Johnson gestured pulling a trigger. "Pow. Boom," he said.
The informant also told investigators he had overheard a jailhouse conversation in which Johnson told Robinson: "If it wasn't for me, your ass wouldn't be going home."
But the kicker was this: The informant said Johnson had worried aloud that he might have left his red baseball cap at the murder scene.
He was right to be worried.
Police had long ago established that the hat recovered at the scene was stained with Smith's blood. Now, new tests matched sweat from the band of the hat with Johnson's DNA.
At Johnson's second murder trial, his lawyer, Michael Coard, called the informant a liar and told jurors that the entire case amounted to nothing more than "a rat and a hat."
Barry, the homicide prosecutor, praised Smith in his closing remarks.
"It is an extraordinary person who steps up and does the right thing like Walter Smith," he told the jury. "And look what happened to him - on the ground, shot in the head, left there with the garbage."
The jury found Johnson guilty. The judge sentenced him to death.
For Smith's family, the verdict brought an incomplete measure of justice.
While Smith's mother found some solace in Johnson's fate, she lamented the short prison sentence handed Robinson in the dice-game shooting.
"What about the time for killing the lady?" asked Mary Smith. "Those shooters are out of prison already."
Although prosecutors told the jury that Johnson killed Smith to help his friend, Robinson was never charged in connection with Smith's murder.
He said he had nothing to do with it.
"They say he did this for me, which is totally false," Robinson said. "They say he did it for me, but they never charged me."
Robinson served the full five years in prison after pleading guilty in the dice-game case and was released on probation last fall.
He was locked up again in March when he was picked up on a drug charge.
Narcotics officers said they watched him sell crack out of a house in North Philadelphia. When police staged a raid, they said, they grabbed Robinson as he counted drug money at a table.
Police seized 63 packets of crack from a jacket in the house and took a loaded .357 Magnum from another man there.
Again, Robinson said he was innocent, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. "I got caught in the middle of a raid," he said.
He expects to beat the case.
Soon, he said, "I'll be home."
Contact staff writer Craig McCoy
at 215-854-4821 or cmccoy@phillynews.com.
Contact staff writer Nancy Phillips
at 215-854-2254 or nphillips@phillynews.com.
Contributing to this article were Inquirer staff writers Mark Fazlollah, Emilie Lounsberry, and John Sullivan.
