Private Eye Is on the Celebrity Case

Michael Jackson spent millions on his defense against child-molestation charges.

But a day after he was acquitted on all counts, attorneys and legal experts said Tuesday that it was the more than $350,000 he reportedly paid for private investigators that may well have made the crucial difference.

The funds allowed Jackson to do what wealthy defendants in many high-profile cases have done: conduct a parallel investigation with the same care and thoroughness of a law enforcement agency.

So while Santa Barbara County prosecutors and sheriff’s detectives focused considerable resources on Jackson, the pop star’s private investigators were able to commission an exhaustive examination of the mother of Jackson’s accuser.

The private eyes dug up embarrassing details about the mother’s past that jurors on Monday said damaged her credibility and harmed the prosecution’s case.

Far from a luxury, many defense attorneys now consider investigators crucial partners, so much so that some lawyers have been known to dip into their own fees to pay them.

“They can make or break you,” said attorney Mark Geragos, whose high-profile cases have included Scott Peterson, Winona Ryder and, briefly, Jackson.

“When they talk about the best defense that money can buy, they talk about that in a disparaging way,” added Donald Re, one of the lead defense attorneys in the late John DeLorean’s 1984 acquittal on federal drug-trafficking charges, “but what that really means is having good experts and good investigators and a good attorney.”

Re said the best investigators turn up leads and witnesses so quickly, he has been taken aback. In one case, he recalled that it took a private investigator only three hours to track down a potential witness with only the name of the street he supposedly lived on and that he worked at an auto body shop. The man became a key defense witness, Re said.

But even investigators on a “run-of-the-mill” criminal case, Re said, would probably bill between $5,000 and $10,000.

The money to hire top-notch investigators -- who can bill more than $100 an hour-- clears attorneys to focus on the law. But it also highlights inequities in the justice system. Superior Court capital cases, for example, allocate $28 an hour for investigators. Although public defenders have access to staff investigators, there are not enough to work on every case.

Robert Kalunian, Los Angeles County’s chief deputy public defender, said his office has 7,500 attorneys and 75 investigators. The office handles about 400,000 cases a year, most of which never go to trial. Still, Kalunian said he believes all the cases that warranted the attention were investigated.

“Oftentimes,” he said, “someone with unlimited resources is in a similar situation to someone who is indigent -- in the sense that on any given case we do have significant resources. It’s the person in between [rich and poor] who really can be in trouble.”

Re said poorer defendants’ lack of access to detective work puts them in a “hole they often can’t get out of.”

In contrast, Jackson’s defense team hired at least two investigators, who developed their own leads and chased down tabloid and mainstream media reports.

The top priority of the defense investigation, said veteran private detective Scott Ross, was finding out everything possible about the family of the boy accusing Jackson of molestation. That meant scrubbing the boy’s mother.

In criminal files, they found a record of an arrest. In civil files, they found two lawsuits. They subpoenaed records from law enforcement agencies in area’s where she had lived -- turning up 911 calls. They talked to her bosses, got copies of personnel files. They spoke to her children’s teachers, interviewed her ex-husband. They traced back calls to celebrities who became defense witness, testifying about suspicions they had about the family’s intentions and the mother’s character.

“One thing just leads to another,” said Ross, “and sometimes it leads to dead ends and sometimes it leads to gold.”

The payoff this time: a portrait of a mother, and family, so devastating that jurors said they couldn’t convict.

Ross said he was able to persuade comedian Chris Tucker to testify that the family had tried to scam him. Private investigator Eric Mason, who preceded Ross on the case, looked into the mother’s $150,000 settlement with J.C. Penney Co. after she claimed she had been roughed up and sexually assaulted by security guards. That inquiry led to a defense witness, paralegal Mary Holzer, who testified the mother had confided that she had lied under oath about the incident and then threatened to kill Holzer and her 9-year-old daughter if Holzer told.

Perhaps most significantly, the investigation of the mother’s background turned up evidence of welfare fraud, something Carl A. “Tony” Capozzola, an attorney working for Jackson, reported to prosecutors in Los Angeles County. The allegations of welfare fraud forced the mother to take the 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination when she took the stand.

Private investigators have made similar probes in other high-profile cases, looking into the backgrounds of actor Robert Blake’s murdered wife, the woman who said Kobe Bryant raped her and the teenage girl sexually assaulted by classmates in Newport Beach.

In the Newport Beach case, prosecutors complained that private investigators working for the defense had trespassed at the victim’s home and, after the girl transferred to a new high school under an assumed name, revealed her real name and details about the case to her new friends.

Investigators who work for the defense said they play a critical role in a justice system based on advocacy.

“It’s quality control,” said Larry Carlson, an investigator with the Washoe County defender’s office in Nevada and the regional director of the National Defender Investigator Assn. “I know cops generally hate us, but they shouldn’t. We ask questions they don’t. Sometimes I think they don’t want the questions asked. Even if you take any sort of malice out of it, they have a point of view and we have a different point of view.”

Lynda Larsen, a Los Angeles-based private investigator with 25 years’ experience, said her goal is to find evidence that frees the defendant from blame.

“The cops are trying to close cases,” said Larsen. She, in turn, does due diligence to find out who the prosecution witnesses are and whether they seem credible.

In the Blake case, that mission led her to Victorville and impeachment witnesses who testified about recent, heavy drug use at the home of one of the prosecution’s star witnesses, an aging Hollywood stuntman who accused Blake of trying to hire him to kill the actor’s wife.

Blake was found not guilty, and jurors later said they felt some of prosecution witnesses were not credible.

Defense attorney Re said he became a convert after seeing how effective investigators were in the DeLorean case -- helping to win an acquittal despite government videotape of the dashing automaker examining 24 kilograms of cocaine. Now, he said, he uses private eyes in all of his cases, on occasion paying the tab out of his own fees.

In Scott Peterson’s trial for the slaying of his pregnant wife, Laci, Geragos said he took “a substantial portion of my fees to rebate them for investigation.”

“A good investigator thinks about cases differently than a good lawyer,” added Harland Braun, whose cases include representing Los Angeles police officers charged in the Rodney G. King beating case.