The Pellicano Trial--Not Much Hollywood, But Quite A Show

Go back to Jersey, Sonny. This is the City of the Angels and you haven't got any wings.
-James Cromwell's Dudley Smith, in L.A. Confidential, gives a visiting thug the advice to leave town.

All America, but especially Hollywood, loves a juicy celebrity trial. The slightly disappointing news to those of us who admit to taking some pleasure in the discomfort of swells is that the Pellicano trial looks like something of a film-industry fizzle. Though the government's hundred-odd pages of trial memorandum contain plenty of front-rank show biz names, they appear mostly as the victims of the nefarious doings of Anthony Pellicano, age 63, and his tight cadre of information-churning accomplices. The principal target of the Feds' case is of course Pellicano, who's not from New Jersey, but was raised by Sicilian parents in Chicago and became the alleged sometime confederate of folks like Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, though he's always publicly denied Mafia ties.

Who needs bad guys when you have a couple crooks from the L.A.P.D. and the Beverly Hills P.D. on your side? The Los Angeles vice cop, Mark Arneson, searched law enforcement databases 2,500 times to scare up useful info some 300 adversaries of Pellicano clients from his P.I.A. agency. Phone company employee Rayford Earl Turner installed wiretaps--noisy ones, sometimes. After Anita Busch first noticed a problem on her line in November of 2005, she complained to provider SBC, who removed the tap; a new one was installed on Nov 18--and subsequently removed.)

Computer programmer Kevin Kachikian helped forensic ace Pellicano develop and distribute a hardware/software package called Telesleuth, for analyzing wiretap calls. And businessman Abner Nicherie first hired Pellicano, then became his on-call Hebrew translator. When Arneson was otherwise occupied, Beverly Hills police officer Craig Stevens filled in and in January 2006 pled guilty to a row of counts.

(Related cases involving Terry N. Christensen, head of a Hollywood law firm who paid Pellicano $100,00 oto wiretap the ex-wife of his client Kirk Kerkorian in a child support case, and John McTiernan, covered on this site recently, are on separate tracks.)

Thin as the gruel--intending no slight to Pellicano's former attorney, Steven Gruel, Esq., now replaced by the lips-zipped private eye himself--may be, certain details in the memo account do provide some specimen lessons in how to watch out for the mistrust, dirty dealing and screwing over of your buddy that are this town's way of life. (We repeat that over and over until it's solidified into cliche, and then the players always renew It.) The major execs are somewhere offstage in these accounts--not to dismiss Mike Ovitz, who certainly comes off in these pages as plenty creepy, but he lost his major player jersey sometime back and has since been complaining the gay mafia chased him out of power. (Yep, and the fawning media are responsible for Hillary's recent 0-11 run.)

While on the topic, many among us have checked out Jack Nicholson's pro-Hillary video. This is a guy who's done the reading-most interviews with him will find their way to some compelling recent (or classic) book on politics or the arts--so it's undeniable he gave it due thought. But the fix Pellicano's in reminds one sooner of Faye Dunaway's character Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown coolly eyeing Jack's Jake Gittes with this:

I see you like publicity, Mr. Gittes. Well, you're going to get it.

Let's look at some of the tragicomic points of the prosecutors' memo, as it was filed under the rubric of the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's Office, Violent and Organized Crime Section:

Submitted by our federal government in the person of U.S Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien, USA Plaintiff vs The Feds have estimated the time required for the trial that begins Tuesday - For the 8 a.m. before the District Court Judge Dale S. Fischer - at about 8-10 weeks. Their memo cites rafts of case law relevant to this sort of RICO (racketeering) investigation. Most of the counts depend on mail and wire fraud--like taping his clients' adversaries during their phone calls and conveying the results to said clients. It's a curious thing that the Feds had little luck "turning" the accused operatives to testify against him, and doubtless certain parts of the government case are less substantial as a result.

The memo details how, from as far back as 1999, through Pellicano's arrest in 2002, Arneson did his searches on databases like the California Division of Motor Vehicles and the FBI adjunct Crime Information Center. Business was good enough that Turner recruited two deputy snoops with more access-- Teresa Wright and Michelle Malkin--and through the devoted efforts of his network was able to pull up such items as CAA agents Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane's records (dated 8/10/01).

