Deputies Portrayed as Criminals : Trial: Prosecutor says they crossed the ‘thin blue line.’ Defense attorneys say the government’s case is based on self-serving testimony from a former colleague of their clients.

On the opening day of their historic trial, seven Los Angeles County Sheriff’s narcotics officers, accused of skimming $1.4 million in seized drug money, were portrayed Thursday by a prosecutor as corrupt deputies who “had crossed the thin blue line” from law enforcers to criminals.

With those words, Assistant U.S. Atty. Thomas A. Hagemann began laying out the federal government’s case against the veteran deputies who are the first narcotics officers charged in a two-year investigation into alleged thefts of seized drug cash within the Sheriff’s Department.

“This is not a case about good police work,” Hagemann told jurors in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. “This is a case about police corruption. It’s a case about cops turning to crime.”

Hagemann’s opening arguments before Judge Edward Rafeedie and a six-man, six-woman jury marked the start of what is expected to be a weeks-long trial in a corruption case sheriff’s officials have called the worst scandal in the department’s recent history.

The 27-count indictment against the deputies, who were once elite members of the sheriff’s major narcotics investigation teams, claims that the officers skimmed money during drug raids in 1988 and 1989, lied in police reports to cover up those thefts, and later spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of the stolen cash on boats, cars, vacation homes, jewelry and other luxuries.

In his 45-minute statement, Hagemann told jurors that the prosecution would provide financial documents outlining some of those purchases, including one deputy’s expenditure of $44,000 during a single month.

The jurors also will view a videotape in which some of the deputies allegedly stole $48,000 in cash from an undercover FBI agent during a 1989 sting operation. The panel will learn that some of the sting money was found in the homes and cars of several deputies, Hagemann said.

Jurors will also hear drug traffickers and money launderers testify that deputies stole money from them. The jury will listen to secret tape recordings of conversations in which the deputies implicate themselves, the prosecutor said.

Finally, the government will produce its chief witness--former sheriff’s Sgt. Robert R. Sobel, who has pleaded guilty to his role in the thefts and has agreed to testify against his former colleagues.

“(These) men, as the evidence will show, chose to cross over to the other side of the thin blue line,” Hagemann told the jury.

Defense attorneys, in their opening statements, wasted little time attacking the government’s case as one built on misleading statements, an inconclusive videotape and allegations of excessive spending that can be explained by the deputies.

In ripping into the prosecution’s case, the attorneys reserved particular scorn for Sobel, who once commanded the defendants as their sergeant on one of the narcotics teams and who has been promised leniency by the government in exchange for his testimony.

“He sold his soul and poured out his heart (to prosecutors),” said attorney Vicki Podberesky, who represents Deputy James R. Bauder. “Robert Sobel is an informant. He is a rat. And a rat will do anything he can to survive, even lie.”

Calling Sobel the key to the government’s case, attorney James Riddet, who represents Deputy Eufrasio G. Cortez, said Sobel has an admitted history of thefts, beatings and planting of evidence on suspects by some of his earlier narcotics teams and is falsely accusing his former deputies to avoid prosecution on those misconduct charges.

“The evidence will show that Mr. Sobel turned that (legal) system upside down for his own greedy purposes,” Riddet said.

In addition to Bauder and Cortez, the defendants are Deputies Terrell H. Amers, Ronald E. Daub, John C. Dickenson, Macario M. Duran and Daniel M. Garner. Duran’s wife, Maria, also is standing trial for allegedly laundering some of the cash.

Two other indicted deputies, Nancy A. Brown and Michael J. Kaliterna, face a separate trial because of a legal dispute over the propriety of evidence seized from them.

In their opening remarks, the attorneys representing the remaining defendants sought to depict their clients as experienced, decorated narcotics officers who had often risked their lives on the job and had unblemished records until they were swept up in the money-skimming scandal.

“This was really the cream of the crop, the elite, the top officers of the Sheriff’s Department,” said Jay Lichtman, Daub’s attorney.

Hagemann contended that the deputies had amassed a small fortune in stolen drug cash, confident that the practice would not be exposed because the victims were drug dealers and money launderers who would not be believed and that none of the deputies would break “the police code of silence” that protected their fellow officers.

Among the most damaging evidence that Hagemann said the prosecution would introduce is the discovery of marked money from the FBI sting at the homes or in the cars of several deputies.

Attorney Charles Goldwasser, who represents Dickenson, said his client had found $2,940 in marked money in an envelope in his office desk on the day after the sting, but took it home because he was afraid someone was setting him up and he did not know whom to trust.

The lawyer said Dickenson took the money home for safekeeping, with the intent of contacting someone he could trust.