Charlie Adelson's Defense Lasted Exactly Three Hours

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski.

Tony Brueski (0:12)

There we go, here I am. I know a lot of you are watching the Welcome to the Family Doc on Hulu right now. If you're not, it's pretty good.

And getting your first taste of the Adelson's. Isn't that bursting with country fresh flavor? Oh, yeah, have seconds on that, right?

What we're doing here, I'm helping you kind of break down the whole damn story. In case you're like, I got to learn more about that. Well, welcome. We're going to help you do that. We already have one video in the can, as they say, and it should already be out by the time you're watching this. This is our second in the series. This is the dentist. This is where we're going to jump a little bit more into the dental practice and kind of explain some of the logistics of what the hell was going on with the Adelson's, the allegations, and what's been proven in a court of law as well. In as cohesive, entertaining, sometimes darkly funny, because it's horrific how stupid these people are, in a way that we can. I know, it's a horrible thing, but you know, sometimes we have that in to get through it. So, I welcome your thoughts, like I said, in the comment section on Substack and YouTube. Here is where Charlie Adelson's extortion story starts sounding less like terror and more like financing. According to Charlie, the man threatening to kill him, were willing to accept monthly payments through his family's dental practice, a layaway plan, if you will. No cash dropped under a bridge, not one desperate handoff and then silence. A payment plan. You know, remember Charlie? Charlie said he was bamboozled here, that he had mentioned being frustrated and that it would be a great idea to kill Dan and never actually ordered it. It was his girlfriend who got some people involved and they did it and now they want to be paid. And he wasn't planning any of this. So how about, how about a layaway plan? How about you pay us in installments through checks at the dental practice and have moms sign them?

That somewhat sounds like Mad Libs, doesn't it? It sounds like something I was just kind of making up as I was going. No, that's exactly what happened.

Charlie did not deny that money moved. He did not deny that Katherine Magbanua received cash and later received checks connected to his family's dental practice. He did not deny the calls, the continued relationship, the hitman joke or the conversation recorded at Dolce Vita. His answer was that everybody. Hey, the story backward. Because according to Charlie, DanMarkel's killing was not something he arranged. It was something Sigfrido Garcia and Louis Rivera carried out on their own after learning about the ugly custody fight through Magbanua. Then Charlie said Magbanua came to his home and told him the men wanted one third of a million dollars. So she's friends, you know, and she's got the baby daddy that's in the gangs down in Miami. And they're just like, whoa, that sounds like a problem for us, the superhero gang fighting villains, fighting for custody battles of rich white people villain. Oh, wait, that's not a thing.

They are just like, it's not, it's not like a side hustle where it's like, I'm going to order the products from Amway and then I'm going to sell them and then I'm going to get my commission, like, no. This isn't like a multi-level marketing scheme for murder. They're coming to claim their rewards, but that's how Charlie was trying to pitch it.

He had 48 hours to pay or he and his family could be killed. Charlie testified that he opened his safe and handed over about $138,000, the rest should be paid in monthly installments of roughly $3,000. So yes, the defense presented jurors with what amounted to a payment plan for death. Now before we turn that into a punchline, let's give Charlie the strongest version of his own argument. People who are terrified do do irrational things. They freeze, they hide, they decide the police will make everything worse. They stay close to dangerous people because they believe those people are also protecting them. Fear is not orderly and it does not have to make sense to somebody sitting safely in a courtroom nine years later. That part is fair. The problem is that fear had to explain absolutely everything. It had to explain why the people supposedly demanding immediate payment under threat of death were willing to wait month after month. It had to explain why Magbanua began receiving checks from the Adelson Institute about two months after Dan was shot. Financial investigator Mary Howell testified that there were 44 checks Adonna Adelson signed every one and that the twice monthly payments continued until May of 2016 Apparently, the threat was urgent, but the alleged extortionists respected the dental office billing cycle. The defense got an important concession out of Howell. A bank record can show where money went, but it cannot tell a jury why. A check does not arrive stamped murder payment or extortion payment. Howell agreed that the financial records alone could not tell jurors which story was true. Fine, but they could show the system. They showed who got paid. They showed when the checks began. They showed who signed them. They showed it was not one terrified handoff in a parking lot. It became a reoccurring business arrangement running through a legitimate family practice. And that is where Charlie's explanation stopped being one frightened man's odd decision and became an entire alternate operating system. Jurors had to believe the safest way to satisfy people threatening to kill a millionaire was to put the woman carrying the threat on something that looked like payroll and let his mother handle the checks. Then the jury heard from Louis Rivera. Rivera was no choir boy arriving with clean hands and a civic duty speech. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 19-year sentence that runs with a federal sentence. He had every reason to cooperate and the defense had every reason to attack him for it. Rivera testified that Garcia recruited him, that Garcia was the shooter and that the two men traveled from South Florida to Tallahassee. According to Rivera, they followed Dan after he dropped his children at preschool, went to the gym and returned home. Dan was then shot in his garage. He died the next day at 41 years old, leaving two young boys without their father. Rivera said the job came through Magbanua and that the motive involved a woman wanting her children back. He also described payment in $100 bills stapled into $100 bundles. Prosecutors presented evidence that Charlie routinely kept stapled cash the same way.