Jailed Drug Agent Faces New Allegation

A state narcotics agent being held on drug trafficking charges was accused Thursday of stealing 650 pounds of cocaine from the evidence locker at the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement office in Riverside.

Richard Wayne Parker, a 10-year veteran at the narcotics agency, used two female acquaintances to peddle the stolen drugs to dealers, according to a new indictment from a federal grand jury in Los Angeles.

The theft, which occurred over the July 4, 1997, holiday weekend, has been a painful embarrassment for the bureau, an arm of the state attorney general’s office.

Parker’s boss at the Riverside branch recently received a five-day suspension, later reduced to a formal reprimand, for sloppy security practices. Among other deficiencies, auditors found that no one could account for all the people who had keys to the evidence locker.

Parker, one of 38 agents assigned to the office, had alarm codes as well as keys to the evidence vault, the indictment says.

To avoid falling under suspicion after the theft, he left alligator clips attached to the alarm pad and pry marks on the vault doors “so the burglary would look like it had been committed by thieves who did not have the alarm codes and access keys,” the indictment said.

The alleged gambit at first appeared to have worked. Parker, 43, was not arrested until a year later, the unintended prize in a routine FBI drug investigation.

A South Bay drug dealer caught by the FBI agreed to lead agents to his supplier, who, he said, was getting her drugs from a corrupt law enforcement officer.

After staging a “buy” from the supplier, the FBI followed Monica Liliana Pitto, 39, from her apartment in Manhattan Beach to Pasadena, where she allegedly gave Parker an envelope containing $47,000 in drug money during a meeting on a parking garage roof.

FBI agents arrested the pair as they attempted to drive away.

About $600,000 in cash was later seized from Parker’s home in San Juan Capistrano and from a 1968 Chevrolet Camaro he owned and a Ford pickup he was driving when arrested.

Agents also reported finding automatic weapons, the business card of a Cayman Islands bank and two books on how to establish a new identity without detection.

Parker has been held without bail since his arrest. He has tried and failed four times to win release on bond. Judges have sided with prosecution arguments that Parker is a flight risk and potentially dangerous.

In his first attempt, Parker’s wife, Diane, a former Orange County sheriff’s deputy, offered to put up her home and her mother’s condo as collateral. But she balked when a prosecutor confronted her on the witness stand with evidence that Parker kept a paramour at a $1,000-a-month apartment in Newport Beach.

After the hearing, Diane Parker drove straight to the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement office in Orange, where the woman worked. A fight ensued, and Diane Parker was later charged in Municipal Court with assault.

Since then, she has renewed her offer to post bond for her husband.

Pitto, a onetime girlfriend of Parker, pleaded guilty in federal court Sept. 18 to a drug conspiracy count. She is expected to testify against Parker and the other defendants named in Thursday’s indictment: Christine L. Whitney, 26, of Redondo Beach and Pamela Sue Gray, 43, of Hermosa Beach. The new indictment charges all three with possession and conspiracy to sell cocaine.

According to the document, Pitto and Whitney obtained cocaine from Parker on consignment and brought him the proceeds once the drugs were sold, keeping a cut for themselves.

The women allegedly paid Gray to store cocaine in her Hermosa Beach apartment.

Parker, Pitto, Whitney and Gray were indicted in July on charges of selling “multikilogram quantities” of cocaine. At that time, the source of the drugs was not specified.

At a hearing Thursday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder set trial for Jan. 26. She again refused Parker’s request for bail.

Outside the courtroom, defense lawyer Sanford Toyen of San Diego declined to discuss the cocaine theft allegations.

“This case is going to trial,” he said, “and we expect he will be acquitted of all charges in the indictment.”