Jury Deliberations to Begin in Bryant Family Murder Case : Court: High-security trial ends in surprise twist when a defendant implicates others in 1988 slayings of four.

The mammoth Bryant Family murder case, which took more than six years and cost several million dollars to prosecute, lumbered toward a conclusion Wednesday with a flurry of finger-pointing by the defendants and their lawyers.

A Superior Court jury in Downtown Los Angeles will begin sorting out the tangle of allegations today, when it retires for deliberations following a three-month trial. The high-security proceeding ended Wednesday after three days of closing arguments that took a surprising turn when defendant Jon Preston Settle, serving as his own lawyer, implicated the others.

Carl Jones and William McKinney, attorneys for defendants Stanley Bryant and LeRoy Wheeler, subsequently argued that Settle and the prosecution’s star witness were the actual killers, contending that they, not the defendants, ran and hid after the slayings. Settle was captured three years later, after being featured on a television police reality show.

The defense lawyers then pointed their fingers toward the prosecution table, accusing the three deputy district attorneys of trying to dupe the jury with corrupted evidence from witnesses who were given deals for their testimony.

Prosecutors maintained all four defendants were guilty. The long and twisted legal saga began Aug. 28, 1988, with the shooting deaths of four people, including a toddler, outside a house in Lake View Terrace.

Prosecutors allege that Bryant, Wheeler and Settle, along with a fourth defendant, Donald Franklin Smith, are ranking members of the Bryant Family, an alleged 200-member, Pacoima-based cocaine cartel that prosecutors say has controlled the drug’s street distribution in the San Fernando Valley for more than two decades.

A power grab by Andre Armstrong, a Bryant Family hit man, allegedly provided the motive for the Sunday afternoon shootings at the heavily fortified crack house on Wheeler Avenue.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Kevin McCormick and defendant Settle agreed that Armstrong and his partner, James Brown, were trapped in a steel-cage security door and shot to death under a plan hatched by Bryant, Wheeler and Smith.

They also agreed that Wheeler shot Brown’s girlfriend, Loretha Anderson, to death as she waited in a car parked outside. Wheeler also fatally shot Anderson’s 2-year-old daughter and left her year-old son for dead, McCormick and Settle said in their closing arguments.

“I’m not going to argue the law because I’m no good at that area,” Settle said Tuesday before dropping his bombshell by blaming the slayings on the others. He also told the jury that Family insider-turned-informant James Franklin Williams, the star prosecution witness, could be believed.

“I don’t think James Williams is lying a whole lot,” he said.

The turn of events prompted attorney Richard Leonard to quip during a break that Settle “should be nominated for prosecutor of the year.”

Settle told the jury that Wheeler shot the woman and child, and would not have done so without Bryant’s approval.

“Justice would be served if the person who did that, LeRoy Wheeler, is held responsible there,” Settle said.

And, he told the jury, “I make my own decisions. Ain’t no way I’m going to kill Mr. Armstrong for anybody. I would be the last person Mr. Bryant would ask to do that. Everything, including this crime, is done for money. Stanley Bryant ain’t got enough money.”

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Defense attorney McKinney also sought to distance his client, Wheeler, from Bryant, saying he worked for another branch of the organization and was considered by the others to be an arrogant outsider.

To illustrate his point, he showed the jury Wheeler’s scrapbook.

“Everybody who is important to him is in this book--his grandmother, his girlfriend, a whole bunch of pictures of himself because he is arrogant,” McKinney said.

McKinney also accused prosecutors of hurling “every piece of dirt they could find” to make their case. The goal, he said, was to “get the Bryants. If Mr. Smith or Mr. Wheeler get (dragged) along, so be it.”

“We’re talking about dope, dope, dope,” agreed defense attorney Jones, who acknowledges that his client, Bryant, was a drug dealer, but denies Bryant was involved in the slayings. He said nine of the 12 weeks of the trial were taken up by testimony regarding drug dealing.

Prosecutors, he said, were appealing to the jurors’ “passion, prejudice and sympathy, which means they have no evidence.”

As he spoke, the defense attorney sported a pin with a slash through the word “evidence.”