Appeals Court OKs ‘Roving Wiretaps’ : Justice: Landmark ruling upholds federal bugging law that led to convictions of Chris Petti and Richard T. Silberman.

Forging new legal ground, a federal appeals court ruled Monday that the nation’s first use of “roving wiretaps,” which led to the convictions of reputed mobster Chris Petti and prominent San Diego businessman Richard T. Silberman, was legal.

Affirming Petti’s conviction on felony charges of money-laundering, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Monday there was no merit to defense contentions that the roving taps violate a criminal suspect’s constitutional right to privacy. On separate grounds, the court also ordered Petti to do even more time behind bars than he had drawn originally.

The decision marked the first appellate court ruling in the nation on the legality of the roving taps. Authorized by a 1986 federal law, the taps enable police and prosecutors to bug multiple telephones, even public pay phones, to listen to a criminal suspect.

That law, the court said Monday, strikes a sensible balance between an individual’s privacy rights and the need for law enforcement to keep pace with sophisticated criminals who might use several phones to try to avoid detection.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Carol Lam, who prosecuted Petti and Silberman two years ago in San Diego federal court, called the ruling “very gratifying.” The roving wiretap law, she said, is designed “to ensure the protection of individual liberties and constitutional rights.”

Petti’s defense lawyer, Las Vegas attorney Oscar Goodman, said that was nonsense. He said he would seek a rehearing at the 9th Circuit Court and stands ready to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The Constitution took another whack on the jaw today,” Goodman said Monday. “Soon, government agents will be allowed to completely intrude into our most private thoughts. But we won’t be able to do anything to stop them, because there will be no Bill of Rights left to protect us.”

Petti, 64, who is free on bail pending appeal, could not be reached for comment. He was convicted in October, 1990, of six felony counts in connection with a money-laundering scheme that grew out of a federal probe of mob interest in the Rincon Indian reservation, in northern San Diego County.

From July, 1987, through early 1989, federal agents listened to thousands of phone calls, wiretaps aimed initially at Petti, who is believed to be connected to organized crime in Chicago and Las Vegas. Petti routinely used pay phones around San Diego, including a bank of pay phones at a Mission Valley hotel, to make his calls, according to prosecutors.

The taps led to Silberman, a San Diego financier who once served as a top aide to former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., and to a money-laundering scheme. Prosecutors charged that Silberman, Petti and three other men laundered $300,000 that an undercover FBI agent had portrayed as the profits of Colombian cocaine trafficking.

Silberman, Petti and the three others were convicted or pleaded guilty to felony charges in the scheme.

Silberman, the ex-husband of county Supervisor Susan Golding, a current San Diego mayoral candidate, is serving a 46-month prison term.

Petti was sentenced to 30 months by U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving, the trial court judge, who called him a “pawn” in the scheme and said it would be unfair to sentence him to anything like the time Silberman received.

Meanwhile, Petti, who has been a longstanding target of federal authorities, was hit in January with a new indictment--15 counts alleging that he and nine other men, including the reputed bosses of the Chicago mob, tried to infiltrate a gaming hall planned for the Rincon reservation. He remains free on bail in that case, too.

The new indictment stems from the same taps that led to Petti’s 1990 conviction. Irving ruled that the roving wiretap law is legal, and Petti’s trial centered on dozens of secretly recorded conversations that were played in open court.

On appeal to the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit court, Goodman contended that Petti deserved a new trial on the money-laundering charges. Goodman said at a May 5 hearing that, even if the majority of Petti’s calls on a given day involved criminal plots, that was still no reason to intrude on his personal affairs in every single call he made.

The 9th Circuit Court rejected that claim, upholding Irving’s ruling and stressing the legality of roving wiretaps.

Though the law permits agents to bug even banks of phones, that means only those phones that agents know a criminal suspect favors, which satisfies the Constitution’s demand that a warrant “particularly describes” the phones to be tapped, Judge James R. Browning said.

Plus, the law demands that agents stop listening to a conversation as soon as they determine the target is not on the line, which Browning said balances a person’s privacy rights and law enforcement’s interest in fighting crime.

Those “safeguards,” Browning said, block the potential under a roving wiretap for a “wide-ranging exploratory search” and mean that there is “virtually no possibility of abuse or mistake.”

The ruling means that the dozens of secret tapes used at Petti’s first trial will again be available to prosecutors in the case against the reputed bosses of the Chicago mob. That case is set for trial Jan. 12.

Though Petti was properly convicted at his first trial, Browning said, he was improperly sentenced to only 30 months in prison.

Even if Irving, the trial court judge, believed Petti deserved to serve significantly less time behind bars than Silberman, rigid new federal sentencing guidelines no longer permit a judge that sort of discretion, Browning said.

Instead, Browning said, the rules require Petti to serve 37 to 46 months in prison. Browning

sent the case back to San Diego for resentencing.

Judges Jerome Farris and Barbara Caulfield joined the opinion.