Holdout Juror Doubted Intent of Silberman

The sole juror who held out for acquittal on the central charges in Richard T. Silberman’s money-laundering trial said Tuesday that he simply did not believe the San Diego financier had the intent to launder drug money.

In his first published comments since the complex case concluded last week with Silberman’s conviction on one count, juror Mark E. Powers, 38, a San Diego machinist, said he stuck to his decision even after it was apparent he had deadlocked the jury on several other charges.

Other jurors “weren’t dealing with the law” but wanted desperately to convict Silberman, a one-time governor’s aide, and were ready to ignore jury instructions to do it, Powers said. “They were dealing with their moral indignation with what had happened,” he said.

But, Powers said, “the law is emotionless.” And, he added, “I do not do things illogically.”

He said he was not convinced that Silberman had the necessary intent to launder cash at any time before he was approached in 1988 by an undercover FBI agent posing as a front man for Colombian drug lords.

If only a tape recorder that agent Peter Ahearn wore to his first meeting with Silberman had worked, “that would have clinched it,” Powers said.

Powers also disclosed that he was convicted about 20 years ago for possession of a controlled substance and received four years’ probation. He said the lawyers in the case knew about his record but left him in the jury pool.

“There were like 30 or 40 people around, and I was the one that got nailed” for possessing an amphetamine, Powers said. He said he made a plea bargain but declined to provide other details.

Powers said the 2-month-long trial, as well as having to discuss his own conviction, have already caused him grief.

“You’ve read the papers: I’m the holdout,” he said. “There’s no way I was the holdout. I was just trying to do my job the way the judge told me to do it.”

Silberman, 61, who once served as a top aide to former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., was convicted last Thursday of one count in the complex case. He was found guilty of violating a federal currency law and was sent immediately to jail without bail by U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving.

On Friday, the jury announced it was deadlocked on the remaining counts. Irving declared a mistrial, but sent Silberman back to jail to await formal sentencing Sept. 25.

Silberman, who is married to San Diego County Supervisor Susan Golding, could draw as much as 10 years in federal prison, but new sentencing guidelines suggest that a term of one to five years is likely.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Charles F. Gorder has already announced that he intends to retry Silberman on the unresolved charges. Lead defense lawyer James J. Brosnahan has said he will appeal the conviction.

Silberman was arrested in April, 1989, in a San Diego hotel room. By then, prosecutors contend, he already had made two money-laundering deals, using cash supplied by undercover FBI agent Ahearn, and was negotiating with Ahearn for a third.

The first deal was a November, 1988, exchange of $100,000 for stock in a Silberman gold-mining company. The second was a February, 1989, swap of $200,000 for untraceable U.S. Treasury bonds.

The jury deadlocked, 11 to 1 for conviction, on the three central counts in the case: two counts of money laundering and a single count of conspiring to launder cash. Powers left the federal courthouse after jurors were dismissed last Friday without talking to reporters.

But he said Tuesday that the law required the jury to find not only that Silberman believed that the cash Ahearn supplied was from unlawful funds but also, specifically, that it was drug money, Powers said.

Powers said all the jurors agreed that Silberman believed the cash was tainted. But, he said, “It was very unclear in the very beginning of the investigation whether Silberman actually knew it was drug money.”

When Ahearn met Silberman on Nov. 9, 1988, the financier had committed no crimes, Powers said. Without clear proof that Silberman knew from the very start that Ahearn’s money purportedly came from Colombian drug proceeds, the government had not proved, as it had to do, that Silberman had not been entrapped, Powers said.

Silberman asserted as a defense that he was entrapped--that is, that he was induced into crimes, if they occurred, by the FBI.

Ahearn testified that, at the Nov. 9 meeting, he made it clear that his money came from Colombian drug trafficking. Silberman testified that Ahearn led him to believe that the money was from Mexican investors who sought confidentiality in their financial dealings.

“Your word against my word,” Powers said. “You need more than that to me for proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Ahearn also testified that he hid a tape recorder in his left sock for the Nov. 9 meeting but that the recorder malfunctioned. And Powers said he found Ahearn’s credibility lacking because the agent was a “mysterious, evasive person.”

Powers also said that, only after Ahearn and Silberman met Feb. 7, 1989, and the agent explicitly said that the cash came from a “bunch of . . . Colombian drug lords,” was it clear that Silberman had to have understood that the funds supposedly were drug money.

“So they had him,” Powers said. “What’s he going to do? Go to the cops?”

Nevertheless, Powers said, what Silberman knew at that point was not relevant to proving he had the intent to launder cash even before he met Ahearn.

“Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t intending to do something,” but even if he was, that was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, Powers said.

Powers said his views caused “some pretty strong sentiment” in the jury room.

“People were telling me over and over again, ‘Don’t pay any attention to that, “ he said, referring to the instruction that the cash had to be drug money. “But, I said, ‘Why did they put it here if they didn’t want us to read it?’ ”

At one point, Powers said, jury foreman John T. Uliasz, 38, a Santee nurse, told him: “ ‘Mark, we are the law. We interpret the law.’ I got real upset about that. That’s the judge’s responsibility. The law is the law. That’s the only thing that’s black and white in this case, and that’s the law.

“I blew up a couple times,” Powers said. “How would you feel about it if you were told, ‘Don’t read that’? You’re talking about trying to find out. The foreman says, ‘I don’t want to look stupid to people by asking questions.’ I got no problem asking questions.”

Testimony from Jack Norman Myers, a longtime associate of Silberman’s who said he knew throughout that the two deals were illegal, proved that Silberman had the necessary intent all along to evade the requirement of reporting all cash transactions of more than $10,000, Powers said. That led to the sole conviction, he said.

“Myers was the case,” he said. “If they didn’t have Myers, they wouldn’t have anything.”

He said he had no particular feelings about Gorder’s decision to retry Silberman. “That’s a very difficult question for me to answer,” he said, “because I have a much dimmer view of the ability of people to separate their emotions from the law.”