Transcript of Talking Dateline: Under the Bay Bridge

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It's Blaine Alexander, and we are talking Dateland. I'm joined today by Josh Mankowitz to discuss his episode Under the Bay Bridge. Now, if you haven't If you haven't seen it, it's the episode right below this one on your Dateland podcast feed. So make sure to go there, listen to it, or stream it on Peacock, and then come right back here. Now, just a recap, when tech executive Bob Lee was fatally stabbed in 2023 on the streets of San Francisco, concerns grew over violence in the city. Investigators discovered that the crime was actually far more personal involving the suspected killer's sister, allegations of sexual abuse, and a rather convoluted theory of the potential motive. Well, for this talking Dateland, we also have an extra clip about the star witness in the trial, Kazaar Mominy, and what it was like for Bob Lee's brother to watch her take the stand and defend the man accused of killing him. All right, Josh, let's talk Dateland. How are you doing? I am good, my friend. How are you doing?

Good. Good. Great to see you.

My first question, actually, this one came to me as I was watching. A lot of time in the Dateland world, our stories don't necessarily make national news before we air them on timeline, right? Our audience is hearing about them for the very first time when we bring them the story. This was clearly the opposite. This is a story that I remember when it first happened. I remember watching it. We covered it so heavily on NBC. How does that change your process? Either the storytelling process or even just how does that impact when you're trying to get people to do interviews with you?

Well, it makes booking interviews a little more difficult because when you're the only people covering a story, it's much easier to deal with the people that you're trying to book for an interview because they don't have 100 other requests. But the thing that makes covering a national story on Dateland difficult is that it can rob us of one of the things that we need date line, which is the suspense. In this case, you have a certain base of knowledge out there among the public. The thing that really, I thought, helped us in this is that, first of all, we covered the trial and we're airing pretty close after the trial ended. It was just a couple of weeks ago. We have one more advantage, which is what you thought, you the viewer, what you thought when this happened. Turns out to be not really the story that was there. A lot A lot of people saw that video of Bob Lee stumbling around downtown San Francisco and then didn't really connect with anything after that because just the general flow of news. They remember, Oh, yeah, that guy got stabbed in San Francisco where crime is so terrible.

That's what people thought. Then it turns out, of course, it really wasn't that at all.

Let's talk about San Francisco. I mean, this really provoked a very strong response about the city. It's fair to say this shook the area and people far beyond it as well.

I think a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that this had to do with the crime problem on the streets of downtown San Francisco, and it didn't.

You talked about, of course, in the story that he still had his wallet, he still had his watch. That was pretty quickly disproven. The police certainly knew immediately that this wasn't a robbery.

But the police did an interesting thing, which is they did not say anything to refute that part of the story, saying, We don't really know what this is, but we're pretty sure what it's not. They didn't do that because Because what they were fine with was the idea of that story, the robbery stories, just sitting out there because they thought, Well, whoever is responsible, and we don't know who that is at this point, they're going to think we're looking for downtown stick-up men or something, and we aren't.

And they'll let their guard down, right? Right.

Yeah. That's what you want if you're doing an investigation.

One thing that really stood out to me in this story, Josh, there was so much video I mean, obviously we had, yes, a video of him stumbling after he was stabbed, but the video of his final moments before that, I mean, the accused killer allegedly demonstrating his crime, all of these different things. Yeah.

I mean, then the police out, they got all of this stuff. That's one of the first things that happens in an investigation. They were able to not just see where Bob was walking around before he collapsed and before the police and paramedics found him after his 911 call, but they went back in time on the video and they saw that white car. Then they follow that white car, and it leads back to the Millennium Tower. The video gets progressively better of the car. As they go back in time. Like the first video at the crime scene is not so good, but then they see it a couple of blocks away heading toward the crime scene, going back in time. They're like, Okay, that's a little better. They go back a little farther, they go to the Millennium Tower, and that's pay dirt. You have this roshamal on thing where they're walking out of the Millennium Tower, he and Nema. The question is, what do you see when you see that video? Is that one guy who knows he's about to commit a murder and the other guy who thinks the danger, whatever it was, has passed, we're fine, we're going to go hang out, we're good?

