Timothy Lance Brodie won big – $16,000 big.

He won so big at a local Indian casino that when news hit the street about his five-figure score, it drove three men to kill him for the cash, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

"Greed got the best of these three guys behind me," Deputy District Attorney Andrew Smith said in his opening statement to a Sacramento Superior Court jury, as he nodded back toward the three suspects on trial for murder in Brodie's Dec. 19, 2008, shooting death in Rancho Cordova.

According to Smith, defendants Derrick Dwayne Sam, Genneledward Miles Jr. and Shannon Shorter kidnapped Brodie and brutally beat him in an unsuccessful effort to force him to reveal where he had stashed his money.

When Brodie tried to run, they shot him dead in the parking lot of the Laurelhurst Drive apartment complex where Miles lived, the prosecutor said. Then they torched Brodie's car and left it to burn on Wayside Lane in Carmichael, Smith said.

Smith told the jury it was Sam – a partner of Brodie's in a south area marijuana growing and distribution operation – who set up what turned out to be the torture killing of the 30-year-old victim.

First, Sam telephoned Brodie to tell him he had arranged a pot sale, the prosecutor said. Brodie left his house on Lemon Drop Court in south Sacramento about 8:30 p.m., Smith said.

About two hours later, authorities reported a 911 call at the Rancho Cordova complex, where they found Brodie's body beaten with a blunt object in the head and around the knees and fatally shot through the side.

In the meantime, three masked men with guns doubled back to Brodie's house. They used his garage door opener to get inside, then broke into his house through a back door. Smith said they tied up Brodie's wife with a vacuum cleaner cord, forced her and the couple's 3-year-old son into a back bedroom and screamed at her to come up with some cash.

"Where's the money, where's the money?" Smith said they yelled.

Although the masked gunmen didn't get any money, Brodie's wife told police they cut down 35 marijuana plants growing in a spare bedroom.

"Tim will explain it all when he comes back," one of the men told the wife, Smith said in his opening statement.

All three defendants have fairly extensive criminal histories, according to online court records. Sam, 33, has two felony drug convictions and a pending felony domestic violence case. Miles, 29, has been to prison three times on felony convictions for criminal threats, drug possession, grand theft and a weapons charge. Shorter, 35, has two felony drug convictions, one for assault and one for a firearms violation.

Their lawyers all told jurors Wednesday their clients should be acquitted at the end of the trial.

Defense attorney Rod Mayorga, who is representing Miles, suggested the key evidence against his client – his alleged admission to the killing – is unreliable.

The statement is expected to come into trial third-hand from the girlfriend of an associate of Miles. She will tell the jury Miles provided her boyfriend with details of the killing, such as the stolen pot plants and the use of the garage door opener, that only somebody tied into the killing could have known, Smith said.

William White, who is defending Sam, said word of Brodie's gambling win was widespread in their circles, and "there are wolves out there" who were ready to jump on it.

Shorter's attorney, Jim Granucci, said his client did not know Brodie and had nothing to do with his killing.

Smith told jurors the case will be based largely on phone records that showed Sam in close contact with Shorter around the time of Brodie's disappearance.

Records taken from cell tower hits show the two of them near the Cobblestone Apartments about the time Brodie was killed. Sam's cellphone also pinged off a tower near Wayside Lane in Carmichael about the time Brodie's car was burned, Smith said.

The prosecutor told jurors forensic evidence will connect duct tape wrapped around Brodie's hands and feet to carpet fibers in Sam's Emerald Creek Court residence. DNA taken from blood spatter on the ceiling of Sam's residence also matched the genetic material of the victim, according to Smith.

Smith said the evidence suggested it was Miles who did the shooting. Investigators retrieved a human-figure shooting target from inside his apartment that had been punctured by .40-caliber bullets, the same size of the projectiles used to shoot Brodie, according to Smith.

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