Shock Wave Rips Through Compton Politics : Probe: Patricia Moore’s admission of extortion stirs speculation that she will be aiding the investigation of a former mayor and others.

As a rising political star, Patricia Moore never shied away from the camera. But there is one incident caught on video that the outspoken former Compton city councilwoman never wanted publicized.

The grainy footage shows Moore receiving a white envelope from a man she thought was a financier trying to build a waste-to-energy plant in Compton. Instead, he was an undercover FBI agent. And the envelope contained cash Moore accepted to back the project, according to sources familiar with the case.

For months after being shown the video by federal prosecutors in March--the same day that word of a sweeping investigation of alleged political corruption in Compton was reported--Moore never flinched from proclaiming her innocence.

“I swear on the Bible, I never accepted any money from anyone,” she said recently, during one of the few times she spoke publicly about the investigation.

But in a confession that stunned her political friends and foes alike, the woman who gained national prominence as an advocate of African American causes admitted last week that she had extorted $9,100 from the company that wanted to build the incinerator. Moore, 46, pleaded guilty to a single count of felony extortion. She could receive up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Moore also pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failing to file a federal tax return for 1992.

Her surprise plea sent shock waves through Compton’s close-knit political community, already reeling from the indictment in August of Rep. Walter R. Tucker III (D-Compton). Tucker is accused of accepting $30,000 in bribes and demanding another $250,000 to support the trash project while serving as mayor in 1991 and 1992. He has proclaimed his innocence.

Moore’s admission fueled speculation that she will be a star witness for the prosecution when Tucker goes to trial in February and that she also may be providing evidence against others in the ongoing investigation.

“People here are running scared,” one Compton political insider said. “They’re just waiting for the next shoe to drop.”

Her guilty plea is the low point in a colorful and often turbulent life in which the daughter of migrant laborers has risen from picking fruit to elective office and endured two failed marriages and four consecutive political losses.

Moore had an uncanny ability to command the spotlight during a series of racially charged episodes, from the fatal shooting of a black teen-ager by a Korean American grocer to the police beating of Rodney G. King, once referring to the Los Angeles riots as “pay-back time.”

Now unemployed, Moore has for months been living as a virtual recluse, even disguising her voice as that of a little girl to fend off unwanted visitors at her home.

“I just want to live a quiet life,” she said last summer, peering from behind her door. “I want to be a normal person with a real life without people placing me in a glass house.”

Despite her problems, Moore had until recently remained outwardly confident about her future, insisting that the investigation represented “another chapter in my life,” and hinting that the public had not seen the last of Patricia Moore.

But that has all changed.

“She made a mistake,” said Paul Potter, her attorney. “Lots of people do. I just hope that when everything is said and done, people will remember the positive things.”

As a youngster, Moore passed her summers in the dusty Central Valley, picking watermelons, plums and grapes with her family. “I couldn’t sleep at night because we would sleep on those mattresses that were full of bedbugs, and they would bite us,” she once recalled.

She remembered wishing she were in the Memorial Day and Fourth of July parades that passed by while she and her siblings were in the fields. She finally got her chance at Corcoran High, near Fresno, where she became the school’s first African American majorette.

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After high school, Moore moved to Los Angeles, went to business school and worked at the Bank of America. She married a former Compton police officer, raised three children and has two grandchildren. The marriage broke up 15 years ago.

There was a secret--and disastrous--second marriage at South Lake Tahoe on Halloween, 1991, to a man barely half her age whom she believed owned his own entertainment company and an expensive home in the Hollywood Hills.

Moore annulled the marriage to Leroy Guillory, citing fraud, court documents show. He is in prison serving a 12-year sentence for kidnaping a man at gunpoint in 1991.

Her political career has also had its ups and downs. But one thing has remained constant: her outspokenness.

A onetime aide to former congressman Mervyn M. Dymally, Moore made her first campaign for public office in 1981 in an unsuccessful bid for Compton mayor. Her political fortunes changed in 1989, when she gained attention organizing marches for gun control after a 2-year-old was killed in a drive-by shooting. The publicity helped get her elected to the City Council that year.

Her fiery pronouncements landed her appearances twice on “Nightline” and once on the “MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,” and also made her a lightning rod for controversy.

