COCKRELL SAYS HE ACTED OUT CONCEPTS FROM NOVEL.

Byline: Michael Gougis Staff Writer

Sweeping people with radio frequency detectors. Placing a wiretap detection device on his telephone. Hiring informants. Meeting with a strip club bouncer to discuss bombs. An envelope filled with newspaper, cut to look like cash.

Frank Boyd Cockrell's last few months of life as a free man - prior to his arrest on charges that he plotted to blow up government buildings, freeways and a refinery in Ventura County - read like something from a crime novel.

And there's a reason. Cockrell, 55, of Sherman Oaks said he acted out concepts and ideas from the John Grisham novel ``Runaway Jury.''

Cockrell read an excerpt from the book while testifying Thursday during his trial in Van Nuys Superior Court on four counts of solicitation of murder. He has pleaded not guilty.

``Absolutely not,'' he said Thursday when asked whether he intended to have anyone killed.

Prosecutors say Cockrell, incensed by fraud and theft charges filed against him in Ventura County, believed that District Attorney Michael Bradbury was a high-level drug dealer working with Cockrell's ex-wife to destroy him financially and kill him.

To destroy evidence in his financial misconduct case, prosecutors claim, Cockrell attempted to hire an undercover federal agent to blow up the Ventura Freeway, an oil refinery and the Ventura County courthouse.

Cockrell was convicted in 1998 on 13 felony counts and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Cockrell insisted Thursday that he had no intention of having anyone killed. He testified that he quickly concluded that the undercover Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent he met with to plot the attack was too out-of-shape to actually belong to a right-wing anti-government militia, as he claimed.

Michael Gougis, [phone]

michael.gougis(at)dailynews.com