Couple Sold Illegal Weapons, Jury Told : Trial: FBI agent who posed as a white supremacist describes transactions. Defense attorneys have maintained that Christian and Doris Nadal are victims of entrapment.

A federal prosecutor said Wednesday that a North Hills couple sold illegal weapons to an undercover FBI agent and an informant who said they wanted to buy the weapons for use in white supremacist activities.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Gregory W. Jessner told a jury in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles that Christian Nadal and Doris Nadal sold illegally manufactured machine guns and silencers.

But Jessner’s remarks were considerably more low-key than his assertion in July that Christian Nadal was “committed to the cause of a white holy war.”

As its first witness, the government called FBI Agent Michael E. German, who had posed as white supremacist Mike McCarthy. He spent several hours on the stand, testifying about weapons purchases he had made from the defendants at the Chino airport, their home and on their boat at Marina del Rey.

All but one of the meetings were clandestinely taped, either by a hidden audio recorder worn by the informant, Joe Allen, or by a video camera operated by another FBI agent. Some of the tapes were shown in court but fuzzy pictures and shoddy sound may have reduced their effectiveness.

German also testified that Christian Nadal appeared eager to create an ongoing weapons operation. “From the very first day that I met him, in May of 1992, he indicated that he had talked with several other people about buying machine guns,” German said.

“He talked about setting up a procedure to manufacture more guns,” German said.

The agent also said that neither he nor Allen pressured the Nadals into the weapons transactions. While the agent described his dealings with the Nadals, Assistant U.S. Atty. Lawrence S. Middleton, the other prosecutor, often handed weapons--including Sten machine guns and an AR-15 assault rifle--to German.

The couple were arrested in July after an 18-month federal investigation into white supremacist groups in Southern California. Their attorneys consistently have maintained that the Nadals were victims of entrapment and emphasized that theme in opening arguments.

“All the time, Mr. Allen was taking a previously innocent person and trying to make him a criminal and continuously trying to raise that level of criminality,” said Joel Levine, Christian Nadal’s attorney.

The attorney also said his client never sold weapons to anyone other than the undercover operatives and maintained that he had not made a profit on the transactions.

Levine told jurors he did not contest many of the facts Jessner mentioned. But Levine said he will present evidence that casts the events in a different light. Levine also cautioned jurors they may hear that his client “has political views that may be offensive to you and to me, but those views are not on trial here.”

Warrants made public in July state that federal agents who searched the Nadals’ house found Nazi literature and paraphernalia. In one room were a Nazi skull-and-helmet coin bank and a framed photograph of Adolf Hitler on a bookshelf.

In his opening arguments, Thomas Nishi, Doris Nadal’s lawyer, tried to blunt the potential impact of such information if it does come into evidence.

“Christian Nadal loved to collect old things. He has a boat built in 1925, 11 old cars, old records and wartime memorabilia, including a World War II plane,” Nishi said.

He maintained that Doris Nadal had no idea what was going on in the weapons transactions. Nishi also raised the entrapment issue in his opening statement, saying that Allen had pursued the Nadals with numerous phone calls starting in early 1992.

Levine later cross-examined German, who said that the FBI had rented an $1,800-a-month beachfront apartment for Allen in Newport Beach to help facilitate the investigation and had converted a warehouse into a gym with weights and other equipment in an attempt to establish contacts with skinheads.

On Tuesday, Christopher Berwick, an Acton machinist who had been the Nadals’ co-defendant, pleaded guilty to conspiring to manufacture and sell illegal weapons.