Charlie Adelson's Girlfriend Did WHAT With The Money?

0:00This is the Big Breakdown. A long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers podcast and True Crime Today. This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruceke. Have you seen the new Hulu Doc? Welcome to the family. The murder of Dan Markella. It's about the Adelson family. Charlie Adelson, Donna Adelson, Wendy Adelson. Their friends, Catherine McBonna, the whole band of weather, the whole crew comes in this four-part docu-series. And if you've not followed this case, you're probably like, whoa, I got to go learn more about that on the YouTube. Well, thank you. Welcome. You found the right place. We're about to put together a four-part series. Now, keep in mind, we've covered this case from way back. If you want to actually watch the trial coverage and our commentary on it on the channel,

1:02there's thousands of videos for you to do that. But if you're wanting to kind of get the recap, we're going to give you a four-episode series here that really dives into what happened here in four different lanes over the next handful of days. We're going to be talking about the hit. That's today's video. We're going to talk about the dentist, Charlie, his dad. We're going to talk about the matriarch, Donna, and Wendy as well in our fourth video. The unindicted co-conspirator who has never had charges against her, maintains her innocence, got somewhat of a deal to say some things exactly what that deal is and how a protector, we don't know the answers to those questions exactly, but whatever it is so far as a cause to her to end up behind bars.

2:04It may mean that that's part of the agreement or it may mean she just didn't know enough. We're going to dive into all of it. I'd love to get your thoughts in the comments section and substacking YouTube as we discuss the Adelson's. This is a wild, wild case. Hanmar-Kell filed a motion in Family Court to keep his mother-in-law from being alone with his children. That's going to be a fun one to have to do. His boys were coming home saying, Grandma says you're stupid. She says you're trying to take away her sunshine. That's lovely. That's Donna. That's who was telling the kids her ungrange children. Grandma is trying to take the sun shines away from me. You are my sun shines. Then the kids go back to Dad. Why is Grandma saying this? Because Grandma's a narcissistic cont. Oh, wait, you can't say that to children. You can't say that to kids.

3:05They're hearing for that motion was scheduled, then continued. I never put back on the calendar because why? Well, Dad was dead before the judge ever heard it. What's a little kink in plans? On July 18, 2014, two men drove five hours from Miami and a rented Toyota Prius, followed Dan from his gym to his garage in Trescott, Drive in Tallahassee, and shot him twice in the head. He was 41, a Harvard-educated law professor at Florida State. A father who dropped his two sons at preschool that morning. He built a career studying criminal punishment theory, authored a book called Privilege or Punished. Founded a widely read legal blog called Prof's Blog and held the chair at FSU's Law School. He grew up in Toronto, came to Florida for the work and stayed for the boys. He died at a hospital that night.

4:06He died at the hospital that night because two men who killed him didn't know him were hired. And the family, the prosecutors say, ordered the hit, paid for it the way they ran every other piece of family business through the dental office and monthly installments with the grandmother signing the checks. What? Yeah. An interesting way to pay for a murder? Right there basically on company letterhead? Everyone involved. Can we get your signature on this, too, please? Okay, great. We just want to make sure the paper trail is really rock solid when we get convicted. Dan Markel married Wendy Adelson in 2006 and both worked at FSU's Law School. The marriage fell apart after their two sons were born. Wendy filed for divorce in September of 2012. Court records say Dan came home from a trip and found the house was empty.

5:09There's no way to get the divorce. On the bed. The divorce was finalized in July of 2013. Then came the fight that made Dan Markel a target. Wendy wanted to move the children to South Florida near her parents and her brother Charlie, a judge denied the relocation permanently in June of 2013. The boys had to stay in Tallahassee near their father. They can't just move because grandma's needy because grandma is a needy, petulant 13-year-old in her brain and thinks the world revolves around her because she's married someone who's made it that way and trained her children to do the same except for the one who ran away to New York and is only the seemingly sane member of the family. No, you can't have your children moved, your grandchildren moved, be close to you. Because you want it when the father says, I'm sorry, I'm working over here.

