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You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Good Evening. This is your host Dan Zupansky for the program True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that are written about them. The case that captivated to Coachella Valley in San Francisco Bay Area for years. Author Sheryluder and her literary team Don Tarud Martinez and Kim Hansen, along with Tyson Wrenched, a former friend now victim of the Khan Men, unraveled the threads of a decade long crimes free filled with twists, turns,
and shocking revelations. Filled with a cast of characters drawn from San Francisco's Castro District, The Dark Prince and the Boys take you from one con to the next until a single brazen act leads to murder. However, the story doesn't end there.
There are the.
However, the story doesn't end there. There are the dramatic courtroom trials that no one predicted and the shocking ending that no one expected, not even the judge. The book that we're featuring this evening is Until Someone Gets Hurt by Sherry Luder and Tyson Wrench, and my guest this evening is Tyson Wrench. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Tyson Wrench.
Yeah, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.
I hope that's the pronunciation of your name. I should have checked beforehand.
Yeah, no, it's just like a wrench. There you go.
Okay, now let's get to this wild story, and for our audience, I don't think it's explained in there so well, but you have we're friends with the people that are the main characters in this story, and then you end up being a victim, and so you can tell us how you became a victim. And this is the fascinating story and it's a unique perspective because of who you are and your relationship to the characters in this including
a murderer. So let's get right to this incredible story Until Someone Gets Hurt And you're the co author along with Sherry Luter. Now let's start off with are me.
Go ahead?
And now I wanted to start our interview basically the same way you unfold the relationships in this book. Because there's a lot of characters and it's a little it's fairly complex compared to some of the stories that we deal with, it's really best to keep this focus. And we'll start our interview with how you start your book and tell us where you are on March fifth, two thousand and seven, and under what circumstances you'd gone on
a vacation. Tell us basically that and maybe even before that, give us your background and at that time, who were you at that time, what was your profession, what was your status, and then explain what happened on March fifth and unfold this story for our audience.
Sure, sure, well, I was raised UH in the Silicon Valley and and obviously started my career there in the UH in the computer industry and rode the dot com boom, and UH just had the had pretty good success with with everything I did and UH in that in that process, I had moved to San Francisco and just had a big circle of friends. And within that circle of friends was a was a man named Danny Garcia, and he and I had become a grateful for five years. My
company transferred me to Europe. I moved to uh Germany and I was there for a couple of years before the dot com boom sort of came to an end, if you will, and they all needed to downsize, and I was given a fantastic parachute out of there. And of course I first person I called was as that was Danny, and I said, I'm coming back to the US and let's go have a good time, because that's uh he was that he was that friend.
Okay, now tell us about your vacation. Uh you you've just been terminated by your company. But like you say, it's not it's not so full. You you did really really well. You were you were You want to come back to the States anyway, or at least you're comfortable with coming back to the States. And you got a lot of money, like you say, seven figure parachutes. So now tell us about this Argentina, Argentina and Brazil, this South American vacation, and tell us a little bit about that.
Why you why you wanted to go there?
And tell us I had had some Germans get an amazing amount of vacation normally done with some of my UH friends and co workers. That's to South America for a month on a trip and included a cruise, and the end of the cruise we ended up from one side rio.
We got to Reha. I went online and decided to go pay for some of my credit carvers. So he spent this and make it was all done, and uh, I get to the internet day, I go on lot and and all of my bank accounts are now empty. And my first thought was really that maybe because I was in Brazil, you know, the huge banks blocked it and and this was in denial. And uh, my friend said, but that doesn't happen. Back to the theay and and and looked further, and I further and enough, Uh, you know,
four thousand dollars a day had been withdrawn from my accounts. Uh. And I had a three hundred dollars limits, so that was even more confusing. Contacted the bank and they said that that when I was telling them didn't make sense, and don't do uh not twenty but I'm coming home. I just knew something wasn't right, and uh, I did that. The airline was very accommodating because they didn't have any money,
and so I hadn't gotten uh home uh lifter. They just someone had moved into my house and there stuff with the bedroom. There was none of it that done through my room in time.