Or is that Nema who is no longer angry at Bob and Bob who is carrying a knife and planning on attacking Nema?

It's exactly like you said. You look at one of those pictures, it's like, do you see a woman with a shal or do you see a dog with a smile? What are you seeing? Let's talk about Bob Lee. I love the way that you unfolded it. I mean, first, of course, you talk about who he was to his family, and then it's like, yes, here's who he was in the bigger sense. For a lot of us, it's like, oh, my God, that's the guy who founded Cash App. That's immediately what a lot of people go to because he's somebody whose influence was certainly felt by all of us in some way.

Cash App, Square, Mobile Coin. In a way, this was robbery because we got robbed of all the stuff that Bob Lee would have created down the line. So many of the things that Bob Lee was involved in and would have done would have continued to change people's lives and make life easier for everybody and better for a lot of small businesses and people like that. He was an interesting guy in that when police began their investigation, they couldn't find anybody that didn't like Bob Lee. Everybody talked about him as being a wonderful guy, a great great friend, a really supportive coworker, a guy who had made a lot of money, but who had turned down probably bigger money because he wanted to help people. The interesting thing was, I didn't know his name. You may not have known his name before this happened, but you knew his work. Inside the tech world, he was very well known. This hit like a bomb because this was a guy that was very well known, very well liked, and very well regarded.

I I have to say I have a new favorite term from this episode, code hard, play hard. I mean, it was one of those things where I heard it, I was like, Oh, I have a surprisingly clear picture of exactly the type of lifestyle you're talking about right now when he said that. Yeah.

No, I mean, look, A lot of these guys are just like world's biggest nerds who have conquered the world through tech. And what do they do on their time off? Sometimes, as one guy said, it's playing wee tennis all night long until dawn.

That was so funny.

Sometimes it's doing something at a different level. Sometimes it's drinking all night long, and sometimes it involves the drug world. One interesting thing, there was a lot of talk about sex at the beginning of this case, that that was going to be part of this Silicon Valley party underworld that was going to be unearthed. In the end, this was drugs. Drugs ended up being the through line that connected all these people. It turned out to be way less sex than I think people were initially expecting to hear about.

I'm curious, as you were going through your interviews and talking about people who knew Bob and also who were in that culture, did you find that anybody was hesitant to dive into that?

Bob's friends were pretty open about it. Krista, his ex-wife, who remained extremely close to him, was open about it, and nobody was really worried about it except Bob's brother, Oliver, who was concerned about the extent to which he thought Bob was self-medicating because there had been some depression in their family, and he thought Bob was dealing with that.

I think that we got a beautiful picture, though, of the duality of Bob's life, right? Because we heard from Krista Lee, like you said, and then we heard from their two kids, right? How he was just this truly loving dad, like some real concrete examples of how he taught them things, doting on his kids.

Krista was not worried about his drug use. She never saw that as imparing him personally, him professionally, or his relationship with the kids. The kids clearly did not feel like they had lost part of him because of that. They were both very attached to him and saw him as a really involved caring, thoughtful, present parent.

Yeah. You get a real sense of loss, I think, from the kids. They added a lot. When we get back, Bob Lee's brother thought Nema Momene's testimony was outrageous, but what did he make of the accused killer's are on the stand? We've got an extra clip from Josh's interview with Oliver Lee coming up.

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I want to talk about Czar Momene. I think it's very fair to say that Czar Momene was one of those unforgettable characters. She was so interesting. She became a key part, but it was very clear that she wanted nothing to do with this trial. What did you learn about her through the course of this?