6:12This is where I live and I'm the father. So my needs, my desires for my children supersede that of grandma. That should have been the end of it. In a family that respects court orders and respects the actual parents, it would have been. But Donna Adelson doesn't respect people, doesn't respect parents, doesn't respect really anything outside of Donna Adelson herself. According to the trial testimony, she offered Dan Marquell $1 million to agree to the relocation, $1 million to let her daughter move the grandchildren south. So he would have less time with his own children. So grandma could have that as if there are a hotel on monopoly making a trade.

7:13I'll tell you what, I'll give you a park place for your grandkids or for my grandkids for your kids. I'm like a good deal. Okay. The court had already said no, he said no. And for a family accustomed to buying its way through every problem hearing no twice, was apparently one time too many. Dan Marquell had won. He won by just wanting life to continue as he had every right to have a continue. He was working. He had children, he got a divorce. He wasn't planning on moving anytime soon and he didn't want his children moving far away. He has every right to say nope, we're staying here. That's how that works when you produce children. You have rights. Especially when you're a good parent. The system told him he was right. The children stay in Tallahassee. The system told the Adelson's they lost.

8:13The question was what the Adelson's did with that answer. Wendy's mother Donna Adelson ran the books of the family's dental practice near Fort Lauderdale. She'd pushed harder than anyone for the move. Wendy's brother Charlie was a period, a period dentist earning between three million and three and a half million dollars a year according to the prosecutions forensic accounted at a later trial. This was a family with resources and a problem they couldn't buy or litigate their way out of. It's a shock for the Adelson's. Charlie made a remark that would haunt him. A joke. A joke. Well, buying Wendy at TV is a divorce present because it was cheaper and hiring a hitman. He told the joke to Wendy to her boyfriend, the people he barely knew. A man so confident in his own untouchability that he was handing out the punch line to his own crime. A neighbor spotted the light colored Prius leaving Trescott drive after the shooting.

9:15Surveillance found Dan's gym showed the same car followed him home that morning with a distinctive black side mirror and a sun pass toll transponder device that automatically plays tolls on Florida highways. Mainly South Florida highways. Tallahassee didn't have toll roads. The killer is bought a car with a built in receipt for every mile they drove. Investigators pulled toll records, long I-75 that traced the Prius to a rental agency in North Miami. The car had been rented July 15th to the 21st. The agreement was the name of Lewis Rivera. And a phone number on it led to his childhood friend, Sig Frito Garcia. Rivera was the leader of the North Miami Latin King. It's already in federal custody. A racketeering charges. Garcia was the father of two children and the mother of Garcia's children, a woman named

10:18Catherine McBanoa. It was also dating Charlie Adelson. The mirror later told investigators that he and Garcia had driven to Tallahassee once before in June of 2014, a month before the murder, but lost Mark Helen went home. They came back in July. Self-unrecorded place, both men's phone near Mark Helen's home and near premiere health in Fitness Center while he was inside matching surveillance footage of the Prius and the parking lot. One woman connected the hitmen through their children and to the Adelson family through the bedroom. That's really the hinge of the entire case after the murder. Money made that connection impossible to ignore. Two months after Dan Rishant, McVanus started collecting paychecks from the Adelson dental practice. She never worked there, not a shift, not a day, not an hour. Donna personally signed 44 checks to her anyway. The total payments from Charlie to McBanoa came to approximately $138,000, documented in

11:21financial records, entered into evidence at four separate trials, prosecutors trace payments, starting two months after the murder and running for nearly two years. It was a steady flow of money from a dental practice to a woman who was only connection to that office was a man who ran it and the woman who kept the books. The cash portion arrived in brown paper bags according to a trial testimony with $100 bills stapled in a thousand dollar increments. Donna had literally washed the money before handing it off. Launder did. Donna thought laundering money meant putting it in the washing machine. Literally. Her son admitted on the witness stand years later, like he was describing something his mother did with the towels, with a bit of embarrassment that, yeah, she is that stupid. How did I know when laundering the money I wasn't supposed to use tied with bleach?

