspires similar priorities in most police departments and prosecutors’ offices.

Still, burglary is a crime that cuts across social strata, leaving its scars on the poor and the rich, the young and the old. And it is one of the most prevalent of crimes in our society. In Broward County there were 25,000 burglaries last year; 22,000 in Palm Beach County. Across Florida it happened more than 250,000 times. Only 16 percent of the cases were cleared by arrest.

The story of one of the most prolific burglars in Broward is not just a story of a man’s addiction to a drug and what that drug made him do. He is part of an epidemic. And the proper way to tell Billy Schroeder’s tale is to also tell the stories of those he stole from, and those who hunted him.

Billy Schroeder was born and raised in the blue-collar Lake Forest area west of Hollywood. He grew up in a home with a mother and sister, and sometimes he lived with his grandparents. There was no father in the house after he turned four. He learned about authority and manhood on the streets. And by the time he was 11 the streets had already led him into the sampling of drugs and burglary. It was during his 11th year that he was caught for the first time: he was inside a neighbor’s home, and placed on juvenile probation.

From there he moved deeper into a life of drug use and thievery. He was kicked out of Hallandale High School for dealing the drug THC in the bathrooms. He was arrested selling Quaaludes to an undercover cop.

Incarceration may have been the best thing for Schroeder, but he avoided prison and always won the second chance. That changed in 1981when, at 17, he was sent as an adult to DeSoto Correctional Institute for burglary. In prison, he finished high school, took carpentry classes, got his tattoos, temporarily ended his addiction to drugs and, most of all, waited for his release. That came in late 1984and he returned to his old neighborhood.

Schroeder says he stayed clean for more than a year, working first as a gas station attendant and then using his prison-learned skills as a carpenter. When he was tempted by the old life of drugs and thievery he would carefully unfold the prison release papers he kept in his wallet.

“Every time I was slipping I would look at my papers,” he says. “I didn’t want to go back. I looked at them and said I’d earned my freedom and paid my debt.”

But by the end of 1985, Billy Schroeder had misplaced his papers and he started slipping. And one night a friend came by his apartment and introduced him to cocaine in the form called crack. Within 24 hours of smoking his first rock, all that Schroeder had learned was gone. So was his TV and stereo and living room furniture, all traded for crack. A week later the job was gone, too. Urges controlled Billy Schroeder again. His first break-in was into the house next door.