by Ann Rule
"David really opened up to me," Steinhart recalled. "And me just being me—from a professional side. See, you have to rise or lower yourself to the occasion and be what you have to be to any man to get what you can get out of it—whatever role-playing it calls for. It keeps you alive. "
Another prisoner, Irv Cully*, who wore the "jacket" of a snitch, hovered obsequiously by David Brown's side. Cully had sat with David at the head table on Christmas Day because he had "seniority"; he had been there longer than anyone. When Steinhart joined their exclusive little group, he sensed he was in the presence of jailhouse power. "They had some little plan going—I didn't pay too much attention," Steinhart remembered. "Something with Cully and his girl, Doreena*."
Steinhart "worked" David Brown, listened with pretended fascination to his stories about his business successes, his great wealth, his women. He responded in just the way he knew would please Brown. He perceived that David longed to be a real man, macho, respected in jail. David, in turn, admired Steinhart, who came complete with his own set of war stories.
By the time Patti Bailey testified in January, virtually blowing David out of the water with her bleak confidences, David was ready to employ desperate measures. For the first time, perhaps, he realized that he might not be acquitted. His own attorney had warned him how good Jeoff Robinson was, filling him in on Robinson's track record.
It was unthinkable that David should go to prison. He had always told Cinnamon and Patti, "Keep me out of this." He had meant to be only the puppeteer, not a participant. He hadn't the stomach for up-close violence, and his health was far too fragile for him actually to serve time.
David didn't want to go to trial and have Jeoff Robinson cross-examine him. Nor did he want Jay Newell sniffing around anymore. Newell had found out things about his very private life that David thought he had covered over years ago.
Not to worry. David had a new best buddy who was going to take care of his problems. Richard Steinhart. Steinhart had convinced him that he could do anything—for a price—and what he couldn't do, he had the connections to have done. David and Steinhart planned how to raise money, escape, wreak revenge, and find a new life far away on another continent. "There was no emotion involved," Steinhart explained. "I wasn't his 'friend.' You might say I was an acquaintance. But he was talking big, big, serious money. Was I going to do what he wanted me to? Hell, yes. For three hundred thousand dollars, I was going to do it."
With Cully eavesdropping like some misplaced Dickensian toady, David approached Steinhart with plans. Steinhart hinted that he might be released at any moment, and David needed a good man on the outside. "David started talking about arson—to begin with," Steinhart recalled. "He wanted me to torch his motor home and the house. I was going to do that first."
Seeing Steinhart's apparent assent, David pushed a bit further. "Then he started with, 'What about an escape plan for getting out?' I just threw some stuff at him—just to keep him shut up," Steinhart said. "But then he started talking about escaping while he was at his dentist's office. Now, I'm serious, 'cause that can be done. I told him fifty thousand dollars, 'cause my buddies have enough loyalty to me—I'd planned on that—that they'd do it for me for free."
Each time Steinhart agreed to one of David's devious scenarios, the plans escalated. Soon, David had a four-phase program: he wanted his motor home and the Chantilly Street property burned for the insurance money—so that he could pay Steinhart; he wanted an escape plan in place when he visited his dentist; and he wanted three, perhaps five, people dead execution style. Any law enforcement officers who got in the way, would be, of course, expendable.
Once all this was accomplished, David would dispatch Steinhart to the desert where he said he had $3 million buried, and the two of them would head for Australia. David said he owned twenty-five acres of land there; they would ride into the outback, two on a motorcycle, free at last. They would eat all the pizza they wanted and drink all the beer they could hold.
The escape plan was doable. But if it should somehow fall through, and David did have to go to trial, the next phase would become operative. The two men and one woman David Brown hated and feared most in the world would be dead. Jeoff Robinson and Jay Newell would be first to die in David's plan. Then he wanted Patti, his treacherous wife, dead. He had no use for her; she was an anchor dragging him down.