I've got to interrupt you, tyson. We have a major connection problem here. That's this is why basically I unless this is the wackiest uh landline phone ever. It's almost incomprehensible the conversation, and so I know, yeah, so it's uh call back in. Uh maybe we try to just call back in and then yes, if it doesn't clear, then we'll have to reschedule the the interview because we really can't. It's incomprehensible. So, uh why don't you recall back in and see if we can we can improve
the clarity for the for those that are listening. So we'll do that. Go ahead and call back in and uh entertaine the audience with my Okay, thanks. I apologize that for that technical difficulty. I do stress and a lot of people do not have access to landline but landline phone. Landline phones are really far superior to cell phones in terms of especially one thing and if you hear this in interviews. You can see what the problem is as well, is that it seems to be a
pile up. There'll be an interference in the conversation back and forth, normal back and forth conversation, and so there's a little bit of a delay, and that's one of the problems. And it's just an in better sound quality. Now we have Tyson Wrench back on and we'll see if this improves. I'm really hoping, so good evening, Tyler our Tyson, pardon me, yes, this is better? Yes, I think so. Okay, sorry, let's let's go. Let's go back a little bit because I think the audience would have
a hard time understanding. You are on this trip, you don't have internet internet access on for a couple of weeks or so, or ten days or so. You can correct me on that you don't have internet access. You can't check your bank account. When you do check your bank account, you see that these accounts are either empty or a great amount of money is missing. And maybe you can tell us how much money you were looking
at missing. You were said you were initially in denial about that, but pick up on the story back at that those details.
Please, yeah, yeah, so I had gone online and I had I had a three hundred dollars withdrawal limit on my accounts. Now, granted, my my severance package was still over in Europe hadn't actually been paid out on it yet, but the money that I had just saved in the US, and it was, you know, four thousand a day for for almost three weeks that they had pulled out. So
it was a very large amount of money. And the airline was kind enough to let me go home and announced and just as I said, well, I got home, I discovered that someone had moved into my house and that was that was unnerving.
And who was this person?
So after digging through my bedroom and looking at the clothes and the luggage tags, I discovered that it was in fact my best friend of five years, who turned out to not be who he said he or was.
Now this is so, Danny Garcia, your friend of five years while you were gone, had lock Stock and Barrel moved into your place.
He's not only moved into my place, but he actually had people over to the house pretending to be me. I learned through through tracking using the GPS in my car that backtracked and I found people who he had gone to their homes and even showed I d with his photo and my name and my middle name happens to be Daniel, So he just told people that he was he goes by his middle name, and he was had people over met the neighbors, and I travel a lot for work, so I didn't really know my neighbors.
I can tell you now that I know my neighbors really well. So the but the shot that that he was everything he had told me throughout our time together was was a lie. From how he how he made his money, the people that he hung out with, all of his stories. But then he went so far as to then begin to isolate me from all of our friends. So again we were part of a big circle of friends.
I of course reached out to them all to tell them and warn them, but he had beat me to it, and the story went that I was in South America because I was a major drug dealer. That how else would a thirty one year old have a big house in San Francisco, and and you know all all the things I had, And it made clear sense to everybody that that by talking to me, they would be getting
involved in some sort of DA investigation. And so I had to clear my name somehow, and that came through the through the Wells Fargo Bank investigation team, where I got my hands on a surveillance photo of him with drawing money from my accounts, and that is what cleared my name. But that didn't The problem was that came after that was the fact that the the police wouldn't take a report for my case because the bank gave me my money back, and therefore the bank was the
victim and not me. And because of that that was I was left just hanging. There was nothing I could do, and the bank said, you know, why why do you keep coming back? I kept I'm thinking, why didn't you arrest them? If if I went into your branch next door with a note that said give me all your money and I got five hundred dollars, you'd have a swat team banging down my door in ten minutes. And yet these guys got tens of thousands of dollars from you,
and you don't care. And finally a police detective said to me, he said, we have so many cases of fraud like this that our manpower is only limited to cases where people are hurt. So until someone gets hurt, they're going to continue to get away with it. And that's how we came up with that. That's how we came up with the name for the book.
Okay, now we've got to go back a little bit, because you opened the book with the introduction on where you met Danny Garcia and in the circumstances under which you did meet him. He invited you to a protest shortly after meeting each other, and then introduced you to attorneys, and I'll get you to pronounce the attorney's name, David Ye.
I was going to ask you about that.
So tell us about the invite, tell us about Danny Garcia's You said everything he told the lie, the big huge con. I mean, this is a story of con men and talking about serious money with some serious people, and then that in conning a lifetime of grifting. So let's go back to how you met, where you Danny Garcia in the protest, and who you met at the protest, and the story that was told and established in your mind at that time.
Yeah, So where Danny had sort of I guess you could say, hooked me in. Was he mentioned to me that several years back that he had been molested by a very wealthy man in San Francisco by the name of Thomas White, and that he was suing him, and there was a protest coming in, and then, you know, I felt sorry for the guy. I mean, it's a
horrible thing that I think could happen. That he claimed you'd been drugged, and so that's that's sort of how I I don't know, you just sort of feel bad for somebody, and they seemed like a nice person, and so I went there to support him, and and there was his lawyer, a man by the name of David
rep Logo. And the protest was basically the fact that one of the city supervisors uh domestic partners was the lawyer for Thomas White, and that this particular lawyer was basically making her money by by defending a child molester. People magazine had done a story on him, The San Francisco Chronicle had done a two Sunday story on him. So everything that he was telling me was in press and print, and it was it was purely believable. And then following that case, they then filed a case down
in Mexico. Thomas White was big into philanthropy and would was building a school for underprivileged children, and twenty two boys came forward and stated that Thomas White had in fact molested them, drug them and molested them. And Thomas White was then sent to jail and the case began to where they were going to get about a million dollars a kid. And of course, you know the there was never even a trial. And believe it or not, Thomas White is still in jail. I just visited him
about three weeks ago and he's still there. And the twenty two boys had come forward, they were all paid to say it. The lawyer in Mexico who brought the case to court was arrested and is actually in the same jail. Now. It's just a tragic and sad story for this man who at once, at one point had everything and these guys just took it from him.