After a judge sentenced grocer Soon Ja Du to five years probation in 1991 for killing 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, Moore told a phalanx of reporters, photographers and television cameras, “There is no justice for African Americans in this country.”

Last year, she was sharply criticized when she spoke at the funeral of a slain Compton police officer and denounced the four Los Angeles police officers who beat King.

While attracting attention, such outspokenness did little to propel her political career. She lost four consecutive elections, twice failing to become Compton’s mayor and twice losing bids for the state Assembly.

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Before she was elected to the City Council in 1989, Moore was a community activist. She played a pivotal role in 1984 in successfully leading public opposition to a proposal to build a trash-to-energy plant in Compton, saying that the project would be built too close to residential areas.

That same project, revived five years later when Moore was on the City Council, led to the federal investigation and Moore’s trouble with the law.

San Gabriel Valley businessman John Macardican sparked the investigation in late 1989 by complaining to the FBI that he was being solicited for bribes by Compton officials as the price for supporting the $200-million project.

Sources say that Moore became friends with a key undercover operative in the investigation who posed as an executive of Macardican’s company.

These sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the executive, who called himself Stan Bailey, made several overtures to Compton officials, offering cash in return for their support for Macardican’s project.

By early 1991, Moore and Bailey were frequently seen together in public. He showered her with gifts of long-stemmed red roses and boxes of chocolate. They took two trips to Mexico together.

“A lot of the (politicians) were skeptical of (Bailey) at first,” one Compton activist said. “But after he took up with Pat, they relaxed their guard.”

Moore has said that her relationship with Bailey was platonic, and that they had a falling out after he failed to make good on a promise to secure financial help for her unsuccessful 1991 mayoral campaign.

No one suspected Bailey’s alleged role in the investigation-- least of all Moore.

Neither did she apparently become suspicious over an incident in December, 1991.

While driving in Long Beach, she noticed two men in a car behind her as she drove her green Rolls-Royce--with its personalized “HEIRESS” license plates.

They followed her to Compton, where Moore drove to the police station and told officers she was being tailed, law enforcement sources said. The men parked across the street. Two police officers walked over to the car and confronted them. But to the officers’ surprise, the men displayed FBI badges.

The next day, sources say, Compton police officials called the FBI, asking why Moore was being followed. The FBI explained that the agents, who were supposedly staking out drug dealers, had mistakenly followed the wrong Rolls-Royce.

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By then, Moore had met several times with Macardican and undercover agents posing as financiers for the project, sources said.

During lunch at a Long Beach restaurant, Macardican pitched the project, telling Moore he wanted her “on the team,” according to a source familiar with the meeting. Unbeknown to her, one of the people at the table was an undercover FBI agent. Macardican, the source said, told Moore that he wanted to avoid a futile repeat of his 1984 effort that Moore had opposed; he and his backers said they lost $1.2 million.

It was at Macardican’s South El Monte office in the spring of 1992 that the video of Moore accepting the envelope was taken, sources said. Macardican had arranged the meeting between Moore and a man who turned out to be an undercover agent, sources said.

Sources say that Moore had been introduced to the agent earlier at her City Council offices by then-Mayor Tucker.

Tucker is said to have brought the agent to Moore’s office, patted him on the back and told Moore: “Pat, this is a good man. Listen to what he has to say,” according to sources familiar with the meeting.

Federal investigators have a secretly recorded audiotape of that meeting, sources said.

In July, 1992--eight months after the extortion incident to which Moore has pleaded guilty--the City Council awarded Macardican’s company exclusive negotiating rights to build the incinerator. The vote was 3 to 2, with Tucker and Moore among the majority. After the vote, Macardican never pursued the project. He withdrew the proposal earlier this year. Macardican declined numerous interview requests.

Last spring, the day before federal authorities showed Moore the video recorded at Macardican’s office, a reporter asked her to comment on the investigation.

The query prompted her to call a trusted friend and former Macardican associate.

“You don’t suppose this has something to do with (Macardican’s) project, do you?,” the friend recalled her saying.

The friend, who insisted on anonymity, assured Moore that her concern was unfounded. But at the councilwoman’s insistence, her friend left a message for Macardican asking if he knew anything about an FBI probe.

Macardican never called back.