Silberman Agrees to Guilty Plea : Crime: Plea bargain calls for aide to former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. to go to prison for conspiring to launder purported drug-trafficking money, sources say.

In a plea bargain expected to be completed in federal court today, financier Richard T. Silberman has agreed to plead guilty to a single felony count of conspiring to launder cash that was represented to him as drug money, sources said Thursday.

As part of the agreement, Silberman, 61, a onetime aide to former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. and once a power in state politics, will not appeal the only count on which he was convicted in June after a two-month trial--a violation of federal currency laws, sources said.

The agreement calls for Silberman to serve from 41 to 50 months in federal prison, although U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving holds the final say on the length of Silberman’s term, sources said. Silberman already faced up to 10 years in prison on his June conviction, and up to 75 years in prison if convicted on all other counts.

The deal, which was announced without details on Irving’s schedule at the federal courthouse here, would mark Silberman’s first admission of guilt. Since his arrest in April, 1989, Silberman and his wife, San Diego County Supervisor Susan Golding, have consistently proclaimed his innocence.

Silberman was accused of directing a scheme to launder $300,000 that an undercover FBI agent had allegedly characterized as the proceeds of Colombian drug trafficking.

Four other men were also indicted; two have pleaded guilty to a single felony count. The other two--including reputed mobster Chris Petti, 63, of San Diego--are due to stand trial on Sept. 25, sources said.

It was unclear whether the bargain might call for Silberman to testify at Petti’s trial. Prosecutors said last month they would seek to try the two men together, a move that would have emphasized Silberman’s alleged links with the reputed mobster.

In his trial, the jury deadlocked for conviction on five counts, including two charges of money laundering and the single count that accused Silberman of conspiring to launder money.

When he was arrested, prosecutors contended, Silberman had already completed two laundering deals, using cash supplied by the undercover FBI agent, and was negotiating for a third. The FBI said that when he was arrested, Silberman confessed to laundering the $300,000 and said he was searching for funds to save his financially troubled mining firm.

According to FBI notes of the alleged confession, Silberman also offered to implicate California business and political figures in wrongdoing. Silberman, who also served as secretary of the state Business and Transportation Agency among other positions, has been a key player in statewide Democratic politics since the 1970s.

At the trial, Silberman testified that he thought the first deal was a legitimate stock sale. He also said in court that he was coerced into the second deal by threats aimed at his family by a government informer.

Immediately after he was convicted on the one count on June 28, Irving sent Silberman to the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown San Diego, where he has remained. Irving indicated then that Silberman was a flight risk because he had disappeared and apparently attempted suicide in Las Vegas in February.