Yeah, we're talking of a very wealthy man. We're talking about billionaire right.
In the one hundreds of millionaire, I would say.
Okay, okay, And the and the attorney was Carol Migdan right and interest and in the protest. What I found interesting in your book was the when you talk about the the placards that were at that protest were Carol Magdan's family earns thousands of dollars protecting a child rapist. I mean, that's a pretty provocative placard.
Really Yeah. I picked up the attention of several of the newspapers, including the Berry Reporter, And as a result of that, I learned just in this last trip that that Carol Mgdan's partner then basically stopped representing Tom and left him, which left him lawyerless in Mexico at the time, and so he has to get a new legal team. So then they proceeded to actually hack into his stock accounts. They sold the stock, they transferred the stock money to themselves,
and uh and and and cashed out the money. When the ft I was called in the story that I was told is that they looked at it and said, well, you know, he's a he's a child blister. He gets what he deserves and and we have other things to work on. So you can almost call it the perfect time mm hmmm.
And this, this this gentleman hacker was this guy they called Brain and he was a hacker, and he was a friend at Garcia, right Alec.
And he actually has a warrant of Mexico. UH listed him as one of the uh defendants in this in this extortion case that they just filed last month.
Now tell us about the I thought interesting too, is uh the the elaborate scam with the art dealing the art dealer. Yes, the famous painting that they said, geez, you know, the Nazis are pretty embarrassed by this and the uh uh you know Scottish museum or a major art gallery in Scotland is you know, wants to sell it and it's about that.
Yeah, it was another brilliant con. They had befriended a an art dealer who had a client. It was a Silicon Valley CFO executive and he had said that he wanted this particular tangy painting. He did the research it was it wasn't in the gallery where they said it was. Had he done a deeper research, he would have discovered that it wasn't for sale. But this was his art dealer. This is the guy he's bought or he's bought millions of dollars of paintings from in the past, so you know,
why would he lie and uh? But they were conning the art dealer as well, and as soon as he transferred four hundred thousand dollars in escrow to verify they were going to shift the painting over and office authenticated, and it never showed up, and the CFO was not happy and began to call. And the art dealer realized that after he had transferred all four hundred thousand dollars
to these con men, that he had been taken. And it turns out that they all went to Las Vegas right here and blew all the money at the Bilagio And so there was Las Vegas. I ended up getting the tax forms for all the greater than twelve hundred dollars wins that they had when they were playing one hundred dollars slot machines.
Yeah, incredible amount of money they spent in a few.
Days, right, amazing, Yes, yeah, yeah.
And what was their next course of business after that? After they lose through that money?
So the you know, they had, they had a couple of other scams going. They very much assembly lined them. They were almost all going at the same time at some point. But there was a Japanese tourist that Kushall and I should maybe just elaborate a little bit on Koushaw Marula.
He was introduced.
He was, yeah, he was a Nepalese immigrants. He came on a student visa. He basically came and told everybody that he was a prince. He was the prince of Nepal, and he had everybody fool He had a British accent, he dressed well, he was very charming, very royal in his mannerisms. It was believable. And and so in that process he had actually actually conned the New College of San Francisco into believing that that that he was a prince and that his family was going to donate a
lot of money to the college. And you know, yeah, they butted that million dollars and spent it, and suddenly the money didn't show up, and after thirty seven years, the New College of San Francisco had to close its doors. But yet, s yet Kushan remained in the country unexpired student visa now and so but he managed to travel around and he went to Hawaii met this Japanese tourist who expressed a desire to have a visa to live
in the US. And Kushall had said, Hey, if you invest in real estate, then I can get you your visa. And so she opened an account at the Bank of Hawaii. She transferred five hundred thousand dollars from her account in Japan, and Kushal had taken you know, when you open a new account and they give you those those temporary checks.
So Shaw managed to tear a few of those out while she wasn't looking, and then wrote him out five hundred thousand dollars dish in in checks, which he transferred to his Bank of Hawaii accounts at the same bank. So the lady gets wind of it, and she and she calls in and the and the bank basically sticks up for Kushal and says, no, he's a good guy. His parents are diplomats. You know, surely there's a mistake. And she's begging for them to call the police and
and they wouldn't. So there's that case is actually still in disuse. But again, here's a woman who was out five hundred thousand dollars and now Kushal is living the life along live with Danny and uh and David and they are they are now a good grifter team that is out on the rampage.