David held fourth and fifth and even sixth possible victims in abeyance. One of the two hits on hold was Brenda Brown Sands and her second husband. David had warned Brenda he would never forgive her for having a baby with another man. It didn't matter that he had had five wives since Brenda, two babies, and countless sexual contacts. Victim five (and possibly six) was to be at least one of the Bailey brothers—Larry and/or Alan—whom David had come to detest.
"I was going to do it," Steinhart recalled. "It was no job for amateurs. I used to hate amateurs. . . . See, a professional will do it any way you want it to look. You can make a hit look like a gang did it—you do a drive-by. You can make it look black or Aryan Brotherhood or like some weirdo flake did it."
Richard Steinhart was prepared to do what he had to do—including arson, murder, and aiding and abetting escape—to get his hands first on the $300,000 David promised for the job, and then to go with David into the desert and find the boulder hiding $3 million. With his share of that, he could travel far, leaving behind the life that was rapidly closing in on him.
But Richard Steinhart had a stubborn, annoying streak of decency running through him, no matter how hard he tried to eradicate it. It surprised him, but he found it difficult to remain detached from David Brown. The guy was slime.
"I picked up a newspaper one day—I read about what David had done, the sexual molestation and stuff, and it just struck me in the heart—that piece of kaka. It really disturbed my spirit." Steinhart grimaced. "I had the full intention of when we got him out for the escape—getting him over in Australia, have the plane set, the monies transferred for cash reserves and all—of taking him to the outback, and he'd have been 'out back' with Crocodile Dundee somewhere being gator bait, 'cause I'd have took that three million dollars and buried him there and came back to the United States. With enough money, you don't need passports or IDs or anything, and I wasn't really that concerned about coming back."
The more Steinhart read and heard about David Brown, the more revulsion he felt. He was admittedly no angel, but he—like all cons—had his own ethical limits.
And David Brown had crossed far beyond them.
But then their bizarre plans took an unexpected turn. "I was in the yard," Steinhart remembered, "and I was telling Irv Cully how I really felt about Thurston, and he says, 'I'm glad you feel that way about it, 'cause I gave you up.' "
"You what?" Steinhart breathed. Cully, that fat little creep, had snitched him off? "I walked halfway around the yard, trying to absorb what Cully had just told me. My first impulse was to choke him, and I walked back. Then I said, 'You want to tell me that again?' "
Irv Cully had, indeed, gone to the authorities. He was a snitch—everyone who had spent any time with him in the Orange County Jail knew that. It was almost preordained that he would tell someone about David Brown's outrageous plans.
A snitch is a snitch.
Cully had palmed a note to a jailer, asking that he be "called out" for a dental appointment. Once out of the module, he announced that he had information that he was sure would be of urgent interest to the DA's office. Jay Newell talked to Cully on Friday, January 13, 1989.
Allowing for Cully's tendency to embroider facts a bit, the story that emerged was electrifying—and chilling. "David told me he has large quantities of cash buried in the desert, undeclared income from government and other business deals. He says the government has a 2.1-billion 'petty cash' slush fund that paid him. See, they paid him less than his ten percent fee but they paid him in cash. "
Cully had no doubt that David Brown had enough money stashed to buy anything he wanted. He told J
ay Newell that David had offered his girl, Doreena Pietro, a job. He had promised that she could live in the Summitridge house if she had herself arrested first so that she could be placed in Patti Bailey's jail module for a few days. "Then Doreena would be a witness for David and make Patti look bad, you know—like say stuff that Patti had said about doing the killing and all."
David had also had the Chicago data recovery firm that was handling his contracts while he was in jail wire Doreena Pietro six hundred dollars. If she wasn't willing to arrange to get booked in with Patti, she had promised to find another woman who would be—for a price, of course. "I told him that it would be five hundred more up front," Irv Cully explained to Newell. "Five thousand dollars total if the gal testified. I told him Doreena had found a girl and her name was 'Smiley.' "
David had instructed his brother Tom—who ran errands without asking questions—to put $500 in an envelope addressed simply to 'The Girl" and deliver it to Pietro. It was to go either to Doreena Pietro or to Smiley—whichever woman broke probation and arranged to be housed with Patti Bailey. Tom insisted on a receipt, and Doreena signed the back of an envelope. She kept the money. Jay Newell didn't care about the money; he only wanted the physical proof that the envelope would give him. He didn't have it yet, but he knew it existed.
