Based on its opening, Pellicano trial is a dud
They’re still eating lunch in this town, thank you.
Three days into the racketeering and wiretap trial of Anthony Pellicano, many of the private investigator’s former Hollywood clients are merrily conducting business as usual.
Paramount chief Brad Grey is prepping for the release of the new installment of “Indiana Jones.” Mega-lawyer Bert Fields is still defending Tom Cruise from scurrilous attacks. And former Creative Artists Agency kingpin Michael Ovitz is doing the chichi thing for former titans: checking out new media.
In his opening statements Thursday, Assistant U.S. Atty. Kevin M. Lally discussed instances in which Ovitz, Grey and other clients hired Pellicano to investigate their adversaries and the private eye’s alleged penchant for illegally accessing victim’s personal records and listening to their private phone calls. Ovitz, Fields and Grey are all on the government’s witness list, but they have not been charged with anything. The three have maintained they had no knowledge of Pellicano’s alleged illegal methods.
Hollywood loves a good courtroom drama, and there’s plenty of potential for that in this trial at the Roybal Federal Building downtown. It revolves around how the wealthy hired Pellicano to investigate adversaries -- allegedly by wiretapping many of them -- in various business and personal disputes.
Though the case could still provide a rare glimpse into the winning-at-any-cost mentality of some of Los Angeles’ most entitled, it might be hard for a 5-year-old scandal to hold public attention. With the exception of Grey, many of the names promised on the government’s witness list -- Sylvester Stallone, Garry Shandling and Farrah Fawcett -- are past their sell-by date. By Day 3, the judge had closed the extra courtroom that had been set aside for media.
“It’s kind of yesterday’s news,” says studio chief-turned-producer Bill Mechanic. “There were all these rumors a couple of years ago that it would explode, and it seemingly never did.”
“The only thing anybody cared about -- and cares about -- is ‘Is anyone we know getting indicted? Oh, gee, it’s nobody from Hollywood.’ ”
“It becomes ‘Who cares?’ ” says another producer, who declined to be named because he knows the players.
“The only bombshell would be if [Pellicano] turns” on his former clients, says one Hollywood fixture who knows the private eye and prefers not to be named. “He should do it. Everybody has abandoned him. That’s my opinion. He didn’t invent these things he did. Someone hired him to do it. Aren’t they just as guilty?”
As Loyola University law professor Laurie Levenson says: “The clients didn’t get punished, but the providers did. That’s generally true. Now the clients had more plausible deniability. ‘We wanted the information, but we didn’t tell them to get it illegally.’ Those who benefited the most aren’t paying the price. The prosecution needs them as witnesses.”
Pellicano is in downtown’s Metropolitan Detention Center and faces hundreds of years in prison if convicted on all counts. Seven others have already pleaded guilty to various Pellicano-related charges. Yet with the exceptions of director John McTiernan, former music executive Robert Pfeifer and entertainment lawyer Terry Christensen, many who bought Pellicano’s wares have not been charged and will appear as witnesses in the government’s case, alongside the very people Pellicano surveilled and allegedly often intimidated for their benefit.
McTiernan pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, which was investigating Pellicano in 2006, and has been sentenced to four months in jail. He’s out on bail pending his appeal. Christensen is charged with hiring Pellicano to wiretap Lisa Bonder Kerkorian, the former wife of Christensen’s longtime client, billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, during a child support case. Christensen had pleaded not guilty and will be tried in a separate case.
In his heyday, Pellicano was repeatedly described as ruthless, menacing and scary, but the 63-year-old was at best tepid in his first day of court, acting as his own counsel. Wearing a prison-issue green Windbreaker, the former private eye barely mustered a defense. Speaking of himself in the third person (as demanded by the judge), Pellicano said it was “important for clients to have the knowledge that their problems became his problems. They loved him while they needed to.”
U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer urged the former gumshoe to stick to what the evidence would show.
Prosecutor Lally described in his opening statement how Pellicano appealed to “wealthy, desperate people . . . people who would pay a premium price in order to get information to discredit and/or destroy adversaries.”
For many Hollywood players, the stakes of this trial are not incarceration but humiliation. And Pellicano, despite his professed adherence to omerta, the Sicilian code of silence (also once his computer password), has turned out to be “the biggest government informant in the case,” said Lally in his opening statement.
