Tonight on Dateline.
I got death threats in this case.
They spent months coming after me.
They had killed.
I did not want to be the next.
I filed a police report and I did tell them, my friend is missing and this is not normal.
It looked like he came from wealth.
He was definitely kind of in this old Hollywood crowd.
He had all these pictures in his house with all these famous people, like icons.
You go to the house, no indication any crime had been committed.
Exactly nothing.
It was the informant that started to put the pieces in place.
There's a lot of people involved in this.
You have the self-proclaimed computer whiz kid.
He identified himself as the Prince of Nepal.
The heavy.
He is the muscle.
This plot sounds like something out of a movie.
This isn't something from Hollywood.
This was real.
I just realized, oh my God.
Could have been me.
It could have been me.
Turn after turn, twists after twist, a Rubik's Cube of crime ends in murder in Palm Springs.
I'm Lester Holt.
This is Dateline.
Here's Josh Mankiewicz with The Prince, The WizKid, and The Millionaire.
There's a place in the California desert that's always been cool, no matter the temperature.
Palm Springs is a mecca of style, glamour, and indulgence.
Two hours east of Los Angeles, you can turn a corner and step into the last century.
Some of the biggest names of Hollywood's golden era built beautiful homes here.
Stars like Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, and that ageless icon of flamboyance, Liberace.
Well, look me over.
I didn't get dressed like this to go unnoticed.
Around the corner from the Piazza del Liberace lived another old-school luminary.
He wasn't as famous, but he also lived pretty large.
Cliff Lambert was a retired art collector and Palm Springs socialite.
His life was all about cocktail parties, friends and filling his modern home with not-so-modern art and tooling about Palm Springs in his Rolls-Royce Corniche.
Everything Gucci, everything designer clothes.
You felt like you were in a millionaire's home when you were in his house.
Then one day, Cliff Lambert just vanished.
It was a disappearance that led to one of the biggest, longest and most expensive missing persons cases in the history of California.
A case we followed for more than a decade now.
A case that would end up tearing prosecutor Lisa DeMaria's life apart.
I was living this case.
Complaints, motions, death threats, lawsuits.
That was their thing, was come after me, break me down.
The story really starts with a guy who was the first to notice Cliff Lambert was missing and was the friend who probably loved Cliff the most.
He just had such a big aura about him.
There was just no taming him at all.
Eddie Mulligan met Cliff Lambert in 2006.
He was very loud and, you know, he was just a fun guy.
Big guy, big personality.
Oh, totally.
Like, you could not put Cliff's personality in a box.
Eddie has met his fair share of characters over the years, including the one he met in the mirror each morning.
During the 90s he was the bottle-blonde boy of the moment in West Hollywood's adult entertainment scene, cover boy for magazines like Blue Boy, Freshman and Frontiers.
Eddie also starred in more than 60 X-rated video features.
Back then, he was known by his screen name, Kevin Kramer.
When you're in public like this, do people ever come up to you and say, oh my gosh, you're Kevin Kramer?
Sometimes.
I want to thank you, by the way, for picking a porn name that our standards department will allow us to say on television.
You're welcome.
Eddie was dancing for tips at Hunter's in Palm Springs when Cliff Lambert walked into his life.
He came up to me, and he just started putting money in my G-string.
But he wasn't looking at me.
He was looking down.
He goes, my name is Clifford Lambert, and I will pay you handsomely to come to Argentina.
I thought, is he kidding?
That trip didn't happen.
What did happen was that Eddie and Cliff became fast friends.
They traveled to Hawaii together.
Later, Cliff took Eddie to New York in style.
You guys were not lovers, never romantically involved.
Because guess what?
Gay dudes can be best friends.
It's not all about sex all the time.
Eddie says what it was about was being there for each other when they both needed it.
Cliff and I were both recovering from broken relationships.
And so we both sort of helped each other heal.
On December 6, 2008, Eddie and Cliff made plans to meet at Palm Springs Festival of Lights Parade.
The annual event is the highlight of the season in Palm Springs.
Cliff was going to meet us there.
We were all waiting for him.
Except Cliff never showed.
And it just wasn't like Cliff Lambert to ghost his friends.
So you go to his house and you have a key.
Right.
You know, I walked inside the foyer of the house.
And when I came around to the living room, you know, it looked like people had had cocktails and smoked cigarettes.
Eddie said the cigarettes were Benson and Hedges cigarettes.
You know, Cliff didn't smoke cigarettes.
But somebody had.
But somebody was.
And you saw, what, a couple of glasses out?
Saw a couple of glasses.
It looked like they had, like, melted ice and liquor in them.
Like, it looked as if Cliff had company.
And so maybe there's a reason Cliff didn't show up or didn't call.
Right.
And so I thought, I'll call him tomorrow.
And I left.
And here we are, right?
Yes.
Eddie didn't go in beyond the entry hall and he left quietly expecting to hear the next day about Cliff's evening.
Except Cliff never called, and radio silence just wasn't Cliff's thing.
After talking it over with a friend, Eddie decided to file a missing persons report.
And I said, you know, I need you guys to know that my friend is missing, and this is not normal.
A few days later, Eddie went back to Cliff's house looking for him and was both surprised and happy to find someone had cleaned the place up.
So like a door was open that wasn't open.
There was no more drinks and no more cigarettes.
I was like, okay, he's here.
He's just not here when I'm here.
Because he's tidied up.
Yeah.
Then days passed and still no word from Cliff.
Eddie wondered if he'd just been kidding himself.
I kept all the hope.
I kept all the hope alive for as long as I could.
The Cliff Lambert investigation would eventually reveal a conspiracy so full of lies, cons and double crosses the cops weren't sure if Cliff was a victim or just on vacation.
It's a case with so many slippery characters, you may have a hard time telling who or what to believe.
You'll meet Cliff's baby-faced online date.
I've lined up potentially $50 million next week.
The ex-con from San Quentin.
You're a sociopath.
Yeah, absolutely.
The lawyer who worked both sides of the law.
I'm just trying to keep him out of trouble.
A bartender who never told the same story twice.
You lied to our base.
Some exiled royalty from the country of Nepal.
He would throw down hundreds and buy everybody a drink.
And everyone knew that the prince was at the bar.
And the prosecutor who took on all of them.
It was like Alice in Wonderland falling into a rabbit hole.
Cliff Lambert had gone missing, but that did not by itself mean something bad had happened to him.
At least, that's what Cliff's friend Eddie hoped.
I had other friends in the Palm Springs area that would disappear and play this game, and then they'd resurface.
We often get missing person cases, especially over the weekend.
The job of finding Cliff fell to Frank Browning, a detective with the Palm Springs Police Department.
Browning's initial take on the case... was the same as Eddie's.
People come for the holidays, don't return home the next day, so people report them missing.
And usually they just turn up.
Yes, you give it a day or two, and they'll turn up.
After a few days, Browning decided it was time to start poking around.
I drove down to his house noticed that the mailbox was kind of filled with mail stacked.
So it's kind of a clue.
No one's been home, no one's been there to take the mail.
Maybe he's away.
Yes.
When you were inside Cliff's house, which was, what, a week or days after he went missing?
Yes, I would say maybe a week after.
Nothing was missing?
The place didn't look like it had been burglarized, ransacked, nothing.
