June 24, 2026
Chapter 4 | Cemetery for the Living Man
Anthony finds a new home in the prison law library. Working on his appeal, he discovers a new name.
Award-winning investigative journalist and longtime Rolling Stone Magazine contributor Paul Solotaroff hosts the next entry in the acclaimed Bone Valley anthology: Bone Valley Season 5 | The Devil's Quarry.
New episodes are available every Wednesday.
Listeners can binge the entire season by subscribing to Lava for Good+ on Apple Podcasts.
Bone Valley Season 5: The Devil’s Quarry is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Rolling Stone Films and Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
00:00:00
Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised. Prison is like a cemetery for a living man. It's like everybody is a shadow of themselves, a shell ghost.
00:00:23
Speaker 2: Some of those people with life. You look in their eyes and there is nothing, nothing good to say, nothing good to feel.
00:00:33
Speaker 1: A couple of months after his conviction for the murder of Josette Wright, Anthony was transferred to Downstate Correctional. It's where they process new inmates into the system.
00:00:45
Speaker 2: I went in young, unprepared, not as tough as I thought I was. When I got to Downstate, the counselor threatened me. The counselor, he says, you're going to have a really bad time. Only how do you mean on sign indoors. It's like, yeah, sure, you're not going to have a good, good life.
00:01:04
Speaker 1: His first day at Downstay corroborated that counselor.
00:01:08
Speaker 2: It's two hours in and there's I don't know one hundred of us, and you know they're doing the spread your cheeks and then it shaved your hair, your eyebrows, all facial hair off. The next thing they did is they made us, all undressed, all naked in one line, and they threw the shit they call lie the lauser. They're taking a picture and now here I look like freaking mini me. So it's like you're being processed, you as a human being and a factory of other human beings. You're you're moving the way they tell you. They put you on a line, they give you your clothes, you're giving an inmate ID number. Mine was nine seven eight five six three nine. You had to walk in two rows, paired off side by side in groups of forty. If you felt back a little bit, they would say something like patch it up on the left retard or if somebody was talking to me, like what part of no talking in my hallway do you not understand? And so I started hearing these direct orders from this foul place. Somebody says sim laughs about something that unacceptable. There will be quiet, and there would be water, and they would take guys that did these things, and then you would hear them beaten in screen. Well, I'm not gonna say nothing.
00:02:36
Speaker 1: It was in places like downstate pens built to terrorize entry level felon into a life of learned submission that Anthony would have to learn how to save his own life. My man left my fears.
00:03:08
Speaker 2: Narrow Depth r Nless.
00:03:15
Speaker 3: Valley.
00:03:31
Speaker 1: This is the Devil's Quarry. In the fall of nineteen ninety seven, Anthony was sent up top That's what inmates called the Max Security Pens in northern New York State. His new address, SHAWANNGA Correctional was where they kept the worst of the worst. David Berkowitz, better known as the son of Sam Robert Chambers, the Central Park strangler Larry Davis, who shot six cops in the Bronx and lived to tell the tale. In a crowd like that, you keep yourself to yourself, and if anyone asks what you're in for, you lie your full head off.
00:04:20
Speaker 2: I was like for the first six or eight months it was a robbery and murder, So I kind of altered the story to kind of protect myself from like having to explain it. But eventually your case comes out in a lot of books and people find out and people talk.
00:04:40
Speaker 1: He didn't have to guess what happened to the untouchables. You had a front row seat for that stuff.
00:04:47
Speaker 2: Like, I seen a lot of stuff happening, like a violent stuff. I seen a guy pick a guy up out of a wheelchair, start fighting him and put them back in a wheelchair. I seen two guys fighting over a state burrito upstairs, slamming each other into the cages. I see a guy on a weight bench cut what made a Nike sign on the kid's face while he was under about two twenty five. Yeah, I mean, I've seen enough blood to fill a bathtub.
00:05:22
Speaker 1: Anthony knew his day was coming, the day he'd have to fight three gangsters in the shower or someone would slip behind him with a straight edge. He lived in a state of low level terror. It's one thing to hulk slam your backyard buddies, it's another to fend off lifers who squat four fifty and who conspire with the guards to get at you. In short, you don't survive up top without a break or two coming your way. Anthony's break came to him out of the clear blue. He met some guys who knew the guy and the mafia there. And what was Anthony's calling card to the crime boss at Schewana his stepdad, Big Larry.
00:06:06
Speaker 2: There was a couple people and I knew my stepfather, And then there was this guy. His name was Angelo, and he was high up in Cazies. He knew some people that knew some people right, and those people knew my people.
00:06:23
Speaker 1: Anthony put out word that he wanted to sit down with Angelo. That request went up the chain and Anthony got to sit down. He went with every scrap of proof he had that the cops had stitched him up.
00:06:36
Speaker 2: Like I brought out the dominic recantation Adam taking his story back.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: He told him how Andy was tricked into a false confession, how his buddy said they were beaten into testifying against him, and they believed. After hearing him out, the Italians made their ruling. This kid gets a pass, so hands off. When you got to pass with.
00:07:05
Speaker 2: Your own kind, that kind things falling water. It didn't mean it put me at the top of the food chain. But no longer am I at the bottom. And so now not only are they like giving me a pass, they're like they're calling me to the table. They're breaking bread with me now. And so it's like I feel a little safer, like when it was happy birthday, some happy birthday, when it was Christmas, they brought out buffets of chips and cookkies.
