Newly unsealed court records show that a federal informant with ties to organized crime provided prosecutors with information about the missing murder weapon in the O.J. Simpson case as the 1995 criminal trial approached its conclusion.

Joseph “Joey” Ippolito, a convicted drug trafficker, prison escapee and Mafia associate, was also a friend of Simpson and close to Al Cowlings, the longtime Simpson confidant who drove the white Ford Bronco during the infamous 1994 police chase.

According to a December 1996 letter filed by federal prosecutors seeking leniency for Ippolito’s cooperation, he possessed information about Simpson’s “disposal of the murder weapon.” The letter became public after The New York Times requested that court records be unsealed.

Ippolito was captured in August 1995 and began cooperating with federal authorities soon afterward. His information reached Los Angeles prosecutors after they had rested their case but before closing arguments in Simpson’s criminal trial.

Former federal prosecutor David Kelley, who wrote the letter requesting leniency, told the Times that he recalled Ippolito describing a knife hidden somewhere around Simpson’s property. Kelley said Ippolito had obtained the information from a close associate of Simpson, but he did not believe Ippolito had participated in the killings.

Simpson was acquitted in October 1995 of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. A civil jury later found him liable for their deaths.

The newly disclosed records also include a separate account from Ippolito’s brother, Sam, who alleged that Joey left their Los Angeles-area apartment on the night of June 12, 1994, to help a friend. Sam said his brother returned around midnight with what appeared to be blood on his hands and a bag containing a heavy object.

Sam told the Times that his brother asked him to dispose of the bag, which he said he dumped in a construction-site dumpster. He also claimed he was “100%” certain Joey had been with Simpson at the crime scene.

However, the allegation remains disputed. An attorney for the apartment’s tenant described the account about the bloody hands as absurd. Sam Ippolito later sought compensation for his story, entered into a contract to tell it elsewhere and subsequently moved to recant his claims.

Friends and relatives of Joey Ippolito, who died in 2006, also rejected suggestions that he had participated in the murders. The Times reported that its findings do not definitively resolve the case and that no new forensic evidence has emerged to establish what happened to the weapon.

Former Los Angeles prosecutor Marcia Clark, who led the case against Simpson, said she had not known about Ippolito. Because prosecutors were never informed of him, she said, he “had no credible or relevant evidence to provide.”

Tom Lange, one of the lead detectives in the original investigation, said he had never believed Simpson received help carrying out the killings.

Nevertheless, the Los Angeles Police Department’s cold case investigators were quietly making calls about potential leads as recently as last winter, according to the Times. A department spokesman said the case remains open and under investigation.

Simpson died in 2024. The newly unsealed records offer additional information about a potential lead from the original investigation, but they do not establish that Ippolito participated in the murders or definitively answer what happened to the murder weapon.