Talking Dateline: The Prince, The Whiz Kid, & The Millionaire

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Hi, everybody, and welcome to Talking Dateline. I'm Lester Holt.
Today, our guest is Josh Mankowitz who's going to talk all about the Prince, the Wiz Kid, and the Millionaire.

Yes, it's an intriguing title, and it's a more intriguing story. If you haven't seen it, you can go watch the full episode on Peacock or listen to it.

on the Dateline podcast feed and then come right back here and you'll be totally nourished on this story. All right, to recap, it was retired art collector and Palm Springs socialite Cliff Lambert.

He suddenly vanished in 2008. Investigators uncovered an elaborate plot by a group of grifters to steal Lambert's money and his life.

And then when Cliff's remains were found nine years after he disappeared, it was hardly the end of this twisted and shady saga, which we'll get into during this talking Dadline.

Josh, let's get right into it. This was not weeks in the making.
This wasn't months in the making, which is sometimes typical for Daideline. This was literally years in the making.

Yeah, this took about two and a half years. I think the first interview I did was Tyson Ranch,

which was in Las Vegas. And then after that,

we went to Palm Springs and we did that wonderful interview with Barbara Wisby. The richness of the characters in this episode, I thought really made a difference.

And I also thought Palm Springs as a character in itself kind of made a difference. And it gave you a sense of sort of what life was like there and also sort of like who Cliff was.

Eddie was a sensational interview. We did him early.

And then, you know, the case took forever, partly because of COVID and partly because there were two trials because the first verdict got thrown out.

And then

the two of the defendants, Danny and David Roplogel, managed to delay sentencing for a long time. And so that made everything last longer.
So it was a lot longer than most Dateline episodes.

Yeah, and one of the things I pulled away from this program is that Cliff, in the end, was a lonely character. He surrounded himself by a lot of people, his buddy Eddie.

But at the heart of it, he strikes me as someone that was rather lonely.

One of the things that I thought sort of kind of is going to hit home with all Dateline viewers is that there were some very recognizable themes in this.

Cliff was a lonely person who made some foolish romantic choices. You know, Cliff lost a lot of his friends to AIDS in the 80s and 90s.
So he was not just lonely, he also had lost a lot of people.

And, you know, there's no way that that doesn't weigh on you. So, you know, I think Danny figured out

that Cliff didn't have a family and he didn't have a lot of close friends.

And I think they thought, if we make this guy disappear, basically no one's going to notice in the amount of time that we need to clean out his house, sell the artwork, and get all his money.

And were it not for Eddie,

they were just about right. The way this came to light, at the end of the day, it came apart because a guy was moving some stuff and a real estate agent

kind of blew the whistle. Yeah, the real estate agent got a listing for the house and couldn't figure out why the person selling it wanted such a small amount of money for what

a house that was going to to bring a lot more money, but they wanted to sell it like in the next couple of days.

The neighbors across the street, who I think were sitting out on their porch having an afternoon cocktail, realized they hadn't seen Cliff in a while, saw a U-Haul across the street with somebody putting stuff into it.

And it's like, that's kind of weird. I had no idea Cliff was moving.
They called the cops.

So, and Eddie, you know, Eddie, who was waiting for Cliff at the Festival of Lights, which is an annual thing in Palm Springs.

It's the event that Eddie and I were walking around during that you saw on the show. But, you know, it was Eddie who first thought something's wrong.
Eddie came across as a true friend in this.

There was no romantic link between these guys, but there was real great depth of affection. Cliff and Eddie clearly were very good friends.
And Eddie, he was like, no, no, something's wrong.

If Cliff had left town, I'd know about it. And he went into the cops.

But the fact that Bustomante was taking stuff out of the house, some of which he was putting in the U-Haul, and some of which was in his hotel room, which police found, everything about that said that Cliff was being victimized in some way.

And that's kind of what made the cops think

there's a crime in progress here.