00:07:34
Speaker 1: It surely didn't hurt that every couple of weeks you'd get a big care package from home, a cart and crame with goodies. He'd chair with a crew h salams and soprisadas, tubs of dried fruits. Then there was the stuff that really opened doors, crisp copies of penthouse and hustler. Those are the kinds of goods that make you a vip in D block Able to finally let it bread out, Anthony got back to the job of living, started training in the jail yard every day, building a brick house, chest and quads.
00:08:12
Speaker 2: It's where he met some of the other guys on his tier. I had a friend of mine. His name was muk Mehan and he was his big Muslim guy. But he was in a wheelchair. He just lost the body function from the waist down. He was military police Vietnam VET. And believe me, he looked like he walked right out of a Black Expectation film. If he had a soundtrack, it would be like Dan and Dan then and then and then.
00:08:40
Speaker 1: And he was so cool.
00:08:41
Speaker 2: Mook was one of my best friends I ever met in jail.
00:08:45
Speaker 1: Anthony got good and tight with Mook enough so that Mook shared a secret with him. He had a little helper that got him through the day. Nothing illegal, mind you. It was actually prescribed by the prison doctors. A muscle relied some called backlaffin for his muscle spasms.
00:09:03
Speaker 2: So he had like they would give him like ninety a month, and he'd be like, Yo, you should try to I I'll try it. We should try. I'm telling you you feel better. Finally like, yeah, I'm gonna take him. I don't know if it was like you know what like beta blockers do for college kids, but if you take ten of them with two heaping spoons of Folger's crystals down the throat, you're gonna be When I was doing with the backlaffins, I mix it with the coffee. I would take like Folgers, and I would put just a little bit of water in a lot of the crystals to get like a super dose of caffeine late at night, and that would kind of counterbalance the down effect of the backliffin. So I was like high and feeling good, but focus. And with that focus came a Russian agency. They urged to fight back to clear his name. A kid he'd had no shot against the Putnam cops, but now with a clear head, and this day is free to work. He was ready to take them on to get hold of his case file and read every work twice, then dig for the facts that weren't in that file. I stopped waiting, lifting so much, I could only do one in the other. I was either going to be the best looking, most macho man in history or I was going home. Because I only had that much time, and so I dedicated my focus on my freedom. What the drugs did was kind of like re resurrect like my will. It gave me a passion to do the research late at night, and I took them and I became a freaking genius.
00:10:49
Speaker 1: For all its reputation, there's a dumb site for psychos. Shwangong had a library he was proud of. There, Anthony, a guy who'd failed the ninth grade twice, found a full set of texts called the Case Law Reporters. Curious, he pulled a volume off the shelf and started on page one. By the time he looked up again, it was dark outside and Anthony was bewitched. Here in his hands was a starter kit for aspiring self taught lawyers. In a matter of months, he went from ninth grade kickout to dep Lock's legal eagle.
00:11:26
Speaker 2: I started sleeping all day like the hurricane.
00:11:29
Speaker 1: That would be Reuben Hurricane Carter, the great middleweight frame for murder in New Jersey. He'd famously written his way out of prison by becoming a jail house lawyer.
00:11:39
Speaker 2: And I would stay up at night and I would study, and I would print all these papers out from the law library. I would just love to learn the law. I had little highlighters, and I had little notebooks, and I started thinking. And when I started connecting the facts and the hope and the law as it applies, as it should be applied, and I see a way out, I get very hopeful and very dreamy, and I kind of create my own kind of euphoria. And you know, it wasn't a fantasy. It drove me, It inspired me. It was part of a chain of things in my life that led me to learn this law.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: As a fixture in those stacks, he found his tribe of jail house lawyers.
00:12:22
Speaker 2: And so like, in prison, it's like a cemetery for a living man. But the people that are innocent, the people that are fighting, the people that had hope, had a different level of energy. These are the people that I need to be around. These are the people that are focused. And they were all learning together and something new came out and we all had ways of sharing the knowledge. Everybody followed the new laws, the advance sheets, the law journals, anything that came out, and they just had the heart and that was the only way out.
00:13:02
Speaker 1: He spent the first couple of years there framing an appeal. Big Larry had hired him new lawyers.
00:13:09
Speaker 2: So in ninety eight we hired Joel Brenner, and Joel was just this legendary old appeal monster whose name is all over these books. I mean, you guys might know too much about him on the street, but in the jailhouse he's a legend. You know, you want to go to like the guy that is going to get the job done. So Larry hires him.
00:13:35
Speaker 1: From his jail cell. Anthony work morning and night writing and revising that petition.
00:13:41
Speaker 2: There's about twelve to thirteen points. A couple of those points are broken, and we argue when you say points, you're talking about, well, when you file an appeal, you raise points of law. So these points of law, or you know, you want to break it down and give the court. You know the basis of your claim and how that law supports you, and how you didn't have a fair trial.
00:14:06
Speaker 1: There's a format to follow in a post conviction relief appeal. Even if you find clear proof of your innocence, you still have to show the court that your conviction broke the law.
