Trial Begins for Former Officer in 2 Slayings

William Leasure, a former Los Angeles police officer who, prosecutors say, hid his “dark side” for years, went on trial Monday in two contract killings that could send him to the gas chamber.

The 44-year-old Northridge resident is charged with murder and conspiracy in the 1980 shooting of a woman involved in a messy divorce and the 1981 shotgun slaying of a man whose ex-wife wanted to speed up her son’s inheritance.

The admitted triggerman in both incidents, Dennis France, has been promised immunity from prosecution and is expected to testify this week that Leasure drove the getaway car on both occasions.

The balding, bespectacled Leasure, pale after five years in jail, appeared relaxed and attentive as prosecutors and his attorneys portrayed him, respectively, as a hired killer in police blue and an innocent victim of circumstances.

In his opening statement, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jim Koller said that the evidence against Leasure, formerly assigned to the Police Department’s Central Traffic Division, stretches back more than a decade and comes from his “best friends.”

“They will tell you the dark side of Mr. Leasure that the LAPD didn’t discover for 17 years while he was on the force,” the prosecutor told the jury in the downtown courtroom of Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg.

Beginning in 1976, “this LAPD officer, a uniformed officer who took the oath, wore the badge and the gun . . . committed every crime from murder to fraud, from theft to perjury,” Koller said.

Then, five years ago, Leasure slipped, the prosecutor said. The alleged mastermind of a multimillion-dollar yacht theft ring, Leasure was arrested aboard a stolen yacht near Oakland. The scheme, for which he faces charges later in Northern California, involved reselling stolen pleasure boats and insurance fraud.

“His carelessness, being aboard a stolen boat, landed him here today,” Koller said.

Although Leasure claimed that he did not know the vessel was stolen, a search of his house turned up evidence that linked him to a string of boat thefts and to France, who implicated him in the murders.

Leasure’s trial is expected to last through June and, as outlined by the prosecution, promises to be a feast of sleaze--a complicated tale of cheap hit men, insatiable greed, battling spouses, double-crosses, snitches, taped conversations, wrongful prosecution and police corruption.

But the courtroom was nearly empty Monday, with only Leasure’s wife, Betsy Mogul, his parents, and a former reporter working on a book about the case in attendance.

Defense attorneys agree that the case is complex, but say they will unfold the circumstances that led to Leasure’s being accused.

Their tale involves “coercive tactics,” deals, plea bargains, threats, extortion attempts and “phony reports and evidence cooked up” to support the allegations, said attorney Richard Lasting. He noted that the prosecution’s star witness is France, a suspect in the yacht theft ring and a man the defense lawyer characterized as “a liar, a thief, an extortionist, a schemer, a braggart--and desperate.”

France will not be prosecuted for the murders, despite having admitted that he pulled the trigger in both cases, albeit allegedly on Leasure’s orders.

“The truth is that William Leasure is not guilty,” Lasting said, adding that his client’s innocence will become apparent when the prosecution’s evidence is viewed in proper context.

Leasure is accused of conspiring with Arthur Gayle Smith, an Alhambra insurance investigator, to have Smith’s wife, Anne, murdered in May, 1980, amid bitter divorce proceedings.

She was shot in the back in her Highland Park beauty salon as horrified patrons looked on. Smith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after agreeing to testify against Leasure.

A third man, Charles Persico, was exonerated, despite having pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter in the Smith case and spending more than four years in prison.

Leasure is also charged with arranging with Paulette de los Reyes of Pasadena the September, 1981, murder of her ex-husband, Tony de los Reyes, who was shot as he left a Sherman Oaks bar. A businessman and part-time jazz musician, Tony de los Reyes was said to have hired Leasure to arrange the murder of his stepfather, Gilberto Cervantes, several years earlier and to have attempted to solicit the murder of his wife.

Paulette de los Reyes was convicted in the death of her former husband and has spent two years behind bars. She is expected to testify against Leasure in exchange for no further prison time.

Cervantes, a San Gabriel tortilla factory owner with real estate holdings in East Los Angeles, was gunned down in his driveway in March, 1977, allegedly so his wealth would pass to his dying wife, and then to Tony de los Reyes.

Leasure has not been charged in Cervantes’ death.