Federal Trial Begins Today for Silberman : Crime: Prosecutors are relying on thousands of hours of taped conversations to prove their money-laundering charges.

During the past year, after he was accused of money laundering, Richard T. Silberman often said he was waiting for the moment when the “truth and full story will be told.”

That moment is here.

Today in federal court in San Diego, Silberman’s case goes to trial, with federal prosecutors and Silberman’s defense attorneys scheduled to begin picking a jury to hear the seven counts against the prominent San Diego businessman.

Silberman, 61, a top aide to former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., is charged with laundering $300,000 in cash that an undercover FBI agent allegedly characterized as the proceeds of Colombian drug trafficking. His trial is expected to last six weeks.

Prosecutors, armed with thousands of hours of secretly taped phone conversations and meetings, have made it clear in a year of pretrial proceedings that they believe the key evidence against Silberman will be his own words.

Prosecutors have said they plan to play hour after hour of tapes, many gathered under a novel federal law--being used for the first time--that allows agents to wiretap even public pay phones.

There will, of course, be live witnesses for the prosecution, many of them FBI agents. The agents are prepared to testify that Silberman confessed shortly after his arrest on April 7, 1989, telling them that the laundering plan was designed to help his failing gold mining company, Yuba Natural Resources.

Meanwhile, Silberman’s San Francisco defense attorneys contend that he sought only to sell stock in the company and did nothing illegal.

Rather than concentrate on what Silberman did or didn’t do, however, the center of defense strategy, as presented repeatedly in court filings, has been a focus on Robert Benjamin, the key government informant in the case.

Lead defense lawyer James Brosnahan has contended that Benjamin, convicted of eight felonies, has such a lengthy history of threats and violence that it is “outrageous” to use him against Silberman, who has no criminal record.

Brosnahan also has suggested that Silberman went along with the undercover agents’ deals because he was threatened by Benjamin, who the lawyer claims, has made death threats against Silberman and his family.

Benjamin is among about 50 witnesses Silberman’s lawyers have said they expect to call.

Assistant U. S. Atty. Charles F. Gorder Jr., the lead prosecutor on the case, has said that Brosnahan’s claims about Benjamin are unsupported “wild allegations.” Prosecutors have said they do not plan to call Benjamin to prove their case.

Silberman himself is not on the list of witnesses the defense team plans to call.

Although the trial is only beginning, the case has already seen its share of drama.

Since he was arrested, Silberman has endured massive publicity about his case, seen his defense lawyers lose every major pretrial challenge they posed on his behalf and, purportedly prompted by an adverse ruling, tried to kill himself.

Silberman, a wealthy businessman married to San Diego County Supervisor Susan Golding, was arrested in April, 1989, in a Mission Bay hotel room.

When he was arrested, prosecutors claim, Silberman was negotiating to launder $1.1 million in funds portrayed to him as proceeds from cocaine sales.

As test runs for the larger deal, prosecutors claim, Silberman directed two transactions--one for $100,000, the other for $200,000, funds allegedly sent around the world, including to Hong Kong and to Switzerland--in exchange for Yuba stock and U. S. Treasury bonds.

Silberman’s arrest actually resulted from a lengthy investigation by federal authorities into unrelated activity. By October, 1988, FBI agents had been busy for months investigating reputed mobster Chris Petti and mob interest in gaming operations at the Rincon Indian reservation.

That October, Silberman, who had known Petti for 15 years--they first met at a Mission Valley hotel barbershop--asked him for help finding people who would be “interested in moving cash out of the country, with no record, using (the Yuba) gold-mining ventures,” the FBI contends.

Silberman bragged that he had secretly moved cash many times in the past and that his system worked like “greased lightning,” prosecutors say.

Through Benjamin, Petti had already been introduced to FBI undercover agent Peter Ahearn, who was posing as Pete Carmassi, a representative of Colombian cocaine dealers. At a Nov. 9, 1988, meeting at a San Diego hotel coffee shop, Petti introduced Carmassi to Silberman, prosecutors say.

The first transaction, $100,000 for Yuba stock, began Nov. 30, 1988, when Carmassi delivered the cash to a Los Angeles hotel, prosecutors claim. The second, $200,000 for Treasury bonds, began Feb. 22, 1989, with Carmassi’s delivery of the money to a San Diego hotel, they say.

Much of what FBI agents learned about the case was developed through wiretaps aimed at Petti. Among the phones they tapped were pay phones they suspected Petti commonly used to try to avoid being detected.

The taps on the phones were instituted under a 1986 federal law authorizing such “roving wiretaps.” In a decision issued March 9, U. S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving, the first judge in the country to consider the legality of the 1986 law, approved the taps.

Defense contentions that the taps violated Silberman’s constitutional rights were without merit, Irving said.

That ruling was one in a series that Irving issued in February and March rejecting every significant defense effort to strike any of the seven counts against Silberman.

After one of those rulings, Silberman disappeared Feb. 15 from San Diego. He was found two days later, unconscious, in a Las Vegas hotel room.

Believing he could not get a fair trial before Irving, he wrote a suicide note and tried to kill himself with an overdose of sleeping pills, according to his wife.

Immediately after being released Feb. 19 from a Las Vegas hospital, Silberman checked into a San Francisco psychiatric hospital. He returned to San Diego after about two weeks.

Since his return, Silberman has declined interviews.

An FBI report released Feb. 16, the day after Silberman vanished, alleges that Silberman confessed to the money-laundering scheme. Two weeks ago, at a hearing before Irving, prosecutors agreed that the FBI report will not be entered into evidence at the trial.

Gorder, however, said agents will testify about portions of the alleged confession.

Including Petti, four other men were charged in the case with Silberman. One of those four, Los Angeles-area investment broker Terry Ziegler, pleaded guilty April 10 to one criminal count of violating federal currency laws and is scheduled to be sentenced June 18.

The three others, Petti and Los Angeles-area men Jack Norman Myers and Darryl Nakatsuka, are scheduled to stand trial together July 17.