12:29Lewis Rivera cooperated with prosecutors and pled guilty to second degree murder for a 19-year sentence. He testified at every subsequent quintrial. His account, Garcia recruited him, Garcia pulled the trigger and the motive was custody. A very cold Garcia telling him the lady wants her two kids back. She wants full custody. Rivera said he has paid $35,000 for his role. That's one cooperating witness's account, a gang member who cut a deal. The defense attacked Rivera at every trial whose story never changed across four proceedings and nearly a decade of cross examination. But Rivera alone couldn't prove the Adelson's order to hit. He was a gang member with a deal. His testimony placed the hitman at the scene in the money in Megbona's hands, but it couldn't prove what Donna or Charlie knew or when they knew it. The financial trail showed money moving from a dental office to a woman connected to the killers. Suspicious, yes. Proof of a murder contract. No. Prosecutors needed the family to react to pressure and they needed that reaction on tape.

13:33So the FBI built a trap in April 2016, an undercover agent named Oscar Jimérez walked up to Donna Ailsen outside her Miami condo. He handed her a newspaper article about Dan's murder with $5,000 written on it and a phone number. He dropped two names, Katie and Tutto. Megbona and Garcia. The message was designed to sound like someone from the killers. The killers world knew what happened and wanted more payment. What mattered wasn't what Donna said to the agent when mattered was who she called next. She didn't call the police on her husband. She called Charlie three times in a row. But strange, your hands, you a murder article and names the dollar amounts and you've never heard any of it. You call 911. If you already know every name on that paper, you call your son. Charlie met Megbona at the Dulce Vita restaurant nearby, Miami Beach where the FBI recorded 41 minutes of conversation.

14:34The tape sat for years to garbled to use under a former CIA audio expert who enhanced it and Charlie's voice came through a little more clearly on the possibility of being investigated. Quote if they had any evidence, we would have already gone to the airport. Unquote. Megbona's no show dental job. Yeah. Quote. You work for the office now because the checks are from there. Unquote. When everybody was there the next day, did any of you take any money? End quote. His defense later argued the tape was exculpatory. Charlie also said, I've got nothing to hide, but the tape is only half the evidence. The bump produced the other half is Donna's phone log. Three calls to Charlie zero to police. That doesn't need a CIA expert to interpret. In April of 22, state attorney Jack Campbell announced that the enhanced recording led to Charlie Adelson's indictment and arrest eight years after Dan Smarter. The case was built from the ground up and every layer pointed back to the same dental

15:37office, the same family and the same checks. Dan Markel's sons were in preschool when their father was shot. Wendy moved them to South Florida within days and later changed their last names to Markel or from Markel to Adelson. Dan's parents Ruth and Phil were cut off from their grandchildren. The custody order that was supposed to keep the boys near their father died with him in that garage. But a toll transponder, 44 checks to a woman who never worked at a dental office and 41 minutes of tape into Miami Beach restaurant would eventually bring the whole family down. That's coming up next. Press subscribe. See you don't miss it. I'm going to be dropping you. The whole series of Adelson's in the coming days. If you want the full deep dive into it beyond what you saw in the doc on Hulu, hit subscribe.

16:38We got it for you and give us your thoughts in the comments section on YouTube or our sub stack, those links are in the description. And if you want to take the audio with you, if you know what I mean, you're watching YouTube right now, probably be sure to take the podcast with you. The link is in the descriptions, hidden killers to search it wherever you get podcasts. There's a QR code on the screen right now. If you're watching us on YouTube, follow that. It'll take you to Spotify or Apple podcasts. And you can press sub on the or follow on the podcast. We appreciate that. And you won't miss any more in our series. All right. It's a lot more to come. Until next time, my name is Tony Birsky. We will talk again real soon. But more on this case and others, then press subscribe now and don't miss a moment of true crime coverage from Tony Birsky and the Hidden Killers podcast. This is Hidden Killers with Tony Birsky. There we go.

