Talking Dateline: Dateline Confidential

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1:03Dennis Murphy:Hi, everybody, and welcome to Talking Dateline. I'm Lester Holt. Today, our guest is Josh Mankiewicz. He's going to talk all about The Prince, The WizKid, and The Millionaire. Yes, it's an intriguing title, and it's a more intriguing story. If you haven't seen it, you can go watch the full episode on Peacock or listen to it on the Dateline podcast feed, and then come right back here, and you'll be totally nourished on this story. All right, to recap, it was retired art collector and Palm Springs socialite Cliff Lambert. He suddenly vanished in 2008. Investigators uncovered an elaborate plot by a group of grifters to steal Lambert's money and his life.

1:41Dennis Murphy:And then when Cliff's remains were found nine years after he disappeared, it was hardly the end of this twisted and shady saga, which we'll get into during this talking deadline. Josh, let's get right into it. This was not weeks in the making. This wasn't months in the making, which is sometimes typical for Dateline. This was literally years in the making.

2:01Andrea Canning:Yeah, this took about two and a half years. I think the first interview I did was Tyson Ranch, which was in Las Vegas. And then after that, we went to Palm Springs and we did that wonderful interview with Barbara Wisby. The richness of the characters in this episode, I thought really made a difference. And I also thought Palm Springs as a character in itself kind of made a difference. And it gave you a sense of sort of what life was like there and also sort of like who Cliff was. Eddie was a sensational interview. We did him early. And then, you know, the case took forever, partly because of COVID and partly because there were two trials because the first verdict got thrown out.

2:43Andrea Canning:And then the two of the defendants, Danny and David Replogle, managed to delay sentencing for a long time. And so that made everything last longer. So it was a lot longer than most Dateline episodes.

2:59Dennis Murphy:Yeah, and one of the things I pulled away from this program is that Cliff, in the end, was a lonely character. He surrounded himself by a lot of people, his buddy Eddie. But at the heart of it, he strikes me as someone that was rather lonely.

3:13Andrea Canning:One of the things that I thought sort of kind of is going to hit home with all Dateline viewers is that there were some very recognizable themes in this. Cliff was a lonely person who made some foolish romantic choices. You know, Cliff lost a lot of his friends to AIDS in the 80s and 90s. So he was not just lonely. He also had lost a lot of people. And, you know, there's no way that that doesn't weigh on you. So, you know, I think Danny figured out that Cliff didn't have a family and he didn't have a lot of close friends. And I think they thought, if we make this guy disappear, basically no one's going to notice in the amount of time that we need to clean out his house, sell the artwork, and get all his money.

4:02And were it not for Eddie, they were just about right.

4:06Dennis Murphy:The way this came to light, at the end of the day, it came apart because a guy was moving some stuff and a real estate agent kind of blew the whistle.

4:15Andrea Canning:Yeah, the real estate agent got a listing for the house and couldn't figure out why the person selling it wanted such a small amount of money for a house that was going to bring a lot more money. But they wanted to sell it like in the next couple of days. The neighbors across the street, who I think were sitting out on their porch having an afternoon cocktail, realized they hadn't seen Cliff in a while, saw a U-Haul across the street with somebody putting stuff into it. And they thought, like, that's kind of weird. I had no idea Cliff was moving. They called the cops. So, and Eddie, you know, Eddie, who was waiting for Cliff at the Festival of Lights, which is an annual thing in Palm Springs.

4:56Andrea Canning:It's the event that Eddie and I were walking around during that you saw on the show. But, you know, it was Eddie who first thought something's wrong.

5:05Dennis Murphy:Eddie came across as a true friend in this. There was no romantic link between these guys, but there was real great depth of affection.

5:12Andrea Canning:Cliff and Eddie clearly were very good friends. And Eddie, he was like, no, no, something's wrong. If Cliff had left town, I'd know about it. And he went into the cops. But the fact that Bustamante was taking stuff out of the house, some of which he was putting in the U-Haul, and some of which was in his hotel room, which police found, everything about that said that Cliff was being victimized in some way. And that's kind of what made the cops think there's a crime in progress. here. And what they didn't know at first was whether this was some kind of crime involving Cliff who might either was being held against his will or maybe was dead or whether Cliff was somehow complicit in this, because that was some of their thinking in the early days, like he's disappeared and he's going to say I'm out of town and he's going to say everything's been stolen.