And what's the next stop in next scam and victim?
Yes, So you know, the there was a a man in Marine County. They had befriended and befriended him separately. Danny got to know him well. Kushall had actually stayed at his house. Well, Danny knew that this man had quite a bit of jewelry in his house, three hundred thousand dollars worth, And when Kushal had stayed there, Kushall stole it. And in a weird case, and I'm not exactly sure you know why this happened, but Danny turned kusha All in and Kushall was arrested for the jewelry
theft and then immediately bailed out by David Repogel. Just a weird twist that I still can't explain. And but what happened was I had gotten a phone call from a friend of mine who said, Hey, you know, my roommate is going to Hawaii tomorrow with Danny, and you had mentioned he's a bad guy and do you have any proof? So I discovered this jewelry heist, and I contacted the victim and Marine County. He proceeded to tell
me what happened. I told him my story, and I asked if he knew where Danny was, and he said that Danny had been spending a lot of time in Palm Springs and that a friend of his there had gone missing. And something didn't sit right with me when he told me that, and I began a search and discovered that a man named Cliff Lambert, seventy four years old in the Lost Thomas neighborhood of Palm Springs, had
gone missing in December of two thousand and eight. And this is now February of two thousand and nine, and there's been nothing done. It's still a missing person case. Well, you know how you go online and you see stories and news articles, and then people can leave the comments under the blog section, and they usually have nothing to do with the article. They're almost comical when you read them.
But there was one in particular that said, the last person I saw him with was a very well dressed Indian mail with a British accent, which describes to shawl to a t. And so I logged on, I created a fake anonymous name, and I left a posting and I said that the people you were looking for are Danny Garcia, David Refugel, and Kushaw and the Rula, the man you described in your response, and immediately following that
somebody had posted a photo. It was the mugshot photo koushawl from his jewelry heist, and that was turned out I was a private investigator who was following the case, and about two hours later, both my posting and the mugshot posting were deleted from the website. I contacted the website administrator and she wrote back to me that they have threatened to shut down the entire website that was devoted to missing people from around the world. And then
I knew something was definitely yet. So I called the Palm Springs Police Department and then the story unravels from there. The the detective I told him my story, Detective Browning was his name, and he was very kind and he just said, you know, Tyson, you need to come down here. We need to talk. And I was very excited. I thought, Wow, you know, there's something. Finally, somebody's gonna do something. And
I had no idea what I was getting into. But as I drove down and I took everything that they had left in my house from two years ago and I brought it to them. We had an interview with another detective and I had my police reports that I'd finally gotten after you know, being persistent enough, and and they thanked me, and I left and I just was
sort of left, like, well, now what. And then a week later they contacted me and they wanted to to They basically thanked me for coming in and they wanted to let me know that they had gone out and arrested everyone. And they've amended the case now to a murder case. And the the murder and the story that follows is one that I don't I don't know that California has seen even in its in its court cases.
But they after they had murdered Cliff Lambert, they had actually sold his house, uh and emptied the accounts very much in the same way, same pattern that they did to me and the and the district attorney investigator said that I was very very lucky that I came home early from my trip because mister Lambert did bot. He came home on time, and they had they had everything, everything was planned out for him.
Right, So you do really believe even though that I mean that it sounds a good possibility given what they did later, But do you think they really that Danny and the and the trio would have killed you and at that point, or you have any kind of explanation why they graduated to murder if they are really essentially grifters con men.
Yeah, so it's you know that the the general consensus is that that was a great possibility. You know, we learned from from the text messages that they did hire somebody for he was thirty thousand dollars to to they hired a hit on me. But fortunately they owed that guy.
They owed that guy money anyhow, and so he didn't he didn't do it, obviously, he took the money, and so it was you know, it was just you know, criminals against criminals, and you know, no no honor amongst these, I guess, but uh, the the the manner in which they murdered him, it was horrific murder. They had hired a couple of hitmen, and one of the hitmen turned state's evidence and actually told us everything. So they told the state everything, And I will.
Tell us about go ahead, I'd like unless you have some reservations, I'd like you to tell us about the murder and the plot to murder and what exactly happened and why tell us about that?
Sure? So I guess from what from what we understand, uh, is that Cliff Lambert had met Danny on.
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Craiglist and Cliff, you know, was a seventy four year old man. He liked younger men and what a wally fly them in or have them come over and stay for the weekend and then just to He just liked the company. You know. His his good friends were younger men, the ones who reported him missing really nice guys. And but Danny, in the process of staying at his house, managed to gather all kinds of information on him and even access to his computer. You know, Danny was very
good with a computer. Cliff was seventy four, you know. He left his passwords all written out, you know, nothing nothing really secure, but nothing he ever thought he'd probably had to worry about. And Danny had everything, you know, when they did the forensics on his phone. He had under his contacts where you and I would have, you know, maybe our names or phone numbers, our address, and our birthday.
