HAMMOND | Deceit and betrayal among the politically connected were on display Tuesday in the first day of testimony in the fraud trial involving the corrupt Gary Urban Enterprise Association.

Two people close to Gary attorney Willie Harris -- his aunt-in-law and his close friend's sister -- testified that their names were forged six times on deeds and checks that bore their names.

Harris and his co-defendants, Lake County Councilman Will Smith Jr. and tax collector Roosevelt Powell, say they were legally entitled to the roughly $183,000 net profit they received through the sales of two buildings to the GUEA in October 2001.

But who signed those names? Witnesses Dharathula Millender and Dorothy Ard claimed they did not make those six signatures, and prosecutors have not explicitly put their theories forward.

Valparaiso Mayor Jon Costas -- who is not accused of wrongdoing -- also took the stand. He acknowledged his family was acting mainly out of a motive for profit when it donated one of the buildings in question to a not-for-profit group founded by Millender.

The Costas family took a $397,500 deduction on 2000 income tax returns for donating an old grocery they partly owned to the Gary Historical and Cultural Society after the building failed to fetch a single purchase offer on the open market. The GUEA bought the building in 2001 for $200,000.

When Powell's defense attorney Kevin Milner asked why the building seemed overvalued on tax forms -- which would decrease the family's tax bill that year -- Costas said the deduction was based on an independent appraisal.

Millender, who is the aunt of Harris' wife, testified she never knew that Harris had put the old Costas building in the historical society's name. The signatures on a deed and a $200,000 check were not hers, she said.

Millender could not explain why her signature appeared on the Costas' "Declaration of Charitable Gift" form. She claimed not to remember meeting Costas in Harris' law offices Dec. 27, 2000, to sign it.

Meanwhile, Dorothy Ard -- who is the sister of Harris' close friend, Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter -- said Harris betrayed her by hiding her true role in the sale of a vacant building on Broadway in Gary.

She admitted trying to do Harris a favor by putting the building in her name to shield it from Harris' then-estranged wife.

Ard said Harris repaid the favor by putting her name on three falsified deeds that later wound up in newspaper articles implying she took $51,500 from the GUEA.

Though she never saw the check, her signature appeared to endorse the payment that went into Harris' bank account.

Harris' attorney Thomas Mullins tried to get Ard to admit it was the FBI that shattered her relationship with Harris, and that Ard's daughter, Michelle -- who worked for Harris -- was a "liar" for notarizing the doctored deeds.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Bell raised the question of whether a seventh forged signature had been made when he noted that Michelle Ard's signature appeared to have only one "L" in the first name.