Nothing.
It was nice and clean.
Do you mind if I have a cigarette?
I do not.
Now meet another friend of Cliff's.
Barbara Wisby wrote a column called People Parties Places for a local magazine called The Bottom Line.
It feels to me like there isn't a lot of Palm Springs gossip that you have not heard about.
To say the least, I know where all the bodies are buried.
Barbara says Cliff's sudden disappearance wasn't completely out of character.
Where'd you think he was?
I thought he might have taken off with some young guy and taken him to Cancun or something.
I mean, you know, Puerto Vallarta, whatever.
Because that's the kind of thing Cliff did.
Exactamwondo.
And sure enough, after a few days of silence, Cliff's friends started receiving emails from him saying he was taking a break in Maui.
I had a horrible third oral surgery last week, great deal of pain.
Going to go on a little trip for the holidays can't stand to be alone in that big house.
I thought, okay, it's not like him to email me, but maybe he felt the need to go on his own.
Going out on his own was nothing new for Cliff Lambert.
He wasn't a to-the-manor-born Palm Springs socialite.
Cliff was raised in middle-class Missouri, although he'd done all he could to put that life in his rear view.
His first stop was New York in the 60s to pursue an acting career.
Cliff got into art instead.
He had this passion for art, so he created this company called Lambert Studios.
He did lithographs of original art and sold them through mail order.
And it caught on, and everybody was buying those things.
And Cliff made a lot of money.
Oh, he was in the chips.
In the late 60s, Cliff moved to Los Angeles, where he developed a reputation as an art collector to the stars.
Act up!
Fight back!
Fight AIDS!
Then, in the 80s, the AIDS epidemic swept through the country, taking with it many of Cliff's friends.
Searching for a change of pace, Cliff moved from LA to Palm Springs, where he bought this home in the historic Old Las Palmas district.
His house was absolutely beautiful.
The fun thing about his house is he had a story for every piece of furniture, every piece of art, every fork, every knife, every cup.
Laughing it up with Zsa Zsa Gabor, playing backgammon against Lucille Ball.
Cliff loved to entertain.
Big name dropper.
Everything was a name dropper.
I've never met anybody that was more full of himself, I don't think, than Cliff Lambert.
In 1993, 58-year-old Cliff started dating 19-year-old Travis Hobbs.
Travis always wanted the fancy life.
Travis's sister, Yvette Bowker.
I figured he'd found himself a sugar daddy.
And it wasn't until I started seeing the relationship with them I could tell he did truly love Cliff.
Is it uncommon to see an older gentleman with a younger boyfriend in this town?
Not here in Palm Springs.
Palm Springs, it's the gays and the grays that love them, right?
Cliff and Travis were together 15 years before they split up.
Travis moved out on Cliff and in with a friend.
That ended in August 2007.
Somebody went outside and saw Travis at the bottom of the pool.
And he had drowned.
And Cliff went into a whirlpool of depression.
Instead of trying to deal with it, he just drank more.
Sounds like he was lonely.
Very.
Yeah, for sure.
Cliff wanted to get back out there and start dating.
So he turned to his friend, Eddie. who has forgotten more about dating than most of us ever learn.
And I said, well, Cliff, you know, everyone's online right now.
He's like, how do I do that?
So I showed him.
In April of 2008, eight months before he disappeared, Cliff matched with an attractive, motivated young man from San Francisco.
So Cliff bought him a ticket to come visit.
I was at home.
Cliff called me at home and he's like, I want you to come over and meet somebody.
I said, okay.
So I went over to Cliff's house and he was a super smart, you know, nice kid.
The kid's name was Danny Garcia and he was Cliff's date and couldn't wait to tell his friends about the older man in his life.
December 2008 was a sad and confusing time for Eddie Mulliken.
Christmas came and went, with no further news from or about his friend Cliff.
What did you think had happened?
I didn't know.
That's the thing, I didn't know.
The same could be said for Lieutenant Browning.
We really didn't have an idea of what was going on as far as his disappearance, whether or not he was still living.
Then, just before New Year's, three and a half weeks after Cliff's disappearance...
Browning got a call from a realtor in the San Francisco Bay Area who said he had a client who wanted to sell Cliff Lambert's Palm Springs home.
And that someone he knows was looking to do what he called a fire sale on Mr. Lambert's house.
The realtor said his client, Kishal Narula, was a rich Nepalese prince who said he'd been given Cliff's house in a recent legal settlement.
Now this prince wanted to sell that house quickly.
Suspicious.
The realtor Googled Cliff's name and came across a missing persons alert on the Palm Springs PD website.
That's when the realtor called Lieutenant Browning, who brought in fraud detective Simon Min to see if this was a legitimate real estate transaction or a crime in progress.
We're trying to figure out whether or not Mr. Lambert is authorizing this type of sale.
Then, before detectives could start looking for this, prince Browning received another call about Cliff's house.
There was a U-Haul truck in front of Mr. Lambert's house.
There shouldn't be a U-Haul truck there.
When Mann and Browning arrived, they found a man getting ready to move Cliff's possessions into the U-Haul.
He said his name was Miguel Bustamante, a bartender from San Francisco.
So Miguel gave us some story that he was paid to come down to Palm Springs and clear out the house.
As incriminating as this scenario was, Bustamante remained calm and cooperative, even allowing detectives to search his motel room without a warrant.
I go there and, lo and behold, there's a bunch of Mr Lambert's belongings in there, to include Louis Vuitton luggage that I had noticed back before when I was in his residence.
Also on the countertops were his ID cards, checkbook things, obviously with his name.
That came from the house.
Also sounds like stuff you would take with you if you were leaving for a long period of time.
Definitely.
It was finally obvious to the cops.
Cliff Lambert wasn't on a jaunt out of town.
Browning arrested Bustamante on a burglary charge.
And under questioning, Bustamante said he'd been hired by a guy he'd met while tending bar.
Prince Kashal Narula, the man who said he got Cliff's house in a legal settlement.
How much stuff were you supposed to take back?
He just did the art.
Just the artwork?
Just the artwork.
And as payment for his hard work?
He gave me a title of the Rolls Royce.
Saying you're getting paid a Rolls Royce for one day's work is the kind of story a thief tells the cops when he thinks they're dumber than he is.
Here's the thing.
You're screwed.
You're involved.
No, I wanted to be really honest with you.
No, you didn't.
Don't insult my intelligence.
When I say you're screwed, I really mean you're screwed.
You need to worry about yourself, not the prince.
After a few more questions, Bustamante was escorted to a cell, at which point, it seems, reality hit him.
He suddenly said he was now ready to tell the truth, which was that Cliff had been lured to Mexico to buy some discounted paintings and was instead kidnapped when he got there.
So Cliff was kidnapped?
Yeah.
And in a case already full of names, the bartender threw one more at detectives.
It's a name police hadn't heard before, Danny Garcia.
Danny Garcia was that young man Cliff, met online and then later invited to stay at his Palm Springs home.
According to Bustamante, that date was the beginning of a plot.
So Danny sends Clifford to Mexico to do some kind of art deal?
Yeah.
Exactly where in Mexico, Bustamante wasn't saying.
Anybody that can give us any leads to go find Mr. Lambert?
Nobody?
The only one is Danny.
