Reputed Drug Lord Guilty in ’88 Slayings : Courts: Stanley Bryant and two underlings are convicted in the brutal murders of a woman and a 2-year-old girl.

Climaxing a case that has consumed six years and more than $3 million, a jury in Los Angeles on Thursday found reputed Pacoima drug lord Stanley Bryant and two underlings guilty of first-degree murder with special circumstances that could result in the death penalty.

The 37-year-old Bryant was found guilty Thursday of two counts of first-degree murder in the Aug. 28, 1988, shootings of a woman and a 2-year-old girl at a heavily fortified house in Lake View Terrace, where, according to testimony, money from crack-cocaine sales was counted.

Last month, the jury found Bryant guilty of two other first-degree murder counts for the shooting deaths of two drug rivals. Those partial verdicts were recorded before a juror left the panel for health reasons and was replaced with an alternate.

Bryant, Le Roy Wheeler, 26, and Donald Franklin Smith, 37--according to prosecutors all ranking members of the ruthless Bryant Family cocaine ring--also were convicted of the attempted murder of a year-old boy.

Police and prosecutors say Stanley Bryant and his brother Jeff were leaders of a 200-member cocaine ring known as the Bryant Family or simply The Family.

Because the jury found the allegation that the three men committed multiple murders true, the case soon will enter a second phase in which the jury will decide whether Bryant and the others should receive the death penalty or life prison sentences without the possibility of parole.

But first the jury of six men and six women will continue to deliberate the charges against a fourth defendant, Jon Preston Settle. According to a juror’s note that Superior Court Judge Charles E. Horan read aloud in court, the panel is deadlocked 11-1 on at least one of the murder counts against Settle.

Killed in the Aug. 28, 1988, shootings in Lake View Terrace were convicted Bryant Family hit man Andre Armstrong, 31, and his partner, James Brown, 43. The two men, who according to prosecutors had threatened to steal business from the Bryant Family, were ambushed inside a cage-like metal security door at the house on Wheeler Avenue and fired upon repeatedly by assailants armed with shotguns and semi-automatic pistols.

Also killed were Loretha Anderson, 23, of Seaside, and Chemise English, 2, who were waiting for the men in a parked car.

During the trial, Wheeler was identified as the shotgun-toting man who killed the woman and child. Wheeler, who according to testimony idolized Bryant and called him “Uncle Stan,” also was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder.

The jury found Smith guilty of first-degree murder for the slayings of the two men, but convicted him only of second-degree murder in the slayings of the woman and child, finding he did not premeditate those murders. The jury seemed to conclude, by returning this verdict, that Smith was following orders.

The verdicts came after the judge read a note from a juror indicting a problem with a dissenting juror. According to the note, the dissenting juror improperly expressed reluctance at returning a first-degree murder conviction against Settle, if it could “send him to the gas chamber.”

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Horan instructed the jurors not to consider possible punishments at this stage in the trial, and ordered the verdicts recorded.

Afterward, prosecutors and defense attorneys left the courtroom without commenting, although two police investigators who have worked the case for years celebrated with “high fives” in the corridor.

The four-month trial was characterized by a stream of prosecution witnesses who balked at testifying--in contrast to the defendants, three of whom eagerly took the witness stand.

Bryant, Wheeler and Settle all acknowledged involvement in the drug business, but denied that they were at the Family house at the time of the killings.

Bryant and Wheeler tried to lay blame on the prosecution’s star witness, former Bryant Family money counter James Franklin Williams IV, who worked at the Wheeler Avenue house. In his testimony, given under a grant of immunity from prosecution, Williams placed Bryant, Wheeler and the others at the house during the shootings.

During the trial, prosecutors told the story of the Bryant Family’s phenomenal growth, its iron grip on the streets of Pacoima and its reputation for ruthlessness.

At the time of the shootings, according to court testimony, the Bryant Family had evolved into a sophisticated, interstate cartel that controlled rock cocaine distribution in the northeast San Fernando Valley, raking in $500,000 a month.

Operating from a Pacoima pool hall and a dozen fortress-like crack houses, the Family was run like a business, according to testimony. They sold the flat “cookies” of crack cocaine in nine-ounce stacks that became the Family’s trademark, prosecutors said.

But as the syndicate grew, so did the Bryants’ penchant for violence.

An unsettled score and an internal struggle for control of the Family’s business set the scene for the bloody shootings, prosecutors alleged.

During a particularly haunting moment of the trial, jurors heard the tape-recorded words of one of the ambush victims, Armstrong.

On the tape, he vowed to get his due from the Bryants, who he said let him take the fall for a 1982 murder. When he was freed in July, 1988, after winning an appeal, Armstrong made good on the threat he voiced to investigators:

“It’s gonna be messy in Pacoima.”

And so it was--within a month of his release.

On Aug. 28, Armstrong arrived at the Bryants’ Wheeler Avenue house, ostensibly for a meeting with Stanley Bryant. Armstrong expected to receive another $500 payment at the meeting, prosecutors said, and was unarmed and smoking a cigarette as he strolled through the front door, accompanied by Brown.

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He got as far as the hallway before being cut down by blasts from at least two different shotguns.

The woman and children had come along for a planned outing afterward to a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant, according to testimony.

In his testimony, Williams said he saw Wheeler run into the yard and heard him shout that people were in the car. Other witnesses recalled hearing shots and breaking glass as he fired through the windshield.

The 2-year-old girl was shot in the head, point-blank. The boy, dazed, covered with blood and apparently left for dead, was found under his mother’s body.

The bodies of Armstrong and Brown were found several days later in Lopez Canyon.