Jury in Bryant Case Asks Death Penalty for Pair : Courts: Family leader Stanley Bryant and employee Donald Smith show no reaction as verdicts are read.

Stanley (Peanut Head) Bryant never fired a shot, but a jury in Downtown Los Angeles on Monday determined that the San Fernando Valley drug lord should die for masterminding a bloody 1988 crack-house ambush that killed four people, including a mother and child.

The jury of seven men and five women also delivered two death verdicts against Donald (Duke) Smith, an employee of the ruthless, Pacoima-based drug syndicate that prosecutors say Bryant ran with his brother, Jeff. The sophisticated, 200-member ring known as the Bryant Family, or simply “the Family,” raked in $500,000 a month during its heyday.

Neither Bryant nor Smith, both 37, showed any reaction as the verdicts were read.

The jury also has recommended death for a third Bryant Family member. LeRoy (Slimm) Wheeler, 26, last week received four death sentences for his role in the crimes.

“It couldn’t have been given to three nicer guys,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Kevin McCormick said.

“We had to make the jury understand how much this organization has devastated the Valley,” he added. “These three people being sentenced to death has made that whole northeastern section of Los Angeles a lot safer.”

Defense attorneys had no comment.

Bryant, Smith and Wheeler return to court Aug. 11, when Superior Court Judge Charles E. Horan said he will set a sentencing date--expected to be a formality, since judges rarely overturn jurors’ death verdicts.

The Bryant Family dominated the San Fernando Valley’s drug trade for two decades, prosecutors said, and has been linked to as many as two dozen slayings.

Even during the trial, seven years after the slayings, the Bryants’ threat was strong enough to intimidate trial witnesses into silence, McCormick said.

“Everybody knows what’s happening, but nobody talks about it,” the prosecutor said. “In the Valley you say, ‘It’s a Bryant thing,’ and everybody shuts up.”

The death verdicts, delivered three hours apart, climaxed a six-month trial involving the murders of four people at a Lake View Terrace crack house where Bryant Family drug money was counted and bundled.

The shootings were planned and executed to guarantee the Bryant Family’s monopoly, McCormick said.

“Stanley Bryant is a capitalist,” McCormick said. “He would do anything for money--murder people, have people murdered, beat people up and pay off witnesses.”

Killed in the Aug. 28, 1988, ambush were former Bryant Family hit man Andre Armstrong, 31, and his partner, James Brown, 43. Also killed were Loretha Anderson, 23, and her 28-month-old daughter, Chemise English. Another child, 1-year-old Carlos English, was wounded.

Armstrong, who went to prison for a 1982 shooting he carried out for the Bryants, was lured to the house thinking he was to be paid for the time he spent in prison, McCormick said.

Instead, he and Brown were trapped in a locked steel security cage and fired upon by at least two people. One of those people was Smith, who had been bailed out of jail in another attempted-murder case so he could participate, McCormick said.

Defense attorney Ralph Novotney tried to persuade the jury to spare his client, arguing that Smith’s IQ was 84, and that other neurological tests showed he was borderline mentally retarded.

The defense attorney said Smith was beaten as a child; once he was tied to the rafters of the garage by his wrists and whipped with electrical cords. Another time, he was beaten with the buckle end of a belt.

Bryant’s attorney, Louise Gulartie, sought simply to humanize her client, to separate the family man from what she called “his business conduct.”

Gulartie acknowledged in her closing argument this month that as a drug dealer, Bryant “did a lot of damage.” But, she told the jury, “you can’t kill the drug dealer without killing the dad and family member. Justice is not achieved by more killing.”

The death verdicts were a victory for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, which had pursued the case through a costly legal thicket.

At one point, a judge ruled that local prosecutors had badly botched the case and literally took it away from them, asking that state officials prosecute the Bryant clan. But that decision later was reversed, and three new county prosecutors were assigned--McCormick, Dale Davidson and Doug Sortino.

The Bryant case has consumed six years, more than 40,000 pages of documents and dozens of lawyers. It cost more than $3 million to prosecute. And, it isn’t over yet.

Several other defendants await trial for their roles in the drug ring. Wheeler also awaits a second murder trial for the September, 1988, shooting death of former Cal State Northridge football standout Tracey Anderson, who worked for the Family as a low-level dealer. However, prosecutors are expected to drop that case once Wheeler is formally sentenced.

Three other family members--matriarch Florence Bryant, 73, alleged cartel co-leader Jeff Andrew Bryant, 43, and suspended Sheriff’s Deputy Eli Bryant, 42--are under a federal grand jury’s indictment on charges they conspired to evade income taxes on $630,000 in alleged drug-syndicate profits.