And what they didn't know at first was whether this was some kind of crime involving Cliff, who might either was being held against his will or maybe was dead, or whether Cliff was somehow complicit in this, because that was some of their thinking in the early days.

Like, he's disappeared, and he's going to say, I'm out of town, and he's going to say everything's been stolen, and then it's some kind of insurance scam.

But eventually, they figured out that the problem was

something has happened to Cliff, and it was a long time before they figured out what. Let's talk, if we can, for a second, about the Nepalese prince or self-proclaimed prince in this.

He kind of appears midway in this and takes on

a large role. Yeah, I mean, look, he's the kind of guy that you want to have if you're doing a grift.
I mean, he can play a role. He sounds like he's from another country.

He's got this very posh, erudite, you know, I went to the best schools accent. He's also sort of of an indeterminate ethnicity, which means he can be the British lawyer.
He can be the Nepalese prince.

It's not exactly clear what Kajal's backstory is.

And part of the problem here is that you can't really trust anything coming from anybody's lips here. But he certainly presented himself as this prince and did that very, very effectively.

And if you're doing a con, you need somebody who can be a good actor. And he definitely was.

He got on the phone at one point regarding the artwork and it took me a second to realize, wait a minute, we've heard that voice. Yeah, that's right.

I mean, these guys were very sharp about some things and they were incredibly stupid about other things.

Like it didn't occur to them, if I pull a U-Haul truck up to this guy's house that we've just murdered, people are going to see it. They might call police.

They did not realize that Cliff had a friend who was such a good friend that he would call police if Cliff didn't show up.

One of the mistakes they made was leaving a voicemail message, which later would be essentially identified as being Kashal. I mean, that's the cops.

That was like the light bulb moment

for the cops. They're like, wait a minute, I know who you are.
You posed as

that British lawyer, and

you're part of this con. But Kashal is the guy who let the murderers into Cliff's house.
So, I mean, he's a fraud. He's a con man, but he's complicit in a brutal murder.

He's a lot more than just a fast-talking guy with a good accent.

We also hear directly from someone who was in the room at the time of the killing, who walked police, literally walked blow by blow through what ultimately happened.

I mean, the old saying, first squeal gets the deal.

That was was craig mccarthy he he pled to a lesser sentence he testified against the other defendants and he told police what had happened now in his version of the story he is sort of a bystander um i don't know the police believe that he was just a bystander but they needed to flip somebody to bring down this this this

web of lies and murder. And he was the guy they did.
Yes, I'm watching the episode and I'm watching my clock thinking, well, this thing's wrapping up early here.

We, you know, the case has gone to court. They've got a guilty verdict.
End of story.

No, this, this, I keep wondering, how do you know when you finish a story like this? And we still might not be finished. I mean, you know,

nothing would surprise me about this story. To the point, I mean, this story

ran at the beginning of this season of Dayton Line. It was supposed to run last season sometime.

And it couldn't because we didn't have the final

disposition of the case. You know, we want to be able to say in a story, this is how it ended.
Yeah, Lisa DiMaria,

what a fascinating character there. She is the, obviously, the prosecutor.
She's no nonsense. She's going to take this case to its conclusion.
She's also about she's also about that tall.

Is she really? I couldn't get a sense of that. Yeah, she's tiny.
Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, she was a go-getter and you're like, well, she's nailing these guys. And then everything gets turned on her.

and i don't think i i didn't see that coming i mean look if i had committed some terrible crime lisa lisa team maria is about one of the last people i'd want coming after me because she was relentless and she lived and breathed that thing for years and years and years and then she got the conviction that she had worked so hard for and then

because of the judge's remark uh the convictions were all were all stricken all reversed they had to have four new trials um and

they did not let her do the retrial. There is no official reason why that was.

I never got the full story out of her for that, but ultimately, I think justice was served by Rob Hightower, who prosecuted the case and got the convictions.

These defendants, though, you know, if you ever can give a murderer credit in this case,

they really turned the prosecution back on its heels. You know,

they definitely fought harder, longer, and more effectively than a lot of the defendants that we see on Dateline.

