Agent’s Lawyers Seek Drug Test of Witness

Defense lawyers accused the prosecution’s star witness of being under the influence of drugs as she testified Friday in the narcotics trafficking trial of state narcotics agent Richard Wayne Parker and two co-defendants.

The attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder to order Monica Liliana Pitto to submit to a urine test for drugs, citing what they described as her sluggish response to questions by a prosecutor.

But Snyder rejected their request and a subsequent motion for a mistrial.

Pitto, 40, who has pleaded guilty in the case, is a recovering addict undergoing treatment at a residential facility. “It is apparent to all defense counsel that this woman is under the influence of drugs,” Parker’s lawyer, Richard Hamar, told the judge after Pitto had testified for about an hour. “We need a test to find out.”

Danny Davis, attorney for co-defendant Pamela Sue Gray, asked the judge to subpoena Pitto’s medical records from Impact House, a drug rehabilitation center.

The defense allegations, made outside the jury’s presence, drew a strenuous protest from Assistant U.S. Atty. Rebecca Lonergan.

Lonergan accused the defense team of trying to humiliate and rattle Pitto as she gave incriminating testimony about Parker, 44, of San Juan Capistrano; Gray, 44, of Hermosa Beach; and Christine Whitney, 27, of Redondo Beach.

“They are purely speculating,” Lonergan said of the defense lawyers’ allegations, “and they are doing it just to attack this witness.”

Lonergan said Pitto was just “scared and nervous” on her first day on the witness stand.

Snyder ultimately agreed .

“I believe she may be nervous, but I don’t believe she’s on drugs,” the judge said. “She’s not slurring her speech and I don’t see anything in her demeanor that suggests she’s under the influence.”

After their motions were denied, the defense called for a mistrial. The judge rejected that as well.

In her testimony, Pitto said Parker, a former boyfriend, asked her in 1992 for help in selling a kilogram of cocaine. She said that she sold it to a dealer friend, Gerhard Hensel, and that she and Parker split the profits.

That was followed by five or six more transactions, ranging from 1 to 4 kilograms each, until Hensel was arrested and jailed in 1993, she testified.

Pitto said Parker would typically deliver the cocaine to her in gym bags at designated meeting places in Orange County.

She said they suspended their trafficking after Hensel was arrested, but resumed it when he got out of prison in 1996. In 1997, she said, she and Parker began supplying cocaine to Whitney on a weekly basis in amounts of up to 7 kilograms a transaction. She described one deal in which she said Parker loaded the drugs into Whitney’s car.

She testified that Gray picked up cocaine from her for Whitney, including a 10-kilogram supply on one occasion. On another occasion Gray delivered $90,000 to her from Whitney, Pitto said.

Prosecutors say most of the cocaine was stolen by Parker from the evidence locker at the State Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement office in Riverside during a faked burglary over the Fourth of July holiday in 1997.

Pitto is due back on the stand Tuesday.