6:04Andrea Canning:And then it's some kind of insurance scam. But eventually they figured out that the problem was something has happened to Cliff. And it was a long time before they figured out what.

6:14Dennis Murphy:Let's talk, if we can, for a second about the Nepalese prince or self-proclaimed prince in this. He kind of appears midway in this and takes on a large role.

6:26Andrea Canning:Yeah, I mean, look, he's the kind of guy that you want to have if you're doing a grift. I mean, he can play a role. He sounds like he's from another country. He's got this very posh, erudite, you know, I went to the best schools accent. He's also sort of an indeterminate ethnicity, which means he can be a British lawyer. He can be the Nepalese prince. It's not exactly clear what Cashel's backstory is. And part of the problem here is that you can't really trust anything coming from anybody's lips here. But he certainly presented himself as this prince and did that very, very effectively. And if you're doing a con, you need somebody who can be a good actor.

7:09Dennis Murphy:And he definitely was. He got on the phone at one point regarding the artwork and took me a second to realize, wait a minute, we've heard that voice.

7:18Andrea Canning:Yeah, that's right. I mean, these guys were very sharp about some things and they were incredibly stupid about other things. It didn't occur, though, if I pull a U-Haul truck up to this guy's house that we've just murdered, people are going to see it. They might call police. They did not realize that Cliff had a friend who was such a good friend that he would call police if Cliff didn't show up. One of the mistakes they made was leaving a voicemail message, which later would be essentially identified as being Cashall. I mean, that's the cops. That was like the light bulb moment for the cops. They're like, wait a minute, I know who you are.

7:49Andrea Canning:You posed as that British lawyer and you're part of this con. But Cashall is the guy who let the murderers into Cliff's house. So, I mean, he's a fraud. He's a con man, but he's complicit in a brutal murder. He's a lot more than just a fast-talking guy with a good accent.

8:12Dennis Murphy:We also hear directly from someone who was in the room at the time of the killing, who walked, police literally walked blow by blow through what ultimately happened.

8:22Andrea Canning:I mean, the old saying, first squeal gets the deal. That was Craig McCarthy. He pled to a lesser sentence. He testified against the other defendants, and he told police what had happened. Now, in his version of the story, he is sort of a bystander. I don't know the police believe that he was just a bystander, but they needed to flip somebody to bring down this web of lies and murder,

8:51Dennis Murphy:and he was the guy they did. Yeah, so I'm watching the episode and I'm watching my clock thinking, well, this thing's wrapping up early here. We, you know, the case has gone to court. They've got a guilty verdict. End of story. No. I keep wondering, how do you know when you finish a story like this?

9:08Andrea Canning:And we still might not be finished. I mean, you know, nothing would surprise me about this story. To the point, I mean, this story was ran at the beginning of this season of Dateline. It was supposed to run last season sometime. And it couldn't because we didn't have the final disposition of the case. You know, we want to be able to say in a story, this is how it ended.

9:33Dennis Murphy:Yeah, Lisa DiMaria, what a fascinating character there. She is obviously the prosecutor. She's no nonsense. She's going to take this case to its conclusion. She's also about that tall. Is she really? I couldn't get a sense of that. Yeah, she's tiny. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, she was a go-getter. And you're like, well, she's nailing these guys. And then everything gets turned on her.

9:56Andrea Canning:And I don't think, I didn't see that coming. I mean, look, if I had committed some terrible crime, Lisa, Lisa DeMaria is about one of the last people I'd want coming after me because she was relentless and she lived and breathed that thing for years and years and years. And then she got the conviction that she had worked so hard for. and then because of the judge's remark, the convictions were all stricken, all reversed. They had four new trials and they did not let her do the retrial. There is no official reason why that was. I never got the full story out of her for that, but ultimately I think justice was served by Rob Hightower who prosecuted the case and got the convictions.

10:42Dennis Murphy:These defendants though, So, you know, if you ever can give a murderer credit, in this case, they really turned the prosecution back on its heels.

10:51Andrea Canning:You know, they definitely fought harder, longer, and more effectively than a lot of the defendants that we see on Dateline. And, of course, one of these defendants was themselves a lawyer, and the others were practiced con men who sort of knew how to take advantage of every loophole in the law. Ultimately, the system won out and they were convicted.

