The prosecutor thinks an email exchange between a one-time Sacramento Public Library official and a contractor to whom he directed maintenance work pretty much summed up a tale of bribery, fraud, embezzlement and conflict of interest.

"What do you want me to add?" a contractor identified by the name of Tom Mueller asked the library system's former facilities director, Dennis Nilsson, in an Aug. 15, 2006, email.

Nilsson and Mueller parried back and forth on the size of the kickback, Deputy District Attorney Mike Blazina told a Sacramento Superior Court jury in his closing arguments, before the library man settled on a $3,295 price that included a nice markup on locker tops.

"Let's rock and roll," Nilsson responded.

According to Blazina, that was all it took for the jury to convict Nilsson.

The panel apparently agreed about the simplicity of the trial, which had stretched across two months. On Friday, it came back after barely four hours of deliberation to convict Nilsson on all 16 counts filed against him.

Bailiffs led the tall, gray-haired Nilsson from the courtroom in handcuffs after his conviction in what Blazina had characterized as a billing kickback scandal.

According to prosecutors, Nilsson, 66, was at the center of the scheme in which an estimated 1,400 billing orders had been fraudulently inflated. Contractors billed a cumulative total of around $560,000 on projects completed between April 2004 through July 2007. Nilsson and two other defendants then billed the library authority for $1.3 million, according to the prosecutor.

Friday's conviction came back before the attorneys had begun closing arguments in the case against the two other defendants.

Blazina and lawyers for James E. Mayle, 66, and his wife, Janie Rankins-Mayle, 62, will make their cases to the jury on Monday in Judge Allen H. Sumner's courtroom.

Mayle, the former security chief of the library system, is charged in four counts with grand theft, bribery and conflict of interest. His wife, who set up two companies that handled contractor billings for the library, is named in two counts of grand theft and one of bribery.

As for Nilsson, his lawyer, Daniel Karalash, suggested that the jury didn't take enough time to consider what he viewed as a lengthy and complex case.

"It was two months of trial and there were 400 exhibits there, and they came back a day later," Karalash said. "I'm rather disappointed the jury didn't listen and take their time in their deliberations with the amount of counts that were out there.

"I almost feel they made their minds up before the closing arguments."

Blazina could not be reached after the verdict for comment.

The judge scheduled Nilsson's sentencing for Jan. 13. Karalash said his client is looking at a maximum term of more than 20 years in prison.

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