17:43Here I am. I know a lot of you are watching the welcome to the family doc on Hulu right now. If you're not, it's pretty good. And getting your first taste of the Adelson's. Isn't that bursting with country fresh flavor? Oh, yeah. Ooh, have seconds on that, right? What we're doing here, I'm helping you kind of break down the whole damn story. In case you're like, I got to learn more about that. Well, welcome. We're going to help you do that. We already have one video in the can as they say. And it should already be up at the time you're watching this. This is our second in this series. This is the dentist. This is we're going to jump a little bit more into the dental practice and kind of explain some of the logistics of what the hell was going on with the Adelson's, the allegations and what's been proven in a court of law as well. And as cohesive, entertaining, sometimes darkly funny because it's horrific.

18:49How stupid these people are. Way that we can. I know. It's a horrible thing, but sometimes we have that end to get through it. So I welcome your thoughts. Like I said, in the comments section on Substack in YouTube. Here is where Charlie Adelson's extortion story starts sounding less like terror and more like financing. According to Charlie, the man threatening to kill him. We're willing to accept monthly payments. There was family's dental practice. A layaway plan, if you will. No cash dropped under a bridge. That one desperate handoff and then silence a payment plan. You remember Charlie? Charlie said he was bamboozled here that he had mentioned being frustrated and that be a gritty to kill Dan and never actually ordered it. It was his girlfriend who got some people involved and they did it.

19:49And now they want to be paid and he wasn't planning any of this. So how about a layaway plan? How about you pay us an installments through checks at the dental practice and have mom sign them? That's some of sounds like mad lips. Doesn't it? It sounds like something I was just kind of making up as I was going. No, that's exactly what happened. Charlie did not deny that money moved. He did not deny the Catherine McBonnaw received cash and later received checks connected to his family's dental practice. He did not deny the calls, the continued relationship, the hitman joke or the conversation recorded at Dulce Vita. His answer was that everybody had the story backward because according to Charlie, Dan Marquell's killing was not something he arranged. It was something like Frito Garcia and Lewis Rivera carried out on their own after learning about the ugly custody fight through McBonna.

20:52Then Charlie said McBonna came to his home and told them the man wanted one third of a million dollars. So she's friends, you know, and she's got the baby daddy that's in the gangs down in Miami. And they're just like, whoa, that sounds like a problem for us, the superhero gang fighting villains, fighting for custody battles of rich white people villain. Oh wait, that's not a thing. They don't just like it's not. It's not like a side hustle where it's like, I'm going to order the products from Amway and then I'm going to sell them and then I'm going to get my commission. Like, no, this isn't like a multi level marketing scheme for murder. They're coming to claim their rewards, but that's how Charlie was trying to pitch it. He had 48 hours to pay or he and his family could be killed.

21:57Charlie testified that he opened his safe and handed over about $138,000. The rest should be paid in monthly installments of roughly 3000. So yes, the defense presented jurors with what amounted to a payment plan for death. Now before we turn that into a punchline, let's give Charlie the strongest version of his own argument. People who are terrified do do irrational things. They freeze. They hide. They decide the police will make everything worse. They stay close to dangerous people because they believe those people are also protecting them. Fear is not orderly and it does not have to make sense to somebody sitting safely in a courtroom nine years later. That partisan fair, the problem is that fear had to explain absolutely everything. It had to explain why the people supposedly demanding immediate payment under threat

22:58of death were willing to wait month after month. It had to explain why McBona began receiving checks from the Adelson Institute about two months after Dan was shot. Financial investigator Mary Hall testified that there were 44 checks had done Adelson signed every one and that the twice monthly payments continued until May of 2016. Apparently the threat was urgent, but the alleged extortionist respected the dental office billing cycle. The defense got an important concession out of Hall. A bank record can show where money went, but it cannot tell a jury why. A check does not arrive stamped murder payment or extortion payment. All agree that the financial records alone cannot tell jurors which story was true fine, but they could show the system. They showed who got paid. They showed when the checks began. They showed who signed them. They showed that was not one terrified handoff in a parking lot.

