Woman Says Mafia Threatened to Kill Husband : Courts: Sharon Snyder testifies that her pornographer spouse owed $100,000 to a crime family. She is accused of hiring a killer to slay him.

A Woodland Hills woman on trial for the murder of her pornographer husband testified Wednesday that a Mafia enforcer had threatened to kill the man shortly before he was gunned down on a Northridge street.

Testifying in her own defense, Sharon Snyder, 41, also scoffed at the accusation that she had hired co-defendant Victor Diaz to murder her husband, sex video producer Theodore J. Snyder.

Her testimony in San Fernando Superior Court reintroduced the long-dormant theory that the machine-gun slaying of Theodore Snyder was an organized crime execution.

Police initially pursued that theory, but four months after the Aug. 1, 1989, murder, they charged Sharon Snyder and Diaz, 47, with the killing.

Citing a gag order imposed on attorneys Wednesday by Judge Malcolm H. Mackey, defense attorney Alex R. Kessel declined to explain whether he was trying to persuade jurors that the killing was Mafia-related.

Before the gag order, Kessel told reporters that he believed that Diaz, who was the Snyders’ cocaine supplier, committed the killing “for his own purposes. He had his own hostile business dealings with Ted Snyder.”

There has been no suggestion in the trial that Diaz, who testified last week for the prosecution, has ties to organized crime.

In a plea bargain with prosecutors, Diaz has been permitted to plead no contest to a reduced charge in exchange for his testimony implicating Sharon Snyder.

Diaz said he killed Theodore Snyder at Sharon Snyder’s behest because he was in love with her and she had promised to share her inheritance with him.

In her testimony, Sharon Snyder said that shortly before the slaying, a New York man she said was a “lieutenant in the Lucchese crime family” had stepped up pressure to collect a debt of more than $100,000 that her husband owed the family.

The man said her husband “had a week, and if he didn’t pay the money, Teddy would be dead,” Snyder said.

Shortly after the slaying, police said they had evidence that Theodore Snyder’s Northridge video company, Video Cassette Recordings, had gone bankrupt in 1988 and owed money to an East Coast crime organization.

Sharon Snyder also scoffed at suggestions of a romantic link between her and Diaz, saying he was no more than a drug supplier and social friend to her and her husband.

“I loved my husband. I expected to be with Teddy the rest of my life,” she said.

She also disputed suggestions by prosecution witnesses that she was bitter because her husband had forced her to have sex with other men while he videotaped the activity.

Snyder said she had performed sexually with other men for many videos, but “I never did it unless I wanted to.” She said her husband enjoyed both filming the videos and watching them.

In an apparent effort to rebut the prosecution’s charge that she had planned to share her husband’s wealth with Diaz, Snyder also said she and her husband were broke and barely able to support their cocaine habits.

If convicted, Snyder faces life in prison without possibility of parole. As the result of his plea bargain, Diaz is to be sentenced to 17 years to life in prison, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lawrence E. Mason said.