Silberman Case Money Launderer to Pay $22,500

A Ventura County investment broker who pleaded guilty to a sole felony count in connection with a money-laundering scheme directed by San Diego financier Richard T. Silberman will pay federal authorities $22,500, part of his alleged profits from the scheme, prosecutors said.

Terry Ziegler, 45, of Moorpark, who pleaded guilty in April to violating a federal currency law, had been scheduled to go to trial Tuesday on charges that he made about $37,000 in the scheme.

But, in a deal worked out last week before U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving, Ziegler agreed to pay authorities $22,500 of that $37,000, Assistant U.S. Atty. Carol C. Lam said.

In return, prosecutors agreed to forgo the trial, which would have been expensive because all of the witnesses who testified in Silberman’s two-month trial earlier this year would have had to have been called again, to detail the cash trail in the complex case, Lam said.

Silberman, 61, who served as a top aide to former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., was sentenced Sept. 24 by Irving to 46 months in federal prison and, on Oct. 2, was fined $50,000.

According to prosecutors, Silberman directed a scheme to launder $300,000 that an undercover FBI agent portrayed as the profits of Colombian cocaine dealing.

Silberman was convicted June 28, after the two-month trial, of a technical currency violation. On Aug. 24, he pleaded guilty under a plea bargain to a felony conspiracy count, averting a second trial.

The case involved two deals, according to trial testimony. The first was a November, 1988 exchange of $100,000 for stock in a Silberman gold-mining subsidiary. The second was a February, 1989 swap of $200,000 for U.S. Treasury bonds.

In each deal, the money went through Ziegler, according to trial testimony.