Bartender Miguel Bustamante's arrest was tough news for Eddie Mulliken to hear, because it meant finally confronting the reality that something terrible could have happened to his friend Cliff.
It just became scary for me to be in Palm Springs.
I was afraid to talk to anybody about it.
I didn't know who was watching me.
I got a little paranoid.
It was about this time when a missing person's website posted an alert about Cliff's case.
That caught the attention of Tyson Ranch, a Las Vegas tech entrepreneur.
I read the article but then down at the bottom, where people can leave comments, somebody had written the last person I saw him with was a well-dressed Indian male with a British accent which describes Kashal Narula to a T.
So my next call is to the Palm Springs Police Department.
Tyson told police he knew Prince Kashal Narula through Danny Garcia.
That young man Cliff met online and had once night clubbed with the both of them.
Lieutenant Browning, who wanted to hear more about how Danny and Kashal were connected, was anxious to speak with Tyson.
He says, you're going to need to come in.
And I said, I'll see you tomorrow.
The story Tyson told detectives started five years earlier, when Tyson was riding the tech wave and tearing through San Francisco's Castro District with his good friend Danny Garcia.
Everyone who met Danny was just enamored by him.
He was just charming, charismatic, knowledgeable, well-traveled.
The kind of guy you want to hang around.
Totally.
Yep, absolutely.
And Danny had enough money to keep up with the high-rolling Tyson.
Danny was the one friend I had where, if we wanted to go to London for a three-day weekend, we could each pay our own way.
Danny's dough came from a 500000 legal settlement with a high-tech investor named Thomas White, who Danny said abused him when he was a minor.
That case, the press coverage that followed and Danny's bottle service lifestyle around town turned Danny Garcia into something of a local rock star.
Which is how he caught the eye of Prince Cashal Narula.
Danny and Cashal would show up in the Castro neighborhood and they would arrive in three town cars because Kushal didn't want anybody to know which town car he was in, because people would be after royalty.
It was like a secret service kind of thing.
And he would go to the bar and throw down hundreds and buy everybody a drink.
And everyone knew that the prince was at the bar.
Everything was over the top, just over the top.
It was a magical time for Tyson, hanging out with Danny and Kajal.
It also wore him out.
When I had been 10 years in technology, my goal was to just go off grid.
And I decided to go to South America for a month.
A long enough trip that while in Rio de Janeiro, Tyson needed to get online to pay some bills.
And lo and behold, I logged on and my bank accounts are empty.
And I'm kind of freaking out because I also noticed that two of my credit cards that I had hidden in a drawer at home were being used.
Tyson caught the first available flight back to Vegas.
And when he opened the door to his townhouse he found There on the closet floor a suitcase with full of ATM receipts from Tyson's bank accounts.
And that suitcase belongs to Danny Garcia.
Apparently, while posing as Tyson, Danny had acquired all new ATM cards and then used those to drain Tyson's accounts.
And you're feeling what at this time?
Anger?
Betrayal?
Or I should have known better?
All of the above.
All of those little things that should have triggered a flag all of a sudden...
Oh, yeah.
Danny your pal.
Danny the victim.
Danny who's so charming.
Danny who loves to live large.
Danny the sociopath.
Danny the conman.
Danny the liar.
The bank's insurance covered Tyson's financial losses.
But after seeing security camera photos of Danny withdrawing money from his account, Tyson wanted to see his now ex-best friend punished, but he says the detective assigned to the case blew him off.
He says look Tyson, until someone gets hurt, we're really just not going to have the ability to do anything about it.
Until someone gets hurt.
Until someone gets hurt.
You know, it's interesting, like, the cops are willing to let this drop.
The bank's willing to let it drop.
You've got your money back, but you won't let it drop.
I'm pissed.
Because you were taken advantage of.
And betrayed.
And now I had nothing but time and money, and I was going to go get him.
A lot of people have time and money.
Tyson also had the skills to pursue Danny.
I worked my way through college for a high-tech crime private investigator.
So suddenly you're a gumshoe again.
Yes.
One of the first things Tyson did was try to find out more about that 500000 settlement Danny had received from Thomas White.
Tyson learned White was never actually charged with any crimes involving Danny and denied any wrongdoing.
He also learned that in the middle of that lawsuit, Danny and his lawyer, David Replogle, went to Puerto Vallarta Mexico, where White had a vacation home.
Danny and his lawyer rounded up 22 street boys to say that they had been molested by Thomas White, and Thomas White was subsequently arrested and taken to jail in Puerto Vallarta.
Tyson went all the way to Thomas White's Mexican lockup in Puerto Vallarta to get this story straight from White himself.
And I sit down and we just start talking.
According to Tyson White claimed, Danny and his attorney, David Replogle, persuaded those boys to fabricate the allegations against him.
White said the whole ploy was to put him on ice and bleed more money out of him in a series of lawsuits.
White gave the same account in this court document, which states that the individuals accusing him of horrendous sexual abuse were engaged in an orchestrated fraud and that it was a conspiracy to extort millions of dollars from him.
In an email, Danny told us he was not part of any grand conspiracy to extort money from Mr. White.
Well, according to White's lawyer, in that same court document, many of those accusers later recanted their accusations.
They came forward and admitted that they had lied.
And Thomas White was eventually released?
He died in that jail.
Back in Palm Springs, prosecutor Lisa DeMaria had joined the Cliff Lambert case.
When she heard Tyson Wrench's story, she saw a connection between what happened to Thomas White and what might have happened to Cliff Lambert.
And that connection was Cliff's online date, Danny.
I believe that taught Danny Garcia, I never need to work.
All I have to do is find elderly males to target.
I can sue them, make millions. and not have to work for my money.
It was time to find out exactly what Danny Garcia had been up to in Palm Springs.
I'm meeting with a very dear friend of mine who has a mansion in Palm Springs.
For prosecutor Lisa DeMaria Tyson.
Wrench's tale of having once palled around with Danny and Cashaw was very helpful.
It established the two knew each other and now appeared to be working together on some sort of con involving Cliff Lambert.
How did Cashaw get involved?
Danny bring Cashaw in on this?
He did.
Danny brought Cashaw Nerula into this scheme.
By now, Di Maria and the other investigators had done some digging into Cashal's background and found out he wasn't exactly what he claimed to be.
He presented himself as this exiled Nepalese prince.
Oh, yeah, we're not talking fresh prince.
We're talking Prince Harry.
Any truth to any of that?
Not even a little bit.
The truth was that Cashal Narula was a notorious grifter.
Nerula had defrauded a woman in Hawaii out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He was involved in an art scheme where he had ties to a very famous painting that had been stolen by the Nazis during World War II, and the art customer put a 450000 deposit down.
Most recently, Cashall had been arrested for pulling a $300,000 jewelry heist.
As a result, he spent most of 2008 in jail.
So Prosecutor DeMaria had a thought.
Check Cashall's recorded phone calls to see if he'd been in touch with Danny and what they might have discussed.
And it turns out, that was a good idea.
Here's Cashaw phoning Danny from inside the slammer and Danny reporting that he had found a new mark Cliff Lambert.
Hello?
Sorry, I had a very, very prominent person on the other phone who basically just told me he was going to fly me down to Palm Springs on Monday.
Danny's original scheme seems to have involved convincing Cliff to invest a large chunk of his money into a phony business Danny had set up.
