Couple Sentenced in White Supremacy Case : Courts: The North Hills man gets eight years and his wife three years and a month. They plan to appeal.

A federal judge sentenced a North Hills man to eight years in prison and his wife to three years and a month for conspiring to manufacture and sell illegal weapons to an undercover FBI agent who posed as a white supremacist.

Christian and Doris Nadal were arrested along with seven others in July and August after an 18-month federal investigation into white supremacist groups in Southern California.

A federal jury convicted Christian Nadal, 35, on Oct. 1 of 15 counts of selling and transferring illegal weapons and Doris Nadal, 41, of a single conspiracy count, acquitting her on three other charges.

U. S. District Judge Ronald S. W. Lew handed down the sentence to the Nadals just moments after they read statements in their defense.

“To this day, after six months in prison, I still ask myself, ‘Why did the government go after me and my wife?’ ” said Christian Nadal. “We were law-abiding, taxpaying citizens bothering no one.”

Doris Nadal’s voice wavered as she told Lew that she had “never committed a crime” nor even “considered committing a crime.” After the hearing, Jan Norman, Doris Nadal’s attorney, released a written statement by her client.

“In my own defense, I can only say once again that I was not involved in any conspiracy to manufacture or sell weapons with either Joe Allen (a government informant), or my husband . . . “ the statement read.

“I feel very bitter at what I know to be entrapment against my husband and fabricated, sexist charges against myself,” Nadal said. “The government would have lost its case to entrapment if they had not turned the general public against us by intentionally lying about us being involved with White Supremacy.”

The prosecutors in the Nadals’ case, Assistant U. S. Attys. Gregory W. Jessner and Lawrence S. Middleton, said Monday that they were pleased with the sentences.

“The bottom line is yes, we’re satisfied,” Jessner said.

The Nadals’ attorneys said that they were unsurprised by the length of the prison terms and that the Nadals plan to appeal their cases.

“The issue in this case is not about whether they should be sentenced, but whether the government manufactured crimes,” said Joel Levine, an attorney for Christian Nadal. “We’re very confident that the court of appeals will interpret the facts that he (Christian Nadal) was improperly entrapped.”

“Both Doris and Christian Nadal had no intentions of selling guns until the government asked him to do it,” Levine said.

Christian Nadal had faced a maximum sentence of 145 years in prison and Doris Nadal faced five years.

During Monday’s hearing in Los Angeles, Christian Nadal also maintained that his wife was innocent, saying she had no knowledge of firearms or any of the gun transactions presented during their trial.

“I’m willing to take a lie-detector test,” Nadal said.

In her written statement, Doris Nadal said her husband had never expressed a desire to own an automatic weapon until he met Joe Allen, the federal informant, at a party last year.

Doris Nadal alleged that Allen called her husband 77 times over 18 months, asking him to put together machine-gun kits in the event of more riots in Los Angeles stemming from the Rodney G. King and Reginald O. Denny beating trials.

“My husband had never committed any crime before meeting Joe Allen and would not have committed any crime if Joe Allen had not persuaded, pushed and forced his way into our lives,” said Doris Nadal’s statement.

During the Nadals’ trial, FBI Agent Michael E. German, who posed as Mike McCarthy, a white supremacist, testified that he purchased weapons from the Nadals on three occasions, two of which were secretly taped.

Prosecutors portrayed Christian Nadal as a racist extremist who was eager to commit the crimes to support his belief that whites should unite and arm themselves. Doris Nadal was portrayed as someone with a knowledge of guns who helped her husband and drove him to deliver machine-gun parts.

Millard Washington, a juror during the Nadal trial who attended Monday’s hearing, said he was disappointed by the sentences.

“I think they (the sentences) should have been a lot more,” Washington said. “The possibility of where the guns could have gone to and the potential for harm and destruction they could have caused is unknown.”

Washington said he and other jurors rejected the entrapment defense presented by the Nadals’ attorneys early on in their deliberations because federal agents met Christian Nadal at a skinhead party.

Of the dozens of phone calls that Allen placed to Christian Nadal, Washington said, Nadal “wasn’t returning them at first, but then he started returning them. He became willing.”

“The government certainly never forced him to return the calls,” Washington said. “He could have stopped whenever he wanted to.”

Washington also said some of the male jurors were reluctant to convict Doris Nadal. Repeated reviews of clandestinely recorded audiotapes, however, led jurors to conclude that Doris Nadal had knowledge of guns and the transactions, Washington said.

A co-defendant, Christopher Berwick, an Acton machinist who pleaded guilty to conspiring to manufacture and sell illegal weapons, was not sentenced Monday with the Nadals because his attorney could not appear. A new sentencing date for Berwick, who faces a maximum five-year prison term and a $250,000 fine, will be rescheduled.