00:14:17
Speaker 2: So our first it's a statement of facts, basically summarizing the trial. And then our point one is the evidence was legally insufficient and Denise rose. The weight of the evidence goes into the verdict as a matter of law. Second point is the erroneous decision of the trial court to preclude dominic neglia.
00:14:39
Speaker 1: Domin neglia, your recall was kept off the stand by the judge at Anthony's trial. This despite the fact that he'd invented the story to put the cops on Anthony's trail. The impact of that story was immense. Domb didn't just put Anthony and Andy in the frame. He also gave those cops the names of their Stone Her friends kids like Adam Wilson and Bill McGregor, whom the cops then stalked and coerced. Wilson at least had recanted at trial. He told the jury the story of those cops coercion, but MacGregor at grudging we played along. He signed a statement that the Putnam cops wrote out and testified against Anthony at his trial, but his testimony would haunt McGregor for a decade. In two thousand and five, a pair of investigators hired by Big Larry tracked him down in Florida. When they did, Bill told him he had a confession to make.
00:15:39
Speaker 2: Bill is like, I've been waiting to say this for quite some time. I have a lot on my chest, and you know, first of all, I wasn't there. I first time I met Denise Rose was when the cops introduced her to me and tried to have her convince me of this story. I never met Josette right a day in my life. I wasn't in that vain and I did not see nothing.
00:16:03
Speaker 1: He said that those cops coerced him, dragged him up to Putnam County from Manhattan, detained and questioned him, and flipped between threatening him with a murder count and offering to a RaSE a pending drug charge he had in New York.
00:16:19
Speaker 2: He's like, he told me that he threatened me with accomplished to murder.
00:16:23
Speaker 1: McGregor signed and swore out of full recantation. So now three of the four witnesses allegedly I'm that fan, Andy Krevak, Bill McGregor Adam Wilson had recanted their coerce statements.
00:16:39
Speaker 2: I got three in the four. Yeah, I got three out of four.
00:16:44
Speaker 1: That left one last witness, Denise Rose, standing by your testimony in court. Alas, at this point in two thousand and five, Big Larry ran out of money. He'd been fed Anthony's defense for nine long years, paying expensive lawyers and private eyes, but his business had run aground and he had to tap out for a while.
00:17:11
Speaker 2: Big Larry is like, I can't pay. I'm having money problems. I can't pay for warriors anymore. So I it's me. I'm on my own here.
00:17:22
Speaker 1: So Anthony filed the next motion based on McGregor's recantation, and then he filed another motion setting all the cops' missteps and the many omissions from his case file. After months of drafting and redrafting motions for an appeal, Anthony wound up nowhere with the courts. Each rejection left him gutted, but never out of gas. His rage against those cops was high test jet fuel.
00:17:53
Speaker 2: I would be based in my cell and I would just put Costyledo in that steel cage and I would light the whole thing on fire. I put barbarier on the top, and I would have steel bats with barbier around him. And in my head, yeah, and it would help me feel better.
00:18:11
Speaker 1: He kept filing motions, hoping that something, anything would stick.
00:18:16
Speaker 2: I'm just motion proliferation and dilatory tactics and I'm stolen, so all of this stuff, I know is like hail Mary stuff. But I'm not ready and i don't want my life to end.
00:18:29
Speaker 1: And then at some point Anthony changed directions. Instead of fixing on the cops, he turned to what those cops had missed, because if he didn't kill Josette, someone else certainly had get access to his case file from the Putnam Sheriff's office. Over and over, he read the cops notes and witness statements, parsing them for unexamined clues, and what he found this time through was a name he'd overlooked, the name of a man lurking in the margins, wired on Folger's crystals and backlaff and Anthony spread out in a cell at night. He stayed up so late reading his own case file that he slept through roll call many mornings and got written up by the guards. But he couldn't help himself. He kept finding clues that snapped together. The first of those clues was a witness statement from one of Josette's neighbors. Her name was Anita Albano, and she talked to the cops on November twenty fifth, nineteen ninety five, three days after Josette's bones were found.
00:19:53
Speaker 2: This lady, Anita Albanon. She's coming home from work on October third, nineteen ninety four, of.
00:20:00
Speaker 1: Course, was the day Josette went missing. Albano was driving home from work when she stopped at an intersection.
00:20:07
Speaker 2: This little corner Seminary Hill and Willow is a stone store away from the White House, maybe a six minute walk at best.
00:20:15
Speaker 1: There she saw Josette walking down the road. Suddenly, a sporty red car stopped beside her.
00:20:22
Speaker 2: Josette speaks to the driver for half a minute maybe a minute, and then runs around to the passenger side gets in. I guess they weren't getting in fast enough because it seemed like Albano drove around them. But as she's driving around them, she looks at the license plate because she's concerned.
00:20:42
Speaker 1: That little red car at Connecticut plate, said Albano, who paused to get a look at the driver get a full mustache and blonde hair. She said everything in her statement track what other witnesses said about the day Josette went missing. Her sisters and their friends eached all the cops that Josette left the aus at three forty five headed towards Seminary Hill Road. That's where Albana saw her a few minutes later, heading down that.
00:21:13
Speaker 2: Road at four pm. She's getting in a red car. There certainly wasn't a brown van with a six foot six anthony depitball.
