Doesn't that contradict his extortion defence? And he's showing he's not in fear of his life like he's suggsted.
The way I hear it when I listen to the tape, and this is just my opinion, is that Charlie is NOT suggesting that they kill whoever is blackmailing them. It’s difficult to explain, because Charlie tends to ramble and digress and talk as though he is someone else. But knowing this, I think that’s what he is doing here. I think he is speaking as though he were the blackmailers, saying how they think, that they know they are messing with Tuto, and “he could be a big problem,” and they might have to kill him/he might have them killed. To me, he seems to be saying that it’s strange to him that these people actually approached him and tried to blackmail him, because they should know who they are dealing with (Tuto/Katie) and how dangerous he can be. When you read the transcript this doesn’t really come through, and I think the cops, when they heard it, jumped to the understandable conclusion that he was, in fact, threatening to kill someone, and so they included it in the probable cause affidavit and it continues to be repeated, zombie-like, in these warrants. But when I listen, I hear differently, taken in the general context of what he’s talking about, which is the fact that the blackmailers, who mentioned Tuto, must know they are messing with some bad people.
A similar confusing moment occurs toward the beginning of the tape, when he’s talking about how they approached his mom and not his dad. The transcript says “and that’s smart, because my mom hasn’t told my dad anything.” That‘s how it’s transcribed. But Charlie doesn’t stop there. When I listen, what I hear is a little aside, and then the rest of the sentence, like this: “That’s smart, because — my mom hasnt told my dad anything by the way —- but [and then he says wtte of “they probably thought that as soon as my dad got home, she would tell him somebody approached her.”]. He then goes on along those lines, saying it is smart that they went through his mom to get to his dad, rather than go to his dad directly, because his dad might have a gun and it could turn into a shootout. (That’s when he says he’s got a gun, too, and who are they going to believe, the periodontist or the dead gang member?) So it all fits together, it’s about how they went through his mom to get to his dad, because they knew she would tell him and they wanted to avoid a shootout.
The only thing that DOESN’T fit is the part about how his mom hasn’t told his dad anything. That would NOT make the cops seem smart, at all, because if his mom hadn’t told his dad anything, then going to her was pointless. But he’s saying the cops are smart. So it makes more sense, to me, that he saying they were smart to go to her because they thought she would tell his dad, not that it’s smart because she DIDN’T. (Which is how the transcript reads). The part about how his mom hasn’t actually told his dad was just a little aside, because Charlie to me speaks in a very scattered way. The people doing the transcribing should put the little dashes for where Charlie interjects/digresses. Context is everything.