There was, of course, no Smiley—not yet. Cully and Doreena had made her up to get money out of David.
No problem, Newell thought. He would supply Smiley. He had to have David's voice corroborating the plot that Irv Cully had told him about. Although jailhouse snitches are often helpful in investigations, their value as witnesses in court was negligible. Now, all Jay Newell had to do was to find a woman who was willing to visit David Brown and pretend to be the mythical Smiley. She would, of course, be wired.
As Newell walked away from the interview, Cully took a deep breath and called him back. There was something more he should know. David had also come up with an extended surefire solution to the problem of Patti. "I think David's offered Richard Steinhart fifty thousand dollars to kill Patti when she gets out on bail . . . and if all else fails, David's going to give Steinhart all the money he has buried in the desert, to help him escape.
"He'll get another court order to visit the dentist. When he visits the dentist—that's when Richard would get him out—kill the deputies and all and help David escape."
Newell was aware that Irv Cully was a snitch, just as he knew that Richard Steinhart was not. Steinhart was not a game player. If he was involved with David Brown and making plans, that could mean real danger. When Cully revealed the magnitude of Brown's plotting, Newell knew that, if David had his way, a lot of people were going to die so he could go free.
When Cully broke the news to Steinhart that the DA's office knew about the plans to murder Patti and/or break David out, Steinhart regretted that he had ever met David Brown. "I was about to be called in to testify as a material witness in a big case, and I didn't want to do that. I was getting ready to call some of my government friends and have them get me out. But the way things were going, I knew I might end up in the witness protection plan in Akron, Ohio, or Walla Walla, Washington, and I didn't want to go to either of those places. David was ruining all my plans. I wasn't stupid. I knew that my next visitors were going to be from the DA's office. . . . I'm stuck. Cully's a self-confessed rat, anyway—but I kind of got a kick out of the guy. I was glad I hadn't choked him blue in the yard."
On January 18, while he was searching for just the right policewoman to play Smiley, Newell received rather startling—but intriguing—news. Richard Steinhart himself wanted to talk to him.
Steinhart admitted he was hoping for an immediate release—if the Brown case was "big enough." But he was realistic; he was more likely to be stashed away as a witness now to two major cases than he was to walk.
The next day, Newell met with Steinhart, who told him the details of David's escape plans. David was sure he could get a court order that would allow him to go to his dentist's office on Seventeenth Street and Tustin Avenue. He had asked if Steinhart had contacts that would help him escape. "He said he'd get me a car, and a place to stay when I got out—his house up on Summitridge in Orange was empty. He began to call me his 'protector' in here. He put money on my book. It was going to be fifty thousand dollars if I got him out of jail. Then he starts asking me how Patti could be killed—while she was locked up—'cause she's the only one whose testimony would really do him harm. He wanted to know what the cost of that would be."
David's other obsessive fear was about what the district attorney was doing to him. "He started talking about killing Patti Bailey . . . and you. " Steinhart nodded at Newell, who kept his face expressionless as he absorbed this information.
"And then Jeoff Robinson too."
"What was he going to pay you for killing us?" Newell asked.
"Gold jewelry and maybe five hundred thousand dollars that he has buried in the ground. Plus he's got some one-of-a-kind coin collection and stamp collection."
The escape plan climaxed with Steinhart and David running off to Australia.
As Newell walked with Steinhart from the interview room, he turned to the big man beside him and asked, "Did you consider following through with the plan to kill Patti and me—and Robinson—at any time?"
There was a long pause, and then Steinhart nodded. "I wouldn't have done you personally, but I would have arranged it. By the time Cully told me he'd given me up, the plan was already in motion. Brown had arranged to leave some cash and a car to start things moving."
