Pellicano Trial: "Perry Mason All the Way"

As Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders came out of a typically combative session of the trial in which he's leading the prosecution of ex-private investigator Anthony Pellicano, he was clearly aghast at what he overheard.

A small pack of journalists—as one of them, I may as well admit to a shameful kinship with the pathetically lightweight performance of Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos in the recent Democratic debate—were obsessively trying to make sure they had accurately recorded a particular quote.

The quote was not the product of one of Saunders' buzz-saw cross-examinations or a fine point of case law. Nope—it came out of the mouth of winningly blithe witness Barry Barnett, who finished his time on the stand with an impressed smile for Judge Dale Fischer: "This is not no Judge Judy," he said, while pens raced across notepads. "It's Perry Mason all the way up in here."

Well, sort of. Television archivists may recall that Perry Mason was a defense lawyer, specializing in beating murder raps, who would pluck his clients out of the clutches of the state with deft late-innings revelations.

Attempting to fill that role today was defense attorney Mona Soo Hoo, who's such an exception to the crackling pace set by Saunders and the keen interrogations of defense attorney Chad Hummel that the judge is often heard telling her such things—in this case, after a row of sustained objections to her line of questioning—as "Miss Soo Hoo, you really can't do this."

When her labored mumblings are thwarted—and they are objected to or stricken from the record at almost as high a rate as those of Pellicano himself—there's usually a painful pause to (not quite) regroup.

It was hard to say if Soo Hoo's client Rayford Turner has been aided by the present defense efforts. A succession of phone company employees seemed to land somewhere in between character witnesses and experts but were not very convincing in either regard.

Longtime phone company technician (and sometime president of Local 9000 of the Communication Workers of America) Janice Wood was positively buoyant about the untenability of the company's code of conduct.

"We say, 'The only thing you sign is your paycheck,''' said Wood, who later shared a smile with the room in depicting the equipment-laden belt known as a butt set. She was at pains to point out that in Beverly Hills, anybody could open the phone company's street boxes (presumably to set up the wiretaps that Turner is accused of rigging for Pellicano).

Wood went from chipper to anxious and agitated as Saunders cross-examined her by citing a specimen quote about one of her accused union members from the wiretapping conspirators ("I really doubt she would rat on us").

Barnett was either simply truthful or the best actor to hit the stand as he said that Turner, his great friend of 18 years, had never mentioned doing work for Pellicano. "After work, we don't talk about the job," he said.

Right.

An added element was the defense's presentation, via Turner pal and witness Alphonse Arnold Jr., that Teresa Wright (a phone company employee who confessed to abetting Turner's wiretapping work and gave testimony earlier in the trial) made amazing fried chicken that she'd bring to gatherings at Turner's house, where he was seen handing her money.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Lally, who earlier in the trial had enumerated some of the payments to Wright, wondered on cross-examination if Arnold had ever seen "Turner provide her $700...for a chicken dinner?"

It was that kind of day in court.

Adam Braun, the defense lawyer for computer expert Kevin Kachikian, seemed intent on proving that his client was too disorganized to be part of what the government, in its racketeering investigation, calls the enterprise.

Sometime Pellicano Investigative Agency lab tech Ricardo Cestero was, as ESPN commentators say, as cool as the other side of the pillow in describing his interactions with Pellicano. He said he'd show in flips-flops and a Hawaiian shirt to present his handwritten bills, which, he acknowledged, were "not particularly well itemized or organized."

The lab tech said he once left Pellicano so "frustrated by his informality" that the boss slammed a computer on the counter and stormed out as Cestero urged him to "chill out, Anthony."

Cestero is now, ironically if not so surprisingly, a lawyer with Greenberg Glusker (home of noted celebrity lawyer Bert Fields, the case's mystery man, who narrowly avoided being called to the stand by Mr. Hummel this week).

Cestero and another witness, Greenberg colleague Jill Cossman, who helped Pellicano seek a patent for his Telesleuth device, both came off unmarked enough to leave their attending colleagues from the firm wearing placid expressions.

(The last thing the big Century City law firm needs is the kind of public relations drubbing that Terry Christensen's firm may be facing when he is tried with Pellicano as a co-defendant in the coming weeks.)

In fact, the trial is drawing to a close, and the players have had a snootful of each other.

Thus it seemed a breath of fresh air when a diminutive Alabaman named Doug Jones took the stand. Jones did yeoman's work for a U.S. attorney in Alabama in winning convictions—35 years after the fact—against the Klansman who blew up a Birmingham Sunday school in 1963, killing four black girls.

Jones seemed to set the courtroom to thinking of what greater evils than wire fraud may exist in life—and correspondingly, as he said when he emerged with a conviction (that would result later in a life sentence) against the first of two Klansmen responsible, what can be done in the face of that evil. As the New York Times' account in 2001 said:

"They say that justice delayed is justice denied, and, folks, I don't believe that for a minute,'' Mr. Jones told the reporters who mobbed him on the steps of the Jefferson County Courthouse. ''Justice delayed is still justice, and we've got it here in Birmingham, Alabama."

Jones' testimony could help to rehabilitate what's left of Pellicano's image. The private investigator had, after all, used his audio forensics expertise to detect a third voice on a murky tape recording of one of the church bombers bragging to his wife about planning the murderous attack. The presence of that third party allowed prosecutors to use the tape as evidence, since a conversation only between spouses normally would have been inadmissible.

By the time the second bombing plotter was successfully prosecuted, the government case against Pellicano was in the news, and Jones left the forensic audio magic out of his presentation. (The Alabama lawyer would also be in the hunt for abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph, who was caught and prosecuted four years after his crimes.)

Pellicano, who had begun the day stating that he was going to skip cross-examining the F.B.I.'s lead investigator, Stanley Ornellas, because he "no longer believed in the fairness of the trial," later gave a better than typical account of himself in grilling Ornellas about the government's crucial (and only) recorded wiretap, that between businessman Tom Gores and his inamorata, Lisa Gores, who happens to be his brother Alec's wife.

Once the jury had been excused for the day, Judge Fischer took some time to further caution Soo Hoo ("You weren't laying the foundation...") and tried to set a schedule that could wrap up the trial expeditiously.

"I'm not chastising you," she told Braun while instructing him to keep his witness ready for Wednesday's session.

When he playfully responded, "I'm not chastising you, either," the judge shot him a second look.

"Good," she said, with a smile that may have been a little frosty at the edges. "We don't allow that."

Former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones outside the courthouse after the 2005 conviction of clinic bomber Eric Rudolph; photo by Brian Schoenhals/Getty Images.