‘Important Politician’ Named in Silberman Talks With FBI

Prominent San Diego businessman Richard T. Silberman volunteered information to FBI agents about an “important California politician” immediately after his arrest last April on federal money laundering charges, a court document released Friday revealed.

The document, a legal brief filed by Silberman’s defense lawyers, does not further identify the politician or elaborate on what Silberman said.

Releasing the politician’s name would inject a “new political aspect” to Silberman’s case, making it “even more difficult” for Silberman to get a fair trial in San Diego or anywhere in California, Silberman’s defense attorneys said in the brief.

Silberman, the husband of county Supervisor Susan Golding, is accused with reputed mobster Chris Petti and three others of laundering $300,000 in cash that an undercover FBI agent had characterized as proceeds from Colombian drug dealers. Their trial is scheduled to begin in April.

The name of the politician can be found in an FBI narrative detailing Silberman’s behavior in the hours after his arrest. That document, though, remains on file under seal at the downtown San Diego federal courthouse while Silberman’s lawyers fight to keep it secret.

Last week, U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving ordered the narrative made public, but Silberman’s lawyers stopped its release, at least temporarily, by filing an appeal this week of that order. What Irving released Friday was only the brief the lawyers had filed last month that failed to persuade the judge to keep the narrative secret.

Silberman was arrested April 7 in a Mission Bay hotel room, where he spent the next three hours with FBI agents. Releasing their report of what Silberman said, defense lawyers contend, would jeopardize Silberman’s right to a fair trial.

One of his lawyers, Hannah Bentley, told Irving at a Jan. 16 hearing that the public will remember the FBI narrative “more than anything else in the case.”

Irving, however, ordered released a version of the narrative in which references to people not involved in the money-laundering case or to federal investigations were deleted. Even that version, however, is not available because Silberman’s lawyers, led by San Francisco attorney James Brosnahan, filed an appeal of Irving’s order Jan. 24 with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The appellate court has not indicated how long it might take to rule on the request or whether it will agree to take the case.

Neither Brosnahan, Bentley nor the lead government prosecutor on the case, Asst. U.S. Atty. Charles F. Gorder Jr., could be reached Friday for comment on the unnamed politician.

The brief released Friday was made public after a request from lawyers from the Copley Press, which publishes the San Diego Union and the San Diego Tribune.