Kill Gus Boulis's Killer?

Now he describes Ferrari as an amateur gangster, incapable of killing Boulis. "He doesn't seem to be a tough guy," Brandreth says.

H. Dohn Williams, Fiorillo's Fort Lauderdale attorney, agrees Brandreth has a tie to the Boulis case. But he says it's much more direct. The Bronx thug drove the truck that cut in front of the Miami Subs founder before the shooting, Williams claims. He offers no evidence other than his client's word. "[Brandreth] was driving that blocking vehicle," he asserts. (Although the lawyer says the truth will come out at trial, Brandreth has not been charged in the Boulis homicide.)

Brandreth's lawyer, Michael Walsh, acknowledges his client drove the truck. But, he says, the accused killers handed over the keys several months after the Boulis slaying, possibly to frame Brandreth. "He didn't know that was the car involved in the Boulis murder," Walsh says.

In the months that followed, Brandreth says, he did the usual: dealt drugs, partied on the Beach, and hung out at strip joints; Gold Rush, the club on NE 11th Street, was his favorite. He says he had two girlfriends at the time, a stripper named Natalie and his steady, Lisa.

"He was always nice, great around the house," gushes Arlene Ellis, Natalie's mother. "He's had a hard life.... I think that's why he took to us so much. He just wanted a family."

Adds Lisa: "Paulie has a big heart. If you didn't have anything to eat, he would give you his food."

Brandreth's brother died of an oxycodone overdose in New York on September 8, 2001. "Keith was all I had in the whole world," Brandreth says. The funeral, he recalls, was on Long Island the morning of September 11, and he watched smoke rise from the Twin Towers.

Lisa was at his side. So was a buddy of Brandreth's: a brown-haired, brown-eyed drug dealer named Steve Citranglo.

Why, Paulie, why?" implored Citranglo, who was on his knees in a hallway of Thomas Lehmann's Coral Gables condo. It was around noon January 4, 2002, and Citranglo had been punched, kicked, zapped with a stun gun, and clubbed with a baton.

Lehmann, who would later recount details of the murder in a court deposition, was headed toward the injured drug dealer, ready to throw a few punches, when he spotted Brandreth pulling a black .38-caliber pistol from his waistband.

"This is for my brother, because you are a fuckin' rat," Lehmann remembers Brandreth saying.

"Fuck you and your bro," Citranglo yelled back.

That's when Lehmann heard the shot. "There was no plan to kill him," Lehmann explains. "Paul flipped out."

At that point, so did everyone else. Ahed Hbaiu began to cry. Kevin Keneuker headed for the apartment's second-floor balcony and thought about jumping.

Lehmann left through the front door and walked down the stairs. He says he returned to find blood everywhere. "We tried to clean the best we could with what we had," he says in the depo. "I had some kind of bleachlike shit, but it was for kitchen dishes and everything."

The four wrapped the body in a sleeping bag, a tarp, and duct tape. Sometime that afternoon, Lehmann went out and bought everyone sneakers. "We sat around waiting for it to get dark," he recalls. "Paul tells everyone to shut the fuck up, relax, it's going to be okay.... When it comes down to it — excuse my language — Kevin, Eddie, and I were too big of a pussy to beat up Steve unless Paul came into the picture."

Around 5 p.m., just as night fell, Lehmann and Brandreth carried the wrapped-up body to the parking lot. "You fuckin' killed him," Lehmann hissed. What he didn't realize was that a neighbor named Lisbet Colon was walking her dog nearby — and she thought she saw two guys carrying what looked like a body down the stairs.

They wrangled the corpse into the back of Lehmann's black Mercedes SUV. Lehmann and Brandreth got in and took off. Hbaiu and Keneuker followed in Lehmann's other car, a Jaguar. They headed west on SW Eighth Street, toward the Everglades. At one point, Lehmann recalls, a cop pulled Hbaiu and Keneuker over and ticketed them for a faulty brake light.

Then they stopped at a gas station, perhaps Dade Corners, on Krome Avenue. Lehmann wanted to dump the corpse in a garbage can. "I got a body in the back seat of my car, and I'm ready to piss myself, to tell you the truth," Lehmann recalls.

Instead the men drove a mile west, past the Miccosukee casino. Soon they turned right onto a dirt road.