According to the government, Pellicano taped many of his conversations with clients. Several former employers and employees have been given immunity in return for their testimony.
So far, the negative publicity has done little to halt the ascension of Paramount’s Grey. When Pellicano was indicted in February 2006, the press wrote reams about Grey’s hard-nosed tactics in two Pellicano-aided lawsuits, one against Shandling and another against writer-producer Bo Zenga, whose phones were allegedly tapped by the private eye for months.
Since then, Grey’s career has prospered, and he has taken Paramount from sixth place to first at the box office, largely because of the DreamWorks acquisition that he engineered.
Ovitz, the onetime most powerful man in Hollywood, has had to combat bad press since long before the Pellicano trial -- everything from the failure of his tenure at Disney to a self-inflicted wound in the pages of Vanity Fair in 2002, when he blamed his downfall on the “gay mafia.” Ovitz later apologized for the comment.
Since then, Ovitz has laid low. He owns two Japanese restaurants in L.A. and recently held the launch party for Dealmaker Media LA, a venture to hook up Hollywood types with venture capital and tech start-ups. In January, he was battling his former business partner, billionaire Ron Burkle, in court.
The bulk of Ovitz’s involvement in the Pellicano affair revolves around bad publicity, and he has denied wrongdoing. On Thursday, Lally described how Ovitz hired Pellicano in May 2002 because he was concerned about articles written by Bernard Weinraub, then of the New York Times, and Anita Busch, a freelance reporter who later worked at the L.A. Times. Later that month, according to the government, Pellicano associates allegedly searched police and telephone company databases for information about Busch.
Pellicano employee Denise Ward kept surveillance on Busch, and that June, Busch’s car was vandalized and someone left a dead fish, a red rose and a sign saying “Stop.” In November, Busch, who’s since left journalism, found a wiretap on her phone.
The man with the most fingers in the Pellicano pie is 78-year-old super-lawyer Fields, who for almost a decade fostered the rise of Pellicano, using him to help defend the late producer Don Simpson from an unhappy former assistant and again in the 1993 Michael Jackson child molestation investigation. (Pellicano disseminated an audiotape to the media that he said showed that the accuser’s father wanted to extort Jackson, a charge the father repeatedly denied.)
According to the government’s outline of the case, Fields or his firm, Greenberg Glusker, either hired Pellicano or referred him to clients including Grey, hedge fund manager Adam Sender and Taylor Thomson, a Canadian heiress who employed Pellicano to investigate her former nanny, Pamela Miller.
Fields was investigated by the government for years. During that time, two big-name lawyers, Dale Kinsella and Howard Weitzman, left his firm to form their own practice. Also, since Pellicano’s arrest, the lawyer, who asserted he had not lost a trial since 1956 lost his first trial. Last year, after a bitter lawsuit, Fields’ client Clive Cussler was ordered to pay the producers of the film “Sahara” $5 million.
Fields continues to work. Just last month, he showed up as counsel to Jimmy Choo shoes President Tamara Mellon in her lawsuit against her mother.
It’s unclear how much the Pellicano imbroglio has affected the popular and erudite lawyer’s standing in the Hollywood community. One producer who used him in the past says he’d “absolutely” hire Fields again, except that “he’s semi-retired.”
Still some think that Fields’ reputation has taken a hit. “It’s harder to accept that the lawyers who hired [Pellicano] didn’t know what he was up to,” says Robert Schwartz, an attorney for O’Melveny & Myers who’s worked for almost all of the studios and has been a co-counsel with Fields on cases as well as against him.
“There’s a certain kind of information that’s too good to be true. It’s too good to be simply overheard in an elevator,” Schwartz said. “Lawyers are trained to be skeptical. That’s the natural instinct when you hear something that’s really juicy about an adversary. How do you know that? If you don’t ask that question, it’s because you don’t want to know the answer. If you bury your head in the sand, it’s because you’re crossing the line.”
The government alleges that Pellicano openly offered illegal service to clients, though he’d warn them to keep it a secret.
At the end of the first day of testimony, the government played an audio recording made by Pellicano of the private detective talking with former Arizona Diamondbacks third baseman Matt Williams. Pellicano is heard making an offer to keep tabs on Williams’ second wife by listening to her phone conversations.
On the stand, Williams explained why he refused. “It’s illegal,” he said.
--