Her conduct played a huge role in setting in motion whatever happened next, whatever you believe. But she said something or did something. She suggested a scenario in which something happened that made Nema angry. This is the prosecution's point of view, and made him angry that Bob had put Khazar in that situation. Position. Now, we do know that whatever happened to Cazar, whatever it was, and that's very murky at this point, we know that Bob wasn't present. We know that Bob had already left at that point. But did Cazar, in some subsequent conversation with her brother, blame Bob for what had happened to her? Or did Nema just take that from her, that inference, like, Oh, Bob must have had something to do with this? That we're never going to know. The sense that you got from this trial was that she would have said or done just about anything to keep her brother out of prison. She's on the stand and she says, My brother is not the person that killed Bob Lee. She said that. Well, her brother admits being the person that killed Bob Lee. That was the problem with her on the stand is he had said, I did do it, but it was self-defense.

That was their defense. He tried to kill me, and I ended up stabbing with his own knife.

I mean, you illustrate it right there. Nema's defense attorney, who, by the way, is being paid for by Cazar, right, says, Don't believe a word she has to say. Don't believe anything.

Which is something you don't hear every day. In the end, the question of what happened that night between Cazar and Bob and Jeremy Boiven is murky. Jeremy Boiven very explicitly says there was no sexual assault, and Cazar later apologized to me. We don't know exactly what happened, and we don't know exactly what Cazar said about what happened. We do know that Bob was not present at the time, which makes that motive, as you said before, really convoluted because it requires that Nema be furious at Bob for something that Bob was not present for. That's the problem with the prosecution motive.

While we're on the subject of Cazar, a lot of people had thoughts about her, clearly, including Bob Lee's family. We have an extra clip of Bob Lee's brother, Oliver Lee, talking about his impressions of Cazar Mominy.

Cazar testified she was heartbroken about Bob's death. You believe that?

That's when I started talking to the media. Whenever we were going to try, we were trying to stay out of the spotlight.

But that was too much.

It was too much.

I felt that she was trying to get on stand and claim this position as some widow or trying to take this whole, Oh, I knew Bob so well. I'm heartbroken by this.

And I felt she was trying to take that.

And the reason I started talking to the media is because I was not going to let her take that from our family. Because, no, we're heartbroken. You helped cause this to happen. You made this happen. It is like, she... Very few things have angered me more. It was so hard to be able to see that. To her, trying like, your brother already killed my brother. Now, you're trying to take our grief away to repair your self-image and to repair your image in society in San Francisco? Absolutely not.

We're not doing this.

Yeah. Without taking anything away from Oliver, because I completely understand him in this, there was some relationship between Cazar and Bob. It It appears to have not been primarily romantic or sexual. It appears to have been social, and it certainly also connected over drugs. But were they close? They were because she sent these texts that night after Bob died, but she didn't know that Bob was dead, thanking him for handling Nema's anger in such a classy way, which was a big part of the prosecution's motive, was these texts in which Cazar essentially acknowledged Nema was furious at Bob, and Bob calmed Nema down. I do completely understand where Oliver is coming from, but the relationship clearly did exist.

When you look at the Mominy family as a unit, and I'm so glad that we heard from the mother and all of this, too. What Krista said at the end, just angry at the family in its entirety. I will never forgive this family for what they did to Bob. I thought that that was really interesting, but it made me wonder, was Have there ever any talk of anyone else facing charges in all this as an accomplice or anything?

I mean, no one else has faced charges. I think what Krista is referring to is not just the issue of whether or not evidence was disposed of, but the question of Bob and Cazar's relationship and what Cazar said to Nema about what happened that night, which in the eyes of the prosecution and also the Lee family, made Nema so angry that he took a knife from Cazar's apartment and then stabbed Bob with it. That's why they say that family.

I want to ask you about the defense attorney, because one, I love the back and forth between the two of you guys. Obviously, you held your own. It was interesting. As soon as you introduced him and said he came from Miami to help with this case, I said, Aha, Miami. He seems like an attorney who came from Miami.

