Camarena Witness Admits Perjury : Crime: Onetime drug cartel worker says on stand that he feared a man would be killed if he revealed his name.

A prosecution witness in the trial of two men charged in connection with the 1985 murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena admitted Monday that he had previously lied under oath but angrily denied that he is cooperating with the government in this case because of its payments to him.

“I abandoned more than half a million dollars in property in Mexico so that I could get $130,000?” the witness, Lawrence Victor Harrison, asked sarcastically of a defense lawyer. “I don’t see the profit.”

Harrison, who spent most of the morning fending off hostile questions from defense lawyers, acknowledged that he had lied during a 1990 trial when he said he did not know the name of a person who contacted him in Mexico and suggested that he come to the United States. Harrison said he told that lie because he believed the person would be killed if he gave up the name.

“That’s the only time I lied,” Harrison said. “I consulted my conscience, sir, and boy, it told me not to give that name.”

Harrison’s testimony Monday came on the heels of his gripping account last week of the work he did on behalf of a powerful drug cartel in the early 1980s. While working for one of the cartel leaders, Harrison said, he saw defendant Ruben Zuno Arce in the company of drug traffickers on several occasions and co-defendant Humberto Alvarez Machain dozens of times.

Prosecutors allege that Zuno and Alvarez Machain worked with the cartel and collaborated in the 1985 murder of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Camarena.

Defense lawyers hammered away at Harrison’s testimony and shadowy background. In particular, defense lawyer Edward Medvene called attention to Harrison’s educational credentials. Although Harrison told jurors that he had attended college and was a lawyer in Mexico, he acknowledged on cross-examination that he had never enrolled in college and had only taken law school classes informally.

As they build their case against Alvarez Machain and Zuno, prosecutors have created a scathing indictment of the Mexican government, producing a series of witnesses who have testified that high-level Mexican authorities were involved in protecting drug traffickers and in thwarting the investigation of Camarena’s murder.

Those allegations have served to emphasize the strain that this case has placed on relations between the United States and Mexico. Mexican authorities have denounced the trial of Alvarez Machain--who was kidnaped in Guadalajara 1n 1990 at the behest of the DEA--as illegal, and officials from the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles observe each day’s proceedings.

Although jurors have already heard tales of corruption by high-ranking Mexican officials, for the first time Monday they heard a witness say he had personally been involved in payoffs.

Jorge Godoy, a former Mexican police officer who went to work for drug kingpin Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo in the early 1980s, said he had delivered a suitcase full of cash to the governor of Jalisco, a state in Mexico, in early September, 1984. Godoy said that he and an associate handed two suitcases to the governor, Enrique Alvarez Castillo, and told him the money was from “El Senor,” a nickname for Fonseca.

A few weeks after that incident, Godoy said, he and several other men were handed more suitcases full of cash and flown to a military base outside Mexico City. There they gave that money to Juan Arevalo Gardoqui, then Mexico’s minister of defense, Godoy added.