And then the phone calls reveal accessing Cliff's circle of wealthy friends.
I've lined up potentially $50 million next week.
Oh, God.
And I'm meeting with a very dear friend of mine who has a mansion in Palm Springs.
He is very good friends with a baroness from Germany.
He's very good friends with the Rockefellers.
That's Cliff he's talking about.
And during that weekend with Cliff, Danny gave Cashon a progress report.
Hello?
Hello?
Hey, I can't talk much.
Where are you?
What's going on?
I'm in Palm Springs.
Oh, are you having fun?
Yeah, I'm busy.
Now listen closely to what Cashaw asks Danny next.
Have you been generating any resources?
Absolutely.
How much?
A lot.
Have you already generated it?
Yep.
Huh?
Yes, I have.
We don't know if Danny was just boasting or if he really had generated resources, as he put it from Cliff.
We do know that shortly after this phone call, Cliff kicked Danny out of his house for snooping around in his study.
Eddie Mulliken says that transgression infuriated his friend Cliff.
He said, I caught Danny in my study.
In my study.
Like, people don't go in my study.
I never even went in his study.
And he was upgrading himself on the plane ticket that I bought him to come and go to Palm Springs.
On his own, without asking Cliff.
Exactly.
Then Cliff called Eddie a few days later and said he'd been robbed.
He said, things are missing from the house.
Can you come over?
So I came over and I noticed certain pieces of art were missing.
The walls in his house were tufted.
So when something's taken off a tufted wall, there's an imprint.
And I thought, this is so, this is just odd.
It was almost like being in a daytime soap opera.
According to police reports, Cliff claimed to have been burglarized three separate times between Danny's visit in April and Cliff's disappearance in December.
During their investigation, detectives Min and Browning did not think those were related.
These two instances didn't appear to be connected at all, not at that time.
Like there was no forced entry.
There's an explanation for that.
According to someone, police didn't talk with Danny's cousin, Dennis Domine.
However, we found him.
Danny knew the code, and he also had a key.
He made his own key.
Dennis told us both were apparently lifted while Danny was generating resources in Cliff's study.
Domine, besides being Danny's cousin, was also his driver.
He's an ex-con.
And in a story full of strange characters, he might be the one we wondered about the most.
You've been arrested how many times?
Three times.
And locked up?
Twice.
Incarcerated?
Yeah, prison.
San Quentin.
The convictions were for growing and selling marijuana.
Did that experience scare you straight?
No, because being a sociopath, you don't.
You're a sociopath.
Yeah, absolutely.
You don't have any conscience.
I do, but there's certain things that I've done that, you know.
You're a criminal.
I was.
Dennis backwards is sinned.
Hence why I am who I am and how my destiny turned out.
You've been convicted of crimes, and we're here to talk about a crime that you were not charged in, but that you do have some knowledge of.
And I guess the question on my mind is whether I can believe anything you're telling me.
Yeah, you can totally believe me.
I'd say 100%.
That's why I'm here and not in there.
There being the California State Prison at San Quentin.
Dennis' story is that he was at the wheel shuttling his young cousin Danny between San Francisco and Palm Springs when the burglaries at Cliff's were taking place.
I would always go drop Danny off and then I'd go to Vegas and then I'd come back on my way back to pick him up when he was done.
And so he would always have something, and he said, yeah, Cliff gave this to me.
So Danny shows up and he's got a couple of paintings which he says Cliff gave him.
But you think what he didn't really give it to him.
It was hard to say.
Three weeks after the third and final burglary at Cliff's place and just days before his disappearance, Cliff received an exciting phone call.
A British lawyer with a posh accent phoned him out of the blue and left this message.
Hi, Mr. Lambert.
This is Samuel Oren calling you.
This is regarding the inheritance you're making from the May Trust.
The lawyer said Cliff's wealthy friend who had a New York apartment full of masterworks like Picasso's had in her will, left Cliff an art collection worth millions.
That did pose kind of a huge question.
Was that windfall too good to be true?
We're only asking that question now.
Cliff Lambert never asked it.
In late November 2008, about a week before he disappeared, Cliff told Eddie about that unexpected phone call from a lawyer.
He was like, Eddie, guess what?
And I said, what?
And he's like well, Florine May, her lawyers from London have called me and they let me know that she has a will.
This is a new will.
Hi, Mr. Lambert.
This is Samuel Oren calling you.
This is regarding the inheritance you're making from the May Trust.
Florine May Schoenborn of New York was an old friend of Cliff's.
She came from Denver and from old money.
Over her 92 years, she became a major patron of the arts.
Cliff considered her a surrogate mother and he had expected to receive at least one of her multi-million dollar paintings when Florine finally met her maker.
That was to be one more disappointment for Cliff Lambert.
When Florine left this earth in 1995, she left Cliff, much to his surprise, nothing.
Now, all those years later, a lawyer was saying a will had surfaced, bequeathing to Cliff a piece of Florine's art collection, the one worth close to 200 million.
Here's the message the lawyer left on Cliff's answering machine.
And I'm thinking, Okay, like I'm not suspicious because it's Cliff.
The life he lived was so far like kind of beyond me.
The impossible happened regularly.
Yes.
Hi, Mr. Lambert, this is once again.
I'm reconfirming for 5.30 California time this evening.
I'm about to get on a flight from New York to Los Angeles and then to be at your place by 530 this evening.
Eddie did give Cliff a bit of advice.
I said, why don't you meet them at a restaurant somewhere?
Don't bring them to the house.
Meet them in public.
And that is what Cliff did.
On December the 4th, Cliff and the lawyer had dinner at Dink's.
Afterwards, Cliff told a friend the deal was on the up and up, and there was a bonus.
The lawyer representing Florine's estate was young handsome, and he seemed kind of interested in Cliff.
As you may have figured out by now, the charming British lawyer was actually Kashal Narula, fresh out of jail and now playing a part in Danny Garcia's latest grift.
Cliff Lambert was still the target, and it was all coming to a head that very night.
It was supposed to be where they were going to kidnap him and Danny was supposed to get all this money.
Danny's cousin.
Dennis said Kashal had hired two guys to hide in Cliff's garage and grab him when he returned from his dinner meeting with Kashal.
Dennis says he knows this because he and Danny were there that night, both sitting in a car outside Cliff's house standing watch.
Dennis said the plan was to kidnap Cliff and take him to Mexico.
You know, leave him there for three months, take all his assets, and then he comes back.
He's broke, because you can make it look like he spent it all and he sold it from Mexico, you know.
It's just normal con stuff.
You're okay with conning him, but not killing him?
Absolutely, yeah.
Then, when Cliff got home from Dink's Dennis, the self-proclaimed sociopath, suggests he had a moral awakening and, right at that moment, decided to pull the plug on the whole operation.
And I thought, yeah, whatever they're going to do to this guy, it's not happening when I'm here.
Simple as that.
Dennis said he started flashing his lights and blasting heavy metal music.
You know, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
Danny's like, what'd you do that for?
I'm like, what do you think?
And I stopped a house down and blasted the metal.
And those two guys tore out of there.
So I figured, okay, this is my good deed for the day.
You ever think about calling police and tipping them up to what Danny and Cashel might be up to, or calling Cliff Lambert and warning him?
