Man convicted in 'gay grifters' case talks to the B.A.R.

The case
According to prosecutors, Garcia's associate, gay Nepali national Kaushal Niroula, pretended to be a lawyer arranging an inheritance for Lambert. While Niroula and Lambert were having a drink in Lambert's house, Niroula excused himself and let Miguel Bustamante and Craig McCarthy into the home by unlocking a sliding glass door.

McCarthy testified for the prosecution that Bustamante stabbed Lambert multiple times after the pair confronted Lambert in his kitchen. Prosecutors alleged that Garcia and his lawyer, David Replogle, were involved in the conspiracy to commit the murder.

Lambert's remains were not discovered until 2016 and 2017 near Castaic, in northern Los Angeles County.

The B.A.R. reached out to Replogle's attorney John Dolan but had not received a response by press time. KESQ-TV reported that Dolan argued during his opening statement in Replogle's retrial in 2022 that the other defendants charged in the murder were Replogle's clients in his role as an attorney, but he was not culpable for their actions. Dolan said that for any role Replogle did play in the murder plot, it was because he was threatened and under duress.

Bustamante and McCarthy were Heald College classmates and roommates from Daly City. Bustamante was a bartender at the now-closed Castro bar Jet, and McCarthy was a former Marine.

Garcia maintains he was not in Palm Springs at the time of the stabbing, and no one alleged that he was during the trials. He told the B.A.R. that the text messages implicating him in the murder plot were fabricated. He said the phone from which they pulled incriminating text messages was purchased after the date the messages were allegedly sent.

He added, "The problem is, no matter how much we argued that the evidence literally shows that these (text messages) are not authentic, that they were not sent or received, that they did not originate on this phone, that the phone had been purchased after the date of supposed messages, all these different factors, the court still let them in, and that was the basis of the prosecution's entire case against me. As far as the cellphone pinging information, it actually contradicted much of the prosecution's case. At one point they said I was in Palm Springs cleaning up the blood at the crime scene. And in fact, the cellphone at that exact time was pinging several hundred miles away."

When asked about Garcia's allegation that the cellphone data used in the trial was fabricated, John Hall, a spokesman for the Riverside County District Attorney's Office, told the B.A.R., "This convicted defendant is still awaiting sentencing and his appellate process. Our office will not be commenting further at this time."

Garcia told the B.A.R. that Niroula confessed the murder to him in a clandestine meeting on a San Francisco pier. Garcia and Niroula were arrested in March 2009, three months after the murder.

"He said that he had tried to con Cliff (Lambert) and that an accident had occurred and Cliff was dead," Garcia said. "And he said that he died in the kitchen and that professionals cleaned up the blood, and he took the body to Maria's mortuary to be incinerated, and just a whole lot of nonsense. And so I went to (attorney) David Replogle's office."

Garcia said that Replogle assured him Lambert was alive and in a prison in Mexico along with Russell Manning, an art dealer whom prosecutors said had helped Niroula and Replogle steal Lambert's assets. Manning eventually pleaded guilty to art fraud and received a five-year sentence. He has since died. Garcia said that Niroula had previously lied and said that he murdered Manning as part of an unrelated con, so Garcia wasn't inclined to believe him when he claimed to have accidentally killed Lambert. And he said that he was able to verify that Manning was in jail in Puerto Vallarta some time after speaking with Replogle about Lambert's disappearance.

Garcia said it would have made no sense for him to be involved in a plot to steal Lambert's assets because he said that Lambert had been having money problems due to a lawsuit from the family of his deceased former partner combined with a large mortgage payment that resulted in Lambert being "insolvent."

Garcia said that Niroula targeted Lambert as the result of something he offhandedly said about him.

"The biggest issue in this case was alleging that I'm the linchpin because while Niroula was in jail over the summer of 2008, he had called me and was trying to get my family to help him bail out of custody. There was no chance in hell that was going to happen. And he was telling me, 'Bail me out. I can help fund you for your technology project. You need me.' So just to give him some kind of a dig, a little bit, I said, 'I don't need you. I have a financial benefactor who's going to invest in my company.'"

Garcia went on to tell him about Lambert. Garcia said he believes Niroula was looking for another victim to con.

Contrary to media reports, Garcia says he didn't first meet Lambert over the internet. He said he met Lambert and his partner, Travis Lambert, at an HIV charity fundraiser in Los Angeles in 2005. He said he kept in touch with Travis through social media.

