Police Links to Gentile, Maine Investigated : Probe: Five officers and a former officer are under scrutiny in the murder of one prostitute and the disappearance of another.

The Metropolitan Homicide Task Force is investigating at least five San Diego police officers and one former officer who may have associated with murdered prostitute Donna Gentile or her missing friend Cynthia Maine, two sources close to the investigation told The Times Tuesday.

Gentile and Maine were both police informants and both served time in jail. Gentile was found murdered in 1985, shortly after she testified against two police officers. Maine, also a prostitute, disappeared just after her 1986 release from jail, where she had been serving four months for writing bad checks.

“The task force is trying to find out where (Maine) is, but they believe she’s dead,” one source said. “They are thinking it’s more than a coincidence that these six officers had some involvement with one prostitute who is dead and one who is missing.”

Task force spokesman Bonnie Dumanis confirmed Tuesday that investigators are looking at police officers who may have been linked to either woman. But she declined to say how many officers are under investigation or provide any details.

“We are looking at anybody who had contact with Gentile or Maine, and that includes police officers,” she said.

Dumanis said she would like anyone with information about Maine to call the task force headquarters at 260-6400.

On Thursday, the task force searched the San Diego home of Sgt. Sal Salvatierra, who worked in internal affairs until Tuesday but has been transferred to the special projects unit. The Times reported Tuesday that the task force also searched Salvatierra’s car, work locker and desk looking for photographs linking police officers with Gentile and Maine.

Salvatierra could not be reached for comment. But his attorney, Everett Bobbitt, said his client is cooperating with the investigation. He said there is no evidence to link his client to Maine’s disappearance.

A source told The Times that Salvatierra is among five officers under investigation for possible ties to Gentile and Maine. The source said another officer is John Fung, who had been working with the narcotics task force and used Maine as a police informant. Maine’s family said she had been intimately involved with Fung for more than a year before her disappearance.

Fung could not be reached for comment.

The former officer is Dennis Sesma, who resigned from the force in 1989, the source said.

In an interview Tuesday, Sesma said Maine used his name on a form that allowed jail officials to know that she was a police informant. Sesma said he had no relationship with Maine, other than dealing with her as a police informant who made undercover drug buys. He also defended Fung against the Maine family’s accusations.

“All John did was show concern for the lady,” Sesma said. “He gave her money, sometimes from his own pocket, and he was like a surrogate father to her, helping her know what was right and wrong. It’s not unusual for informants to develop an attraction to these guys.”

San Diego police would not comment about the possibility that the task force is investigating their officers in regard to Maine’s disappearance or Gentile’s death. They referred all questions to the task force.

According to court records, Maine was sentenced to a four-month jail term that began in September, 1985, for writing a series of bad checks to Mervyn’s department stores.

On Nov. 5, San Diego Police Capt. Mike Tyler wrote the district attorney’s office asking that Maine be released from the County Jail at Las Colinas by the end of that month. She was released with about two months left on her sentence.

Maine’s probation report describes an abused heroin addict, who told her probation officer that she was molested by her grandfather from the time she was 5 to age 12. She worked in various jobs, including automobile sales and an animal hospital. Married in 1979, she filed for divorce in 1985 and gave birth to a son who is now 8 years old.

Her father is former Police Officer Kenneth Maine, who died of a heart attack in late 1982 and had served on the force between 1967 and 1973. He was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and fined $5,000 for his role in the scandal of a financial company operated by San Diego financier Joseph Bello.

Cynthia Maine, who also went by the names Cindy Coleman or Cynthia Smith, told her probation officer in 1985 that she passed bad checks to buy merchandise and then have a friend take the purchases back in exchange for cash. She and her boyfriend would then use the money to buy heroin. Sometimes, she spent as much as $50 a day on the drug, Maine told her probation officer.

At the time of her disappearance, the brown-haired, blue-eyed Maine was 26 years old. She was 5 feet tall and weighed 105 pounds. A source said she was close to Gentile, who was found murdered in 1985, her mouth stuffed with gravel.

Three years after Gentile’s death in 1985, investigators from the San Diego Police Deparment, San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and district attorney’s office formed the homicide task force. They are investigating the murders of 43 women, mostly prostitutes and transients, since Gentile’s murder. Last month, the state attorney general’s office was added to investigate possible police corruption associated with the slayings.

Maine’s mother, Lynda Coleman, said she remembers her daughter crying over a newspaper article about a woman’s death.

In an interview Tuesday, Coleman said her daughter started working as a police informant in 1984 despite her objections.

Coleman said that, for about a month in 1984, Fung and Sesma gave her daughter a phony ID so she could work in a defense plant in San Diego. Coleman can no longer remember exactly what company her daughter worked for.

She was paid by the defense plant for a month and worked as an informant to tell the police who was supplying drugs to the defense plant workers.

Fung would often fix a tape-recording device to Maine and send her to buy heroin, her mother said.

“That’s a good way to get yourself killed, and that’s what I told her,” she said. “These police officers are asking you to do something that they don’t (want) to do. Nothing good can come of this, and if you get yourself killed, they won’t even come to your funeral.”

Maine met Fung in 1984 after she was arrested for prostitution, her mother said.

Coleman said her daughter was in love with Fung and agreed to become an informant at his insistence.

“She did it out of love,” she said. “‘He flirted with her and told her he cared for her, that’s how he got her to do it.”

She said that Fung sometimes came by their house to visit, and dropped off cards outside when they weren’t home or at night when they were asleep. Fung and her daughter had an affair, Coleman said.

“He acted like he cared for her,” Coleman said.

When they first met, Fung used to come over daily and they would sit outside in a car and visit or he would come inside for coffee, she said.

Coleman said she didn’t discourage the relationship because she thought it might help her daughter straighten out.

“Here was a man who’s anti-drug and a cop,” she said.

When Maine disappeared in 1986, Coleman said, Fung stopped returning her telephone calls.

Coleman said she spent a year driving up and down neighborhood streets looking for her daughter and plastering her picture on city buses.

Coleman said she took it upon herself to search for her daughter because the police weren’t helping.

Police once told her: “We don’t actively look for these kinds of people. ‘Look, lady, you turned in a missing-person’s report, what do you want us to do, tell a 26-year-old woman that her mom is looking for her?’ ”

Coleman guessed that Maine stopped being an informant when she started serving her time at Los Colinas. Two months after being released in November, 1985, she was missing.

Maine met Fung in the summer of 1984 when he arrested her for lewd acts.

Coleman said she is disgusted with the way police have handled her daughter’s investigation, given that her father had been a San Diego police officer.

“This thing has been so mishandled, I am furious. To say that they are actively investigating Cindy’s disappearance is a joke,” she said.

Since her daughter has been missing, Coleman said, she has had to give the police copies of her daughter’s dental records five times because they are continually being lost or misplaced.

The police told her last year they would try to match Maine’s dental records with every unidentified female murder victim since February, 1986.

“I have yet to hear from them,” she said.

About her daughter getting involved in prostitution: “What else can a girl who’s hooked on heroin do to support her and the jerk that got her started? How else do you make $700 a day?”

Maine has an 8-year-old son whom Coleman has helped raise since he was 3. Maine and her son lived with Coleman the last year that she was seen.

“He is a very bright little boy and he has gone through lots of therapy to understand why he doesn’t have a mom or a dad,” Coleman said.

She said the boy’s father--the man who first introduced Maine to heroin in 1980 when they met--lives downtown “in a gutter near a methadone clinic.”