Other sideshows abound.

In 1996, Susan Reddan Maguire initiated divorce proceedings against LA real estate developer Robert Maguire III, seeking evidence from the detective re the developer's ongoing affair with mistress Rosa Serrano. Around the time she filed, Maguire's Playa Vista project was losing its cornerstone tenant, DreamWorks SKG, because it was too slow off the mark (and also became an environmental pariah before serious modifications restored some credibility.)

Another not-so-savory Pellicano client was one John Gordon Jones, who in October 1998 was facing charges of raping nine women he met in nightclubs; Pellicano set about discrediting these Jane Does with a series of background checks. (Jones was eventually acquitted following a trial in 2001.)

The memorandum alludes to the scramble in Pellicano's office "in late 1999 or early 2000" when the private eye was so concerned that LA County Deputy District Attorney Karla Kerlin was going to execute search warrants that he ordered his files, particularly the ones tainted by Arneson references, to be purged.

Then there's former music executive Robert Pfeifer, 50, of Hollywood, who allegedly hired Pellicano to investigate and wiretap a former girlfriend; the aforementioned Abner Nicherie, 42, of Las Vegas, Nevada, who was involved in a business hassle with a man who was allegedly wiretapped; and Daniel Nicherie, 45, of Las Vegas, Nevada, Abner's brother, who is currently in federal custody on charges of defrauding the man who Pellicano allegedly wiretapped.

For a you-can't-make-this stuff-up touch, at the end of 2000, venture capitalist Alec Gores hired P.I.A. to investigate his wife Lisa's relationship with his younger brother Tom, an Israeli-immigrant buyout king and would-be Hollywood player who was exec producer on the Lindsay Lohan vehicle, I Know Who Killed Me. Alec paid the p.i. $160,000 in early 2000, to confirmed the nature of the relationship between Tom and Lisa, and played his client three wire-tapped calls involving the lovers. (That had to be an interesting follow-up conversation between the brothers, both on the Forbes 400 Richest List last year).

Then there's the nasty scraps among the smaller fry--Pellicano's investigation of screenwriter Vincent Bo Zenga In July 2000 after he sued Brad Grey for breach of contract and fraud (the Grey legal team had previously retained P.I.A. in February of 2001 to investigate alienated Grey management client Garry Shandling.) The researchers threw Zenga's wife, journalist Zorianna Kit, and three of his colleagues in the searches for good measure.

There's the Pellicano-aided February 2001 Sandra Carradine beef with husband Keith and his girlfriend, and a job for hedge fund manager Adam Sender over a dispute with a planned film company start-up with movie producer and Nevada gubernatorial candidate Aaron Russo. The p.i. used a wiretap to predict when Russo would be outside a Beverly Hills hair salon, and in one of the case's better Krooked Keystone Kops moments, the memo describes how the servers "traveled to the salon, where they subsequently chased Russo through several buildings before effecting service eon him. One haircutter-witness testified that Russo had turned down" the service, but he recanted his testimony after Pellicano's search found an outstanding arrest warrant (subsequently not served) bearing his name.

Perhaps most interesting to the media is the section called "The Enterprise's Investigation of Anita Busch" [the Ovitz matter, as opposed to the Steven Seagal dead-fish-on-the-car flap]. Arneson, at one stage, tried to submit that his Busch searches related. to " a legitimate gambling investigation he was working in his capacity as a vice squad detective in the LAPD." He tried to place and tried to place her at a pizzeria called Enzo's, which Busch will testify, she's never entered. (One hazards a guess hat Arneson, however, has.)

All in all, it looks to be an amusing few weeks downtown in Federal Court, moguls or no.

As Danny DeVito's Sid Hudgens says in L.A. Confidential, "Something has to be done, but nothing too original, because hey, this is Hollywood."

(Anthony Pellicano in his offices, circa 2001; photo by Micahel Ochs/Getty Images)