Most of the prosecutors and investigators have been working full-time on the case for a year or longer. They primarily work out of an office near the San Fernando Courthouse, its location kept secret for security reasons. In the course of the investigation, members of the team have traveled to 11 states to interview witnesses and gather evidence.

While most murder cases result in investigators accumulating reports and other documents that fill two or three thick blue binders called “murder books,” the Bryant case has filled 58 so far. During one preliminary hearing, they were lined up in the unused jury box so they could be easily referred to by prosecutors. Side by side, they stretched more than 10feet.

“It’s a nightmare when you try to get everything collated,” Flanagan said. “I have attempted to computerize everything. But there is so much. There are approximately 20,000pages. There are thousands and thousands of telephone numbers.”

It is difficult to estimate how much has been spent on the case or how much taxpayers will eventually have to pay. The investigation of the shooting involved numerous law enforcement agencies, and at times as many as 200officers were brought in to conduct searches. Flanagan estimated the investigation has cost more than $2 million. Maurizi said that estimate could be in the ballpark, but she could not confirm it.

The true costs of the case would include the salaries of prosecutors, police investigators, bailiffs, judges and court staff. The defendants’ attorneys are each paid about $100an hour. At that rate, a year in trial – minus a two-week vacation – will cost taxpayers more than $3.5million for defense attorneys alone.

Defense attorneys said the cost of the trial should not be criticized because the defendants are constitutionally guaranteed competent counsel and a fair trial. They said the prosecution has set the stage for the lengthy and expensive battle by alleging complicated conspiracy charges.

“Millions have been spent on their investigation,” Flanagan said. “I don’t think anybody can quibble over the money” spent on defense attorneys.

Novotney said that if the prosecution dropped some of the “garbage charges” against the defendants, such as the allegation that the organization was involved in a drug conspiracy, the trial and costs would be greatly trimmed.

“The cost of justice sometimes is expensive,” Novotney said. “This is a megacase. I have a client who faces a possible death penalty. I have an obligation to prepare the best defense possible. It’s an expensive proposition.”

Citing confidentiality, he declined to say what his defense team has been paid in the 1¹⁄2 years he has been on the case.

Maurizi said the length of the case works to the advantage of the defendants as well as their attorneys. As a case drags on, the prosecution’s evidence can unravel.

“Memories fade to a certain extent, evidence can be lost or destroyed,” she said. “In this case, there has always been a great danger factor to our witnesses.”

Vojtecky said one of the case’s defendants, Nash Newbil, 56, had been free on bail awaiting trial but was then jailed in September when he allegedly directed an assault against a witness in the case. Newbil was charged with assault for allegedly ordering two men to hold down the witness and inject a hallucinogenic drug into her tongue with a hypodermic needle. During the alleged attack, Newbil called her a “snitch,” police said.

Defense attorney Flanagan countered that the slow movement of the case causes defendants an enormous hardship.

“It’s a nightmare for those individuals,” he said. “There is a presumption of innocence, but they languish in jail.

“I don’t think it is anybody’s fault. There is an investigation that has been done by both sides. I don’t think anybody is trying to hold it up.”

note: The sheer size of the prosecution spawned by the quadruple murder in Lake View Terrace proved to be unmanageable. The case was eventually pared down and split. Still, over the next five years there were several prosecutions and convictions of members of the Bryant Family Organization for crimes ranging from murder to drug dealing and money laundering. Stanley Bryant and two others were eventually sent to death row for the killings. His brother, Jeffrey Bryant, was returned to prison as well after being convicted of drug-related crimes. By 1997, the organization most responsible for bringing rock cocaine to the northeast Valley was completely dismantled and irrelevant, according to police and federal authorities.

BILLY THE BURGLAR

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

June 7, 1987

Billy Schroeder is 24 years old. But he looks, at his best, like 24 going on 40. Put him up next to his boyish mug shot of just a few years ago and the boy is long gone. The bleached blond hair has turned to brown and shows signs of thinning. The body, too, is thin, having been tapered by its addictions. Sometimes the eyes, set in a ruddy face, are glassy and have a thousand-yard stare in a six-by-six room.

Permanent blue ink wraps around both his arms. The lion, the hawk, the skull. He wears his philosophy – his former philosophy, mind you – forever beneath his sleeve: the man with a dope pipe, the inscription “Get High” on his biceps. All of it the work of jailhouse tattoo artists.

Looking at Billy Schroeder, it is easy to imagine what a nightmare it would have been for someone to have come home to find this stranger inside. Though on occasion that did occur, hundreds of times in the last year Schroeder was in and out of homes without being seen. He was a burglar, one of the most prolific that local police have known about in recent years.

For a time, it seemed as though nothing could stop him. He cruised through the streets of South Broward and North Dade, through the back doors and windows of up to five homes a day. Fueled by cocaine or the craving for it, he broke into at least 350homes in a year’s time and stole an estimated $2million worth of property.

Despite the big numbers he posted, Schroeder was no master burglar. He lived high and blew every dollar he got. He was just another crack addict, who in actuality was not as good as he was lucky. Locked up now, even he will tell you that. And he’ll tell you that his luck worked against him as much as it worked for him.

“I guess I was a good burglar, but it seemed like I was lucky more than anything,” he says. “I was sloppy. It seems if they really wanted me, they could have gotten me sooner. I wish now that they would have. My good luck was really bad luck, I guess.”

Burglary is a mid-level crime, meaning that on a seriousness scale it is far below murder, somewhere above petty theft. Also meaning it inspires similar priorities in most police departments and prosecutors’ offices.

Still, burglary is a crime that cuts across social strata, leaving its scars on the poor and the rich, the young and the old. And it is one of the most prevalent of crimes in our society. In Broward County there were 25,000 burglaries last year; 22,000 in Palm Beach County. Across Florida it happened more than 250,000 times. Only 16 percent of the cases were cleared by arrest.

The story of one of the most prolific burglars in Broward is not just a story of a man’s addiction to a drug and what that drug made him do. He is part of an epidemic. And the proper way to tell Billy Schroeder’s tale is to also tell the stories of those he stole from, and those who hunted him.

Billy Schroeder was born and raised in the blue-collar Lake Forest area west of Hollywood. He grew up in a home with a mother and sister, and sometimes he lived with his grandparents. There was no father in the house after he turned four. He learned about authority and manhood on the streets. And by the time he was 11 the streets had already led him into the sampling of drugs and burglary. It was during his 11th year that he was caught for the first time: he was inside a neighbor’s home, and placed on juvenile probation.