Ex-Sergeant Recalls Money Skimming : Trial: Sobel says deputies planted evidence and set aside money from arrests. He also testifies he took up to $22,000 from a single drug seizure.

A former sheriff’s sergeant testified Thursday that he personally skimmed as much as $22,000 from a single drug seizure and that his elite team of deputies often planted evidence on suspects, wrote false police reports and committed perjury.

Robert Sobel, a 20-year Sheriff’s Department veteran who has pleaded guilty in the case, was testifying for the prosecution in the trial of seven deputies, six of whom were under his command.

Sobel, 45, detailed cases in which he and the deputies set aside cash for a slush fund they referred to as “the kitty.”

Sobel said he was the sergeant in charge of the department’s Lennox station narcotics crew in 1985 when he first skimmed money from a 49-pound marijuana bust. He testified he took $400 and used the money to buy entry tools for his team.

Sobel said members of the Lennox crew took money from arrests on 20 to 30 occasions in 1985 and 1986, including a Paramount heroin case in which they took more than $3,000 and used it to buy guns.

Sobel testified that the largest amount of money he took from a single arrest was $22,000, his share of the cash seized in a Beverly Hills bust in October, 1986, while head of the department’s Southwest narcotics crew. He said he spent the money on personal expenses, including a $5,000 payment on his wife’s car.

Sobel, who is in the federal witness protection program, also told of instances in which deputies planted drugs, phony evidence, wrote false police reports and used excessive force against suspects.

Under questioning by Assistant U.S. Atty. Thomas A. Hagemann, Sobel recalled a December, 1987, conversation in a Santa Fe Springs bar with deputies Daniel Garner and Bobby Juarez.

Garner, who is one of the deputies indicted, allegedly told Sobel that “1988 was going to be our year,” Sobel said. According to Sobel’s testimony, Garner said he had custody of the “kitty,” and that it contained several thousand dollars.

“(Garner) said, ‘I’ve been watching you. You’re a stand-up guy. We can all be rich. All you have to do is look the other way,’ ” Sobel testified.

Sobel, the prosecution’s key witness, was indicted along with 10 other deputies and one of the deputies’ wives in February in the worst corruption scandal to strike the nation’s largest sheriff’s department.

In addition to Garner, the other deputies on trial are Terrell Amers, James Bauder, John Dickenson, Eufrasio Cortez, Ronald Daub and Macario Duran.

Deputies Nancy Brown and Michael Kalinterna face a separate trial.

Sobel began his testimony late Wednesday, describing how he watched as one narcotics officer dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars on a bed and divided the cash to steal during an FBI sting.

He told jurors that the deputies who had been shadowing what they thought was a drug trafficker on Aug. 30, 1989, targeted the cash in a pattern familiar to his narcotics squad.

“The protocol was that the investigating officer would make the call if money was to be skimmed or not,” said Sobel, who began what is expected to be several days of testimony.

The deputies are on trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on charges of stealing more than $1.4 million in cash seized from suspected drug dealers and money launderers.

Sobel is viewed by prosecutors and defense attorneys as the trial’s most important single witness, and his brief appearance Wednesday was the most dramatic in the weeklong proceeding.

Sobel told jurors of his 19 years in the Sheriff’s Department, then moved quickly through a description of the FBI sting--and how the narcotics officers were tracking what they believed was an East Coast drug trafficker carrying about $500,000 in cash. The supposed drug dealer turned out to be an FBI agent.

In describing their raid on the hotel suite, Sobel said the deputies detained the suspected dealer and then took hundreds of thousands of dollars that had been found in the suite. Although the sting had been videotaped--and portions of it shown earlier to the jurors--FBI surveillance cameras did not capture any footage of what Sobel said was deputies taking the money into a nearby hotel room from which they had conducted their surveillance.

Inside that room, Sobel said, Brown--who was the investigating officer in the case--dumped the cash on the bed and began counting what Sobel said was more than $450,000.

“Nancy separated the money. She separated a large pile of money,” Sobel recalled. “She said this is what we will book (as evidence) and put the rest in a small bag.”

Defense attorneys were quick to challenge Sobel’s account.

The attorney for Brown disputed the former sergeant’s testimony in a telephone interview.

“This is a highly questionable guy with credibility problems,” said Roger Hanson, referring to FBI interviews in which Sobel has acknowledged involvement in planting drugs on some suspects and beating others.

Another defendant, Bauder, who Sobel said had earlier grabbed bundles of cash from the hotel suite in an attempt to steal the money, also vehemently denied Sobel’s allegations.

“He is lying through his teeth,” Bauder said of his former boss. “And I intend to take the stand to challenge and refute what he says.”

Prosecutors contend that Sobel and the other narcotics officers skimmed $48,000 that night from $498,000 in bags in the hotel room.

In addition to Sobel’s testimony Wednesday, the jurors heard from a parade of federal agents who described seizing nearly $85,000 in cash, as well as financial records, cars, boats, jewelry and other valuables from the deputies’ homes and businesses in Southern California and Arizona. Included in the seized cash was $19,680 in marked money from the sting, investigators said.

Duran’s wife, Maria, was a defendant until Wednesday when Judge Edward Rafeedie severed her case from the others.

However, only hours later, federal prosecutors indicted Maria Duran, her husband and her mother for allegedly conspiring to obstruct the money-skimming investigation.

The criminal indictment claims that the Durans and Maria’s mother, Lilia Vazquez, attempted to conceal the source of an $88,500 down payment on a Northridge home by telling federal investigators that Vazquez had loaned the money to the couple. Vazquez, 60, was also accused of lying to a federal grand jury about the source of the money.

Maria Duran’s attorney, Scott Furstman, called the indictment “just one more attempt by the government to bring pressure on the Durans” to cooperate with the government and undermine her husband’s defense.