Trial Opens in Extortion Mail Scheme : Justice: Prosecutors say they will prove two men sent threatening letters to 265 Antelope Valley residents even though the evidence is circumstantial.

The trial of two former aerospace technicians accused of sending hundreds of “pay-or-die” letters to prominent Antelope Valley residents opened Monday, with a prosecutor saying he can convict the suspects despite a case based on circumstantial evidence.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephen L. Cooley acknowledged in San Fernando Superior Court that no single witness or piece of evidence conclusively links Richard Faroni, 27, and Roman (Moose) Makuch, 28, to the mailing of extortion letters to about 265 prominent business people, doctors, lawyers and community leaders in the Antelope Valley in November, 1988.

But Cooley said the evidence shows Makuch and Faroni had the capacity, equipment and motive to collect information about the people and carry out a “bizarre but feasible extortion scheme” in which hundreds of thousands of dollars were demanded, but never collected.

“We have a wide variety of circumstantial evidence,” Cooley said in an interview. “No one piece provides a critical link. But the weight of the evidence shows they were involved.”

Makuch and Faroni pleaded innocent to charges of conspiracy and attempted extortion and opted for a non-jury trial before Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen. They have spent more than a year in custody and face up to eight years in prison if convicted.

The letters threatened recipients and their families with grisly deaths and included details that indicated the writers may have been keeping their subjects under surveillance. The letters demanded that hundreds of thousands of dollars be sent to other local residents, some of whom also had received threatening letters, and it is not clear how the extortionists intended to collect the money.

Acting on a tip that Makuch and Faroni had bragged of engineering the plot, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detectives arrested the two on Thanksgiving Day, 1988, in Las Vegas, where several victims had been instructed to drop off payments. Detectives confiscated surveillance equipment and small two-way radios of the type some people were told to bring to Las Vegas, as well as numerous lists, some containing victims’ names.

But the informant has never surfaced and the tip is hearsay, inadmissible as evidence, Cooley said. Makuch and Faroni have alibis that they were in Connecticut when the letters were mailed. And there is no physical evidence directly connecting them to the crime, Cooley said.

Defense attorney William Clark said Monday: “There’s a huge quantum leap between potentiality and reality of accomplishment. I haven’t seen anything that bridges that gap yet. . . . It’s distinctly possible they could have done it. So could have half the people in Lancaster.”

Monday’s proceedings were dominated by the testimony of Lawrence Mock, who worked with Makuch and Faroni at Rockwell International. Mock said the three often discussed commission of the perfect crime, electronic surveillance tactics and elaborate plots to take revenge on people using letters and multiple mailings.

But defense attorneys said Mock’s testimony is tainted because Cooley’s office charged him with perjury after learning that Mock lied when he said during the preliminary hearing that he had been a Navy commando and a Los Angeles police officer. Prosecutors agreed not to use Mock’s testimony Monday against him in the perjury case, in which a plea agreement is being negotiated.