Yeah, I flashed the high beams on the house.
But I mean, you never called police.
You didn't warn Cliff.
There was no, like nothing, no crime had been committed.
You know?
Well, at least not yet.
That wouldn't happen until the following night.
In Dennis Domine's telling of this story, he's a hero.
By flashing his lights and playing loud music.
He claims it was he who thwarted the scheme to kidnap Cliff Lambert.
It caused them to flee the house and ruin their first attempt.
And I figured I succeeded.
After doing that good deed, Dennis said he pointed his SUV north.
And along with his cousin, Cliff's online date, Danny, got the heck out of Palm Springs.
And then I said, this is the last time I'm dealing with any of this, Danny.
Period.
In an email, Danny told us he was in Sacramento that night.
Wherever Danny was.
Dennis said he couldn't believe it when he got word a day later the job was done.
To him, that meant Cliff had been abducted.
I thought they had kidnapped him and put him in Mexico.
That matched the story.
The bartender with the U-Haul, Miguel Bustamante, had told detectives Browning and Min when he was arrested a month after Cliff's disappearance.
Cliff Lummer is in Mexico.
Prosecutor Lisa DiMaria says that story changed a few weeks later after Bustamante started getting the side eye from other inmates at the Riverside County Jail.
Miguel Bustamante, being the pretty boy that he was, was not used to jail.
And when he walked into that holding tank, everybody gave him the once-over.
Who are you?
Let me see your papers.
And he got scared.
That's when one of the OGs saw Bustamante nervous.
And he said, basically, you better get in my cell now if you want protection.
So he went in his cell and he said, everyone can tell you're not from around here.
Who are you?
What are you doing here?
And what are you in for?
And Bustamante, perhaps wanting to appear tougher than he was said.
He was arrested not for burglary, which would have been the truth, but for murder.
So our inmate, who we'll say is a bit familiar with the system.
And knows that you have to have something to trade something.
He had been in prison most of his life.
So he knew the game.
So it's in his interest to get as much from Bustamante as possible.
It was in his interest.
In a recorded interview, the informant said Bustamante claimed he'd killed a rich guy and then buried his corpse out in the desert.
He told me a specific map. where the body was buried, how he stabbed him.
The whole shebang, the whole story from point A to point B. And how did he kill him then?
What did he do?
Stabbed him.
The inmate knew if he was going to the police.
He needed more than his word and he certainly didn't have a recording device.
So he said to Bustamante, man, you know what?
They're going to find that body if you didn't bury it deep enough.
Tell you what, my boys will move the body.
But if we're going to do that, you need to tell me who the players are and you need to give me a map.
Here's a pen.
Here's some paper, start writing.
And he got Bustamante to write out this was Replogle and he was acting as the attorney, and this was Garcia and this was Nerula.
And he mapped out the players on a flow chart.
And at the bottom of the flow chart, he did have one bizarre name, Ricky McCain.
We didn't know who Ricky McCain was.
Then, on a separate piece of paper, he drew a map of where the inmates' boys were supposed to go and dig up the body and get rid of it for good.
The map Bustamante drew was rich in detail.
But except for the main highway, US 101, none of the roads pictured were named.
And with only those vague details to go on, investigators started looking. for Cliff Lambert's body.
We went just about up and down the state, trying to figure out this map on where the body's at.
The map's not exactly accurate, but you think that's because Bustamante just got it wrong.
He's not deliberately trying to throw you off.
Correct.
Then one day, while driving this stretch of I-5 north of Los Angeles, they saw a runaway truck ramp exactly as depicted on the map, with instructions to take the next exit.
So we took this exit, drove all the way down to the end of it, and we started digging there.
And they found... Nobody.
Maybe it's all a fantasy?
No, the map was too detailed.
We just didn't get that lucky.
It sounds like you're at about the point of believing that maybe you haven't found him yet, but Cliff Lambert's dead.
Yes.
Two months after Eddie reported him missing, investigators were now convinced Cliff was dead, murdered at his Palm Springs home, a victim of some elaborate criminal conspiracy.
Now the hunt was on for four more bodies that were very much alive.
Cashon, Danny, their lawyer David, and whoever this guy Ricky McKean was.
We could not link that name to anything.
Miguel Bustamante's jailhouse confession to an informant had convinced investigators that Cliff Lambert was not being held against his will in Mexico as part of some elaborate shakedown, but in fact had been murdered right in his own home.
You were pretty sure by then that Cliff Lambert was no longer alive?
Oh, absolutely.
With all the evidence I had.
But I needed to prove it.
It's one thing for me to believe it.
It's another thing to be able to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
Because some defense attorney is going to say at some point the prosecution can't even prove that.
Cliff Lambert's not going to walk into the courtroom in the next five minutes and say what's all the fuss about?
Exactly.
So as investigators continue to search for Cliff's body, Prosecutor Lisa DiMaria finally had Cashel Narula and his attorney, David Replogle arrested on fraud charges for illegally trying to sell Cliff's house.
The two were taken into custody at the San Francisco courthouse after one of Cashall's hearings on that 300000 jewelry heist.
The attorney's involvement was established when his thumbprint was found next to a forged signature of Cliff's in a notary book connected to the sale of Cliff's home.
At first, Attorney Replogle said he knew nothing about any of this.
He quickly changed his story after Detective Browning told him that he, the attorney, would be facing charges far more serious than fraud.
What?
Suddenly, the attorney admitted Cliff Lambert was dead.
But, he said, it wasn't murder.
They didn't tell me how.
And I heard that there was an accident or somebody did something to him.
He was dead.
Who was they?
Miguel.
And your son.
How are you doing?
Okay.
I don't know what this is all about.
Would you like to know?
Yes.
Yes, the spotlight shifted to Cashaw, the self-coronated prince who, when confronted by Detective Browning, denied almost everything.
How did David have Lambert's ID?
I have no idea.
To get this stuff notarized?
I have no idea.
As he was speaking with Cashaw in person for the first time, Detective Browning realized he'd heard that voice before.
It had been on Cliff Lambert's answering machine.
Hi, Mr. Lambert.
This is Samuel Oren calling you.
I don't know what happened, Detective.
I'm telling you the truth.
That voice was just a striking resemblance of him.
So that's a big moment when Cashall opens his mouth and you realize he's the voice on Cliff Lambert's answering machine.
Yes.
Posing to be an attorney out of New York with inheritance from.
So Browning pressed Cashall about posing as that lawyer.
Now, you called Lambert several times.
You left voicemails on his actual machines where you messed up.
And you were posing to be an attorney.
Okay?
Why?
No, but... Narula.
Narula.
No, because... Don't, Narula.
Don't lie.
Okay?
At all.
You're at Dink's posing as an attorney.
No, but I didn't pose as an attorney.
You did pose as an attorney.
Don't lie.
You're digging yourself a deep hole when you lie, man.
He introduced me to his friends as I'm turning.
He was a very difficult interview spoke in circles, never wanted to admit nothing about Mr Lambert other than the fact that he had a settlement agreement for him to sign that Replugo put together for him.
No, I signed the document and then.
So Browning told Cashal exactly what investigators knew about his involvement in Cliff's presumed death and what was going to happen next.
You were the last person to see him.
I'm going to go back to the DA's office this week and I'm going to ask for murder charges.
