Returning to their office trailer at Lennox Station, the five Los Angeles County sheriff's narcotics deputies eyed the $5,000 bundles of cash stacked on the office couch.

Then their leader, Sgt. Robert R. Sobel, announced that the crew would skim some of the money they had just seized in a successful drug raid.

"Each crew member took a bundle off the couch and returned to their desks," Sobel told a federal court jury in recounting the 1986 incident.

As he described the alleged theft, Sobel used the same matter-of-fact tone that has marked his two weeks of testimony during the civil rights trial of six narcotics officers accused of stealing drug money, planting drugs on suspects and beating and torturing some of them.

One suspect was thrown down a flight of stairs, another was beaten unconscious with a flashlight and several others were nearly drowned in a motel hot tub as officers tried to extract information, Sobel said.

But defense attorneys quickly challenged his testimony.

"So much of this is made up," said attorney Lindsay Weston after one court session. "It's just Sobel's fantasy, pure fantasy."

For Weston's client--Deputy Roger R. Garcia--and the other defendants, whether the jury believes Sobel will be one of the key factors in determining the fate of the veteran officers.

In addition to Garcia, deputies John L. Edner, Edward D. Jamison, J.C. Miller, Robert S. Tolmaire and Los Angeles Police Department detective Stephen W. Polak were members of an anti-drug task force who worked with Sobel in the mid- to-late 1980s.

As members of the Lennox/Southwest Crew, they targeted both middle-level and major drug dealers. And as their supervisor, Sobel was a leader with a flamboyant nickname--El Diablo--and a hard-charging style that made his crew one of the most active drug enforcement teams in the Sheriff's Department and LAPD.

But Sobel told jurors that his team was lawless in its anti-drug crusade.

The 46-year-old Sobel testified that his officers tortured and beat drug dealers in an effort to coerce them into confessions or force them to become informants.

In one case, Sobel said Tolmaire slugged a handcuffed drug dealer so savagely with a flashlight that the man lapsed into unconsciousness. Fearful that he might be dead, Sobel said, one of the deputies--"It might even have been me"--grabbed the dealer by the testicles to make sure he wasn't feigning injury.