Key Takeaways
- Sam Ippolito claims his brother Joey returned to a Los Angeles apartment on the night of the 1994 murders with apparent blood on his hands and asked him to discard a bag containing a heavy object.
- Newly unsealed records show Joey later became a federal informant and shared information about O.J. Simpson’s alleged disposal of the missing murder weapon, though prosecutors never called him to testify.
- Sam later tried to retract his account after the New York Times refused to pay him, while former prosecutors and Joey’s relatives disputed his alleged involvement. The LAPD says the case remains open.
The brother of Joseph “Joey” Ippolito, a friend of O.J. Simpson, reportedly told The New York Times that Ippolito returned to a Los Angeles apartment around midnight on the night of June 12, 1994, with what appeared to be blood on his hands and a bag containing a heavy object.
Sam Ippolito’s account, published in the Times’ Oct. 18 re-examination of the O.J. Simpson case, raises questions about whether Joey Ippolito helped dispose of evidence after the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. But the allegations remain unproven, and Sam later sought payment from the Times and attempted to retract his account after being refused, saying he could no longer distinguish memory from confusion.
According to Sam’s initial account, Joey had left earlier the evening of June 12, 1994, to help a friend. After returning, Joey allegedly stuffed his clothes into the bag, asked Sam to get rid of it, and went to shower. Sam said he tossed the bag into a dumpster near a construction site on Doheny Drive. Its contents were never confirmed.
Sam also said he overheard Joey speaking with Al Cowlings, Simpson’s longtime friend, about “helping” Simpson that night.
Joey was a mob-connected convicted drug trafficker who escaped from a Florida prison in May 1994, weeks before the killings. He knew Simpson through Cowlings and died in 2006.
After his arrest in August 1995, as Simpson’s murder trial neared its conclusion, Joey became a federal informant. Newly unsealed records first reported by the Times show he provided authorities with information about Simpson’s alleged disposal of the murder weapon, which was never recovered.
A December 1996 prosecution memorandum, unsealed at the Times’ request, described Joey as a “remarkable source of information.” Information he supplied reached Los Angeles prosecutors during the trial, though he was never called to testify.
The Times also reported that Joey may have been waiting at a private airport for Simpson and Cowlings on the day of the Bronco chase, potentially to help Simpson leave the area.
In the 2007 book If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer, Simpson described a hypothetical scenario involving a friend who helped dispose of the weapon and bloody clothes.
But the new reporting includes significant caveats. David Kelley, the former federal prosecutor who wrote the memorandum, told the Times he did not believe Joey participated in the killings. Lead prosecutor Marcia Clark said she had never heard of him and would have been informed if he had supplied credible evidence. Joey’s friends and relatives also disputed suggestions that he was involved in the murders.
The Los Angeles Police Department told the Times that the double-murder investigation remains open. Simpson was acquitted in the criminal case on Oct. 3, 1995, and found liable for both deaths by a civil jury in 1997. He died in April 2024 at 76.
