Woman Sniffed Drug at Sheriff’s Station, Ex-Deputy Testifies : Trial: Police ‘groupie’ surprised officers who showed her seized cocaine in evidence envelope, jurors are told.

A former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy testified Thursday that he and another officer once tried to impress “a police groupie” by showing her cocaine from an evidence envelope at narcotics headquarters--only to watch horrified as the young woman suddenly inhaled some of the drug.

Eufrasio G. Cortez told federal jurors that he panicked during the 1986 incident, which began when the young woman joined narcotics officers in a late-night drinking session to celebrate a successful drug raid.

When the woman told Cortez that she had never seen cocaine, the deputy said he and another officer, Daniel M. Garner, took her to their Whittier headquarters. Cortez said no one else was around, so he opened an envelope containing a kilogram of cocaine that had been seized as evidence. When he poured the narcotic on a table, however, Cortez said the woman immediately took some and inhaled it.

“I went into a panic and sealed the envelope immediately,” Cortez testified.

“I looked at Dan, and he looked at me. We sat the female down, gave her a beer . . . and asked her why she did it,” he added. “She said she just wanted to try it.”

In hopes of making the woman forget about the incident, the officers plied the woman with beer, and the three passed out in the headquarters office before being awakened by an arriving deputy, Cortez said. As a result of the incident, the envelope of cocaine was eventually destroyed and the drug case was never pursued, he said.

Cortez’s testimony came during his appearance as a prosecution witness in the federal trial of two sheriff’s deputies accused of skimming drug money as members of an elite anti-drug team. Garner’s wife, Yhvona, is also charged with laundering stolen money and filing false income tax returns in the case.

Guided by the questioning of a federal prosecutor, Cortez spent Thursday detailing alleged beatings, thefts and acts of perjury by narcotics officers in the mid-to-late 1980s. And he named two dozen present and former deputies--some of whom have not yet been indicted in the money-skimming investigation--as participants in thefts.

Cortez, serving a five-year prison term for skimming drug money, testified that he regularly received skimmed cash--ranging from several hundred dollars to $250,000--and sometimes drove around with $20,000 to $30,000 of stolen money in his car “in case I wanted to buy something.”

Cortez also testified that:

* He once gave a departing deputy $10,000 in skimmed cash as a “going away” present after the deputy was promoted to sergeant and set to leave Cortez’s anti-drug team.

* He watched a narcotics deputy on another anti-drug squad secretly stuff several bundles of cash inside his jacket or vest, but never confronted the officer because Cortez already had planned to steal money.

* Members of his narcotics crew held an emergency meeting, in part because one deputy’s wife had discovered a hoard of stolen cash and threatened to turn in her husband to the police until Cortez and Garner intervened.

Cortez told jurors that his wife knew nothing of his illegal activities, but he testified that he heard Yhvona Garner once complain that “she was tired of living like a Mafia wife.”