Excuse me?
Yes.
As he put handcuffs on Cashaw, Browning handed out one piece of advice.
And talk to your attorney, ask him what the penalty is for premeditated murder.
Okay.
What the max is.
In California, the answer in 2008 was the death penalty.
After hearing about impending murder charges, Cashal Narula made a phone call.
It wasn't to an attorney.
It was to Danny Garcia.
Hello?
Hello?
Where are you?
I'm at my apartment.
Go.
In other words, start running, which Danny did.
It was his cell phone that gave him away.
We actually had a team of investigators locate him in Sacramento and arrest him hiding in the closet with a bunch of computer information.
So many computers, so many hard drives, cell phones.
This guy could open up his own electronic shop with the amount of electronic devices that he was in possession at the time.
Rather than wait for Cliff's corpse to surface, DiMaria made a bold move and, without a body, filed murder charges against Garcia Nerula, Replogle and Bustamante.
Tell me the challenges presented with a no-body case.
In addition to having to prove that he's dead, we have no forensic evidence that can lead to the cause of death.
That could lead to a weapon, which could potentially lead us to suspects.
All of that are reasons why no body cases are hard to win and maybe sometimes not brought.
Absolutely.
It's a whole different challenge.
Adding to the confusion, investigators couldn't find Ricky McCain, the last guy named on the list of co-conspirators Bustamante had given to the informant.
And we never knew who Ricky McCain was, and we could not link that name to anything.
That was until about six months into the investigation, when Bustamante's girlfriend told Browning and Mann that she and Bustamante shared their apartment with a third roommate.
Craig McCarthy and I went, McCain McCarthy.
We need to find McCarthy.
Craig McCarthy was an ex-Marine with no criminal record.
He was working and going to school in San Francisco when he was brought in for questioning.
Be honest and tell me From the get-go, how you ended up in Palm Springs.
McCarthy said he took a short trip to Palm Springs the previous December with Bustamante only after Bustamante said he'd pick up the tab.
He told me we were just supposed to go down there and kick it.
He was supposed to go down there and help out a friend initially.
That's what he said.
And we're just going to have fun.
Then, without explaining the how, what, and why of it all...
McCarthy said he found himself inside Cliff Lambert's kitchen with Bustamante and Kashal Narula when, seemingly to everyone's surprise, Cliff Lambert walked in.
Lily, I literally hear him go, what are you doing here?
What the hell's going on?
Soon investigators would take Craig McCarthy back to Cliff's house, where he would give them a harrowing description and a recreation of exactly what happened on the night when everything changed, when a crazy plan became real.
What is Coach saying right now?
Coach is like, what do you guys want?
Investigators had finally found someone who was willing to tell them what exactly happened to Cliff Lambert.
That person was Craig McCarthy.
And on a desert, hot day in July they brought McCarthy back to Cliff's house and recorded his detailed account of how Cliff Lambert's life came to an abrupt end.
The ex-Marine's story began the night before the murder.
You guys come in the garage.
McCarthy said the plan was to hide in Cliff's garage, then jump him when he returned from his dinner meeting with Cajon.
McCarthy admits he lost his nerve.
McCarthy said nothing about Dennis Domine's flashing car lights or loud metal music.
And despite his moral concerns, McCarthy said he and Bustamante came back the following night to take another crack at killing Cliff.
McCarthy said Cashall, still posing as that British lawyer, had convinced Cliff to let him come over to his home under the pretext that Cliff needed to sign some legal documents regarding that art collection Cliff supposedly stood to inherit.
McCarthy said during that entire time, he and Bustamante were waiting outside this door.
So we waited right here.
Inside, Cashall and Cliff had cocktails and a smoke.
Then Cashall excused himself, saying he needed to use the bathroom.
Michelle came to the door to unlock the door.
McCarthy and Bustamante then crept into Cliff's kitchen, where they grabbed two murder weapons out of Cliff Lambert's kitchen knife block.
In his reenactment video, Craig McCarthy picks up the story from when Cliff entered the kitchen.
Go ahead.
Show me.
Show me how you did.
Then, as if he was reliving the experience, McCarthy reenacted in horrific detail his version of Cliff Lambert's murder.
What is Coach saying right now?
Coach is like, what do you guys want?
What do you want?
And you have a knife to throw right here?
I have it right here.
Okay.
And the guy was like, you know what this is about.
Where are you going to get out now?
He's right here.
Okay.
He's like, you know what this is about.
So I look at Cliff now in the background, just like, and he says, move.
So I do like this, and I just step back.
That's when we came.
Miguel came from there?
Mm-hmm.
And how many knives did he have?
He had the one at first.
When he struck the first time, initially it was here.
It's over here.
Cliff said, ah.
He did like that, and he did that.
Miguel looks at me, waiting for the next one to sit.
But at least he's over grabbing up.
And now Cliff has punched over here?
Mm-hmm.
And he just...
He went over and he just started stabbing.
And where are you?
I'm right here.
I'm still staying there.
Just standing there.
That's when McCarthy and Bustamante moved Cliff's body to the trunk of his silver Mercedes Benz.
Then they took Cliff Lambert on his last ride out to the desert. and a hole in the ground.
After McCarthy told his tale, crime scene investigators were called in.
But Cliff's house had been so thoroughly scrubbed clean CSIs could find no sign a murder had ever been committed there.
While McCarthy's on-camera confession was damning evidence against Cashaw and Bustamante, it was not for Danny Garcia.
If anything, McCarthy corroborated Danny's story that he was nowhere near Palm Springs when Cliff Lambert was murdered.
That was true.
He wasn't there.
What incriminated Danny Garcia was cell phone data.
This was the first case where downloading text messages were ever used to solve a murder.
In 2008, when Cliff Lambert was murdered... the vast majority of the public still used a flip phone.
Texting wasn't a thing yet, except for those who saw themselves as trendsetters people like Kashal Narula and Danny Garcia hip, stylish and armed with iPhones.
It was something prosecutor Lisa DeMaria had never encountered on a case.
It was the iPhone 3 first generation.
The question was, once investigators had Danny and Kashal's devices, what to do with them?
The iPhone technology was so brand new that the forensic tools that we use now weren't even in place at the time to download these phones.
I didn't know what an app was.
I didn't know the difference between downloading a phone or getting records on cell tower sites.
So DeMaria found a hacker to work with Detective Min and crack open Danny's phone.
They wanted to see if there was anything there that might connect Danny to Cliff's murder.
And when the hacker finally got inside that phone, Min couldn't believe what he saw.
Text messages.
Tens of thousands of them.
Overall, we had a full set of 32000 messages that were not deleted on that phone, many of which were dubbed Operation CL.
There were mentions of Cliff Lambert's home address, banking information.
Based on text messages that were recovered, they believed that Clifford Lambert was worth 68 million.
So there were a lot of messages that on their face didn't scream.
We just killed Clifford Lambert.
But when you put the text messages together with other evidence, they painted the picture.
They were inculpatory.
They made sense.
And DiMaria said there was one text the night of the murder from Cashall to Bustamante that did come awfully close to admitting they'd killed Cliff.
Do it now.
Stab with a knife.
DeMaria said.
Another incriminating text was one sent from Danny to Cashaw shortly after Cliff's killing.