He had on top of that his security number, his credit card numbers, where he went to college when he graduated, his security alarm code, the everything he could never want to know about somebody. He had it in his contact, and so as they were, they tried to murder him twice. They actually hired that two guys. They hired a bartender from San Francisco and hired him for thirty thousand dollars. He managed to talk to his roommate into joining and they went down to Palm Springs and broke into his
garage and waited for him to come home. They had no murder weapons when they entered. They grabbed some pruning shears and a screwdriver, and one waited in the rafters and one waited behind his other car. And they he came home, and they both chickened out, and he went from his house, went from his car right into his house, not knowing that he almost met his faith. Well, Koushaal, who had hired him hired them, was incensed. He was
he was outraged. Well. One of the things that Danny had learned in the UH in spending time with Cliff is that he was in a dispute over a will, and the will was a New York case. So Kushaw went out and got a pay as you go cell
phone that had a a New York area code. He called Cliff and UH and told him that he was a lawyer and that he had come to a resolution with the will and that Cliff was going to be a wealthy man, and he was coming down to sign the paperwork, and as Kushawl shows up and he uh they had they had actually gone ahead and contacted the alarm company claiming that the back door censor was faulty and kept calling the police, so please turn it off,
And so the alarm company remotely disabled the rear door alarm, and as Koushal takes the tour of the house, he unlocked the back door and the two hitmen, Miguel Bustamante and Craig McCarthy both enter into the kitchen again unarmed, and Cliff hears some commotion and comes into his kitchen and he he sees McCarthy McCarthy bear hugs him and then he you know, he's what are you guys doing here?
What are you doing in my house? And Bustamante grabbed like a pairing knife from the kitchen block and McCarthy pushed him away, and Bustamante then stound him in the back of the neck, just below the skull, and the blade actually broke in his vertebrae and he went down.
Then bost Monty grabbed a couple more knives out of the kitchen block and just proceeded to sort of left right, left right, and Crisp basically laid there and as as he was breathing his last breath gurgling, Kushan enters the room and begins to order them to grab his rings, his watch, his wallet, all of the basically as the district attorney said, they picked him like vultures. As he later he lay the dying, and they never found the body.
They wrapped up the body in sheets. They claimed they have buried it somewhere in the town of Fontana off of the Interstate ten. When they went out to go where the body was supposed to be, it was no longer there and the body was never found.
Now, how did they get around to when they make the arrests? How did the police, like this is interesting, How did the least get around to getting a person that obviously somebody's revealed this intimate information and usually it's not all three people simultaneously at once. So when they made the arrest, how do they get the information that we just mentioned right now?
Right? So the the murder was actually re enacted by Craig McCarthy. He was a He had just gotten out of the US Marines and he felt an extreme amount of remorse. He in fact, when they when when McCarthy gave him his share of the of the the money for the job, he supposedly refused it. And then while he was in jail, he happened to talk to his cellmate, and his cellmate was, uh, sort of, I guess you'd
call the prison rat. He was the tank bob. Yeah, So he uh used that information, went to the warden and said, hey, I got some information, and using it as a basically a token for him to maybe get a lighter sentence or get a strike removed or something, then proceeded to befriend McCarthy and and tell him that he would be able to get McCarthy out of this.
And so McCarthy drew a map, and of course they turned that in and then through the process of charging them with murder, they went the strict attorney decided to go with a life without charge, and they gave McCarthy the option to turn state's evidence in exchange for twenty five years, and so he actually re enacted the entire murder in the house, and that was that was videotaped. So that's that's how we know from the court hearings and so forth of exactly what happened.
How far did he go into re enactments? Was it the actual did they get him to do the stabbing? I guess this is this is a slam dunk when you get a prosecutor to do some half something like this, but tell us about the extent of the reenactment.
Yeah, so it was well, and because because McCarthy wasn't the one who did the stabbing, he just sort of guided them through. You know, he was using the other other people who were there as as sort of a mannequins or not mannequans, but just as examples of what went down. And it was it was. It was just clear. The other the other bit of evidence that sunk them was their text messages. There were over thirty one thousand
text messages before, during, and after the murder. And the one thing that a lot of people don't know is that while your text messages are recorded, which we all know saved on a server somewhere, your geographical location when you send or received them is also recorded, and the prosecution was able to put together a map of the detailed going down from the they went down from from San Francisco to Palm Springs and then the murder happened, and then they went back and then went back down
to MTV accounts and then and then sell his house as well.
Now, people with money and people in dire straits, whether they have or people who have friends with money, get representation. It helps them at least even though you know, so, what kind of representation do these people eventually get? What kind of any tell us about kind of the names, the kind of representation they got.
