Witness in Pellicano trial deviates from pattern

People acquainted with private detective Anthony Pellicano who must make the unpleasant journey to the witness stand in the federal courtroom where he sits accused of wiretapping and racketeering fall mostly into two categories: those who profess they knew nothing and those who confess they knew something.

Those with immunity against prosecution are dry-eyed and those with plea agreements but awaiting sentencing are the teariest.

So it was surprising to see former Beverly Hills Police Officer Craig Stevens, who plumbed law enforcement databases for years for Pellicano and pleaded guilty to multiple counts of fraud, climb the witness stand Tuesday and stoically fall on his sword. He recalled his decision to cooperate with the government.

“I was drinking myself to death,” Stevens said in a low monotone; he wore a white shirt and tie but no jacket. “I couldn’t take the pressure anymore. I hit rock bottom.”

So he decided to plead guilty, he was asked.

“I decided to do the right thing,” Stevens answered.

The former officer, now a grocery store clerk, said he made unauthorized entries into confidential databases to provide criminal records and state Department of Motor Vehicles data to Pellicano.

For a while, the detective gave him a pager, Stevens testified. (He was paid a relatively modest $10,000 overall for his work, which stretched through the 1990s and into 2001.) Stevens said he never knew Pellicano was wiretapping people.

Stevens testified that Pellicano told him he also had other police sources.

One of them, the government alleges, is Mark Arneson, a former LAPD sergeant who is being tried with Pellicano and three other co-defendants. All have pleaded not guilty.

Stevens, unlike others who have admitted some crime, has not used his time on the witness stand to beg for mercy. When witnesses do, they leave themselves open to cross-examination by defense attorneys trying to show that their eager cooperation has more to do with pleasing the government than telling the truth.

“It is your hope your sentence will be reduced?” Arneson’s attorney, Chad Hummel, asked Stevens.

“All I’ve got is hope,” he said.

“So that’s your hope?” Hummel said.

“Would be yours too,” Stevens said with a little chuckle.

In the category of witnesses who seemed to know nothing was Gaye Palazzo, Pellicano’s former bookkeeper. With a swath of disheveled blond hair, dark-framed glasses and a voice so faint that Judge Dale S. Fischer asked her three times to speak up, Palazzo recounted with some difficulty her time working for the private eye.

“I don’t like remembering things that are not good energy,” Palazzo said on the stand. She worked for Pellicano from 1995 to 1999 and for several months around the end of 2001. “I don’t like remembering that part of my life,” she added.

Palazzo regularly paid Rayford Turner, the phone company technician who is on trial with Pellicano, she testified under a grant of immunity from prosecution. Turner, the government alleges, supplied confidential phone company information to Pellicano and helped him wiretap opponents.

“Were you tasked with getting phone company information from Turner?” Assistant U.S. Atty. Kevin Lally asked.

“What does that mean?” Palazzo said.

“Did you ask defendant Turner to get phone company information?”

“Yes,” she answered.

She also admitted to having had a relationship with Turner. “It was 98% a physical relationship,” she said.

Under cross-examination, she was asked by Turner’s attorney, Mona Soo Hoo, what she was doing with Turner in a phone closet near Pellicano’s office. “We were messing around,” she said.

--

carla.hall@latimes.com