When we first met, well, actually, both times when we met, he was wearing a very expensive suit and some very expensive low gophers with a big logo on them. This was a guy... I mean, look, Sam Zagina is a guy that if you are in serious trouble and you have some serious coin, he's the guy you want. So make no mistake about this. They came, I thought, that close to getting a mistrial in this case. They did a very good job. Look, it's fun sparring with guys like that. You'll be doing plenty of that in the months and years ahead.

But it was for our listeners who watched the episode and who are listening to us right now, one, it was a master class on how to do those types of interviews, right? Because I think for people who see the end product of Dateland, when we're prepping for these, there's a lot of, you know the story in and out. You anticipate what your interviewee is going to say. You anticipate the arguments they're going to have. It really is just an interesting way of going into a conversation and thinking about all the different angles they're going to throw at you.

You got to know the facts of the story before you go in because people, not everybody, but people are going to try to sell you a different version of it. That's part of the job here.

Absolutely. There are a lot of just still, I guess, hanging chads in this story, the sentencing phase. I do want to ask you, though, about the deliberation. Five days.

Yeah. I mean, it was long, and many people thought it went past the amount of time that the judge had told the jurors, this is how long the trial will take, including your deliberations. So many people, this reporter included, many people thought this is going to be a mistrial, which would have been, I think, a pretty big victory for the defense. For sure. I think that would have been exactly what Sam Zang wanted. Because look, in a mistrial, you've already seen the other guy's hand. You know what cards they have. You know how they're going to... I don't know that there were that many more ways to present the evidence that the prosecution had presented. They put it out there, and the motive was always convoluted. That's one of the harder things to understand. The forensics, they're a little more clear. The video, that's a little bit more clear. You know Nemo was the last person to see Bob before he was stabbed. But then at the last minute, they came out with a verdict. Not guilty of first-degree murder, but guilty of second-degree, which is going to be when he's sentenced, it's a 16-year minimum.

I think the prosecution was happy with a 16-year minimum. I think the family see as a measure of justice in this. Here's one interesting thing. At the beginning of this case, people saw this as crime is the great equalizer because even the rich can't protect themselves in the streets of San Francisco. Of course, that wasn't this was about. This wasn't about how much crime there was or wasn't in San Francisco. But in the end, the Lee family are like a lot of other families we cover, which is they got the verdict that they wanted, or at least one close enough to it, but they've discovered that the criminal justice system is not a time machine. Whatever happens to Nemo Momene now, this trial, that verdict, doesn't bring back Bob Lee, and your life is split in half. In that way, the Lee family is like all the other people that we cover on Dayline, which is there's the part before, and then now there's the part after.

Yeah, and there's nothing to change that. Josh, we are going to talk about questions from social media. A lot of people had thoughts about this episode, so we've got that coming up.

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Okay, we're back, and Josh, we have a couple of audio questions this week. First up, let's hear from Amy Brownstein-Berry on Facebook. Here's what she had to say. Hello, Dateline. I wanted to ask what the friend thought that Bob was using as an implement for cocaine, the Fence claims it was a knife, but I was wondering if the friend actually commented on what that was.

The answer is we don't know for sure, but there was discussion from many people that what Bob Bob used to do cocaine was a collar stay, one of those little plastic things that fits inside your shirt collar to keep it stiff as you're wearing it with a tie, and that that would have been about the right size to be the object shown in the video. By the way, I believe that no collar stay was recovered from Bob, which doesn't mean anything because he could have thrown it away. Men tend to have a lot of those. I mean, I probably have hundreds of them.

Interesting. Do people keep them? I mean, obviously, they're in your shirt, but do you keep them just in your pocket Are they usually found loose in your pocket somewhere?

