Las Vegas- Mary Kincaid-Chauncey had lived in the same North Las Vegas tract home for two decades and drove a 10-year-old Oldsmobile when strip club lobbyist Lance Malone first approached her and offered cash to get her through a tough time in early 2000.

“I told him I didn’t need help,” Kincaid-Chauncey, a former Clark County commissioner, testified Monday in her political corruption case. “I lived within my means; I had a budget.”

Kincaid-Chauncey told jurors she accepted a total of $9,000 from strip club owner Michael Galardi and Malone, his bagman, but that was on behalf of family members. She said she never took the $70,000 to $80,000 in cash bribes Galardi claimed last week that the pair paid her.

Defense attorney Richard Wright stunned the courtroom Monday when he announced his first witness was his own client, the 67-year-old Kincaid-Chauncey. Wright said she made the decision to take the stand over the weekend.

“She wanted to tell her side of the story, but they (prosecutors) were hamstringing me,” Wright said outside court.

Kincaid-Chauncey and her former colleague on the commission, Dario Herrera, are on trial facing charges of accepting bribes from Galardi and Malone between 1999 and 2003. Former Commissioner Erin Kenny also was charged with the federal offense.

A 2003 federal indictment also accuses Kincaid-Chauncey, Herrera and Kenny with depriving the public of honest services by voting on matters of importance to Galardi without disclosing their relationship with the former strip club entrepreneur.

It was initially unknown whether Herrera or Kincaid-Chauncey would testify. Now that Kincaid-Chauncey has taken the stand, sources involved in the trial said, Herrera probably will testify this week to erase any perception from jurors that he cannot refute prosecutors’ allegations.

U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks rejected eight of the 10 witnesses proposed by the defense, saying they were outside the scope of testimony offered so far. Aside from the defendants, Hicks will allow Clark County Manager Thom Reilly and Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Johnson to take the stand.

The defense plans to use the witnesses to impeach Galardi, who testified that Reilly accepted $5,000 in bribe money and that he provided lap dances and free drinks to Johnson in his Cheetah’s strip club. Johnson was removed from Galardi’s case as a result of the allegations.

Wright decided in favor of putting Kincaid-Chauncey on the stand so he could question her about the night of May 14, 2003, when Galardi’s strip clubs were raided and two FBI agents showed up at her home. Those agents were not called to the stand and prosecutors did not ask their witness, FBI Agent Christopher Byers, about that interview, precluding Wright from bringing up the event during his cross-examination.

Kincaid-Chauncey told federal agents that night that she accepted cash from Galardi twice. Galardi gave her daughter $4,000 for her son’s Olympic ski school and gave Kincaid-Chauncey $5,000 for her son’s bid for North Las Vegas City Council. Mark Kincaid was defeated in the race.

“They didn’t even know about the ski school until Mary told them,” Wright said afterward, reiterating that his client has always been honest with the government. “They didn’t even know about that.”

Kincaid-Chauncey testified that the agents told her they wanted to interview her about Malone, her former colleague who later became a close friend. They repeatedly denied they were investigating Kincaid-Chauncey, saying, “We’re just trying to get the truth about Lance Malone,” she testified.

After the two-hour interview, agents handed her a stack of documents she later learned included a “target letter.”

Kincaid-Chauncey rebutted the prosecution’s claims that she voted against Galardi matters in 1999, but later — after he began paying her cash bribes — started lobbying for legislation that protected or benefited his topless clubs.

In 1999, she favored a request to spend $20,000 to send Metropolitan Police Department detectives to Atlanta to conduct a background check on Galardi and his father, Jack, who police believed had ties to organized crime. She objected to giving the Galardis a liquor license.

Kincaid-Chauncey said she was opposed to the license because she despised Jack Galardi, who had threatened her after she voted against his request to build a sexually oriented massage parlor.

“He pointed his finger at me and said, ‘Don’t mess with me. You could get hurt. You don’t know who you’re messing with,’ ” Kincaid-Chauncey testified.

When Jack Galardi removed his name from the applications, Kincaid-Chauncey said, she had no concerns. If an applicant meets all the county requirements, commissioners have no legal standing to deny licenses and permits, she said.

“I couldn’t see that we really had a choice,” she said. “I believe very strongly in both property rights and business rights.”

In 2001 and 2002, the commission considered a series of issues that affected Galardi.

In exchange for cash bribes, the federal government claims, Kincaid-Chauncey worked to lift a “red tag” that had stopped construction on Galardi’s strip club, Jaguars.

They allege she helped push through an ordinance increasing the permitted distance between adult-oriented businesses in order to protect Galardi’s clubs from competitors. And they claim Kincaid-Chauncey supported a new ordinance that would have allowed alcohol to be served in clubs that offered all-nude dancing, a piece of legislation that could have boosted revenue flow at Galardi’s establishments.

Kincaid-Chauncey denied she was doing Galardi any favors. She said all strip club owners were interested in seeing regulations loosened.

“I didn’t consider it his (Galardi’s) vote,” Kincaid-Chauncey said. “That was public policy. It wasn’t Michael Galardi.”

In several intercepted phone conversations, Malone made remarks that raised the government’s suspicions about Kincaid-Chauncey.

For example, Malone at one point told her he planned to come by and “supply” her. In a separate instance, Malone spoke of Kincaid-Chauncey’s efforts to approve the adult-use ordinance: “We did what we could do.”

She explained that such comments meant little to her because “Lance would talk a lot and not always say a lot.” So, she often ignored him.

She denied Malone made cash payments to her during encounters with him, as Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Schiess suggested.

Malone met with Kincaid-Chauncey on one occasion in her car and offered her $5,000 cash to donate to Child Haven or Opportunity Village, two organizations she often supported. She declined the offer and told him to write a check or deliver the cash himself. The former commissioner testified it was not unusual for Malone to get into her car to talk after they lunched together.

Schiess also suggested that Kincaid-Chauncey used the bribe money she received from Galardi to help Mark Kincaid, who was struggling financially. Schiess said on the same day Kincaid-Chauncey had lunch with Malone and met in her car with him afterward, her son deposited $3,800 cash in his bank. Kincaid-Chauncey adamantly denied taking money from Malone that day and said she was unaware of her son’s cash deposit.

“My son is 45 years old,” she said. “He doesn’t confide in me what he does with his banking.”

Schiess pulled out copies of checks to Mark Kincaid from her 2001 campaign coffers and claimed she never reported them as campaign expenditures. Wright, however, later displayed 2004 campaign reports that listed 13 checks totaling about $31,000 to Mark Kincaid, who served as Kincaid-Chauncey’s campaign manager.

Wright said it is permissible for commissioners to note expenditures any time during their four-year term.

Kincaid-Chauncey is expected to return to the stand this morning. Herrera is expected to testify afterward.