Pellicano a ‘thug,’ attorney tells jury

After all the testimony about Anthony Pellicano -- the industry titans who said he loyally helped them during troubled times, the harassed men and women who recalled being targeted at their most vulnerable times -- a federal prosecutor, in arguments Tuesday, reduced him from a powerful private detective to a “very well-connected and very well-paid thug.”

Masquerading as a legitimate private investigation agency, Pellicano’s business “was nothing more than a criminal organization,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Daniel Saunders said in closing arguments of the private investigator’s nine-week wiretapping and racketeering trial.

When Pellicano gets hired, Saunders said, “witnesses start receiving threatening phone calls . . . and dead fish appear on reporters’ cars.”

The trial of Pellicano and four co-defendants entered its final stretch Tuesday with Saunders’ five-hour-long marathon summation. (That’s not including the coffee breaks.)

If Saunders had any doubts the jury was hanging on his every word, that was dispelled when Judge Dale S. Fischer gave the jurors the option of staying half an hour longer to hear him finish rather than continue Saunders’ summation today. They chose to stay. The defendants are expected to begin their closing remarks today.

Saunders had the daunting task of reviewing 78 counts against five defendants. “That’s a lot,” Saunders said, in the understatement of the day.

But Saunders said the case was fairly simple: “It is about a group of people who got together to gather information, and who did it in ways that broke the law,” he said. “And the reason there are so many counts is because they did it over and over and over again.”

Saunders spent most of his time arguing that Pellicano and two co-defendants -- former Police Sgt. Mark Arneson and former telephone technician Ray Turner -- were part of a criminal, moneymaking enterprise and “participated in the activities of the enterprise,” the legal definition of racketeering. Arneson provided confidential information on people by illegally accessing law enforcement databases, the government lawyer said. Turner supplied Pellicano with confidential phone company information on people and, Saunders indicated, helped implement the wiretapping. Both were on Pellicano’s payroll.

In several examples, Saunders noted how “the enterprise worked in sync:” A few days after super agent Michael Ovitz paid Pellicano to find “embarrassing information” on two reporters -- Anita Busch and Bernard Weinraub -- Arneson rifled through the journalists’ official confidential records. Phone company information that Turner obtained went to Pellicano around the time Arneson was accessing information from law enforcement databases on the reporters, Saunders said.

Saunders easily recapped his evidence that Pellicano is guilty of the wiretapping charges. “If I have to spend a lot of time explaining that defendant Pellicano is guilty of wiretapping,” he told jurors, “then the government hasn’t done its job or you haven’t been paying attention.”

For backup, he cited witnesses who testified that Pellicano played them wiretapped conversations or -- in the case of a former employee -- had her transcribe wiretap recordings. There was also, Saunders told the jury, “one indisputable wiretap recording in this trial” -- the intimate telephone conversation between Lisa Gores and her former brother-in-law, Tom Gores. Saunders noted that the first Pellicano search warrant didn’t authorize the government to look for wiretaps. By the time a second warrant cleared investigators to hunt for wiretaps, Pellicano had cleaned house, Saunders explained. The Gores tape was found in Pellicano’s office by accident, he said.

But the government ended up with something better, Saunders said -- Pellicano’s secretly recorded conversations with clients and co-defendants, relating “the contents of the intercepted conversations that he is listening to.”

Saunders noted that what Assistant U.S. Atty. Kevin Lally said at the start of the trial bore repeating -- those recordings make “defendant Pellicano the biggest government informant in this case.”

--

carla.hall@latimes.com