Moore Used Harlins Case to Fuel Assembly Campaign, Tapes Show

Black teenager Latasha Harlins’ slaying by a Korean-born grocer greatly inflamed racial tensions in Los Angeles and, along with the Rodney G. King verdicts, helped fuel the rioting that convulsed the city in 1992.

It also catapulted into prominence Patricia Moore. The otherwise little-known Compton councilwoman led a recall campaign against the Superior Court judge who sentenced Harlins’ killer to probation instead of a jail term.

But in a conversation with an undercover FBI operative, secretly recorded and played to a federal court jury Wednesday, Moore revealed an ulterior motive for championing the Harlins case--winning a race for state Assembly.

“I hope we recall [trial Judge Joyce Karlin], “ she confided to businessman John Macardican. “But that’s not my goal. My goal is to keep the issue alive until the election.”

Moore’s comments about the Harlins case dominated a day of damaging testimony in her trial on charges of extorting more than $62,000 from two Compton businesses while serving on the Compton City Council from 1989 to 1993.

Other tapes played for the jury showed Moore receiving regular cash payments from Macardican in amounts ranging from $120 to $1,500. Macardican has testified that he had earlier agreed to pay her $1,500 a month to help get the project approved.

In the Harlins tape, Moore explained to Macardican that she had decided to run for the Assembly--”I can’t make a dime here”--but was delaying an announcement because she wanted to continue to be viewed as an activist rather than as a political candidate.

“This is better than campaigning,” she said of her role as leader of the recall drive. “This is why I said I don’t know about announcing [her candidacy] because once you announce, the press starts looking at you as a candidate as opposed to an activist involved in a cause.

“So if I can keep this going as an activist and run for the Assembly without just saying I’m a candidate and that’s why I’m doing it--you have to be real careful--I’ll have more notoriety and more publicity than [my opponent] ever will.”

Moore described the Harlins case as “the greatest issue” for a candidate because it involves “a black child, and here’s my district, predominantly black, I mean you know it’s the best.”

*

After learning of Moore’s comments, Harlins’ aunt, Denise, told The Times on Wednesday: “This is sickening. The thought that she would use my niece’s death to further her political agenda is horrible. But worse than that, she came into our family and took our trust. And she betrayed us.”

In the end, Moore’s bid for an Assembly seat failed, as did her drive to oust Karlin from the bench.

Moore has maintained that her supporters failed to gather enough signatures to qualify the recall for the ballot, but that, too, is in dispute.

Denise Harlins and Queen Malkah, another longtime member of the Latasha Harlins Justice Committee, said they were given conflicting accounts by Moore about what happened to the petitions.

At one time, they said, Moore told them that many petitions were destroyed when rainwater leaked into a garage where they were being stored. In another version, they said she told them the registrar-recorder counted and found that they were 15,000 signatures short.

Reached for comment after Wednesday’s court hearing, Moore’s defense lawyer Thomas A. Mesereau Jr. said, “Certainly, she aspired to higher political office and she would be the first one to admit she wanted to use [the Latasha Harlins case] as both an activist and a politician.”

He said Moore “knew she could do a lot more for Latasha Harlins” if she had been elected.

Moore is charged with extorting more than $12,000 from Compton Entertainment, which needed a permit to open a card casino in the city, and $50,100 from Macardican’s Compton Energy Systems, which was seeking council approval to build a garbage-to-energy conversion plant in Compton.

Macardican was working as a cooperating witness for the FBI, which secretly recorded his meetings with Moore and other politicians in a four-year probe of official corruption in Compton.

On one tape played Wednesday, Moore complained about the failure of Macardican’s financial backer--an undercover FBI agent who used the name Robert Kelly--to make good on a promise of large payoffs to her and other politicians.

Moore had asked, on the tape, for $20,000 from Kelley and $5,000 each for council member Omar Bradley, currently Compton’s mayor, and then-Mayor Walter R. Tucker III.

Tucker, who went on to become a congressman, was convicted last year of extorting more than $30,000 from Macardican’s company and is serving a 27-month sentence at Lompoc federal prison.

According to the FBI tapes, Moore also arranged a meeting between Macardican and Rep. Mervyn M. Dymally (D-Compton), whose assistance was needed to win approval of the project by the Compton school board.

Macardican needed to buy a vacant parcel of land owned by the school district and Dymally was said to control three of the board’s five votes.

In preparing Macardican for the meeting with Dymally, Moore said, “Now Dymally’s not gonna give you any indication that it’s gonna take anything, but I think you and I need to decide what that should be.”

Under questioning afterward by Assistant U.S. Atty. John M. Potter, Macardican said it was clear that Moore was talking about a payoff.

But no evidence has been offered at the trial that Dymally or Bradley received payoffs.

Dymally, who has retired from elective office, and Bradley have denied in interviews that they ever solicited or received illegal payoffs.

In another videotape played for the jury, Moore asked Macardican for $80,000 so she could make a down payment on “my dream house,” a mansion reputedly built by a drug dealer on six lots in Compton and seized by the U.S. government.

“I want this house so bad, I’ll never ask you for anything again,” she told the businessman. “It’s a masterpiece. He even inlaid the bathroom with gold.”

She said the house could be bought from the government for about $400,000. Macardican promised to help, but he never followed through, he testified.

*

The FBI undercover project almost came a cropper once when Moore and her then-husband Leroy Guillory discovered that they were being tailed by FBI surveillance vehicles and a helicopter after leaving Macardican’s offices in South El Monte following an alleged payoff, the tapes showed.

When they returned to Compton, Moore used her car phone to telephone city police, who intercepted the FBI agents. The agents explained that they mistook Moore’s Rolls-Royce for a drug suspect’s car.

But the episode scared her and she spent the night in a hotel, waking up every 15 minutes, according to a taped phone conversation the next day with Macardican. “It was horrible, I tell you.”

She urged him to have his telephones checked at home and in his office for any FBI bugs.

About a week later, Moore telephoned Macardican and expressed relief. She said she had just learned that the FBI surveillance was not directed at them. She and Macardican laughed about it.