24:03Became a reoccurring business arrangement running through a legitimate family practice. And that is where Charlie's explanation stopped being one frightened man's odd decision and became an entire alternate operating system. Jurors had to believe the safest way to satisfy people threatening to kill a millionaire was to put the woman carrying the threat on something that looked like payroll and let his mother handle the checks. And the jury heard from Lewis Rivera. There was no choir boy arriving with clean hands and a civic duty speech. He pleaded guilty to second degree murder and received a 19 year sentence that runs with a federal sentence. He had every reason to cooperate in the defense and every reason to attack him for it. Rivera testified that Garcia recruited him. That Garcia was the shooter and that the two men traveled from South Florida to Tallahassee.

25:03According to Rivera, they followed Dan after he dropped his children at preschool, went to the gym and returned home. Dan was then shot in his garage. He died the next day at 41 years old, leaving two young boys without their father. Rivera said the job came through McBonna and that the motive involved a woman wanting her children back. He also described payment and $100 bill stapled into $100 bundles. Prosecutors presented evidence that Charlie routinely kept stapled cash the same way. Could Rivera lie? Of course. Cooperating witnesses can lie with astounding confidence when freedom is on the menu. And the prosecution was not asking jurors to admire Rivera. He was asking whether his account fit the rental car. He had to travel, the surveillance, the relationships and the money.

26:04And then came McBonna, the bridge between Charlie and Garcia. Her credibility problems were even larger. Her first trial ended without a unanimous verdict. Her second ended with convictions for first degree murder, conspiracy and solicitation. She was serving life. She admitted that she lied during her own proceedings because she was trying to save herself. That's not a footnote. That's the first thing any honest analysis is going to say about her testimony. So she comes in a little, a little damaged, if you will. The defense argued that cooperation was her only imaginable path towards a different future. Prosecutors said she had been promised a sentence reduction and that is exactly why jurors had to treat every word she gave rather carefully. And Bonna denied extorting Charlie. She testified that Charlie is the one who proposed the killing. That she recruited Garcia and that later payments were connected to dance death rather than

27:09legitimate work. She described the initial cash, cash rather as a snutty staple but wet. She also said she believed Charlie's parents are possibly Donna, the allegation in the dark bizarre story goes, is that Donna literally washed the money in a washing machine to launder it. These are the criminal masterminds redeling within this case. I know that last part was her belief. Not proven by a video of Donna at the same giving $100 bills, a delicate cycle. That would have been a big hit. This is where people tend to outrun the evidence. The wet cash was touched to money. The claim about who watched it was McBonna's interpretation.

28:10So it should be, it should stay that way technically. But come on. The wet cash was still one more place where the two stories collided. Charlie said he surrendered money because he was afraid McBonna said she received money because the killing had been completed. Jers did not need to decide that McBonna had suddenly become trustworthy in every area of life. They had to decide which account required fewer miracles. And then there was Charlie's own voice. In April of 2016, the FBI stage, it became known as the bump. An undercover agent approached Donna with material suggesting that someone connected to Rivera wanted money. Donna contacted Charlie. Charlie later met McBonna, the Dolce Vita restaurant while investigators recorded the conversation. Parts of that recording were difficult to hear. The state used enhanced audio, prepared by former CIA audio forensic specialist James

29:15Keith McLeven. But Judd Stephen Everett warned Jers that the transcript was not evidence. They had to rely on what they actually heard. That's important because the recording was not a movie confession. Charlie did not sit down, order an appetizer and announce the entire conspiracy for a microphone. Prosecutors argue that the guarded language sounded like people protecting a shared secret. The defense argued that it sounded like a man trying to understand a new extortion threat. And came to the line about the airport. Charlie was recorded saying that if authorities had evidence, we would have already gone to the airport. He testified that he meant there was no evidence because he was innocent. Prosecutors heard something else. Not a declaration that he would never run, but a statement that the presence of evidence if in the right hands might change travel plans. Could that sentence be interpreted more than one way? But Jers did not hear it floating alone in space.

