Waitress Tells Her Story in Murder of Restaurateur Sarno

The jailing of a waitress for a string of unpaid traffic tickets triggered a series of events that led to the October death by ambush of Los Angeles restaurateur Albert Sarno, the waitress testified Tuesday.

Ironically, the waitress, Krysteen Ann Ackerman, said she liked Sarno, her boss of three years, who often sang opera for customers at his Los Feliz cafe, Sarno’s Caffee Dell’Opera.

“He had a real explosive temper,” Ackerman testified. “But nobody had a bigger heart than Al.”

Ackerman, who described herself as a heavy heroin user, was the star prosecution witness Tuesday at a preliminary hearing for Ralph Mora, a 33-year-old parolee who is accused of murdering Sarno during an attempted robbery in front of the restaurateur’s Los Feliz home.

Hearing Adjourned

The hearing, which will determine whether there is sufficient evidence to try Mora for the slaying, was adjourned until Jan. 15, when Mora’s defense attorney said he may call witnesses on his client’s behalf.

Ackerman, who said she lived with her boyfriend, Mora’s brother, in Highland Park, but has since moved, outlined the series of events that began with her jailing.

The witness said that she could not post bail, which she gave variously as $250 and $350, after her arrest for the unpaid tickets a month before Sarno was shot.

She said her boyfriend borrowed part of the bail money from Mora, who had recently been released from prison after serving seven years for armed robberies.

Ackerman was freed from jail, but a problem arose when Mora wanted his money back, she said.

“He said that I had better pay, or I was going to be sorry. And then he asked, ‘Can I come and rob you--rob your boss?’ ” Ackerman told Los Angeles Municipal Judge Alban I. Niles.

“I told him, ‘No,’ ” she said.

Mora persisted, she said, asking how she thought Sarno would react.

“I told him I thought Al would give up the money. He wouldn’t fight,” she said.

But she said she never warned Sarno.

Asked to explain why, she said: “There was no reason to rob him. I told (Mora) I was going to pay him the money back.”

She said she finished paying him Oct. 6, the day her boyfriend was arrested on a charge of petty theft from a department store.

With her boyfriend in jail, she said, she began using heroin with Mora regularly, and periodically answered his questions about Sarno.

She said she told Mora, for instance, that Sarno sometimes took money from the restaurant home with him, and showed him Sarno’s house.

A week after showing him the house, she said, she learned that Sarno had been slain in front of the residence at 2 a.m. on Oct. 20.

She said she went to visit her boyfriend in jail to tell him she suspected Mora had killed her boss.

Then she said she went to the El Sereno neighborhood where she regularly bought heroin and ran into Mora.

“I asked him if he robbed Al, if he killed him,” she testified. “At first he answered no,” she said, and told her he had decided to rob someone else.

‘He Started Yelling’

Then she said she went with him to pawn her videocassette recorder for money to buy heroin.

She said she asked him again why he had killed Sarno.

“He said because he started yelling,” she recalled.

The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Sterling Norris, called another witness, a neighbor of Sarno, who testified that she heard a male voice yelling, “ ‘Who’s out there? Get out of here!’ ” before she heard two gunshots.

Ackerman testified that Mora also told her that he had had a crime partner, whose name she said she could not remember.

Mora said he had told his partner to kill Sarno “to shut him up,” Ackerman testified.

Mora also told her, she said, that he and his accomplice got nothing from Sarno because each erroneously thought the other had rifled Sarno’s body for cash.

Ackerman said that for the next couple of days she continued to spend time with Mora, committing petty thefts at department stores to get money to buy heroin. Then she said she got caught trying to steal a quilt from a May Co. store and was jailed again.

She said she told her story to police while in jail.

“Every once in a while,” she recalled on the witness stand, “I asked (Mora), ‘Why did you have to do that?’ ”