Pellicano defense motions rejected

In a setback for the defense, a federal judge Friday rejected a string of allegations by indicted private eye Anthony Pellicano and his co-defendants that the government’s wiretapping and racketeering investigation was replete with misconduct.

Issuing six separate rulings, U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer denied defense motions to suppress evidence in the long-running case, as well as a request to throw out the sweeping indictment against Pellicano and five co-defendants.

The rulings came only two months before the scheduled start of the trial, and days after contentious court hearings in which defense lawyers angrily accused federal prosecutors and the lead FBI agent in the case of mishandling evidence, relying on bad information for search warrants and other misconduct. Authorities denied the accusations.

“We are extremely pleased with the court’s ruling,” said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. “As we argued in our court papers, we maintain that this investigation was conducted well within the confines of the law and that the investigators demonstrated the highest degree of integrity.”

Attorneys for Pellicano declined to comment on the judge’s rulings. The lawyer for one of his co-defendants expressed disappointment.

“At the very least, we thought we were entitled to evidentiary hearings to determine the seriousness of the government mistakes in this case,” said Terree Bowers, attorney for entertainment lawyer Terry Christensen. “And we will be evaluating any opportunities for an immediate appeal of the rulings.”

In one ruling, the judge denied Christensen’s motion to suppress evidence from a July 25, 2003, search of Pellicano’s Sunset Strip offices on grounds that a search warrant was overly broad. The search was one of several conducted at Pellicano’s offices and was of particular interest to Christensen because agents seized recordings of phone conversations between Pellicano and Christensen that allegedly implicate them in wiretapping.

Fischer ruled that the warrant was appropriate because two earlier searches found ample evidence of potential criminal conduct.

In a separate ruling, she also turned down requests to dismiss the indictment because of alleged government misconduct.

The judge said attorneys for Pellicano and Christensen had not demonstrated that the government did anything that violated the law’s “universal sense of justice” standard or acted in such a “flagrant and prejudicial way” that the charges should be dismissed. “There is no merit to the motions,” Fischer wrote.

greg.krikorian@latimes.com