And of course, one of these defendants was themselves a lawyer, and the others were practiced con men who sort of knew how to take advantage of every loophole in the law. Ultimately,

the system won out, and they were convicted. Well, Josh, as you mentioned, we're going to get a little more insight into this.

We're going to talk to David Ketterling, one of our colleagues, a producer on this program. He'll be talking about Stephen Valentino.

This is a character you didn't meet in the actual broadcast, but he's got an interesting story to tell. We're going to have that when we come back on Talking Day Live.

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All right, welcome back to Talking Dateline. We're back here with Josh as well as David Ketterling.
He's a producer at Dateline NBC and was one of the producers on this program.

There was so much in this two-hour broadcast that some stuff did get left on the proverbial cutting room floor, including an interview with a guy named Stephen Valentino.

He crossed paths with Prince Kashul Narula and has a story to tell about his mother's missing jewelry. And Josh, why don't you give me a setup on this?

Well, I mean, look, Stephen Valentino is one of the guys that we came across while we were reporting this story. But the interesting thing about Mr.

Valentino is he didn't really have anything to do with the Cliff Lambert plot. He can give you some background on

what it was like to know Kashal Narula.

And ultimately, we decided that, first of all, you know, with the amount of material we had and the size of this story, there's some stuff that didn't make the final cut.

So that's why you're going to hear this now and not on the TV program. Okay, David, you want to set up the exact bite for us? Yeah.

So Kashal Narula lived with Stephen Valentino for a while, and Stephen saw him one day going in and out of his mother's bedroom and came home later to realize that all of his mother's jewelry had been stolen.

Which was worth a lot of money. Yeah, he was a jewelry collector, and he came home, the person who he thought it was his friend, ended up stealing a bunch of his mom's jewelry.

I went into my mother's bedroom, and the first thing I noticed was her

chest of drawers. The top

drawer was actually ajar. It was open.

And I walked over to it and I pulled it out

and it was virtually empty. Millions worth of jewelry missing.
What immediately went through my mind other than wanting to choke him to death was where is Kashal

right now?

Because he was the only one that was in that room.

So I called the Marin County Sheriff's Department. They came out.
They fingerprinted,

and basically they started searching for Kashal.

Well, it sounds like there are other stories to tell, Dave.

Nonetheless, the

crickets have their own story to tell.

I love that. I love the crickets.

The crickets were definitely a thing in that. But more importantly, it gets me back to this.
And the thing that I was curious about this whole program was.

There have to be more stories, more, you know, that this isn't necessarily a one-off. You know, we talked about Eddie and we talked about the neighbors, right? We didn't talk about Tyson, right?

Tyson, you know, got fleeced by Danny very early on, long before these guys, I think, had ever heard of Cliff Lambert. And he kind of, you know, thought, no, no, you're not, you're not doing this.

Not with me. You're not.
I'm going to find out what happened.

Because like the bank said to Tyson, like, you know, and the cops said to Tyson, like, we're not going to really do anything until someone gets hurt.

You know, it's just one guy stealing somebody else's money, and you got your money back from the bank. So, you know, we're not going to knock ourselves out.

Well, you know, let's say that San Francisco PD had gone after Danny and that he had been locked up. I don't know what would have happened, but Cliff Lambert might still be alive.

And part of what happened here was that, you know, conning somebody is not perceived as as serious a crime as conning somebody and then killing them. And unfortunately,

you know, none of the brakes were put on until Cliff Lambert was already gone. You know, I'm going to say one more thing about this, which is

Dave, who's joining us today, one of the two producers, is not just responsible for following this thing because he's not just a producer, but he's also a video editor and photographer.

And so, you know, normally we say,

you know, you can listen to this episode. It's right on the podcast feed, right?

But I would urge you to go to Peacock and watch this episode because part of what made this such a great episode are those pictures.

And part of why that all works is because of Dave, who was largely responsible for the sort of look of this and of making Palm Springs a character. And

looking at this episode, in addition to just listening to it, is worth your time. And that's because of Dave.

