Man Accused in Silberman Case Pleads Guilty to Criminal Count

Terry Ziegler, a Los Angeles-area investment broker accused of taking part in a money-laundering scheme with San Diego businessman Richard Silberman, pleaded guilty Tuesday to one criminal count, the first resolution of any charges connected to the complex case.

Under a plea bargain, Ziegler, indicted on five counts related to the alleged scheme to launder $300,000, pleaded guilty to a single charge of structuring the transfer of funds to avoid filing the paper work that federal law demands for any transaction over $10,000.

Ziegler also agreed to forfeit his share of the cash, stocks and bonds that federal prosecutors contend were central to the scheme. In exchange, prosecutors dropped the other four charges against him.

The disclosure of Ziegler’s plea bargain came as U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving denied a defense request to move Silberman’s upcoming trial out of San Diego. The judge rejected--at least until he has questioned prospective jurors--the claim by Silberman that he could not get a fair trial here because of intense publicity.

Silberman, reputed mobster Chris Petti, Ziegler and two other men have been accused of laundering $300,000 in cash that an undercover FBI agent allegedly characterized as the proceeds of Colombian drug trafficking.

Silberman, 60, is due to stand trial on April 25. The remaining three defendants are scheduled for trial on July 17.

Ziegler, 45, of Moorpark in Ventura County, was added to the case in October, six months after the original indictment named Silberman, Petti and two Los Angeles men--Jack Norman Myers and Darryl Nakatsuka--in the scheme. All but Petti, who is in a federal prison after his probation on a bookmaking conviction was revoked, are free on bail.

Ziegler had faced a maximum penalty of 35 years in federal prison and $1.75 million in fines on the five original charges.

Through the plea agreement, he faces a

maximum of five years in prison--followed by two or three years of probation--and up to a $250,000 fine, Irving said. Ziegler is scheduled to be sentenced on June 18.

In a six-page plea agreement filed Tuesday in federal court in San Diego, Ziegler admitted that he received $45,000 in cash in November, 1988, from Myers and Nakatsuka. Prosecutors allege the $45,000 was part of $100,000 delivered by the undercover agent, the first of two deals involving a total of $300,000.

Through a series of transactions he directed that broke the $45,000 into various sums less than $10,000, Ziegler deposited the cash into a San Fernando Valley thrift account to which he had access, according to the plea agreement. Then, it said, he wired the money to a bank account in Hong Kong that prosecutors contend was controlled by Silberman.

“I knew what I was doing was a violation of the law,” Ziegler told Irving in a brief hearing Tuesday confirming the plea bargain.

The $45,000 that Ziegler wired to Hong Kong eventually made its way to a Swiss bank account, along with most of the rest of the $100,000, which got there through various other channels, prosecutors contend.

The $100,000 deal involved a swap of money for stock in a Silberman gold mining company, prosecutors contend.

Under the plea agreement, prosecutors dropped charges against Ziegler relating to the second deal in the alleged money-laundering plan, a February, 1989, exchange of $200,000 for U.S. Treasury bonds. According to prosecutors, Ziegler arranged for the bond purchase.

Prosecutors also allege that the bond deal hit a snag when Myers told Silberman that Ziegler had changed his fee and would not produce the correct number of bonds. Silberman asked Petti for help in collecting the rest of the money from the bond transaction, prosecutors claim.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Charles F. Gorder Jr., the lead prosecutor in the case, declined to comment Tuesday on the plea agreement or to speculate on the possibility that Ziegler would become a government witness against Silberman. In a brief filed Tuesday, Ziegler’s name was not among 33 witnesses prosecutors said they expect to call at Silberman’s trial.

The judge’s decision to deny Silberman’s request to move the trial out of San Diego followed a hearing Tuesday morning at which defense lawyer James Brosnahan said pretrial publicity was so pervasive that a fair trial in the local courts was impossible.

A March survey commissioned by the defense team found that 89% of the eligible jurors in the San Diego area were “familiar” with the Silberman case, Brosnahan said. On Tuesday morning, when Brosnahan and Silberman stopped at a coffee shop, the lawyer said, “six people recognized (Silberman).”

Assistant U.S. Atty. Carol C. Lam said the survey was “nothing more than a lot of smoke and a lot of mirrors.”

She added, “We are reduced to listening to Mr. Brosnahan’s report of how many people said hello to his client at breakfast. That is not enough to (move the case).”

In a written decision issued late Tuesday, Irving said publicity about the case had so far not been so damaging to Silberman that he had to transfer it. But before making a final decision, he said, he wanted to question prospective jurors to see if the San Diego metropolitan area could produce 12 open-minded people.