11:16Dennis Murphy:Well, Josh, as you mentioned, we're going to get a little more insight into this. We're going to talk to David Ketterling, one of our colleagues, a producer on this program. He'll be talking about Stephen Valentino. This is a character you didn't meet in the actual broadcast, but he's got an interesting story to tell. We're going to have that when we come back on Talking Dateline.

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13:13Dennis Murphy:All right, welcome back to Talking Dateline. We're back here with Josh as well as David Ketterling. He's a producer at Dateline NBC and was one of the producers on this program. There was so much in this two-hour broadcast that some stuff did get left on the proverbial cutting room floor, including an interview with a guy named Stephen Valentino. He crossed paths with Prince Kashul Nerula and has a story to tell about his mother's missing jewelry. And Josh, why don't you give me a setup on this? Well, I mean, look, Stephen Valentino is one of the guys

13:44Andrea Canning:that we came across while we were reporting this story. But the interesting thing about Mr. Valentino is he didn't really have anything to do with the Cliff Lambert plot. He can give you some background on what it was like to know Kashul Nerula. and ultimately we decided that first of all you know with the amount of material we had and the size of this story there's some stuff that didn't make the final cut so that's why you're going to hear this now and not um on the tv program okay david you want to set up the exact bite for us yeah so kashal narula lived with um steven valentino for a while and steven saw him one day going in and out of his mother's bedroom and came home later to realize that all of his mother's jewelry had been stolen.

14:30Andrea Canning:Which was worth a lot of money. Yeah, he was a jewelry collector and he came home. The person who he thought it was his friend ended up stealing a bunch of his mom's jewelry. I went into my mother's bedroom and the first thing I noticed was her chest of drawers. the top drawer was actually a jar. It was open. And I walked over to it and I pulled it out, and it was virtually empty. Millions worth of jewelry missing. What immediately went through my mind other than wanting to choke him to death was where is Cashall right now because he was the only one that was in that room so I called the Marin County Sheriff's Department they came out they fingerprinted and basically they started searching for Cashall

15:39Dennis Murphy:Well, it sounds like there are other stories to tell, Dave. Nonetheless, the crickets have their own story to tell, I guess. I love that. I love the crickets. Yeah. The crickets were definitely a thing in that. But more importantly, it gets me back to this. And the thing that I was curious about this whole program was there have to be more stories, more, you know, that this isn't necessarily a one-off.

15:59Andrea Canning:You know, we talked about Eddie and we talked about the neighbors, right? We didn't talk about Tyson, right? Right. Tyson, you know, got fleeced by Danny very early on, long before these guys, I think, had ever heard of Cliff Lambert. And he kind of, you know, thought, no, no, you're not, you're not doing this. Not, not, not with me. You're not. I'm going to find out what happened. Because like the bank said to Tyson, like, you know, and the cops said to Tyson, like, we're not going to really do anything until someone gets hurt. You know, it's just one guy stealing somebody else's money and you got your money back from the bank.

16:34Andrea Canning:So, you know, we're not going to knock ourselves out. Well, you know, let's say that San Francisco PD had gone after Danny and that he had been locked up. I don't know what would have happened, but Cliff Lambert might, might still be alive. And part of what happened here was that, you know, conning somebody is not perceived as, as serious a crime as conning somebody and then killing them. And unfortunately, you know, none of the brakes were put on until Cliff Lambert was already gone. You know, I got to say one more thing about this, which is Dave, who's joining us today, one of the two producers is not just responsible for following this thing because he's not just a producer, but he's also a video editor and photographer.

17:21Andrea Canning:And so, you know, normally we say, you know you can listen to this episode it's right on the podcast feed right but I would urge you to go to Peacock and watch this episode because part of what made this such a great episode are those pictures and part of why that all works is because of Dave who was largely responsible for the sort of look of this and of making Palm Springs a character and looking at this episode in addition to just listening to it is worth your time, and that's because of Dave.

17:56Dennis Murphy:Well, Dave.

17:57Andrea Canning:Thank you, Josh. All right. Palm Springs is such a beautiful place. I mean, sometimes you can just point the camera and you get gold. But I really appreciate that, Josh. It was a long journey.