"And then I received a message from Cliff (Lambert) in March or April 2008 and discovered that Travis had passed away and drowned in a swimming pool. And Cliff offered to bring me down to Palm Springs," Garcia said.

Niroula was murdered in jail by a cellmate in 2022. He was 41.

Niroula had a long history of alleged cons. A Japanese woman visiting Hawaii said Niroula conned her out of more than $500,000. Niroula was born in Nepal and falsely claimed to some that he was Nepalese royalty. He was granted a student visa to study at the now-closed New College in San Francisco's Mission District. He promised the school a $1 million donation. The donation never came. New College eventually closed in 2008, months before Lambert's murder.

Niroula indirectly helped Garcia gain a second trial for him and two other co-defendants. While acting as his own attorney in court, Garcia secretly recorded Riverside County Superior Court Judge David B. Downing in the first trial saying he wasn't going to open envelopes with legal matters from Niroula because Niroula was HIV-positive and had licked the envelopes. A second trial was granted for the defendants because of the judge's misconduct.

New attention to case
The story of Lambert's murder is gaining new attention with a podcast, "American Hustlers," by True Crime News from Warner Brothers, with a new episode dropping every Monday. The sixth episode dropped on March 3 and there are 12 in the series. The saga has been previously featured in a number of true crime documentaries and podcasts. NBC's "Dateline" program is working on a new two-hour show about the case.

Garcia says he hasn't been able to listen to the podcast in jail but has been sent transcripts.

"I have seen the transcripts of four episodes altogether. They are just mind-blowing. There's zero fact-checking whatsoever," he said.

A co-producer of the American Hustlers podcast, Kim Kantner, told the B.A.R. Garcia's reaction to the podcast is not a surprise.

"I wouldn't expect Danny to be happy with the podcast," she said. "It's putting the story out there again. The story has been out there before and has never shown him in a favorable light, and neither does this. He is a convicted murderer, and he's in prison, and he was a con man and con men lie. So what comes out of his mouth, I feel, needs to be taken with a grain of salt."

Addressing Garcia's complaint about his allegation of a lack of fact-checking in the series, Kantner said, "We are as careful with the facts as we can get. We do interview a lot of people, and those people are talking to us based on memory, so we don't state that those are facts, those are opinions, and those are people's memories. As far as the facts, we did everything that we could as far as reviewing court records, ad nauseam. I can't even tell you how many pages (of court records) to do the best we could to get everything correct. The podcast was vetted by lawyers to make sure that they could corroborate what we had said to the best of our ability."

Kantner said she and co-producer Julie Golden had been working on the podcast series since 2020, with several new developments in the case happening as they were in production. Kantner said she hasn't had as much time to review the comments on the series as she would like because she was among thousands who lost their homes in the Los Angeles area fires in January, about two weeks before the series debuted.

Garcia said that the podcast incorrectly stated that he had consensual sex with the late gay San Francisco philanthropist Thomas White when he was 16. Garcia said he was violently sexually abused by White and suffered permanent physical scars. He told the B.A.R. that White had burned his genitals with candle wax. With the help of Replogle, a gay man and his attorney, Garcia and another man sued White and eventually received a settlement from him. That settlement was $500,000 each to Garcia and his co-plaintiff, according to NBC News. Other reports have placed the settlement as high as $1 million for each. Despite the settlement, White denied the allegations.

The podcast interviewed Dennis Domini, who was identified as Garcia's cousin and was a driver for Garcia and Niroula. He knew Garcia since Garcia was a child growing up in Modesto. He was insistent that Garcia and White had a sugar daddy relationship and that their sex was consensual. Because Garcia was 16, if White did have sex with him, it would still be illegal in California, where the age of consent is 18. Domini said his last name is an alias, a name that means master or dominate in Latin.

"The FBI and the DEA have that as an alias for me, so we might as well just stick with it," he said on the podcast.

The B.A.R. exchanged text messages with Domini, but he hasn't yet agreed to be interviewed by the paper.

Garcia told the B.A.R. that Domini's statements about his relationship with White were "mind boggling" and extremely upsetting to his family.