00:21:25
Speaker 3: It was a red car with Connecticut plates. Albana was alarmed that Josette got into that car, but from the look of it, she said, Josette knew the driver and seemed happy to hop in with him. The cops taking her statement shown her a photo lineup.
00:21:42
Speaker 2: She is then brought a photo array of six individuals.
00:21:47
Speaker 1: The six loosely fitter description. Each was assigned to number one through six. Albana studied the mugshots she said the guy she saw driving that day look younger than his mugshot, but she pointed to his photo anyway.
00:22:03
Speaker 2: And in this photo ray she says, if anybody number two, she she picks number two, if anybody, and then number two was Howard Dombern.
00:22:23
Speaker 1: Reading through file, Anthony saw that other Putnam detectives not Castaldo and Quick picked up the Albano lead and ran with it. They brought in Gombert's girlfriend, a young woman will call Anne Marie, but I'm like Costaldo and Quick. Those detectives made a recording. If the take sounds a little fuzzy, remember it's been sitting in a drawer for decades to money soon get and Marie told those cops she met Gombert when she was just a teen, that she got pregnant by him when she was sixteen or so, that he was almost thirty at the time. She said they shared a little girl together, and then she started dropping bombs on those cops. He said he did whatever he wanted to answer her question was ask questions for years. She said Gombert had raped her, then they were all beatings, and the times he choked her till she passed out. She said she'd left many times, and even had him arrested for rape. But he'd always wriggle out of those jams, and then he'd stalk her and hunter down again. When was the last time, cops asked her? Six months ago, She said she'd fled with their toddler to a shelter in Connecticut, but he tracked her there and attacked her in her car. What did he do to you, asked the cops. He put a knife to my throat, she said, and told me not to scream, and then then she laid the big one on them. She told them she drove a Pontiac's Sunbird, a red and black sports car with Connecticut plates.
00:24:18
Speaker 2: And.
00:24:21
Speaker 1: That he drove her car all the time. In fact, he'd been driving it the day they saw missing posters with Josette's name and face on them. And Marie saw that poster and the deli she went to every day.
00:24:35
Speaker 4: This was the first time I noticed the posters. They just put that poster up and to get picture she won the name again, he said.
00:24:47
Speaker 1: She told the cops that after seeing the missing poster, she went back to the car and told Howard about it.
00:24:53
Speaker 4: Well, I went back to the car. I told him and he was always driving. I went into the daylight to get a coffee and I'm looking and then sell the names. So that's missing, he said.
00:25:06
Speaker 1: What, and that she and Howard knew Josette and Anne Marie told the cops about this. One time before Josette went missing. She and Howard went driving one day when they saw Josette walking with some friends. She said, Howard hit the brakes, pulled over to chat her up.
00:25:29
Speaker 4: Buying me, stopped and we talked to him.
00:25:31
Speaker 2: Who who stopped?
00:25:32
Speaker 4: Howard stopped talking to drive.
00:25:35
Speaker 1: It was a reasonable stopped.
00:25:36
Speaker 4: He tasked off the card and jose Saws wanted to talk to her.
00:25:41
Speaker 1: She told them Howard asked Josette if she wanted a babysit for him.
00:25:44
Speaker 4: So that's when I actually remember conversing with her about being him.
00:25:49
Speaker 1: Oh and one last thing she said. That day they saw the missing posters, Howard told Anne Marie he'd given Joseph a ride.
00:25:59
Speaker 4: Was it last week?
00:26:02
Speaker 1: When did he give her that ride? Asked the cops. Em Marie paused a moment to think the week before she went missing. In his cell at Hwangong, Anthony read a Marie's statement, then stopped and read it again and again. He found photos in the case file of the red Sunbird with Connecticut plates the cargomber drove all the time. There was a statement from John Reese, the Putnam Sheriff's detective. He towed her red car in and dismantled it to hunt for evidence. When did he do that?
00:26:46
Speaker 2: Four days after Josette's body was found, taken apart, tires off, the seats out, vacuum, all the breeze are collected.
00:26:56
Speaker 1: A diagram showed he'd scrape the car for forensics. There was an note attached from Reese about collected and saved contents, but his list of those contents was nowhere to be found. And then Anthony found a statement from Josette's sister, Chloe. She told the cops that Josette was hanging around Gombert and that there were rumors flying around town about him, that he'd raped a young girl. And then Anthony found a statement that topped them all. It was scribbled by one of the cops who'd gone to the right household the day they found Josette's bones in the woods. Susan, Josette's mom, answered the door. They delivered the awful news to her and the very first words out of Susan Wright's mouth, oh my God, Howard Gombert killed my daughter. The Devil's Quarry is a production of Lava for Good in association with Rolling Stone Films and Signal Company Number One. I'm Your creator and host Paul Soltarov. Executive producers are Jason Flomm, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardis and Gilbert King from Rolling Stone Films. Our executive producers are Alexandra Dale and Sean Woods. Our producers Areka Krnhaber, Hannah Beale, Jackie Pawley, Austin Smith and Kathleen Horn. Our editors Joel Lovell. Fact checking by Lucy Croning. Our sound designer is Brit Spangler and our engineer is Austin Smith. Additional reporting by Kathleen Horran. Original music arranged and produced by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Rojas Studio at A Marketing and operations Jeff Clyburn, publicist Nathaniel Baruch, art director Andrew Nelson, Social media manager Sarah Gibbons. Legal review provided by Claris Law and Gibson Dunn. Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars. Is performed by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Rojas Studio, Vocals by Rob Reddy of California. Corns written by Leo Schofield and Kevin Harrick at the Florida Department of Corrections Hardy Correctional Facility,
Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised. Prison is like a cemetery for a living man. It's like everybody is a shadow of themselves, a shell ghost.
