Lawyer Tells of Bribe ‘Team’ in Card Club Case

Orange County businessman W. Patrick Moriarty was gone but not forgotten Tuesday as a Los Angeles federal court jury listened to final arguments in the City of Commerce card club trial.

Chief prosecutor Richard Drooyan told jurors that the strategy of Las Vegas gambling figure Frank J. Sansone, the lone defendant left in the corruption trial, was “to lay off all the blame on Mr. Moriarty” for the scheme to bribe Commerce city officials into licensing the poker casino by giving them secret shares in the club.

Co-prosecutor Michael Capizzi argued that Sansone’s strategy was “untruthful” because testimony in the trial revealed that “there never was any question that Mr. Sansone was a member of the team that offered the bribes long before Moriarty entered the picture.”

‘Assemblage of Liars’

Sansone’s attorney, Richard Walton, countered that the government witnesses who testified against Moriarty and Sansone were “the sorriest assemblage of liars, cheats and shakedown artists since Watergate.”

The particular targets of Walton’s remarks were three people who admitted their roles in the scheme--Robert Eula, 12-year city councilman and two-time mayor of Commerce; Phil C. Jacks, the city’s former director of economic development, and Horace Kelly Towner, a Broadway department store executive who acted as a “front man” to hold the hidden interests for the city officials.

Walton called Eula “that master of the political shakedown,” described Jacks as a “shameless liar” and called Towner “that princeling of perfidy and perjury.”

Through the daylong final arguments, the jurors may well have wondered about the whereabouts of Moriarty, who until a week earlier had been sitting next to Sansone at the defendant’s table.

They have not been informed, officially at least, that the reason Moriarty no longer is in the courtroom is because he pleaded guilty March 12 to mail fraud charges stemming from the bribery scheme.

All that U.S. District Judge William V. Rea told them last week was that the case against Moriarty had been “disposed of” and that they were “not to concern themselves with that.”

The day after Moriarty’s departure from the proceedings, Sansone took the witness stand to deny that he ever took part in a plan to rig bidding for the license granted to the California Commerce Club by promising secret shares to city officials.

The 47-year-old former manager of the MGM Grand card room also testified that he was never present when anyone else made such a proposition.

Called It Finder’s Fee

Sansone said he was told by Moriarty that the 10% of the casino stock granted to Towner was a “finder’s fee” for bringing Moriarty into the project to finance the club when Sansone’s Las Vegas group could not raise the money. Sansone insisted that he did not know at the time that Towner was holding hidden interests for three city councilmen and Jacks.

Earlier in the trial, Eula and Jacks testified that Sansone took part in the bribery scheme from its beginning in late 1981. The license was granted in early 1982 and opened in August of 1983.

Before the trial, Eula and Jacks, along with Councilmen Arthur Loya and Ricardo Vasquez, pleaded guilty to bribery-related charges and agreed to be government witnesses against Sansone and Moriarty. The city officials are scheduled to be sentenced later this month. Towner was granted immunity from prosecution in the deal he made to testify for the prosecution.

Sansone’s fate is expected to be put in the hands of the jury today after Rea instructs them on the law relating to the racketeering, mail fraud and corruption charges filed in the case.