Moore Links Downfall to Failed Love Affair

Taking the stand in her own defense, a sometimes tearful Patricia Moore testified Wednesday that she began accepting cash payments from a Compton business after falling into a trap set by an undercover FBI operative who became her lover and then abandoned her.

“I was angry, I was hurt, I was disgusted because of what happened to me,” the former Compton city councilwoman told jurors in her federal extortion trial in Los Angeles.

Moore, who has based her defense on a claim of entrapment, is charged with extorting more than $62,000 from two Compton businesses whose projects required City Council approval. Guided by her defense attorney through five hours of testimony, Moore also said that:

* She was threatened by prosecutors in 1994 with 200 years in prison if she refused to accept a plea agreement that turned her into an undercover government operative.

* She was coerced into confessing that she took bribes from Compton Energy Systems and Compton Entertainment, the two businesses from which she is accused of extorting payoffs.

* Prosecutors “put words in my mouth” when they said she also admitted taking regular bribe payments from Western Waste Industries, the city’s commercial waste hauler.

Most of Moore’s testimony focused on her relationship with Stan Bailey, an ex-convict recruited by the FBI in 1990 as an undercover operative in an investigation of official corruption in Compton.

Bailey, who had worked in other FBI investigations, introduced himself to Moore in the fall of that year as a public relations representative of Compton Energy Systems, which was seeking permits to construct a $250-million waste-to-energy conversion plant in the city.

The company’s president, John Macardican, was also working with the FBI as a cooperating witness.

Persuaded by Bailey that the project would bring as many as 1,000 jobs to Compton, Moore said she gave the project her blessing and promised to work for its approval.

She said Bailey’s persuasiveness went beyond the project. He began sending her candy, flowers and cards. They began dating, she said, and before long she had practically moved into his Long Beach apartment.

She also told of taking three trips with Bailey to Rosarito Beach and one weekend jaunt to Catalina.

“It was a very intimate relationship,” she said. “We were very close. Eventually, he proposed and asked to marry me.”

Bailey has denied having any romantic relationship with Moore.

At the same time Bailey was supposed to be representing Compton Energy Systems, Moore said, he came up with an idea for holding an international trade conference in Long Beach that would promote ties between African American and Mexican entrepreneurs in the wake of NAFTA’s approval.

Moore, 47, said Bailey persuaded her to serve as honorary chairwoman of the proposed conference and that he persuaded some of her friends to invest about $15,000 in the project.

But the conference never got off the ground, she said, and Bailey became remote and irritable when she pressed him to reimburse her friends who invested money with him.

Moore said Bailey also talked her into her unsuccessful campaign for mayor in 1991, promising to bankroll her printing bill, a major expense. The bill was never paid and she was sued in small claims court, though she was found not liable.

She said she frequently gave him money, bought him gifts and picked up the tab when they went out on the town.

Finally, she testified, Bailey began avoiding her and stopped taking her phone calls, signaling the end of their eight-month romance.

But there was still the issue of the money he took from her friends and acquaintances, and she said Bailey told her to come to his apartment to collect some of it.

When she arrived, she said, Bailey had dinner prepared and he offered her a drink of orange juice and 7-Up.

“That’s all I remember,” she said in response to a question by chief defense lawyer Thomas A. Mesereau Jr. She said she woke up in the morning in his bed--groggy, bruised and bleeding after being sodomized.

In the distance, she said, she could make out Bailey talking to someone on the telephone and saying, “ ‘She’s not feeling well. You should come and get her.’ ” Then he disappeared.

A short while later, she said, her daughter, Shayla, and a friend of Moore’s, Cynthia Bass, showed up and took her home.

Asked why she did not report the occurrence to police, Moore said she was ashamed and fearful that it wound wind up in the newspapers, damaging her political career and bringing embarrassment to her family.

Besides her daughter and Bass, Moore said the only one she confided in was John Macardican, Bailey’s nominal boss at Compton Energy Systems.

She said Macardican promised to help her recover her personal possessions from Bailey’s apartment as well as the money she lost as a result of her association with Bailey.

To accomplish that, she said, he put her in touch with his financial backers--actually undercover FBI Agents Robert Kilbane and Gary Will, who represented themselves as intermediaries for Asian investors.

Over the next year, Moore was captured by hidden video cameras and recorders accepting cash payments 20 times from Macardican, Kilbane and Will.

“I was trying to keep them happy so I could get my things back,” said Moore, explaining why she voted to give Compton Energy Systems an exclusive negotiating agreement and lobbied other city officials.

Looking at the FBI videotapes that show her taking cash payments, Moore said she asks herself, “How did I ever get involved in this? How foolish I was to trust someone. I feel ashamed.”

Moore also expressed regret about a plea agreement she signed with the government in 1994 after learning through a reporter that she and U.S. Rep. Walter R. Tucker III (D-Compton) were about to be indicted on corruption charges.

Contending she was coerced and threatened by prosecutors, Moore said she reluctantly agreed to cooperate in the FBI probe and surreptitiously recorded conversations with Western Waste Industries Chairman Kosti Shirvanian and George Osepian, a vice president of the waste disposal firm. “I betrayed my friends,” she said of them.

Moore later withdrew from the deal and withdrew a guilty plea to one count of extortion and one count of income tax fraud. She was subsequently indicted on 25 criminal counts.

Moore, who served on the City Council from 1989 to 1993, also disputed the testimony of her former campaign manager, Basil Kimbrew, who testified that he served as a conduit for illegal payoffs to Moore from Compton Entertainment, which sought approval to open a card casino in Compton.

The prosecution says Moore received more than $12,000 from the casino’s backers in return for her promise not to oppose the measure.

But in her testimony Wednesday, Moore said she never received any such payments from Kimbrew. She said she absented herself from voting because she had received a $10,000 political contribution from one of the backers and wanted to avoid a conflict of interest.