00:00:23
Speaker 2: Some of those people with life. You look in their eyes and there is nothing, nothing good to say, nothing good to feel.
00:00:33
Speaker 1: A couple of months after his conviction for the murder of Josette Wright, Anthony was transferred to Downstate Correctional. It's where they process new inmates into the system.
00:00:45
Speaker 2: I went in young, unprepared, not as tough as I thought I was. When I got to Downstate, the counselor threatened me. The counselor, he says, you're going to have a really bad time. Only how do you mean on sign indoors. It's like, yeah, sure, you're not going to have a good, good life.
00:01:04
Speaker 1: His first day at Downstay corroborated that counselor.
00:01:08
Speaker 2: It's two hours in and there's I don't know one hundred of us, and you know they're doing the spread your cheeks and then it shaved your hair, your eyebrows, all facial hair off. The next thing they did is they made us, all undressed, all naked in one line, and they threw the shit they call lie the lauser. They're taking a picture and now here I look like freaking mini me. So it's like you're being processed, you as a human being and a factory of other human beings. You're you're moving the way they tell you. They put you on a line, they give you your clothes, you're giving an inmate ID number. Mine was nine seven eight five six three nine. You had to walk in two rows, paired off side by side in groups of forty. If you felt back a little bit, they would say something like patch it up on the left retard or if somebody was talking to me, like what part of no talking in my hallway do you not understand? And so I started hearing these direct orders from this foul place. Somebody says sim laughs about something that unacceptable. There will be quiet, and there would be water, and they would take guys that did these things, and then you would hear them beaten in screen. Well, I'm not gonna say nothing.
00:02:36
Speaker 1: It was in places like downstate pens built to terrorize entry level felon into a life of learned submission that Anthony would have to learn how to save his own life. My man left my fears.
00:03:08
Speaker 2: Narrow Depth r Nless.
00:03:15
Speaker 3: Valley.
00:03:31
Speaker 1: This is the Devil's Quarry. In the fall of nineteen ninety seven, Anthony was sent up top That's what inmates called the Max Security Pens in northern New York State. His new address, SHAWANNGA Correctional was where they kept the worst of the worst. David Berkowitz, better known as the son of Sam Robert Chambers, the Central Park strangler Larry Davis, who shot six cops in the Bronx and lived to tell the tale. In a crowd like that, you keep yourself to yourself, and if anyone asks what you're in for, you lie your full head off.
00:04:20
Speaker 2: I was like for the first six or eight months it was a robbery and murder, So I kind of altered the story to kind of protect myself from like having to explain it. But eventually your case comes out in a lot of books and people find out and people talk.
00:04:40
Speaker 1: He didn't have to guess what happened to the untouchables. You had a front row seat for that stuff.
00:04:47
Speaker 2: Like, I seen a lot of stuff happening, like a violent stuff. I seen a guy pick a guy up out of a wheelchair, start fighting him and put them back in a wheelchair. I seen two guys fighting over a state burrito upstairs, slamming each other into the cages. I see a guy on a weight bench cut what made a Nike sign on the kid's face while he was under about two twenty five. Yeah, I mean, I've seen enough blood to fill a bathtub.
00:05:22
Speaker 1: Anthony knew his day was coming, the day he'd have to fight three gangsters in the shower or someone would slip behind him with a straight edge. He lived in a state of low level terror. It's one thing to hulk slam your backyard buddies, it's another to fend off lifers who squat four fifty and who conspire with the guards to get at you. In short, you don't survive up top without a break or two coming your way. Anthony's break came to him out of the clear blue. He met some guys who knew the guy and the mafia there. And what was Anthony's calling card to the crime boss at Schewana his stepdad, Big Larry.
00:06:06
Speaker 2: There was a couple people and I knew my stepfather, And then there was this guy. His name was Angelo, and he was high up in Cazies. He knew some people that knew some people right, and those people knew my people.
00:06:23
Speaker 1: Anthony put out word that he wanted to sit down with Angelo. That request went up the chain and Anthony got to sit down. He went with every scrap of proof he had that the cops had stitched him up.
00:06:36
Speaker 2: Like I brought out the dominic recantation Adam taking his story back.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: He told him how Andy was tricked into a false confession, how his buddy said they were beaten into testifying against him, and they believed. After hearing him out, the Italians made their ruling. This kid gets a pass, so hands off. When you got to pass with.
00:07:05
Speaker 2: Your own kind, that kind things falling water. It didn't mean it put me at the top of the food chain. But no longer am I at the bottom. And so now not only are they like giving me a pass, they're like they're calling me to the table. They're breaking bread with me now. And so it's like I feel a little safer, like when it was happy birthday, some happy birthday, when it was Christmas, they brought out buffets of chips and cookkies.
