The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh - 40
Episode 40: Mrs. Walsh trained at a Hollywood bodybuilding gym. Its owners were later convicted of a triple murder
Or start at the series beginning and binge from there: (Link to Episode 1)
Back to Allen Rivenbark, who died in the flight that John Monahan, it was said, had intended to be on:
A year before the 1981 crash, in federal court, Rivenbark’s voice was played on a police-recorded conversation talking with his business partner, Tom Farese, the head of the Joseph Colombo crime family’s drug smuggling and money laundering operation in South Florida:
The tapes were made in June 1976. In 1979, Fort Lauderdale Police organized crime detective Len Oliveri reviewed them with the Broward State Attorney:
Farese was married to a niece of Carmine Persico, the head of the crime family. Top members of the Colombo family, as fugitives, were said to have been hiding at Rivenbark’s Colorado ranch — the ranch where Rivenbark and the others on the plane that crashed were headed for. And that Monahan later said he was going to do promotion for.
Did Monahan not know who Rivenbark was? Before the plane crash, his name had been in the newspapers, associated with Farese.
That’s Meyer Lansky, perhaps the most powerful mobster of all, and underworld financier and money-launderer.
Farese was convicted and sentenced to 30 years, but Detective Oliveri questioned why the feds didn’t try Rivenbark as well:
After the conviction, the Colombo family was in disarray, and a capo named “Johnny Irish” Matera took over. He was said to have participated in the murder of Carmine Galante in 1979:
By muscling in, Galante had tried to become the principal mobster of all the families.
Heads of other families had united to eliminate Galante:
Sweeney was a New York City P.D. organized crime detective:
In 1981, another capo, Dominic Napolitano, who was reported to have smuggled illegal aliens from Sicily to be hired killers for the Mob, sent his longtime confidant from New York to run gambling activities in Broward and send the proceeds to Napolitano, who would use them to finance narcotics operations.
The confidant’s name was Donnie Brasco.
In the movie more than a decade later, Johnny Depp played Donnie, while Napolitano’s character seemed to be divided into two roles, played by Al Pacino and Michael Madsen.
In April 1981, Matera was in a meeting at a restaurant in Queens “to discuss the realignment of the Colombo family, possible narcotics problems in South Florida, and to plan upcoming homicides,” the Fort Lauderdale News wrote.
Three months later:
The same week that Matera disappeared, Adam disappeared.
A later police informant said that Matera’s killer was named Hubert Christie:
It was actually in July 1981.
Christie owned the Apollo Gym in Hollywood. Gil Fernandez, a Metro-Dade cop until 1983, had begun working for Christie collecting gambling, loansharking, and drug debts for the Colombo family.
In 1983, four boys on three-wheeled motorbikes near a mobile home community at the edge of the Everglades in Dade County, within where Fernandez had patrolled as an officer, found three bodies next to a canal:
Seven years later, in 1990, Christie and Fernandez were charged with the murders, on April 1, 1983.
Tommy Felts was also a bodybuilder who trained at Apollo. The presiding judge at Fernandez and Christie’s trial had wrestled against Felts in high school – and lost. In 1984, Felts was killed by the same hitman who admitted killing Don Aronow, the Cigarette boat builder and racer, which is another story I wrote of.
Notice the security cameras at sign-level.
Fernandez and Christie were also suspected in another eight or ten murders:
Of Fernandez, a Metro-Dade Police detective said, “I would classify him as one of the most dangerous individuals we’ve had to deal with.” A Broward Sheriff’s Office captain said, “Having a mass murderer like that off the streets, the people of South Florida can rest a lot easier.” Both were convicted, but at sentencing, apparently swayed that they were sincere born-again Christians, the jury declined to give them the death penalty and instead recommended both get three consecutive life sentences.
In 2021, Marc Lopez, a former bodybuilder who said he’d partnered with Fernandez to sell steroids at the gym, said on a muscle podcast that he’d seen Gil get extremely violent.
Back then, “If there was an MMA, or a UFC, he would have been doing it, he would have been the champion. You gotta remember, the guy was a second-degree black belt, expert kickboxer.”
At the gym, he said, a bodybuilder had gotten into a cursing argument with Gil. Gil grabbed him by the sweatpants
and at the same time punched him square in the side of the face and knocked him unconscious. Then he picked him up, rag doll-style, from the back of his shirt and the back of the waistband of his sweatpants and he literally rammed his head into the plate glass window in the front of the gym so hard that the whole building shook.
And then he did it again, and dragged the man out the front door and left him on the sidewalk. Everyone in the gym saw it but was too scared to say anything. That included cops who were there, working out.
Another time, leaving a movie theater, Lopez said he and Gil saw a woman they knew from the gym; she was crying, she said, because her boyfriend was being a jerk to her. Gil approached him, the man told him off, and Gil “stuck his finger inside the guy’s mouth and pulled, and this guy’s whole lip and face basically ripped open like a seam, and blood shot all over the place… His whole face came apart.”
The Sun-Sentinel wrote that the Apollo gym had photos of some of their bodybuilding champions on walls above mirrors. At least two of them had since been murdered.
My friend actually photographed the statewide “body sculpting” competition that May of 1981, photographed Reve, and delivered her pictures to her. By the time I asked him to find them, they were either gone or too far buried in his photo archives. But The Miami Herald had photographed the winner. She was from Sunrise, nearby the Apollo Gym, and although I couldn’t confirm whether she’d trained there, it was possible.
A 1994 story described John Walsh an apparent bodybuilder himself:
In her August 1981 police interview, Reve had said she’d regularly worked out at the gym, which Hubert Christie confirmed to Jack Hoffman:
Hoffman’s notes include this about Christie, which he didn’t include in his typed report:
“O.C. connected” – that’s cop shorthand for organized crime. So at some point, Hoffman came to know that.
Reve said she sometimes took Adam with her to the gym, apparently when he wasn’t in school or she didn’t have anyone, like her mother-in-law, to take him for a few hours.
At the funeral service, the chapel had a guest sign-in book. Detectives had made a copy of all the signatures, and in 1997, after the file was opened, Hollywood allowed me to view its evidence box and I wrote down the names of a few notables who had signed the book:
There was Bill Collins, mentioned previously as a co-worker of Walsh, but also Bert Christie. He was later alleged to be involved in a major Mafia hit at the end of July, 1981 – and then Adam went missing – and then he came to the funeral service in the second week of August. Hoffman interviewed him within the next two weeks, he must have already seen his name in that sign-in book.
Lopez said that Gil hit on women bodybuilders who he was training. “He had a couple of regular clients who were females that I knew he had gotten involved in. He ran around on his wife a lot back in the day, and he didn’t really make any bones about it.”
Looking back, were these good leads which Hoffman previously didn’t have?
For an alleged mob hit, Christie was said to have dismembered the victim and dumped him in water – the same week that Adam disappeared.
Or Fernandez, convicted of leaving the bodies of drug dealers on the banks of a remote canal in 1983, was said to do steroids and cocaine and was highly volatile and was thin-skinned and hit on women he trained. Reve said she’d intended to go to the gym on the afternoon that Adam disappeared, and afterwards never went again. Wouldn’t – or shouldn’t – the cops have considered whether Reve had refused him – and he’d taken Adam?
Beyond a speculative motive, there’s no evidence for it – unlike Dahmer, for whom there is evidence and witnesses but no motive, other than he just liked to pick up people and dismember them.
Next on Adam Walsh: America’s Missing Child:
Episode 41: The much larger criminal investigation against Allan Rivenbark
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