Replogle also sued White on behalf of 20 Mexican boys and young men in Puerto Vallarta. Garcia said that against his advice, Replogle included some boys in the suit who were never molested by White. Mexican authorities charged several of the boys with extortion for lying about being molested for the promise of a lawsuit payout. Garcia said federal authorities have ample evidence of White molesting boys, and possession and making of child pornography. The B.A.R. reached out to the U.S. Attorney's office for verification of that claim but the office said it could not provide comment.

Domini, who said on the podcast that he helped recruit the boys in Puerto Vallarta, said the allegations against White were all false. He said the only victim was White.

White died in custody in Puerto Vallarta in 2013. His lawyer, Stuart Hanlon, had told the B.A.R. at the time that his official cause of death is listed as pneumonia but that it stemmed from septic infection from a prior surgery. White was 78 and had spent more than a decade in custody, first in a jail in Thailand where he was initially arrested before being extradited to Mexico.

John Hill, an Oakland attorney who along with Replogle represented White's accusers in Puerto Vallarta, told the B.A.R. in 2013, after White's death, that a psychiatrist examined 10 of 20 young men and boys who had accused White in Mexico and determined the accusations were credible and that they suffered serious harm caused by White. Hill questioned why White would agree to a $7 million settlement before all the victims were examined if he were innocent.

When discussing the new podcast Garcia didn't mince words. "It's basically just a classic hit piece designed to get as much publicity as possible for Tyson Wrensch and paint us in the worst picture as possible," he said.

Wrensch is a former friend of Garcia's. Wrensch knew Garcia for five years and considered him his best friend. Wrensch appears on the podcast and was interviewed by the B.A.R. in February.

Less than two years before Lambert's murder, Wrensch, who now lives in San Francisco but at the time was living in Las Vegas, had to cut short a trip to Brazil after learning his bank account was drained and he had no more money to continue his trip. When he returned home he said he quickly learned Garcia was responsible and had ripped off at least one other friend.

Wrensch co-authored a 2013 book with Sherrie Lueder on the Lambert case called "Until Someone Gets Hurt." The title refers to something a Las Vegas police inspector told him when he pressed them to do more to stop Garcia before he could steal from anyone else. The investigator said they couldn't do anything until someone gets hurt.

Wrensch has spoken before groups with a PowerPoint presentation showing how easily otherwise cautious people can be taken in by a con. He said he is speaking out about the case to help others to avoid becoming the victim of a swindle.

In retrospect, Wrensch told the B.A.R. that there were some early warning signs that Garcia may not have been on the up and up. He noticed once when Garcia withdrew $1,500 from an ATM the message on the machine said, "Thank you Thomas White." Wrensch thought it may have been an account set up by White to pay off his lawsuit settlement. Another time Garcia was supposed to rent an apartment near where he was living in Munich, Germany but, after all the arrangements were made, Garcia never showed up at the apartment to sign the papers and just returned to the U.S. On another occasion, Garcia's father asked about his recovery from a motorcycle accident, but Wrensch said there was never an accident.

Garcia denied Wrensch's allegations in his telephone interview with the B. A. R.

"It is a little complicated, our relationship back then. But no, 99% of his allegations are patently false, and we're actually going to ...," Garcia said. At that moment the call was automatically terminated by the jail after the 15-minute time limit was reached.

Wrensch told the B.A.R. that he met with White twice while he was in jail in Puerto Vallarta. White gave Wrensch a piece of advice to avoid being a target of a con artist, advice he shares with others.

White told him, "I would have never told anybody how much money I made when I sold my company," Wrensch said in the B.A.R. interview.

In the interview, Wrensch recalled telling Garcia of the golden parachute he got when he was laid off by a tech company. In retrospect, he thinks that may have been the lure for Garcia to victimize him.

When told of the B.A.R.'s interview with Garcia and of Garcia stating that the incriminating texts that were used against him were fabricated, Wrensch said that AT&T experts at Garcia's trial testified otherwise. Wrensch said that it came out after the murder that Lambert was having financial problems but, at the time of his murder, Garcia didn't know that. Wrensch said Garcia wouldn't have asked Lambert to invest in a company he hoped to start if he didn't think he had a lot of money.

In recounting his ordeal, Wrensch recalled a conversation he had with a friend and mentor who was also a cop. The friend prophetically told him, "'When this is over, there will be a body. It might be his. It might be yours. It might be someone else's, but there will be a body at the end of this story."

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