Well, Dave. Thank you, Josh.
All right. Palm Springs is such a beautiful place.
I mean, sometimes you can just point the camera and you get gold. So, but I really appreciate that, Josh.
It was

a long journey. Really was.

So at the end, the big surprise was Cliff and this

multi-million dollar art collection was not what it seemed. Nothing.
I mean, look, this is a story in which nothing was what it seemed. And

Cliff Lambert,

rest his soul, bragged himself into an early grave. He told everybody how much money he had.
He told everybody how valuable his art was. And it was all BS.

Like, you know, Cliff would, I mean, and again, like, how stupid were these killers? This guy had run an art reproduction business. Like, this guy sold that phony art.

Like, you think none of it was on it. You think he sells that, but he's got the real thing on his walls?

Like, I mean, that wasn't a giant leap of logic, but these criminals, these murderers, could not figure that out.

So I can't let you guys get out of here with talking about Barbara Wisby, who was a terrific character, gave a lot of insight into the lifestyle in Palm Springs. How did you come across her?

We found her through Karen Devine at KESQ in Palm Springs. She's the anchor out there.
And she's like, have you talked to Cliff's friend Barbara yet? And I'm like, no.

And she's like, well, she's a talker. And I was like, great.

When I did this thing,

I did producer booking interviews. And so we kind of had a chat.
And I sat her down. I said, you know, Barbara, you know, Palm Springs, what do you love about it?

And she's like, it's such a diverse place, you know, come one, come all, come short, come tall, come fat, come slim. You can all get in.

And I was like,

and you're like, that's getting on television. Yeah, that's going.
Yeah.

So I'm like, wow. And then the Barbara isms just kept coming.

Barbara's one of those people that, you know, and I'm sure all the other correspondents on Dateline, you know, would agree with me about this, which is after you interview them, you think, like, were you a witness to any other crimes?

Because I'll put you in any story that you want to talk about. Yeah.

Whose idea was it to put Mankiewicz in the driver's seat of a car? And it's, by the way, it's not the first time this season we've seen you, Josh, at the wheel. Yes.
Well, okay, I was not.

I was going to say, I was not at the wheel. I was in the back of the car where I can do a lot less damage

with Barbara, who was smoking innumerable cigarettes, we had the top down.

And I love how Barbara says to me, Do you mind if I smoke? I'm thinking, like, as if there's any way I could stop you, right?

You know, I'm like, yeah, go ahead.

First of all, you know, we should do more stories like that, right? In which we're driving around with the person. A lot of times we do the story.

We do interviews in cars, but one of us is driving, either the person that's being interviewed, which frequently is a law enforcement representative, or

I'm driving and I'm looking at the camera. I've done that a few times.
You know, the camera's in like the passenger seat.

This was great because this chauffeur interview with me and Barbara in the back seat and her with her cigarette,

talking about how La Rue

Cliff's parties were, which is a word I had never heard before and have never heard since.

Is it a word? We don't know.

I mean, it's a barbara word. It's a barbarism.
I'm willing to accept that it's a word. I don't know if Websters would agree with me, but hey, why not? We'll take a break here when we come back.

We're going to listen in on social media, say what folks are asking or curious about in this program.

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All right, welcome back, Josh and Dave Ketterling. We've got several questions about the crime scene that we want to bring to you.
Let's take a listen. Hi, this is Amy in Massachusetts.

I'm calling how the crime investigators missed the blood that would have been in the kitchen or the car trunk. And were they not using luminol?

Because I've learned about luminol on dateline and it seems to work in most cases. Thank you for another great episode.

I thought it wasn't possible to clean a crime scene so effectively that modern forensic techniques, and it's not just Luminol, who, by the way, should be paying us some kind of royalty.

It's not just Luminol. There's a couple of other products like that.
But I would have thought that modern forensic techniques would bring out blood.

I mean, the whole point of that is it finds blood and bodily fluids even after you try to clean them up, even after you make a really good effort to clean them up. But they didn't.

