More than 30 years after the trial of the century, nobody sits in prison for the Brentwood murders.
The knife never turned up. Detectives searched dumpsters, woods, and even an airplane waste tank.
But newly unsealed records point to one mob-connected informant who claimed to know where it went.
The Limousine Escape Artist Who Ran With OJ Simpson’s Inner Circle
The New York Times recently persuaded a federal judge in New York to unseal a court memo that sat hidden for three decades.
The memo centers on Joey Ippolito.
Most folks never heard the name. Ippolito grew up around New Jersey’s DeCavalcante crime family, where his father ran with the mob, and he spent his younger years racing cigarette boats in Florida. He also ran drugs up the East Coast, and in 1981 the feds nabbed him for helping move 20 tons of Colombian marijuana to Long Island. He served three years.
Fresh out of prison in the late 1980s, he landed in Los Angeles and started managing an Italian restaurant near the Santa Monica beachfront. And that’s where he got tight with Al Cowlings, the ex-football star best remembered for driving a certain white Ford Bronco.
Cowlings and Simpson went back to high school. They played together in college and in the NFL.
Ippolito and Cowlings hiked together and walked the beach together. Cowlings later wrote a judge saying Ippolito helped him kick a cocaine habit that might have killed him.
But Ippolito had a funny way of fighting cocaine. Federal agents ran a sting on him and arrested him in Los Angeles in 1992 for moving the very same drug through his Hollywood connections. A jury convicted him the next year, and a judge gave him 10 years.
He made it about eight months. In May 1994, Ippolito slipped away from a work duty at a minimum-security prison in Florida and hopped into a car he had called. His own lawyer later told a court it was the only known prison escape by private limousine.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Weeks later, on June 12, 1994, somebody butchered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman outside her Brentwood condo.
Federal Prosecutors Rang Los Angeles and Nobody Picked Up the Phone
US Marshals already suspected the escapee had a line into the Simpson camp. Marshal John Cuff told the Times that after the Bronco chase, police found the number for Ippolito’s old prison mess hall tucked in Cowlings’ wallet. Detectives also found photos of one of Ippolito’s girlfriends inside the Bronco itself.
The marshals chased him coast to coast for more than a year. They finally staked out a pager store in New York’s Little Italy and spotted a man with a full head of hair who looked an awful lot like their balding fugitive. Cuff grabbed the hair, pulled off the toupee, and asked, “What’s with this?”
Ippolito just smiled. Then he started singing.
Federal prosecutors in New York later put his cooperation on paper in a sealed letter to the court. They called him “a remarkable source of information.” And the first case they listed was the Simpson case.
According to the letter, Ippolito’s friendship with Cowlings and others gave him knowledge of Simpson’s alleged domestic violence, drug use around the couple, the flight from police, and “his disposal of the murder weapon.”
David Kelley, the former federal prosecutor who wrote that letter, told the Times he remembered Ippolito describing a knife concealed around Simpson’s property. Kelley said Ippolito picked up the information from a close Simpson associate, though he declined to name the person. Kelley also said he did not believe Ippolito took part in the killings.
Cowlings didn’t answer the paper’s calls, texts, or letter. No one has ever charged him in connection with the murders.
Now here’s where it gets ugly. New York passed Ippolito’s information to Los Angeles prosecutors while the trial was still going. The prosecution had already rested. Closing arguments hadn’t started.
One Los Angeles law enforcement official involved in the prosecution told the Times a federal official called in the summer of 1995 to say Ippolito had information and would talk. That official remembered Ippolito balking at “being the snitch of the century in the trial of the century.” Swamped with tips, Los Angeles let it drop.
Kelley sees it differently. He doesn’t remember Ippolito dragging his feet, and he said any refusal would have violated the cooperation deal.
Lead prosecutor Marcia Clark told the Times she never heard of the man. “The fact that I was never so informed establishes he had no credible or relevant evidence to provide,” Clark said.
But Kelley recalled a string of conversations with the Los Angeles team, including Clark and fellow prosecutor Christopher Darden. Darden declined to comment.
Maybe somebody’s memory slipped after 30 years. Maybe a message died on somebody’s desk. Nobody can say for sure. But a prized federal informant offered a lead on the missing murder weapon in the most watched trial of its era, and Los Angeles never ran it down.
And the LAPD already had his name. In September 1994, detectives sat down with NFL star Marcus Allen, with Darden in the room, and asked whether he knew a “Joey Ebalito.” Their own report botched the spelling.
A jury acquitted Simpson in October 1995. A civil jury later found him liable for the two deaths.
The Snitch Walked Free and His Brother Wanted a Paycheck
Ippolito did just fine for himself. At a closed hearing in 1996, Judge Kimba M Wood called the government’s letter “one of the strongest letters I have ever received, possibly the strongest.” She sentenced him to time served for the escape, and the government agreed not to prosecute him for five years of California drug dealing.
Records show he got out in 1998. He died in 2006, and his obituary described him as a self-employed restaurateur.