Yeah, well, in the case of of of Danny Garcia and Kashawl and Narula, their lawyers were Danny Garcia and Kushawl and Rula, they chose to represent themselves. And uh uh and in which you you know, there's that that famous saying the client that has a lawyer is actually the lawyer as a client for a fool or something like that, And you think that that would be a
stupid move. And yet we know that about halfway through the trial they had actually gotten the State of California to give them over six hundred thousand dollars and we think at the end of the trial it was close to a million dollars in support for their their defense investigators, their advisors. They were they got brand new math book pros to work at their case on because the computer in the jail was too slow. They were also had Starbucks delivered in court every day. Oh thanks, thanks, thanks
to the California taxpayer. So it is it's just mind boggling. And the UH Attorney General for the State of California, Kamala Harris, even was quoted as saying that, you know that the theatrics and the complexity of these cons and and their and and their and their crimes are are
beyond any Hollywood script. And uh, it's true. It's just everything about these guys, how they continued to get away with it, and then even when they got caught, they continued to proceed with their cons and and just getting
everything given to them. It's just amazing, you know. They even Danny filed a civil suit against the district attorney who was prosecuting him, Lisa Di Maria, and she Vanny claimed that she had violated his civil rights by listening to his privileged phone calls, and UH you get two kinds of privileged phone calls in jail, and that's between you and your lawyer and you and your spiritual guide. Well, the DA had listened to a call between Danny and
his mother. Well, his mother had gone and gotten her reverendships and has now become Danny's spiritual advisor. Now, the case was eventually thrown out because there's a code that you punch in and if you were, if Danny was really a lawyer, he would have known that. That's how you stopped the DA from listening to your call. So
the case was dismissed as Danny's pure ignorance. But nonetheless, again everything he could do to distract the state and the prosecution, they were just trying to trip up anywhere they can. The number of there were over one hundred pre trial hearings, just three and a half years that it took, which is just far longer than it ever should.
Have right right now, it's really testament of their like you say, again, Starbucks delivered and being able to get that kind of money for this kind of case. I mean they they've given death penalty cases a whole lot less money than that, you know, for the whole team, and so it is really testament of their their abilities as con con in and with the other. The other one we didn't mention too, is that the the woman
from Japan. Yeah, the Japanese woman. She caught him stealing, and yet he still CONTs some more money out of her. Isn't that what you have in the book?
Yeah, yeah it is. It's unbelievable. But with with Kushaal's ability, and he even is quoted in one of his texts saying that even after I've conned someone, I can con them again. And uh he did. He did that with the with the Magumi, and that after he had taken her money, he claimed that he he was sorry and that he needs it because his family had been kidnapped. The sister was kidnapped in the Pall and they needed
the money for ransom. But of course his family was royalty, and that she would get that money back, that he
just needed to borrow it. And sure enough he gave her a check for eight hundred and something thousand dollars, which she deposited, and then Kushall had convinced her that now she was in danger, and then he needed another forty thousand dollars to get her that they found out that she was involved, and so sure enough, she cuts them another forty one thousand dollars check and three days later, his eight hundred thousand dollar check bounces, so she's out
even more money. I mean, it's just it's mind boggling. I feel bad that she that she fell for, but he's that convincing.
Now, one thing we didn't talk about is that you did a fair amount of work on your own to be able to bring these people to justice. You you were pretty persistent, and you did have you do have a background in a private investigation yourself. Tell us just a little bit about how much of a I guess an ordeal it was for you to re establish yourself and straighten things out and also get this validation that you were right all along, and that tell us a little bit about that story.
Yeah, No, I had. I had worked to work my way through college with a private investigation firm that was a one collar crime investigation, so a lot of a lot of the high tech stuff, and I have quite a few resources in law law enforcements that I was
able to call and get advice from. What I think was the most interesting one was the fact that a friend of mine that said, you know, Tyson, there is going to be a body at the end of this, and he says it might be yours, it might be his, it might be somebody else, but there will be a body. And it's it's shocking to know that few years later there was. But I, uh, you know, there's a there's The banks do offer extra methods of security. You can have verbal passwords when you go to the banks to
withdraw money. There are there are a lot of ways to do it. Uh. These guys just you know, they figured their way around it. They did a big power of attorney to uh to sell Coach Lambert's house and then they then they even tried to take out the notary who had done the power of attorney. So there was was really difficult to Lucky Land Casino asking people, what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?
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Recover from something like that emotionally, I think, you know, physically I was able to get all the passwords done, but I think emotionally it's I still still have trust issues, but probably for the better, Probably for the better in that sense.
Go ahead now, attending the trial and being involved in the trial and seeing Danny Garcia and defending himself and and tell us a little bit more about that phenomena.
