Silberman Tried to Kill Self, Wife Says

Businessman Richard T. Silberman--facing federal money-laundering charges--tried to kill himself in a Las Vegas hotel room and is recovering at a San Francisco psychiatric hospital,his wife said Thursday at a news conference.

Silberman’s wife, San Diego County Supervisor Susan Golding, distributed copies of what she said was a suicide note found in Silberman’s hotel room. In the note, Silberman said he was innocent of the charges against him but wanted “to leave with some parts still unshattered,” adding that “enough has been destroyed.”

He attempted suicide--swallowing an overdose of prescription sleeping pills--because he felt he could not get a fair trial before U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving, Golding said.

Silberman, who was found unconscious Saturday in his Las Vegas hotel room two days after he abruptly vanished from San Diego, is suffering from “severe depression,” Golding said.

She said she did not know how long Silberman will remain hospitalized and offered no details of his treatment. She said he is “getting better and feeling better.”

Silberman, once a top aide in Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s Administration, was due to stand trial April 10. Prosecutors said Thursday they did not know whether Silberman’s hospitalization would delay the trial.

Reputed mobster Chris Petti, Silberman and three other men are accused of laundering $300,000 given them by an undercover FBI agent who had characterized the money as the proceeds of Colombian drug dealing. An FBI report released Friday, the day Golding reported Silberman missing, alleges that Silberman confessed to the money-laundering scheme.

Federal prosecutors filed papers Tuesday asking Irving to revoke Silberman’s $500,000 bond. A hearing on that request is scheduled for next week.

Golding said she did not know how many sleeping pills Silberman took or when he took them. While he remembers taking the pills, he “doesn’t remember much about it after that,” she said.

After he was found unconscious, Silberman spent the next two days in a Las Vegas hospital. Goulding said Silberman was released after he was “able to walk on his own,” and flew immediately to San Francisco, where he voluntarily admitted himself to the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, a UC San Francisco Hospital.