00:07:34
Speaker 1: It surely didn't hurt that every couple of weeks you'd get a big care package from home, a cart and crame with goodies. He'd chair with a crew h salams and soprisadas, tubs of dried fruits. Then there was the stuff that really opened doors, crisp copies of penthouse and hustler. Those are the kinds of goods that make you a vip in D block Able to finally let it bread out, Anthony got back to the job of living, started training in the jail yard every day, building a brick house, chest and quads.
00:08:12
Speaker 2: It's where he met some of the other guys on his tier. I had a friend of mine. His name was muk Mehan and he was his big Muslim guy. But he was in a wheelchair. He just lost the body function from the waist down. He was military police Vietnam VET. And believe me, he looked like he walked right out of a Black Expectation film. If he had a soundtrack, it would be like Dan and Dan then and then and then.
00:08:40
Speaker 1: And he was so cool.
00:08:41
Speaker 2: Mook was one of my best friends I ever met in jail.
00:08:45
Speaker 1: Anthony got good and tight with Mook enough so that Mook shared a secret with him. He had a little helper that got him through the day. Nothing illegal, mind you. It was actually prescribed by the prison doctors. A muscle relied some called backlaffin for his muscle spasms.
00:09:03
Speaker 2: So he had like they would give him like ninety a month, and he'd be like, Yo, you should try to I I'll try it. We should try. I'm telling you you feel better. Finally like, yeah, I'm gonna take him. I don't know if it was like you know what like beta blockers do for college kids, but if you take ten of them with two heaping spoons of Folger's crystals down the throat, you're gonna be When I was doing with the backlaffins, I mix it with the coffee. I would take like Folgers, and I would put just a little bit of water in a lot of the crystals to get like a super dose of caffeine late at night, and that would kind of counterbalance the down effect of the backliffin. So I was like high and feeling good, but focus. And with that focus came a Russian agency. They urged to fight back to clear his name. A kid he'd had no shot against the Putnam cops, but now with a clear head, and this day is free to work. He was ready to take them on to get hold of his case file and read every work twice, then dig for the facts that weren't in that file. I stopped waiting, lifting so much, I could only do one in the other. I was either going to be the best looking, most macho man in history or I was going home. Because I only had that much time, and so I dedicated my focus on my freedom. What the drugs did was kind of like re resurrect like my will. It gave me a passion to do the research late at night, and I took them and I became a freaking genius.
00:10:49
Speaker 1: For all its reputation, there's a dumb site for psychos. Shwangong had a library he was proud of. There, Anthony, a guy who'd failed the ninth grade twice, found a full set of texts called the Case Law Reporters. Curious, he pulled a volume off the shelf and started on page one. By the time he looked up again, it was dark outside and Anthony was bewitched. Here in his hands was a starter kit for aspiring self taught lawyers. In a matter of months, he went from ninth grade kickout to dep Lock's legal eagle.
00:11:26
Speaker 2: I started sleeping all day like the hurricane.
00:11:29
Speaker 1: That would be Reuben Hurricane Carter, the great middleweight frame for murder in New Jersey. He'd famously written his way out of prison by becoming a jail house lawyer.
00:11:39
Speaker 2: And I would stay up at night and I would study, and I would print all these papers out from the law library. I would just love to learn the law. I had little highlighters, and I had little notebooks, and I started thinking. And when I started connecting the facts and the hope and the law as it applies, as it should be applied, and I see a way out, I get very hopeful and very dreamy, and I kind of create my own kind of euphoria. And you know, it wasn't a fantasy. It drove me, It inspired me. It was part of a chain of things in my life that led me to learn this law.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: As a fixture in those stacks, he found his tribe of jail house lawyers.
00:12:22
Speaker 2: And so like, in prison, it's like a cemetery for a living man. But the people that are innocent, the people that are fighting, the people that had hope, had a different level of energy. These are the people that I need to be around. These are the people that are focused. And they were all learning together and something new came out and we all had ways of sharing the knowledge. Everybody followed the new laws, the advance sheets, the law journals, anything that came out, and they just had the heart and that was the only way out.
00:13:02
Speaker 1: He spent the first couple of years there framing an appeal. Big Larry had hired him new lawyers.
00:13:09
Speaker 2: So in ninety eight we hired Joel Brenner, and Joel was just this legendary old appeal monster whose name is all over these books. I mean, you guys might know too much about him on the street, but in the jailhouse he's a legend. You know, you want to go to like the guy that is going to get the job done. So Larry hires him.
00:13:35
Speaker 1: From his jail cell. Anthony work morning and night writing and revising that petition.
00:13:41
Speaker 2: There's about twelve to thirteen points. A couple of those points are broken, and we argue when you say points, you're talking about, well, when you file an appeal, you raise points of law. So these points of law, or you know, you want to break it down and give the court. You know the basis of your claim and how that law supports you, and how you didn't have a fair trial.
00:14:06
Speaker 1: There's a format to follow in a post conviction relief appeal. Even if you find clear proof of your innocence, you still have to show the court that your conviction broke the law.
00:14:17
Speaker 2: So our first it's a statement of facts, basically summarizing the trial. And then our point one is the evidence was legally insufficient and Denise rose. The weight of the evidence goes into the verdict as a matter of law. Second point is the erroneous decision of the trial court to preclude dominic neglia.