30:16They heard it beside the checks, the cash, the prosecutions, fake employment theory, the calls and Charlie's refusal to contact law enforcement while claiming armed men were threatening his family. They also heard the hitman joke. Charlie admitted joking. The television he bought Wendy as a divorce gift was cheaper than hiring a hitman. He called it one of the stupidest things he had ever said and insisted it was only a joke. And one disgusting joke does not prove an agreement to kill anybody. But once Dan was killed by men connected through Charlie's former girlfriend, that joke stopped being harmless background noise. He became another fact. Charlie needed the jury to seal inside its own little container and never placed next to anything else.

31:16That was the entire defense problem. Okay, let's accept the initial cashess fear. Now accept the checks his fear, accept McBonnus continued access to Charlie as fear, except the business records as a delivery system, except the guarded calls, his confession, except the airport line as confidence, except the hitman joke as meaningless, except that Charlie believe McBonnus was innocent for years, even though his secret account supposedly could have explained the case. Any one of those things might be possible. But all of them had to be true at once. Charlie was arrested on April 21st, 2022 after Leon County Grand jury charged him with first degree murder conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder. He chose to testify at his 2023 trial, which means jurors to not have to imagine how he would explain the contradictions. They watched him do it. On November 26th of 23, after roughly three hours of deliberation, a jury found him guilty

32:20on all three counts. On December 12th, Judge Everett sent in Sim to life without parole plus two consecutive 30-year terms, Charlie maintained his innocence. His directive field later focused heavily on whether years of publicity made it impossible to receive a fair trial in Leon County. It wasn't a ridiculous concern of 130 prospective jurors' question, 96 had heard about the case. 54 said they had formed an opinion in 53 of those believed Charlie was guilty. But all 54 were removed. Then the appeal ran into a problem. No amount of courtroom drama could really fix procedure. The first district court of appeal ruled on July 1st, 2006 that the venue issue had not been properly preserved because defense counsel did not file the required written motion with supporting materials and did not renew the objection before the jury was sworn. The court also looked beyond that mistake and found no record showing that the jurors

33:21who actually served were biased. The convictions and sentences were affirmed. So yes, the paperwork hurt the appeal, but the court did not simply hide behind a technicality. It also reviewed the jury selection record and found no fundamental unfairness and the people who actually served. Charlie Adelson's extortion defense did not fail because frightened people, always act logically. They do not. It failed because every piece of evidence leaded its own private exception to common sense. And every exception somehow transformed a prosecution fact into proof that Charlie was the real victim. Some of our people sometimes believe that complexity is the same thing as credibility. And enough detail, credit enough alternate explanations. Maybe somebody will notice that the entire machine is running backwards. But jurors are not required to admire the engineering.

34:23One strange decision can be misunderstood. Two can be coincidence, but the whole story requires us to rename the money, reinterpret the relationships, ignore the business structure and believe that men threatening immediate death accepted a multi-year installment agreement through a dental office. That's not just an explanation anymore. It's a bizarre sales pitch with a payment plan for murder. Your thoughts in the comments section on substacking YouTube. I'd love for you to weigh in. There's more to come in our series. Donna's next. Oh, Donna. We're going to dive deep into her world. And after that, Wendy, where is she today? Press subscribe. She don't miss any of it. Take her podcast with you wherever you go. So you can listen at work in the car at Jim wherever the QR code is there on the screen

35:26on YouTube. If you're watching us right now, just scan it and press subscribe. Spotify Apple Podcasts wherever you get them. We'd love for you too. Be a regular listener. Until next time, my name is Tony Bruceke. We will talk again real soon.