And I'm sorry to repeat that again.
Well your relationship, given your relationship with Danny Garcia and in the court case and your participation in in the case itself, tell us a little bit more about that sort of uh, that event for you.
Yeah, So you know, fortunately I was not called in for for for court and the the The good news is that there were there were a couple of other events that led to led to their arrest and and and the court and the evidence and that was that uh, you know, the sale of the house triggered an incident where the title company reached out and and said something wasn't right, and uh the the they actually had sent a U haul to the house uh to h to
take with Lambert's things. So there was all these other bits of evidence that that led up to their arrest. But I was I wasn't allowed to go to the trial because there was a slight chance that I would have been called as a witness because the manner that they withdrew Danny's minute, that they withdrew my money was the same way that Danny had withdrawn money from Cliff's account in a way of not raising any any flags
of the bank to freeze the account. But even that didn't stop them when when Danny went on a spending spree with Cliff's AMEX card, they called and Danny answered and said, no, that's me. I'm I'm I'm Cliff, and I'm I'm spending this money. And so he, you know, was able to continue spending the money on on on cliffs guards.
Now because it had the prosecutor spoken to you about the goods ability or any possibility of you being called as a witness, is not that that's why they said you have to stay away from this trial because you are witness.
Can't be.
I don't know influenced by evidence beforehand. So but had they done any kind of preparation or were you how confident were you going to be that you were a witness or not a witness in that trial?
I was, I felt more or less because I really didn't have anything to do with with the murder itself, and that in that particular case, so I wasn't if anything there were there were would be obviously the case of Danny was going to initially claim that he and Cliff were in a relationship and that he Cliff had given him permission to use his bank accounts and his credit cards, and so there would be the possibility of me coming in and going, that's funny because he did
the same thing to me, and I never gave him that permission. And he had also filed a petitions to have I think around two hundred or two hundred something people subpoenaed to testify for him, and most of those were character witnesses, but it did even included uh, uh, it included jajahboor it included Oliver Oliver Stone's mother. You know, all these celebrities that that that Cliff Lambert was familiar with,
and uh, they were all gonna be character witnesses. And the judge actually uh says, look, you know Dan and who you are, your your own attorney here. But I'll tell you if if you bring in one character witness, uh, the prosecution will bring in hers. And and that I'm sure within me as well.
Yeah, that would have been quite a circus. I mean, even the idea of contemplating some of those witnesses. Job, that's that's funny.
Yeah. But but even after they had been arrested, even even more things unfolded, and and uh, the one that caught the attention of a lot of people in San Francisco was the Ringcon Hill Scan as it's known now. And that is uh, they had with the money that they had taken from Cliff, they had put down as sort of earnest money on a on a very expensive condo and the tallest condo building in San Francisco. And they then managed to transfer title fraudulently and on paper
and in the system. They owned this condo. They reached out to the Bank of Solving or and and and the banks Center represent as representative over for a home equity line of credits. Uh. They saw the house, they tricked the the realtor in to give them a key, and the Bank of Solving believed that, in fact they were uh the owners, and and they give them a two billion dollar home equity line of credit and they
immediately withdrew it. And as a result of that fraud coming to life because they were arrested right after it, the bank went insolvent and the sci C picked it up. And you and I, UH as taxpayers have also paid for that as well. Incredible, incredible.
Now, why do you think, why do you theorize that these guys that were essentially cons felt it necessary to resort to murder. I mean, that's the one thing I get out of this. I don't understand how collectively they were in agreement with this that they would go that far. Now, it's also interesting, it's even unusual for guys to go when they've committed such a crime, to be so high profile and go gamble and just squander the money as fast as possible, go through incredible amount of money in
short order. Why do you think that do you always think that the murder was murder wasn't always the plan? But why did could these guys Why do you believe that they felt it necessary to include murder and not just steal and con and defraud.
Right, you know, and I I think it's like everything, it just it. You know, bank robbers get more brazen as they continue their their crimes. The fact is that these guys were unstoppable. I mean, Koushaw had even been arrested for his for being an illegal immigrant and was released later on five thousand dollars bail. They just couldn't be stopped. And when they they believed the cliff was worth around ninety million dollars, when in fact it was
more like nine hundred thousand. But they figured if they had just kidnapped him and taken everything from him, that he would then finger them and they could actually get in trouble for this one, and it would be easier to just kill him him and hide the body and you know with a with using a power of attorney. And this is where as part of their team, David Rufflegol being the lawyer. Uh, a power of attorney is good as long as someone is alive. The minute they're dead,
a power of attorney no longer works. So his body remained hidden and they proceeded to uh use their legal knowledge to Pilfer and and and like like the DA said, the vulture, Uh take everything, yes, but they and so it just it was the progression I guess, if you will,
of being unstoppable. I almost I almost think that especially Kushaw, wanted to live this James Bond lifestyle of of the being the you know, the bad guy and and uh just you know, they they he would peel off one hundred dollars bills as tips and and you know it was just so slashy with everything, and that was the style he he wanted to live and wanted people to to uh see him as just just really more so scopathic, I think.