Early in January, David had instructed his family to take his Ford Escort up to Summitridge and leave the keys behind the house. They were to place an envelope containing $600 in the glove compartment of the car. David told his family not to ask questions. However, when Tom and Arthur went up to the house two weeks later to do some work on the pool gate, they found the car had been moved. The keys were in the ignition, and the Escort had a flat tire; the money was gone.
They didn't know who moved the car or took the $600. There was no way Steinhart could have done it; he was still in jail. Possibly, some joyrider had found the keys and the money.
(It was important legally that these preparations had taken place—before the DA's office learned of the murder-for-hire scheme. The $600 was pin money to David, and yet that $600 left in the Ford Escort was the single overt act that could prove David guilty of conspiracy. Later, when Jay Newell questioned Tom Brown about the money, he verified that David had told him to leave it in the car. And this first payment was weeks before Irv Cully went to the DA's office.)
It was a curious thing to hear your own murder plotted. Of all the precarious situations Jay Newell had found himself in, in sixteen years of law enforcement, this was, perhaps, the most surrealistic. Steinhart was so matter-of-fact that it was hard to disbelieve him or oddly, to dislike him. The man with the deep-set black eyes and goatee was a professional. Jay Newell, Jeoff Robinson, and Patti Bailey had been only "assignments" to him. And yet Newell sensed a kind of relief in this tough guy, almost as if he was glad he had been snitched off.
However, that left Newell with a problem. If Steinhart should back off from David Brown now, Newell might not know who the next "professional"—or the one after that— would be. He had begun to see how insidious the mind of David Arnold Brown was.
There was no one who was not expendable.
For the moment, the best plan would be to let David go on thinking that Steinhart was his man. As long as David believed he was covered, that the "hits" were in motion, he wouldn't look around for more assistance.
Newell told Steinhart that he would get back to him as soon as possible. Three days later, Jay Newell, Deputy District Attorney Tom Borris, Deputy Sheriff Dan Vazquez, and Richard Steinhart's defense attorney, Andy Gale, visited Steinhart again. Tom Borris would handle the alleged murder plot against his fellow staff members of the DA's office, while Jeoff Robinson moved ahead on the Linda Brown murder case. Borris
knew Richard Steinhart; they had gone to school together, and then their lives had veered off in opposite directions. Fifteen years later, they recognized each other in the Orange County Jail.
Just as Cinnamon Brown's accusations had needed to be corroborated—from David Brown's own mouth—Borris explained that Steinhart would have to be willing to wear a wire and have a conversation with David. "They told me this was it—I had to go with it," Steinhart remembered. "It was the only game in town. If I was in, I was in one hundred percent. I figured the worse that could happen was I'd end up in prison—as a snitch. I could take care of myself, and I was arrogant—so arrogant."
Steinhart agreed to cooperate and wear a wire. Borris told him that it had to be David who initiated the subject of contract murders and escape. Only then could a criminal case be filed for "solicitation to commit murder," and only then would Steinhart's testimony be accepted.
Things were getting heavier, Steinhart told the group. "Dave's now willing to pay one hundred thousand dollars up front to have Patti Bailey killed—while she's in custody. At the very least, he wants her to know that he can get to her anytime he wants." If Patti wasn't physically vulnerable, David wanted her mother and her brothers hurt—just to let her know he was out there.
Things, indeed, were getting heavy. It was time to move.
The wire for Steinhart had to be approved by either the Orange County Sheriff's Office, which supervised the jail, or the Orange County Marshal's Office, which is in charge of all prisoners while they are in the courthouse. The Sheriff's Office declined to become involved. Fortunately, the Marshal's Office agreed to help. Orange County Marshal Michael Carona assigned Capt. Don Spears to place Steinhart and David together, and to wire Steinhart.
With a lot of help from others, Newell and Borris arranged for Steinhart to be released from the Orange County Jail. But he wouldn't really be free; he would simply be transferred to another jail. Chief Grover Payne of Huntington Beach agreed to house Steinhart for a week or two. Judge David Carter, in Department 47, signed the order of transfer.