Did you make sure to clean up even the Benson and Hedges?
And now, knowing that Eddie Mulligan saw Benson and Hedges on the table, that directly linked Nerula to having been in the house.
DeMaria's overall take on those texts is that Danny and Cashaw were acting as if they were the leads in some Ocean's Eleven remake.
I believe they loved the cat and mouse of it all.
I believed they loved the drama.
The text messages were always, call me now.
Operation CL is a go.
Are we ready on Operation CL?
CL for Clifford Lambert.
They were self-important because they weren't important.
They were no one, but they wanted to be someone.
So this whole entire thing was a drawn-out drama that they were living in.
That drama followed them from the crime scene to the courtroom.
That's where Daly and Cashel would run their biggest con yet turning the criminal justice system inside out.
The stakes were their lives.
And one of them was going after the prosecutor herself.
They came after me on death threats.
Oh yeah, I got death threats in this case.
Prosecutor Lisa DeMaria had trouble figuring out which characters and crimes factored into Cliff Lambert's murder and which did not.
It was like Alice in Wonderland falling into a rabbit hole.
It took months of me eating, living, sleeping, breathing this case to sort it all out.
My life was this case.
That very line could also have been uttered by Danny and Cashal, who were representing themselves and relentlessly bombarding the court with one pretrial motion after another.
Danny Garcia and Kishal Narula decided to represent themselves.
Why'd they do that?
They represented themselves after they went through nine different Tax paid for attorneys from the county.
We went to court on this case 128 times before we ever went to trial in a period of two years.
And why was that?
Because the defendants are con artists and they conned the court.
Because time's on their side, not on your side.
That's their thinking.
I have no idea what their thinking was.
No matter how many pre-trial motions were filed, the prosecution had a strong case.
It included Craig McCarthy's recorded confession, which earned him a plea deal of 25 years in prison.
And, sure enough, the first two defendants, Miguel Bustamante and David Replogle, who were tried together, were quickly convicted of first-degree murder.
Replogle, because his thumbprint was found next to a forged signature of Cliff's, and Bustamante, because of Craig McCarthy's testimony that he Bustamante, was the one who'd stabbed Cliff to death.
However, neither was as gifted at double talk as Danny and Cashon.
And of course Cliff's body had not been found.
So DiMaria worried the pair might just have it in them to con the jury into believing they were innocent businessmen, railroaded by a confused and overzealous prosecutor in over her head.
Which is exactly what they tried to do, even before jurors took their seats.
And right when the last juror walks into the jury box, the very last person behind him says to me are you Lisa DeMaria?
I said, yes, I am.
He says, you've been served.
And he hands me a lawsuit right in front of the jury, minutes before I'm supposed to give opening statement.
The lawsuit accused DeMaria of prosecutorial misconduct.
None of it which was sustained.
I had to testify and get cross-examined by Garcia and Nerula.
I don't know of any district attorney ever being cross-examined by the defendants they are prosecuting for murder.
And all of it went nowhere.
All of it went nowhere.
I never committed misconduct.
It was smokescreen.
Then came the death threats.
I got death threats in this case.
From?
Informants from the jail.
Who would say to you, hey, by the way, they're talking about killing you?
No rule is talking about killing you.
Were you ever actually in fear for your life?
At one point, I went and stayed in a hotel in San Diego.
They had killed.
I did not want to be the next.
In his opening statement, Cashel said the texts found on his phone were planted by police.
Remember, the same detectives told us.
They'd never seen an iPhone before.
Well, I can assure you it's not an explanation.
It is a fact that those text messages were forged planted, fabricated for a very specific reason and a very specific purpose.
Plato once said, to deceive is to enchant.
Danny, in his opening, told the jury it was laughable to think he was the head of some sort of criminal conspiracy.
You heard that this is like something out of a Hollywood script or the mind of Marcus Borsetti.
Well, I don't know if that's supposed to make me the gay godfather or what, but you'll see a very different version of me than what's been portrayed.
The heart of both defenses was that Cliff Lambert was still alive and living it up somewhere in the tropics.
Lisa DeMaria said that's nonsense.
Emails Cliff supposedly sent to his friends from Hawaii were really sent by Danny, who had hacked into Cliff's computer.
I was able to prove he was no longer alive several ways.
Activities that people do in normal life don't just cease to exist.
People...
Don't just stop living.
As far as DeMaria could tell, Danny and Cashaw were only out to wear down the judge, the jury and her in hopes a mistake would be made and a mistrial declared.
They made a mockery of the court system.
One thing they did was first point fingers at each other and then, weirdly, at themselves.
Nerula testified that Danny Garcia was not involved and he planted all of the evidence on Danny Garcia.
And then he refused to sit for cross-examination, at which point Danny Garcia moved for a mistrial and then Nerula wanted a mistrial.
The whole thing was designed to get the case tossed out.
In the midst of this circus, the judge gave Danny, who is a computer whiz, a new MacBook to help him organize his case files.
Were you okay with that?
I was not okay with that.
Giving Danny Garcia a laptop is like giving a sharpshooter a rifle.
It was the weapon of his crime. one she says Danny was adept at wielding.
As soon as he got his MacBook, he used it to secretly record audio in court, which is illegal.
He was caught doing so, but was allowed to keep using his computer.
The most damning evidence against Danny were those thousands of text messages in which he appears to be calling the shots on Operation CL.
For Cashaw.
It was Craig McCarthy's testimony placing him in Cliff's house on the night of the murder.
After six months of testimony, the case made it to closing arguments without cratering into a mistrial.
And after silently watching this extended run of the Danny and Cashel show, jurors were finally able to give their review of the performances.
We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of first-degree murder of Clifford Lambert, as charged in count one.
Cashaw nodded and smiled.
Danny shed a tear.
And I'm thinking they've been found guilty, they've been sentenced to life and they are finally out of my mind.
It was over, right?
Wrong.
Because Danny still had one last play to make.
A big one.
I felt probably the way Lambert did when he had the knife shoved into his back.
The trial judge had warned Danny not to use his MacBook as an illegal recording device.
That warning apparently meant little to Danny, who midway through the trial recorded some private conversations.
At times when court was not in session.
Those were off-the-cuff chats between the judge and his clerk.
He likes licking envelopes.
Oh, gross.
He's HIV positive.
He is HIV positive.
Yeah.
God knows where his tongue has been.
Danny secretly and illegally recorded that conversation.
Though neither the legality nor the irony of that mattered.
What did matter was that the bias perhaps suggested by the judge's off-color comment resulted in the convictions of Cashon Danny, David Replogle and Miguel Bustamante all being overturned.
And just like that, The three-plus years Lisa DeMaria put in on this career-capping case were undone.
That had to be, A, pretty shocking, and B, pretty disappointing.
I felt probably the way Lambert did when he had the knife shoved into his back.
All of those years that I dedicated to getting justice for Lambert, out the window.
One of the most upsetting days of my life, the absolute most upsetting day of my career.
It was a victory for Danny and Cashall, who were granted new trials, along with Replogle and Bustamante.
This time, Lisa DeMaria would not be prosecuting.
As to why that was, DeMaria would only tell me this.
I'm not at liberty to comment on the inner workings of my office.
Her files were handed over to Deputy D.A.
Robert Hightower, who knew very little about the Cliff Lambert saga.
