Silberman Lawyer Raps Prosecution

Though Richard T. Silberman abruptly vanished last week for two days and tried to kill himself in Las Vegas, the indicted San Diego financier has done “absolutely nothing” to justify revoking his $500,000 bail, Silberman’s lawyers said.

In legal papers that provided further details about Silberman’s disappearance, the lawyers also said that, despite the suicide attempt, the prominent businessman is still mentally competent to stand trial on federal money-laundering charges.

Urging the federal judge presiding over the case to reject prosecutors’ pleas to revoke Silberman’s bail and force him to see a court-ordered psychiatrist, defense lawyers said both requests were “opportunistic” ploys aimed at using the suicide attempt to gain tactical advantage.

U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving has set a hearing for Tuesday on the unusual requests. The judge’s clerks made the defense team’s remarkably frank legal papers--delivered Friday to the clerk’s office at the downtown San Diego federal courthouse after public hours--available Saturday to reporters.

Silberman, 60, is recovering from the suicide attempt at a San Francisco psychiatric institute. Hospital officials maintain that state law bars them providing information about his condition.

It is not yet known whether the length of his recovery will delay his scheduled April 10 trial date on charges stemming from a complex money-laundering case. Silberman, reputed mobster Chris Petti and three other men are charged with laundering $300,000 given them by an undercover FBI agent who had characterized it as the proceeds of Colombian drug trafficking.

An FBI report released Feb. 16, the day Silberman was reported missing, alleges that Silberman confessed to the money-laundering scheme.

Silberman disappeared Feb. 15 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 last Thursday at a press conference.

In the defense papers, lawyer James Brosnahan said that he and Golding received word about 5 p.m. Feb. 17 that Silberman had been identified by police in his fifth-floor room at the Las Vegas Hilton. A half-hour before, a maid had called police after looking in Silberman’s room, Brosnahan said.

When Las Vegas police arrived, Officer Danny J. Harness told Brosnahan, they found a chair lodged against the room door, but they could see Silberman motionless on the bed. Officers forced the door open, Harness told the lawyer.

Harness gave Golding a letter addressed to her that was found with Silberman in the hotel room, Brosnahan said. Golding distributed copies of a three-page suicide note to reporters on Thursday.

The note, which is dated Feb. 15, says, in part, “I am innocent.”

Harness could not be reached Saturday for comment.

After he was discovered, Silberman was rushed to the University Medical Center in Las Vegas. Golding and Brosnahan, who flew there on a private plane, caught up with him about 8 p.m., “lying on a gurney, semi-conscious,” the lawyer said.

The physician primarily responsible for treating Silberman at the hospital was Dr. Blaine S. Purcell, Brosnahan said. Purcell declined to comment Saturday on the details of Silberman’s treatment, saying that information was protected by doctor-patient privilege.

But, Purcell said, he wanted to “put to rest” rumors he had heard that Silberman was not ill or had, in some way, staged the suicide attempt.

“That sort of spurious thinking has no basis, no foundation,” Purcell said. “I examined Mr. Silberman and I believe, at that time, taking care of him medically, I felt him to be significantly a very sick person.”

Silberman was released from the hospital last Monday after he agreed to check himself into the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, a UC San Francisco hospital nationally renowned for its treatment, Purcell said.

“I felt that he needed more acute psychiatric intervention after he was medically cleared, which is why I released him on Monday,” Purcell said.

Defense lawyers said in the legal papers that it was especially ironic that prosecutors--who filed their request last Tuesday, before Golding disclosed Silberman’s whereabouts--asked that Silberman be forced to see a psychiatrist.

Possibly even before Tuesday’s hearing, the defense promised, one of the San Francisco doctors treating Silberman would file a sworn statement with the court. Brosnahan, however, said that he had spent part of every day since Feb. 17 with Silberman and found him “completely oriented as to time and place” and “able to discuss the pending case.”

“It is my opinion, however, that he needs a couple of weeks of rest before resuming active work on necessary trial preparations,” Brosnahan said.

As for the request to revoke the $500,000 bail, defense lawyers said that was “without merit.” Prosecutors said Silberman’s trip to Las Vegas suggested he was a flight risk, but defense attorneys said there “is absolutely no evidence that he was attempting to flee from prosecution.”

Shortly before he left, Silberman transferred the proceeds from the sale of one of his houses, which prosecutors labeled a “sizable” sum, from an account he controlled to an account to which Golding has access.

“There is hardly anything unusual or improper in Mr. Silberman’s placing funds in account on which his wife can draw checks,” defense lawyers contended in their papers.

In a parting shot, the defense team said it was “hysterical and preposterous” for prosecutors to seek to censure Brosnahan for comments the lawyer made to reporters after Silberman was discovered. Irving is due to take up this request too at Tuesday’s hearing.

Brosnahan told reporters in Las Vegas that Silberman was worried he couldn’t get a fair trial before Irving. He also said that Silberman’s concern, as well as his disappearance, were prompted by Irving’s comment that statements Silberman allegedly made to the FBI agents were “self-incriminating.”

Defense lawyers said there was nothing improper or unprofessional about those comments.

The judge characterized the statements as “self-incriminating” in a recent ruling allowing FBI agents to testify at the trial about what Silberman said upon arrest last April 7 at a Mission Bay hotel room.