A certain amount of time had gone by. That might have helped.

I'm sure they bleached it, and by then the bleach had probably the bleach smell had disappeared because it wasn't like they were there the day after Cliff died.

Maybe they shouldn't have been grifters. Maybe they should have been house cleaners because they might have been better at that.
Okay, here's one.

We got a lot of viewers weighing in about Danny's sociopath cousin, Dennis. Hi, this is Catherine from South Carolina.

What was the experience like interviewing someone who actually identified as a sociopath? Thanks so much. Yeah.

Hi, Catherine.

Look,

I'm not sure I have ever interviewed anyone who self-identified as a sociopath.

That was a little surprising.

I also need to tell Dennis Murphy that Dennis Backwards is sinned. I don't think he's aware of that.

You know, Dennis, Danny's cousin, was a very interesting guy and a very important guy for our story because he tells us all kinds of things that happened behind the scenes.

And,

you know, at this point,

has not faced any charges. Yeah, he just kept himself out of it.
And here's Myla on Facebook. She adds, she says this about Dennis.

The self-proclaimed sociopath appeared most likable out of all these criminals. That doesn't say a lot, guys.

That's not the best commercial for you when somebody who says, I'm a sociopath. But yes, I agree.
He was by far

the most rational of all of those people. And then our viewer, Mila, goes on to say about the motive.
I understand money was the motive, but how?

I still don't get why those losers had to kill him since they knew very well how to con people without violence. Sickening, but it's just very confusing.
I think it's actually a very fair point.

I did find myself wondering about that, that, you know, you guys know how to con. Why kill? Yeah.
Well, I mean, look.

You know, I think originally, and Dave, check me on this, but I mean, I think originally the plan was to con Cliff out of money.

The plan was, you know, Danny, well, part of Danny's backstory, don't know how much of this or any of it is true, is that he

was abused as a younger man and that he wanted to create an app that would allow people to track sexual predators or people who are registered sex offenders in real time so you'd know if you were near them.

Danny originally approached Cliff with, was, I want you to participate in this business venture with me.

And when, when Cliff didn't bite on that, and in fact, threw Danny out of his house for sort of, you know, going through his computer and going through his office, that's, I think, when Danny also got the idea, wait a minute, if we disappear this guy, no one will notice.

And so this kind of escalated, this original plot escalated to separating Cliff from his money to killing him, selling his house, his possessions, and his artwork.

I would say also it was like, you know, they were all kind of trying to one-up each other on who's the better con, you know, including Dennis.

And then when Kashal got out of jail or out for the jewelry heist, you know, I'm thinking maybe he was a little bit desperate or something, and it escalated at that point.

I mean, Danny's whole thing was he was financial crimes up until Cliff Lambert came into the picture.

And Danny, and there is no allegation or evidence that Danny was present when Cliff was killed. I mean, it is a little bit like he was

the director of this plan because he sent all those texts. But Danny definitely wasn't there at the time that Cliff was killed.

And we have, before we get out of here, we have a video question from one of our Dateline ambassadors, Chuck Deasy76. Let's give this a watch.
Hi, Dateline. Hi, Josh Mankowitz.

It's Charles, aka Chuck Deasy76. My question is for Josh.
There were a lot of amazing fashions in last week's episode. I just want to know, was your tie bloodstained?

I think you're sitting in an interview. It's like dark blue at the top, and then it starts to get red, and the tie actually matches your jacket.
Please let me know. Thanks in advance.
Bye.

Hi, Chuck Deasy. No, I do not have a bloodstained tie, although it did kind of look like that.
No, it's just a blue and red striped tie.

But great to see Chuck Deasy, who is a friend of our broadcast and

literally one of our most loyal viewers. Chuck, you rock.

You did bring the outfits in this show, though, Josh. You always look dapper, but you did look great in this show.
I was trying to look very La Rue.

And you did.

All right. Well, guys, that's going to do it.
Talking Dateline.

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