Juror on Tucker Case Describes Inner Turmoil : Courts: Panel’s only African American says that after verdicts, she was overcome by empathy for the defendant’s family. She is angry at him for his wrongdoing.

The only black member of the federal jury that convicted Rep. Walter R. Tucker III spoke Monday of her inner turmoil in deciding his guilt and of her anger toward an African American politician she believes betrayed his family and his community.

“I had the overwhelming sense of mixed emotions,” said Wanda Flagg, who joined 11 other jurors Friday in finding Tucker guilty of extorting $30,000 in bribes and cheating on his income taxes while serving as mayor of Compton.

“I knew we had done our best,” she said in an interview, “that we had deliberated fairly and thoroughly. I can’t tell you how thoroughly. I knew that we had reached the right conclusions.”

But hearing the federal court clerk announce the jury’s findings “just pushed me over the edge,” she said.

“I started to cry,” she said. “I couldn’t help it.”

Then came the most heart-wrenching moment as Tucker’s wife, Robin, and mother, Martha, broke down and sobbed loudly.

“They wailed like they were at a funeral. I couldn’t recompose myself too well after that,” said Flagg, 40.

The memory of that scene, especially the anguish of Tucker’s family, remained painfully etched in her mind.

“I felt badly. I felt really, really badly for them,” she said. “I felt horrible for their children. I have a little boy the same age. I am relatively close in age to Robin and Walter. It’s something I never want to be in the position again to do.”

Flagg, who works for the Los Angeles Housing Authority and has been politically active, is particularly angry at Tucker, once considered a rising star in area politics.

“I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve said to myself [that] if I could see him on the street, I would deck him,” she said. “This didn’t have to happen. He was naive, he was arrogant.

“It might have been a case of too much too fast. I was very much upset that he had put himself in this position. At some point along the way he didn’t listen to those little bells that are supposed to go off inside your head when something isn’t right about a situation.”

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Flagg was referring the scenes from nearly 30 hours of undercover FBI videotapes in which Tucker was given piles of cash by businessman-turned-FBI informant John Macardican and was told it was in exchange for his vote.

She said she could detect a hint of ambivalence on Tucker’s part during the secretly recorded meetings with Macardican, but that he took the money anyway.

During his trial, the Tucker, 38, maintained that the payments were consulting fees, campaign contributions or an interest-free loan.

But Flagg said she asked herself: If the money was for consulting work, why didn’t he declare it on his income tax returns? And, if it was a campaign contribution, why was the money deposited into his personal bank account?

She also suggested that Tucker, a lawyer, tried to micromanage his defense team and it backfired. While one of his lawyers was at the lectern examining a witness, Tucker would sometimes clear his throat loudly to get the attorney’s attention. Defense attorney Robert Ramsey Jr. or Mark Stephen Smith would then walk back to the defense table to confer with Tucker. This caused the lawyers to lose their train of thought and appear disorganized before the jury, Flagg said.

That view was shared by other jurors interviewed Monday.

Jeffrey Levison, a 27-year-old software engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said Tucker’s interruptions were “an indication that he didn’t have full confidence in his own counsel.”

Levison said the jury also was troubled by inconsistent theories advanced by the defense to explain Tucker’s acceptance of the $30,000 from Macardican.

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On the one hand, they contended that it was for legitimate consulting work and, on the other, they protested that Tucker was pressured by government agents to commit an illegal act.

“It was like they were saying, ‘Pick one of the above and see what fits,’ ” said Stanley Martinez, a 39-year-old supermarket manager from Carpinteria. “It was if they were trying to confuse us.”

Flagg said she was skeptical from the outset of the jury’s deliberations, which lasted nearly nine days.

“Every day, I said, ‘Show me. prove it to me.’ Over and over again. I wasn’t alone. There were a few of us that had doubts on certain issues.”

In the end, she said, it was impossible “to ignore what was staring me in the face--the evidence that led to the guilty verdicts.”

Asked if she thought Tucker was targeted in a conspiracy against black elected officials, she said, “I guess that the main thing is that Walter just wandered into this. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time. These investigations [of alleged political corruption in Compton] were ongoing from at least the early ‘80s.”

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Although Flagg was the only black person on the jury, she was not the only minority. Three others were Asian and two were Latino.

Still, she said: “I suddenly felt this weird responsibility . . . the only black person. The only one who comes from an urban environment that would halfway qualify as a . . . peer of the defendant.”

When other jurors said they were Tucker’s peers, she would disagree.

“I said ‘Let me tell you, I think you are being very naive if you think this comprises a jury of his peers. You guys are from Simi Valley, Ventura and San Luis Obispo. You have no idea what it’s like to function in the inner city, let alone a depressed area like Compton. The closest I’ll grant you is that we are all human beings.”