So a mob-connected trafficker who busted out of federal prison in a limo got the softest landing the law allowed. Two grieving families got an acquittal and a civil judgment. Draw your own conclusions about which side the system bent over backwards for.
Then there’s the brother.
Sam Ippolito told the Times he picked Joey up in Florida after the escape and drove him to Los Angeles, where the pair stayed at an apartment belonging to a stylist friend. Sam said Joey left around 6 pm on the night of the murders, saying he needed to help a friend. Around midnight, according to Sam, Joey came back carrying a bag with something heavy inside and what looked like blood on his hands. Sam said he heard his brother call Cowlings and say he had been “helping” Simpson, and that he tossed the bag into a dumpster along Doheny Drive.
The friend’s attorney called the bloody-hands story absurd.
Sam told the paper he was “100 percent” sure his brother was with Simpson at the scene. He stuck with that account for months.
But in a later conversation, Sam asked to be paid. He said someone had “offered a ton of money” for his story, and he wanted to take back what he had told the Times.
Joey’s friends and other relatives say Sam can’t be trusted. And Sam has paid a price for his brother’s loose lips before. In 1997, a mafia gunman shot him repeatedly and ran him over with a vehicle, retaliation that authorities tied to Joey’s cooperation with the government. Courts later convicted the gunman of attempted murder and witness tampering.
Everybody Tells a Different Story About OJ Simpson’s Last Secret
Joey Ippolito handed out different versions to different people over the years.
Longtime friend Eddie Trotta said Joey once phoned him claiming he had told law enforcement that Cowlings hid the knife and later got rid of it. Trotta figured Joey was spinning yarns.
Rapper Fat Joe told a podcast audience that Joey once said he sat at an airport with a private jet during the Bronco chase, ready to help Simpson and Cowlings escape. Fat Joe also described a birthday party at Joey’s home where Joey handed Simpson a machete to cut the cake and declared that Simpson did it. Simpson chased him around with the blade, apparently as a joke.
Investigators did find a passport and a disguise kit in a travel bag inside the Bronco.
Former DEA agent Rob Brisolari, who spoke regularly with Ippolito, said Joey told him Cowlings called after the murders looking for help getting Simpson out of the area. Ippolito said he told Cowlings that would be tough, since he was on the run himself. Brisolari doubts Ippolito had anything to do with the killings. “It seems a little far-fetched to me, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” he said.
And then there’s Simpson himself. In June 2006, he sat down with ghostwriter Pablo Fenjves in a Miami hotel suite to work on what became If I Did It, his so-called hypothetical confession. His opening line once the recorder started: “You know I couldn’t have done this alone.”
In that telling, a friend named “Charlie” rode along to the condo and later took the bloody clothes and the knife off Simpson’s hands. Fenjves says he came up with the name himself. Charlie Ehrlich, who faced charges alongside Simpson in a 2007 Las Vegas robbery case, once hinted on tape to a film producer that he might be the guy. Ehrlich now says he never met Simpson until years after the murders and only played along to cash in.
The Brentwood Case Still Has an Open File and a Price Tag
The LAPD says the case remains open. With no conviction on the books, the department told the Times it has an obligation to keep pursuing justice, and cold case investigators quietly made calls about potential leads within the past year.
Retired lead detective Tom Lange isn’t buying the accomplice talk. He told the paper he never believed Simpson had help, and that any real evidence would have come out by now. Only a handful of the hundreds of tips he handled involved Ippolito.
Robert Blasier, who worked on Simpson’s defense team, leaves the door cracked. He called the accomplice theories possible. “But none of them amount to proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.
Fair enough. Nobody has produced new forensic evidence. The star witness took his story back and asked for money. The informant is dead. Simpson died of cancer in April 2024 at age 76, still claiming innocence.
But the money keeps flowing. Simpson tried to profit off a fake confession. Ehrlich tried to sell a movie. Sam Ippolito wanted a check. Peacock plans to roll out a two-part documentary called OJ’s Accomplice in December 2026, promising never-before-heard eyewitness accounts about Simpson’s inner circle.
The only people who never got a dime’s worth of answers are the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
And that ought to stick in the craw of anybody who watched that Bronco crawl down the freeway on live TV. Los Angeles had a federal informant dangling a lead on the murder weapon while the trial was still alive. Prosecutors were too buried, too distracted, or too sure of their own case to chase it. Then a jury let Simpson walk.
Maybe Ippolito was a con man peddling a story to save his own hide. Men in his line of work usually are. But the federal prosecutors who knew him best leaned on him in mob cases, and a federal judge called their praise of him possibly the strongest she ever read.
When a city’s justice system won’t follow that kind of tip in a double murder, nobody should wonder why the file is still open three decades later. And with nearly every key player dead, recanting, or selling the rights, it may stay open for good.
Sources: The New York Times, investigative report on Joey Ippolito and the Simpson murder case; BroadwayWorld, Peacock documentary announcement; Seat42F, Peacock documentary premiere details; MediaPost, commentary on the Peacock documentary; Gray News via WECT, FBI release of Simpson records and Simpson’s death.