D. A.’s Office Denies That It Coerced a Witness : Bryant Family: A judge must decide whether to make the state prosecute the 4-year-old murder case.

The Los Angeles district attorney’s office has denied allegations by defense lawyers in the Bryant Family murder case that prosecutors coerced a witness into changing her story and then sought to conceal their actions from the defense and the judge.

The denial was included in documents made public Tuesday by the state attorney general’s office.

They were submitted to a Superior Court judge who must decide whether to take the 4-year-old case away from county prosecutors, due to the witness-tampering allegations, and force state prosecutors to handle it.

The documents released by the state appeared to corroborate claims by the defense that prosecutors in the highest levels of the district attorney’s office were indeed aware two years ago of potential witness-tampering in the case involving the crime family.

Much of the information regarding the alleged witness tampering, according to the documents, was deliberately withheld from defense lawyers for two years, until after Superior Court Judge J. D. Smith made a crucial decision last month to allow the district attorney’s office to remain in charge of the case.

Smith had scheduled Tuesday’s hearing to reconsider the issue and discuss whether to assign the case to the state attorney general’s office, which has argued vehemently that it does not want it.

The attorney general’s most recent objections to taking the case were included in a 3-inch-thick legal document filed with the court minutes before closing time Monday.

As a result, Smith on Tuesday granted requests by defense attorneys for a 10-day continuance so that they could review the new material.

Smith did say, however, that he would allow defense lawyers to question top officials of the district attorney’s office at a Jan. 22 hearing to determine why the information was apparently withheld for so long.

Smith said that like the defense attorneys, he was concerned that he did not receive information regarding the alleged witness tampering until after he had ruled Dec. 17 that the district attorney’s office could remain on the case.

The judge also said he received no indication that one of the prosecutors, Deputy Dist. Atty. Eduards Abele, had expressed concern within his office that witness tampering may have occurred.

“I didn’t know about those things” before deciding, Smith said. “I asked and asked, and did not get them.”

Defense lawyer Louise Gulartie told the judge that cross-examination of officials of the district attorney’s office is needed to prove that the local prosecutors covered up serious allegations of witness tampering and so should be taken off the case.

“There are a lot of people dancing around the truth here about what they knew and when they knew it,” Gulartie said.

Gulartie is one of 16 defense lawyers representing five men, allegedly members of the notorious Bryant Family crime syndicate, who face trial on charges that they gunned down two rival drug dealers and two innocent bystanders in Lake View Terrace in 1988.

The judge again expressed his impatience with continuing delays in the case, noting that it has already cost taxpayers as much as $2.5 million in payments to court-appointed defense attorneys before even getting to trial.

In the documents, state prosecutors argued that the district attorney’s office “has already taken the most important step to rid itself of a potential conflict” by removing two officials from the case--Abele and Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan Maurizi, the prosecutor alleged to have tampered with a witness.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Tricia Bigelow told the judge that there is no reason to bring in her office because the district attorney’s office has 900 prosecutors who could handle the case without fear of a conflict of interest.

In a detailed four-page memorandum written in early 1991, Abele told his superiors that he was concerned that Maurizi may have helped a police investigator coerce a witness to the killings into changing her story to bolster the prosecution’s case.

But in the documents, top officials in the district attorney’s office said they reviewed the situation shortly after the alleged witness tampering and determined that Maurizi had not acted improperly.

Maurizi herself said she gave defense lawyers Abele’s memo two years ago, but decided to delete some portions of the document because she considered it confidential.

A top official in the district attorney’s office, Assistant Dist. Atty. Frank E. Sundstedt, said he learned of the unedited memo’s existence only days before Smith’s hearing.

But he said he and other officials decided to wait until later to release it because it had nothing to do with the hearing.