But that's pretty evident.
That's and that's the again, the message that that we have in our book until someone gets hurt is not only do we have a system that for you know, fraud that is needs to be relooked at, but that if if any of your listeners out there are people are telling them stories that are a little too hard to believe, you know, don't fall for it. Uh Uh. People are gonna unfriend you because you're not going to
loan them some money. That's okay, you know. So the the real message here is if these if these stories that you're hearing are too good to be true. You know, the the these Nigerian scams, the print scams that will send you a chat and you know, cash my check and I'll give you a thousand dollars. It's all logus, it's all fraud. Don't fall for it.
And the thing is, if you don't, you should be more wary of people. And there are ways of checking, especially checking on people and their backgrounds and hence, so that you could be more confident one way or another. And it's it's just your due diligence. You're talking about a lot of money. If you're talking a lot of money, and this is a good lesson. And what can also happen. It can't be just It might not just be theft.
That might be just the least of the things that could occur to you as a result of interacting with some of these people.
Yeah, and again these are this isn't just somebody you know who you met a weeko. This for me was somebody I'd know them for five years? How did that happen? And I looked back and there were signs and of course I just ignored them because you know who does that.
No, but what there's side? But were really could you say unequivocally that there was signs to indicate the you know, the entire future, or were there signs that he might have been dishonest and he might have been a thief?
No, you know, it was more just the stories that he told. You know, he told me that his parents had invented the core technology behind laser hair removal, and and you know, and and and I and I never ever looked into it. I never you know, he said that they had come up with some new handheld device that they were selling in Japan, and yet I never saw that device, and and I just you know, I was like wow. But it all hit me, you know when I got back and uh and discovered what he
had done. And then it just you know, how do you have those you know, movies receive those people go through flashbacks. That's exactly what happened. Yeah.
Yeah, And so you say, you still have trust issues, but you're not taking this, You're you're you're just learning some lessons from this. This book must have been I guess, cathartic to a certain degree. I know that sounds like a cliche, but it did. It writing this book and talking about this book and talking about this story, is it is it really helping?
Yeah? You know, and and uh, you know, working with the with Sharry Leader and and uh, Kim and don Uh they were amazing. They had they they were supportive through a lot of it. There were times where Sherry would call me and she'd say, you know, sit down, I have something to tell you, and here's something we found and and uh shocking. But at the same time, now that it's out, Now that it's out, I'm I'm uh, it's it's a good release, if you will. So I
think psychologically I'm okay. And you know, I think the trust issues are probably better. You know, they will they will keep it from happening again, that's for sure.
Now, how was it? What was the experience like in terms of working with Luter best selling author Cherry Luter as the author of this book and knew the co author. How was what was the relationship like? Uh, tell us about that experience in terms of what it you know, what it consisted of.
You know, we had a lot of a lot of investigations, a lot of interviews. Sorry, I have interviews I had, I had gotten all the contact info and I've found all these other victims, and uh and Sherry and Don and Camp, everybody was we were calling. We recorded the conversations, transcribed them, and then, you know, it's funny when we put it together. I think we probably spent we probably spent about three months trying to put it in order because it was so confusing and there were so many
different events. And then just when we thought we had it done, somebody else would call and tell us, Hey, I read you guys are writing this. I have something to tell you. And so now we're figuring out where are we going to put that in there? And it was a it was definitely a lesson in in you know, for me in terms of how how difficult it is
to write a book. It is not easy. And definitely Sherry was Serry was was crucial in that, and again Kim and Don's help and their interviews and the things that they doug up and the forty thousand documents that were presented in courts and the thirty one thousand text messages, just so much information to go through, and it was it's great there they've become family now.
Yeah, and it's a it's a really fascinating It is a really fascinating case. It's very unique and and you know, I do these things all the time in terms of unique stories. This is very very unique and different motivations and just incredible, incredible California, San Francisco, you know, crazy scams and cons involving again you get Josh Jacobar and all kinds of characters, cast of characters, and the Prince and so it's a it's a fascinating story. You can't
write fiction like this stuff. It's just amazing. So I want to thank you very much, and I want to thank the literary team, like you said, Don and Kim and Sherry Luter of course, and yourself for putting this really really spellbinding tale together here, and for you coming on and Don and Kim arranging and helping arrange this interview and having you come on and talk about this your own personal experience in this incredible story. Well, thank
you very much. Until someone gets hurt by Tyson Wrench and Sherry Luter, thank you very much, Tyson Wrench, thank.
You for having me and I really appreciate it. Everybody, take be safe from the alert.
Yes, absolutely, have a good night. Nine