00:14:39
Speaker 1: Domin neglia, your recall was kept off the stand by the judge at Anthony's trial. This despite the fact that he'd invented the story to put the cops on Anthony's trail. The impact of that story was immense. Domb didn't just put Anthony and Andy in the frame. He also gave those cops the names of their Stone Her friends kids like Adam Wilson and Bill McGregor, whom the cops then stalked and coerced. Wilson at least had recanted at trial. He told the jury the story of those cops coercion, but MacGregor at grudging we played along. He signed a statement that the Putnam cops wrote out and testified against Anthony at his trial, but his testimony would haunt McGregor for a decade. In two thousand and five, a pair of investigators hired by Big Larry tracked him down in Florida. When they did, Bill told him he had a confession to make.
00:15:39
Speaker 2: Bill is like, I've been waiting to say this for quite some time. I have a lot on my chest, and you know, first of all, I wasn't there. I first time I met Denise Rose was when the cops introduced her to me and tried to have her convince me of this story. I never met Josette right a day in my life. I wasn't in that vain and I did not see nothing.
00:16:03
Speaker 1: He said that those cops coerced him, dragged him up to Putnam County from Manhattan, detained and questioned him, and flipped between threatening him with a murder count and offering to a RaSE a pending drug charge he had in New York.
00:16:19
Speaker 2: He's like, he told me that he threatened me with accomplished to murder.
00:16:23
Speaker 1: McGregor signed and swore out of full recantation. So now three of the four witnesses allegedly I'm that fan, Andy Krevak, Bill McGregor Adam Wilson had recanted their coerce statements.
00:16:39
Speaker 2: I got three in the four. Yeah, I got three out of four.
00:16:44
Speaker 1: That left one last witness, Denise Rose, standing by your testimony in court. Alas, at this point in two thousand and five, Big Larry ran out of money. He'd been fed Anthony's defense for nine long years, paying expensive lawyers and private eyes, but his business had run aground and he had to tap out for a while.
00:17:11
Speaker 2: Big Larry is like, I can't pay. I'm having money problems. I can't pay for warriors anymore. So I it's me. I'm on my own here.
00:17:22
Speaker 1: So Anthony filed the next motion based on McGregor's recantation, and then he filed another motion setting all the cops' missteps and the many omissions from his case file. After months of drafting and redrafting motions for an appeal, Anthony wound up nowhere with the courts. Each rejection left him gutted, but never out of gas. His rage against those cops was high test jet fuel.
00:17:53
Speaker 2: I would be based in my cell and I would just put Costyledo in that steel cage and I would light the whole thing on fire. I put barbarier on the top, and I would have steel bats with barbier around him. And in my head, yeah, and it would help me feel better.
00:18:11
Speaker 1: He kept filing motions, hoping that something, anything would stick.
00:18:16
Speaker 2: I'm just motion proliferation and dilatory tactics and I'm stolen, so all of this stuff, I know is like hail Mary stuff. But I'm not ready and i don't want my life to end.
00:18:29
Speaker 1: And then at some point Anthony changed directions. Instead of fixing on the cops, he turned to what those cops had missed, because if he didn't kill Josette, someone else certainly had get access to his case file from the Putnam Sheriff's office. Over and over, he read the cops notes and witness statements, parsing them for unexamined clues, and what he found this time through was a name he'd overlooked, the name of a man lurking in the margins, wired on Folger's crystals and backlaff and Anthony spread out in a cell at night. He stayed up so late reading his own case file that he slept through roll call many mornings and got written up by the guards. But he couldn't help himself. He kept finding clues that snapped together. The first of those clues was a witness statement from one of Josette's neighbors. Her name was Anita Albano, and she talked to the cops on November twenty fifth, nineteen ninety five, three days after Josette's bones were found.
00:19:53
Speaker 2: This lady, Anita Albanon. She's coming home from work on October third, nineteen ninety four, of.
00:20:00
Speaker 1: Course, was the day Josette went missing. Albano was driving home from work when she stopped at an intersection.
00:20:07
Speaker 2: This little corner Seminary Hill and Willow is a stone store away from the White House, maybe a six minute walk at best.
00:20:15
Speaker 1: There she saw Josette walking down the road. Suddenly, a sporty red car stopped beside her.
00:20:22
Speaker 2: Josette speaks to the driver for half a minute maybe a minute, and then runs around to the passenger side gets in. I guess they weren't getting in fast enough because it seemed like Albano drove around them. But as she's driving around them, she looks at the license plate because she's concerned.
00:20:42
Speaker 1: That little red car at Connecticut plate, said Albano, who paused to get a look at the driver get a full mustache and blonde hair. She said everything in her statement track what other witnesses said about the day Josette went missing. Her sisters and their friends eached all the cops that Josette left the aus at three forty five headed towards Seminary Hill Road. That's where Albana saw her a few minutes later, heading down that.
00:21:13
Speaker 2: Road at four pm. She's getting in a red car. There certainly wasn't a brown van with a six foot six anthony depitball.
00:21:25
Speaker 3: It was a red car with Connecticut plates. Albana was alarmed that Josette got into that car, but from the look of it, she said, Josette knew the driver and seemed happy to hop in with him. The cops taking her statement shown her a photo lineup.
00:21:42
Speaker 2: She is then brought a photo array of six individuals.
00:21:47
Speaker 1: The six loosely fitter description. Each was assigned to number one through six. Albana studied the mugshots she said the guy she saw driving that day look younger than his mugshot, but she pointed to his photo anyway.
