Federal prosecutors said the victim was lured from Jamestown to rural Pennsylvania and buried after a 2014 shooting.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A New York veteran was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison after admitting he helped kidnap a man in 2014, drive him across state lines to Pennsylvania and kill him in what prosecutors said was an effort to silence someone believed to be helping police.

Anthony Neubauer, 39, of Falconer was sentenced Feb. 24 by U.S. District Judge Elizabeth A. Wolford after pleading guilty to aiding and abetting a kidnapping in the death of Joseph Anthony. The punishment closed one major chapter in a case that sat for years before investigators reopened it, tying together a shooting in Pennsylvania, a burial on private land and a motive built around fear that Anthony would cooperate with law enforcement.

Prosecutors said the crime began May 27, 2014, in Jamestown, a city near the Pennsylvania line in southwestern New York. Anthony was told he could get cocaine, according to federal prosecutors, and that claim was used to get him to travel with Neubauer and Matthew Rudy to property owned by Rudy in Pennsylvania. Once there, authorities said, the story changed. They told Anthony there was no cocaine. Then, according to the government, he was shot and killed and buried on the property. In announcing the sentence years later, U.S. Attorney Michael DiGiacomo said Neubauer and his co-defendant went to great lengths to silence someone they believed was cooperating in an investigation.

The federal case turned on the kidnapping charge rather than a murder count in New York or Pennsylvania state court. Prosecutors said the interstate travel gave the case a strong federal hook, and they described the killing as part of the same scheme that began when Anthony was lured from Jamestown. Court authorities identified Neubauer as a Falconer resident and said he had already admitted his role before sentencing. Rudy, who owned the Pennsylvania property where Anthony was buried, was previously convicted as an accessory after the fact and sentenced to 60 months in prison. Officials have said Anthony was taken to Pennsylvania because Neubauer and Rudy believed he was a cooperator. Public accounts of the case do not answer every question, including what specific investigation they thought he might discuss with police.

The case drew added attention because local coverage and later crime coverage described Neubauer as a former Marine and Army veteran who had been known by the nickname “Captain America.” But the sentence itself rested on the facts of the kidnapping and killing, not on his military background or nickname. The broader context was a cold-case homicide that forced investigators to work backward across time and across state lines. Jamestown police and the FBI eventually rebuilt the timeline, according to federal officials, and Warren County authorities in Pennsylvania assisted because the burial site was on land there. That cross-border mix explains why the case stayed in public view even after the killing was more than a decade old.

Federal prosecutors said the investigation that led to sentencing was carried out by the Jamestown Police Department and the FBI, with help from the Warren County, Pennsylvania, district attorney’s office. DiGiacomo said the long delay did not erase the conduct, and FBI Buffalo Special Agent-in-Charge Philip Tejera said the sentence showed the bureau would keep working cold cases no matter how much time had passed. Neubauer’s sentence followed his guilty plea in 2024 and Rudy’s separate sentencing in 2025. No new public hearing date has been announced in the case, and federal officials have not said whether any further charges against anyone else are expected. For now, the formal next step is the start of Neubauer’s prison term under the federal judgment entered in Buffalo.

Even in its closing stage, the case carried the feel of two places joined by one violent path: Jamestown, where Anthony was last drawn into the scheme, and the Pennsylvania property where prosecutors said the plan ended in a killing and burial. The public record is stark and spare. It says Anthony was promised drugs, taken over the state line, confronted with the lie and then killed. It says the men involved believed he might talk to police. And it says investigators kept returning to the case until they could prove enough to secure guilty pleas and prison sentences. Those facts, more than the nickname attached to one defendant, explain why the case still stands out in western New York.

Both federally charged defendants have now been sentenced, and the last major public milestone was Wolford’s Feb. 24 sentencing of Neubauer in Buffalo. Unless prosecutors announce further action, the next development is likely to be administrative rather than dramatic: the continued service of the prison terms already imposed.

Author note: Last updated March 23, 2026.