You sort of inherited this case.
I did.
Something you were happy to inherit?
It was exciting.
It was a challenge, that's for sure.
And I remember calling my paralegal and saying, you need to order the file.
And she called me back about an hour later and said, it needs its own office.
In September 2020, just days before the first of the four retrials was to get underway, the ghost of Cliff Lambert made a surprise guest appearance.
A skull and jawbone which had actually been found years earlier in the high desert north of LA, were now identified as Cliff's remains.
The timing... couldn't have been better.
That really changed not only the dynamic of the case, but the trajectory of it as well.
So now you don't have to prove he's dead.
Correct.
Which made things easier.
How far was the area where the remains were found from the map originally drawn by Miguel Bustamante?
As the crow flies, about a mile and a half.
Eddie, who had never stopped hoping Cliff would one day reappear with a wonderful story to tell.
Heard the news on the road between LA and Palm Springs.
One of my friends called and said, Cliff's dead.
I just want you to know because I didn't want you to read it in the paper and be alone.
And it was tough to hear.
Yeah.
So the drive home was really long.
As evidence, Cliff's skull and jawbone were only helpful to a point.
Yes, they proved Cliff was dead, but not how he died.
That was still a mystery.
In the new round of trials, the defendants went one after the other.
David Replogle was up first.
It was 12 years after his first trial, and that is plenty of time for witnesses to have died or memories to have faded.
Well, not Eddie Mulligan's.
He came to court and testified exactly as he had 12 years earlier.
And then there was a COVID outbreak.
It was beyond challenging.
We had, obviously, the jury of 12, and we had, I want to say, 10 alternates.
And we lost almost all of them throughout the course of the trial.
Hightower was just one COVID case away from a mistrial.
But the final jurors made it through the closings and were quick to arrive at a verdict.
One down, three to go.
That made the defendant Miguel Bustamante.
Next up was Bustamante.
Again, Eddie testified.
And again, the trial seemed to go smoothly.
Until the case went to the jury.
Deliberations went on for days.
And that made Prosecutor Hightower very nervous.
When you go to sleep at night, you can't help but think... Oh my God, I've screwed this up.
Right, right.
And you worry.
Bustamante's jury deliberated for nine days... before arriving at this verdict.
Two down, two to go.
And then, before the next trial could get underway, Hightower learned of one more murder connected to the Lambert case.
This one involving someone he knew well.
I'll be honest, at first I didn't believe it.
And then, when we came to learn that he had been murdered, it was an emotional moment, I think, for everybody to learn that.
The whole Cliff Lambert case was a snake pit of grifts and cons.
The poisonous, the deadly, the devious, all twined and twisted together, which made for long, complicated trials, as prosecutors unraveled those lies in front of juries.
Now, before we tell you how the case is concluded, we need to tell you about some lies that were not presented in court, because those lies were told by Cliff Lambert himself.
Remember, the accused grifters weren't just after Cliff's cash, but also artwork worth millions.
Paintings like the ones Danny was said to have lifted from Cliff's home.
Dennis Domine said Danny took those works to an art dealer in San Francisco who, before putting them up for sale, sent the paintings out for appraisal.
Analyzed them, they're like, yeah, these are replicas.
And they're worthless.
So Danny steals paintings off of Cliff's wall.
Yeah.
And gets them assessed, and they're fake.
Yeah.
So then, why would the wealthy Rolls-Royce-driving party-throwing high-society art collector Cliff Lambert have forged paintings hanging on his walls?
Well, according to DiMaria, maybe because that's the only kind of artwork Cliff could afford.
Were any of the pieces that Cliff Lambert boasted about being actual paintings from famous artists?
Any of that true?
We have no evidence that he had authentic original pieces of art.
It appears Cliff was passing off the reproductions sold at his gallery as originals to fool his friends and his dates into thinking he was a lot wealthier than he actually was.
And the tens of millions in cash Cliff had stashed away.
Dennis told us Danny hacked into Cliff's bank account and found almost nothing.
Like 18 grand in the account.
In truth, on the day Cliff Lambert was murdered, he was nearly broke.
The biggest thing he had to lose was his life.
I think, unfortunately, the persona that he exuded is what got him killed.
I fully believe he'd be alive if he wasn't so boastful.
Barbara Wisby says she knew all along Cliff was playing a risky game inviting strangers he met on the Internet into his home.
It's dangerous because you don't know whether the kid he's flying in is a psycho.
You don't know anything.
I was dumbfounded.
I thought he was smarter than that.
It was as epically evil as it was epically foolish.
An eight-month-long grift that ended with the brutal murder of a lonely man in order to steal a fortune that wasn't there.
The next weird twist in a story packed with them involves Kashal Narula, the prince.
On September 6 2022, just before he was to be retried for the murder of Cliff Lambert, Kashal Narula was himself murdered in the county lockup, beaten to death by his cellmate.
Lieutenant Frank Browning heard it was a familiar part of Kashal's demeanor that provoked his killer.
My understanding is because he wouldn't stop talking.
If Danny was broken up about the death of his con artist sidekick, he didn't show it.
If anything, by the time he went to court, Danny treated Cashaw's murder as if it were the luckiest of breaks, because he now had the perfect defense.
All the crimes he was accused of were really done by Cashaw.
Mr. Garcia had nothing to do with the Lambert's murder.
Mr. Garcia was nowhere near the scene of Mr. Lambert's murder when it took place.
D.A.
Rob Hightower said Danny was trying to blame the newly deceased Cashaw Nerula for everything and the rule is dead.
It is time that the con stops and this defendant is held responsible for what he did and what he orchestrated.
After closing arguments, Hightower felt he had Danny nailed.
I thought we had demonstrated for the jury an entire picture of how this came together.
Mr. Garcia, if you could please stand.
After less than a day, jurors delivered their verdict.
We, the jury, find the defendant Daniel Carlos Garcia Guilty of first-degree murder of Clifford L.
It was a clean sweep for prosecutors.
Danny Garcia, David Replogle and Miguel Bustamante were all sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Cliff Lambert.
All are appealing their convictions.
This is all for Cliff.
It is entirely possible.
Danny and the rest would have gotten away with Cliff's murder were it not for Eddie Mulliken, who was called to testify over and, over and over again.
But I'm just going to keep doing this until it's done, because Cliff's my friend and I love him.
Eddie Mullican set this 15-year-long case into motion the night he dropped by Cliff's house simply because he was worried about his friend.
You're one of the few people in this story who didn't take advantage of Cliff.
I could have, but I didn't because I'm just not that guy.
He was my best friend.
It was a fun ride.
That's why I wanted to hang out with him all the time.
There is a granite wall at the Riverside County DA's office with the names of all the murder cases they've prosecuted.
That's Cliff's name up there, near the top.
Beyond anyone's reach.
Untouchable.
Cliff would talk about his death.
And he said, Eddie, when all is said and done in this life, none of this is worth anything.
I hope when I get old, I can be as much fun as him and as insightful as him.
That's all for this edition of Dateline.
And check out our Talking Dateline podcast.
Josh Mankiewicz and I will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the Dateline feed, wherever you get your podcasts.
We'll see you again next Friday at 9, 8 Central.
I'm Lester Holt.
For all of us at NBC News, good night.
