Defense Goes on the Offensive in Bryant Family Murder Trial : Courts: Lawyer questions evidence of alleged drug killings and attacks credibility of prosecution witnesses.

Defense lawyers in the Bryant Family murder trial continued their assault on the prosecution’s case Wednesday, telling jurors that police had cut a deal with one key witness, pressured another into changing her story and distorted the scope of the Pacoima-based drug ring underlying the four killings.

Attorney Carl Jones downplayed the alleged Bryant Family cocaine empire, telling the jury that his client, Stanley Bryant, was hardly the drug lord and murder mastermind portrayed by the government.

Instead, Jones said during his 45-minute opening statement, Bryant had been a gofer whose nickname--”Peanut Head”--shows how little power he actually wielded.

“There is a Bryant Family,” Jones told the jury as he slowly and dramatically pinned blown-up family snapshots on a poster board in Los Angeles Superior Court.

“And the Bryant Family consists of Mrs. Bryant, the mother, whose name is Florence. She’s 70. Jeff Bryant Sr., now deceased, the father. Eli Bryant, a member of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, much like the deputies you see here and working in this building. . . .”

Another brother, Jeff Jr., “took a different path” and is a convicted drug dealer, Jones acknowledged. But he told the jury: “You must distinguish between Jeff Bryant, Stanley Bryant, Mother Bryant, and the nieces and the cousins. . . . You cannot paint everybody with the same brush.”

Stanley Bryant and three alleged Family agents--Jon Preston Settle, Donald Franklin Smith and LeRoy Wheeler--could face the death penalty if convicted of killing two drug dealers and two witnesses, including a 2-year-old girl, seven years ago in Lake View Terrace.

The defendants are charged with four counts of murder for the deaths of Andre Armstrong, James Brown, Loretha Anderson and Anderson’s daughter, Chemise English, who were fatally shot at a cash-counting house on Wheeler Avenue.

They also face one count of attempted murder for the injuries suffered by Anderson’s infant son, Carlos English Jr., who was cut by bullet-shattered glass in the back seat of a car.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Kevin McCormick told the jury on Wednesday that the Aug. 28, 1988, slayings were carried out by a sophisticated rock-cocaine machine that murdered rivals, intimidated witnesses and synchronized drug dealers’ work schedules with police roll calls so that street sales could take place before patrol cars were deployed.

The multimillion-dollar Bryant Family ring ran its business from a neighborhood pool hall and a network of northeast Valley crack houses, whose ownership and utility records were placed in employees’ names, McCormick said.

Within the Mafia-style world of the Bryant ring, the prosecutor said, defendants Bryant and Smith married the daughters of a former Valley heroin baron, and the Family women had taken part in a scheme to keep a witness to a 1982 murder from testifying.

But Jones told the jury there was no physical evidence linking Stanley Bryant to the Wheeler Avenue slayings and that the prosecution’s key witnesses were not credible, a theme begun on Tuesday by defendants Settle and Wheeler.

James Franklin Williams IV, a former low-level Family employee with a long criminal record, not only witnessed the slayings but helped carry them out and is testifying for the prosecution in exchange for immunity from murder charges, Jones said.

Another prosecution witness, Rosa Hernandez, was a 14-year-old girl playing outside when the shootings occurred and originally claimed to have seen only one man run outside the crack house. Her story allegedly changed to two men, including Bryant, after she was badgered by LAPD Detective James Vojtecky and Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan Maurizi, Jones told jurors.

Jones also told the jury that another prosecutor had been so alarmed by the Hernandez interview that he complained to supervisors and documented his concerns in a memo, raising anew a misconduct charge that surfaced in 1992 and helped delay the trial.

“Stanley Bryant is innocent,” Jones said. “He was not at that house that day.”

Attorney Ralph Novotney Jr., in a brief opening statement for defendant Smith, similarly challenged Williams and Hernandez’s stories and said prosecutors would offer no corroboration. Smith was not one of the men Hernandez saw drive away from the scene, allegedly to dump two victims’ bodies in Lopez Canyon, Novotney said.

The trial, which could last six months, continues today before Judge Charles E. Horan.