Contempt Finding Sought on Silberman

Businessman Richard T. Silberman, recovering from a suicide attempt, should be held in contempt of court for failing to sign papers allowing government investigators access to foreign bank account records, federal prosecutors said in legal papers filed Friday.

Prosecutors said they have been trying for months to get Silberman to sign a form allowing investigators to search those accounts and had been told by defense lawyers that Silberman would allow access to Swiss accounts. However, Silberman still hasn’t signed any forms and should either do so immediately or be held in contempt, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors want to search the records, in part, to try to trace government funds that they claim Silberman, reputed mobster Chris Petti and three other men laundered through a complex series of fund transfers involving a number of companies in different countries.

The five men are accused of laundering $300,000 given them by an undercover FBI agent who allegedly had told them it was the proceeds of Colombian drug dealing.

Silberman abruptly vanished last week from San Diego and was found two days later in a Las Vegas hotel room, unconscious. After leaving a suicide note, he tried to kill himself with an overdose of sleeping pills, his wife, San Diego County Supervisor Susan Golding, said Thursday.

Silberman disappeared about two months before his April 10 trial date on the money-laundering charges. Immediately after being released Monday from a Las Vegas hospital, he checked himself into the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, a UC San Francisco hospital noted nationally for its psychiatric treatment, where he remains.

No information on his condition is available from hospital officials, who say state law forbids them from discussing patients.

In the legal brief they filed Friday, prosecutors did not disclose the number or location of Silberman’s foreign accounts or explain whether they were held by him or merely for him. U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving, who is presiding over the case, set a hearing on the request for next Tuesday.

Earlier this week, prosecutors filed papers asking Irving to revoke Silberman’s $500,000 bail, contending that his trip to Las Vegas suggests he is a flight risk. A hearing on that request also is set for Tuesday.

Silberman’s defense lawyers also filed legal papers Friday responding to prosecutors’ request to revoke bail. The papers were not available, however, because they were delivered under a special procedure at the downtown San Diego federal courthouse permitting filings after the clerk’s office closes to the public but before the clerks actually leave.