No, I've never seen anybody carry them around. Sometimes when you send your shirts out, sometimes they come back with those stays in them. Usually when you buy the shirt, they have them, and you're supposed to take them out before you send them to the laundry. Otherwise, they'll get pressed into the shirt, which is not good. So you want to take them out before the laundry. This is the vital premium content that Talking Dayline listeners expect, by the way.

I said we've learned a lot. We've learned a lot here about. Okay. This is a fun question. Jabor Estefan on Facebook asked, has anyone ever said to Josh Bro, the defense attorney, called you Bro. Have you ever been called Bro in an interview before? I noted that one, too.

I mean, there's a guy on Turner Classic Movies who does it all the time, and it's really irritating. But I can't think of anybody else. He has a right, though. Well, I mean, maybe technically. But no, I don't... But that's who Sam Zangeneh is. I certainly took no offense at any of that. That's how he talks normally to everybody. But hey, I've been called better, I've been called worse.

Okay, we've got another audio question. This one is from Amanda Lekman-Depalice on Facebook. Let's take a listen. Hi, Josh. Why did the judge not allow the video that police took of Nema talking to the private investigator and pantomiming the stabbing Why did he not allow the jurors to see what his mouth was doing in that video? Why did they cancel that out? Thank you in advance.

The video, what's called the pantomime video, which is Nema, depending on who you ask, either pantomiming or not pantomiming, stabbing Bob Lee in a conversation with his then attorney's private investigator in a parking lot. The defense argued that that was attorney work product. Talking to an investigator is like talking to your attorney. You obviously would not be able to take a video of a person talking to their attorney inside the attorney's office. That's clearly attorney-client privilege. The issue was that it happened in public, that it happened in a parking lot where anyone could have seen it. The video was blurred because the judge, I think, was splitting the baby here and saying, Okay, you can see what he's doing, but I'm not going to let you hear what he said because anybody walking by might not have heard what he said. So that's why the court blurred Nema's mouth. So you can't try to make out the conversation, but you can see what he's doing. And what the prosecution says he's doing is pantomiming, stabbing Bob Lee twice, and then throwing the knife away.

Well, lots of audio questions. I love the audio questions, by the way. This is a lot of fun to hear actually from people's voices.

I want to encourage everybody to submit audio questions.

Here's something that was funny, Josh, that people noticed, and I have to admit that I noticed this one, too. Fans noticed just how tall Sergeant Dittmer is. When you guys were walking side by side, I think down the street, Sylvia NYC wrote on X, I don't think I've ever seen anyone tower over Josh Mankowitz on Dateland. What was the deal there? How tall was this gentleman?

Well, first of all, Keith does tower over me. When Keith is over 6 feet, I'm 5'9, and Keith is over 6 feet tall. But Sergeant Dimmer, I think is 6'5. A lot of people on social the other night were saying things like, Wow, is Josh five, three. I'm like, And he's normal-sized? I'm like, No, he's very tall.

Josh, this was a fascinating episode, and it's always good to talk Dateland with you, my friend. Thank you.

So great to see you.

That's it for talking Dateland for this week. Remember, if you have any questions for us about stories or about Dateland, you can always reach us 24/7 on social media @datelandnbc. If you'd like to hear your voice on an upcoming episode of Talking Dateland, please send your questions as an audiophile. We cannot to wait to hear from you. And Keith got a brand new podcast, murder in the Moonlight. When a couple is found shot to death in their quiet farmhouse on America's Great Plains, the investigation includes four suspects, spans three states, and comes down to a single shiny clue, a gold ring found at the scene of the crime. Follow murder in the Moonlight now and get two new episodes a week starting February 17th, completely free. Or subscribe to Dateline Premium to start listening now. Premium subscribers get early access and ad-free listening. And as always, we will see you on Fridays on Dateline on NBC. Thanks for listening.

So he was like, messaging me all night, and then he just ghosted me. No way. Yeah. He was like, You're so hot. I want to come over.

Okay. And I was like, Cool.

And he was like, I'm on my way, driving over right now.

And then?

Nothing.

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