Deputy Sent to Prison for Role in Drug Family

The tables were turned Monday night on former sheriff’s deputy Ely Bryant as he was shackled and hustled from court--just as he had taken others into custody countless times in the past.

Sentenced to three years and a month in federal prison for helping Pacoima’s notorious Bryant Family crack cocaine syndicate launder nearly $800,000 in drug profits, Bryant had just two words to say:

“I’m innocent.”

Moments earlier, the 44-year-old Bryant had told U.S. District Judge William D. Keller that federal prosecutors had failed to prove their case against him.

“It just seems to me that I have been inferred to prison,” he said.

Keller also fined Bryant $75,000. Calling the deputy’s downfall tragic, the judge shook his head and said, “Why he got dirty with his brother, it’s absolutely beyond me.”

Also sentenced Monday were Jeff Andrew Bryant, 45, Ely’s brother and a reputed leader of his family’s drug empire, and the brothers’ mother, 75-year-old Florence Bryant.

Jeff Bryant was sentenced to nine years and two months in federal prison and ordered to pay a $100,000 fine for tax evasion and conspiring to hide his drug ring income from the Internal Revenue Service.

Florence Bryant, who wore a floppy straw hat in court, was sentenced to two years’ federal probation for her role in the conspiracy. During her first year, she will be confined to her home, Keller said. She could have received five years in federal prison.

“If it weren’t for your age and your infirmity, I’d send you to jail, truly, because you were involved in this with your boys,” Keller told the matriarch, noting that she had been used by her sons as “a pawn.”

Assistant U.S. Atty. Monica Bachner said she was pleased with the sentences, but declined further comment.

But the prosecutor who headed a lengthy murder trial two years ago against other Bryant Family members was more effusive. He said the prosecutions in state and federal court had finally crippled the crime family.

“They’re so dismantled at this point, that should take care of them as a destructive, ongoing entity,” McCormick said.

According to prosecutors, the mother and her sons illegally profited for decades from one of Los Angeles’ oldest and most sophisticated crack cocaine rings.

Los Angeles police, who began investigating the Pacoima-based syndicate 15 years ago, have credited the Bryant Family with being the first organization to sell crack cocaine from heavily fortified “rock houses.” Some of those houses were purchased with laundered drug proceeds, Bachner said. A federal grand jury indicted the three in April 1995--midway through the murder trial in Los Angeles Superior Court of another brother, Stanley “Peanut Head” Bryant, 39, and three of the ring’s employees.

Law enforcement officials say Stanley Bryant and his older brother, Jeff, headed the 200-member operation, which for a decade dominated cocaine distribution in the northeast San Fernando Valley. Jeff Bryant was in prison at the time of the slayings.

At the murder trial, McCormick laid bare the tale of the Bryant Family’s ruthlessness, sophistication and iron grip on the streets of the northeast Valley.

Operating from a Pacoima pool hall and a dozen fortress-like crack houses, the Family was run like a business, with employees working regularly scheduled shifts. The Bryants flourished, selling flat “cookies” of crack cocaine in nine-ounce stacks that became their trademark.

In its heyday during the mid ‘80s, the organization raked in about $500,000 a month, according to records seized during a police raid. But as the syndicate grew, so did the Bryants’ penchant for violence. Over the years, the Family was linked to more than a dozen drug slayings.

An unsettled score and an internal power struggle set the scene for a blood bath--the Aug. 28, 1988 murders of four people at a house in Lake View Terrace where drug money was counted. A woman and child were shot to death as they waited in a parked car for two men, rival drug dealers who were ambushed in the house’s cage-like security entrance and slain.

Killed were Family hit man Andre Armstrong and his new drug-dealing partner, James Brown. Armstrong, who had been released from prison the previous month, was angry that he had served the term for a 1982 murder he claimed was commissioned by the Bryants; he vowed to steal some of the Bryant’s business as compensation for the time he spent in prison.

“It’s gonna be messy in Pacoima,” he told investigators, according to a tape-recorded statement played during the state trial.

And so it was. Besides the slayings of Armstrong and Brown, two potential witnesses--Loretha Anderson, 23, and her daughter, Chemise English, 2--were gunned down at point-blank range. Anderson’s 1-year-old son, dazed and covered with blood, was apparently left for dead in the car, cowering under his mother’s body.

Stanley Bryant and two employees--LeRoy “Slimm” Wheeler and Donald Franklin Smith are on death row for their roles in the killings. Another employee, Jon Preston Settle, is serving a 21-year sentence.

According to the federal indictment, Jeff, Ely and Florence Bryant accumulated more than $791,000 in cash between 1986 and 1991, and “attempted to conceal the source, the ownership, the control, the taxable nature and the ultimate disposition” of the cash.

The money was used to purchase houses--including the rock house where the murders occurred--as well as to buy cars and business equipment and pay other family members’ taxes and mortgages.

According to federal prosecutors, Ely Bryant, who worked in the sheriff’s Court Services Division, deposited more than $250,000 into three savings accounts between August 1986 and October 1987. He also purchased cashier’s checks totaling more than $330,000 during the same period.

He was dismissed from the Sheriff’s Department after his conviction in May.