00:22:03
Speaker 2: And in this photo ray she says, if anybody number two, she she picks number two, if anybody, and then number two was Howard Dombern.
00:22:23
Speaker 1: Reading through file, Anthony saw that other Putnam detectives not Castaldo and Quick picked up the Albano lead and ran with it. They brought in Gombert's girlfriend, a young woman will call Anne Marie, but I'm like Costaldo and Quick. Those detectives made a recording. If the take sounds a little fuzzy, remember it's been sitting in a drawer for decades to money soon get and Marie told those cops she met Gombert when she was just a teen, that she got pregnant by him when she was sixteen or so, that he was almost thirty at the time. She said they shared a little girl together, and then she started dropping bombs on those cops. He said he did whatever he wanted to answer her question was ask questions for years. She said Gombert had raped her, then they were all beatings, and the times he choked her till she passed out. She said she'd left many times, and even had him arrested for rape. But he'd always wriggle out of those jams, and then he'd stalk her and hunter down again. When was the last time, cops asked her? Six months ago, She said she'd fled with their toddler to a shelter in Connecticut, but he tracked her there and attacked her in her car. What did he do to you, asked the cops. He put a knife to my throat, she said, and told me not to scream, and then then she laid the big one on them. She told them she drove a Pontiac's Sunbird, a red and black sports car with Connecticut plates.
00:24:18
Speaker 2: And.
00:24:21
Speaker 1: That he drove her car all the time. In fact, he'd been driving it the day they saw missing posters with Josette's name and face on them. And Marie saw that poster and the deli she went to every day.
00:24:35
Speaker 4: This was the first time I noticed the posters. They just put that poster up and to get picture she won the name again, he said.
00:24:47
Speaker 1: She told the cops that after seeing the missing poster, she went back to the car and told Howard about it.
00:24:53
Speaker 4: Well, I went back to the car. I told him and he was always driving. I went into the daylight to get a coffee and I'm looking and then sell the names. So that's missing, he said.
00:25:06
Speaker 1: What, and that she and Howard knew Josette and Anne Marie told the cops about this. One time before Josette went missing. She and Howard went driving one day when they saw Josette walking with some friends. She said, Howard hit the brakes, pulled over to chat her up.
00:25:29
Speaker 4: Buying me, stopped and we talked to him.
00:25:31
Speaker 2: Who who stopped?
00:25:32
Speaker 4: Howard stopped talking to drive.
00:25:35
Speaker 1: It was a reasonable stopped.
00:25:36
Speaker 4: He tasked off the card and jose Saws wanted to talk to her.
00:25:41
Speaker 1: She told them Howard asked Josette if she wanted a babysit for him.
00:25:44
Speaker 4: So that's when I actually remember conversing with her about being him.
00:25:49
Speaker 1: Oh and one last thing she said. That day they saw the missing posters, Howard told Anne Marie he'd given Joseph a ride.
00:25:59
Speaker 4: Was it last week?
00:26:02
Speaker 1: When did he give her that ride? Asked the cops. Em Marie paused a moment to think the week before she went missing. In his cell at Hwangong, Anthony read a Marie's statement, then stopped and read it again and again. He found photos in the case file of the red Sunbird with Connecticut plates the cargomber drove all the time. There was a statement from John Reese, the Putnam Sheriff's detective. He towed her red car in and dismantled it to hunt for evidence. When did he do that?
00:26:46
Speaker 2: Four days after Josette's body was found, taken apart, tires off, the seats out, vacuum, all the breeze are collected.
00:26:56
Speaker 1: A diagram showed he'd scrape the car for forensics. There was an note attached from Reese about collected and saved contents, but his list of those contents was nowhere to be found. And then Anthony found a statement from Josette's sister, Chloe. She told the cops that Josette was hanging around Gombert and that there were rumors flying around town about him, that he'd raped a young girl. And then Anthony found a statement that topped them all. It was scribbled by one of the cops who'd gone to the right household the day they found Josette's bones in the woods. Susan, Josette's mom, answered the door. They delivered the awful news to her and the very first words out of Susan Wright's mouth, oh my God, Howard Gombert killed my daughter. The Devil's Quarry is a production of Lava for Good in association with Rolling Stone Films and Signal Company Number One. I'm Your creator and host Paul Soltarov. Executive producers are Jason Flomm, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardis and Gilbert King from Rolling Stone Films. Our executive producers are Alexandra Dale and Sean Woods. Our producers Areka Krnhaber, Hannah Beale, Jackie Pawley, Austin Smith and Kathleen Horn. Our editors Joel Lovell. Fact checking by Lucy Croning. Our sound designer is Brit Spangler and our engineer is Austin Smith. Additional reporting by Kathleen Horran. Original music arranged and produced by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Rojas Studio at A Marketing and operations Jeff Clyburn, publicist Nathaniel Baruch, art director Andrew Nelson, Social media manager Sarah Gibbons. Legal review provided by Claris Law and Gibson Dunn. Our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars. Is performed by Alexis Quadrado at the Plaza Rojas Studio, Vocals by Rob Reddy of California. Corns written by Leo Schofield and Kevin Harrick at the Florida Department of Corrections Hardy Correctional Facility,
