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Kill Gus Boulis's Killer?

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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.

It was a cool, dark evening, and a half-moon was rising as they slid the body into the inky water. Brandreth said the alligators would eat the body. "I was hoping he was right," Lehmann says in the deposition. "I'm from New Jersey. I don't know about this place. To me, I think alligators are everywhere in the Everglades, just walking around."

Lehmann would later conjecture that Brandreth killed Citranglo for giving his brother Keith a lethal dose of drugs. Citranglo had even dealt drugs at Keith's funeral, Lehmann says in the deposition.

But, as with the story of the Boulis killing, there are problems with Lehmann's version of events. He claims Brandreth shot Citranglo four times in the back and the blood splattered everywhere. However, the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's Office concluded Citranglo was shot only once, at close range in the chest — which would mean there was likely little bleeding.

And Hbaiu and Keneuker contradict each other on the number of shots, the purpose of the meeting with Citranglo, and who wanted him beaten.

Moreover, Brandreth denies pulling the trigger. On the day of the murder, he says, he was laying stepping stones in his dad's garden in Weston. (His father cannot corroborate the story because, conveniently, he died in 2005.) A few days later, on January 9 or 10, Brandreth recalls, he received a call from a friend named Eva while he was shopping at Home Depot. "They found Steve," she allegedly said.

"Hey, where is he?" Brandreth recalls asking.

"In the Everglades."

"What the fuck is he doing there?"

"You really don't know, do you?"

The murder, it seems, was all part of doing business. In May 2002, Lehmann ordered Brandreth to go to Tijuana, where he was to buy 1,350 vials of ketamine for $10 each. They'd be labeled as nutritional supplements, shipped to Miami or New York, and sold for $60 apiece. Lehmann's cover was a legitimate business, a vitamin and health-goods store on South Dixie Highway in Coral Gables called Super Nutrition, federal agents say.

Lehmann had moved to a white stucco mansion with thick foliage and an iron gate on Pine Tree Drive near the LaGorce Country Club in Miami Beach. Brandreth sometimes crashed there. He fondly recalls they often invited strippers over to get naked in the pool — and kept a pair of clippers handy in case anyone needed a last-minute pubic-hair trim. There were always eight or ten swank rides in the driveway: Corvettes, Range Rovers, Jaguars. "I liked Tom's lifestyle," Brandreth says. "He was out every night with Benzes, girls. He made a lot of money."

Things got ugly, though, in June, when Hbaiu was arrested in Swatara Township, Pennsylvania, for stealing a camera. Soon local cops discovered he had been convicted of federal drug trafficking, had been indicted in both California and New York after agents found ketamine and guns in his Columbia dorm room, and was on probation. When questioned, Hbaiu started singing about Citranglo's murder. (He would later be sentenced to two years in prison for the trafficking and other charges.)

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