Music executive tells about Pellicano’s snooping for him

Another Hollywood power player provided a fleeting glimpse in federal court Thursday of some of the allegedly illegal handiwork of Los Angeles private detective Anthony Pellicano.

Freddy DeMann, a former manager of Madonna and a co-founder of Maverick Records, testified that he hired Pellicano in 2000 to investigate his daughter Pilar’s then-husband, who DeMann suspected of infidelity.

DeMann said he paid Pellicano a total of $135,000 -- the first $25,000 in cash -- over the course of several months.

DeMann, who also has produced films and Broadway plays, waited 3 1/2 hours to deliver his brief testimony on how Pellicano played as many as half a dozen tapes of Paul Rusconi, his son-in-law at the time, talking to other people.

“As far as I could tell, it was on the phone,” DeMann said of the recordings.

Pellicano is charged with wiretapping, racketeering and other crimes. DeMann was asked by federal prosecutor Kevin Lally how he knew the recordings were of phone conversations.

“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I just believed it was.”

DeMann said he confronted his daughter with the tape recordings, which he said revealed his son-in-law’s “dalliances.”

“I played one second of one conversation,” he said.

Attorney Chad Hummel, who represents Mark Arneson, a former Los Angeles Police Department sergeant and a co-defendant accused of illegally accessing confidential LAPD databases for Pellicano, told DeMann he had only one question on cross-examination.

“Do you consider your daughter far better off today than she was before Pellicano . . . “ Hummel started to ask as Lally shouted “objection” and Judge Dale S. Fischer pronounced an emphatic “sustained.”

The methods that Pellicano allegedly employed to obtain those recordings occupied most of the trial day.

David Lopes, an asset protection manager at AT&T; -- which was SBC at the time of Pellicano’s alleged wiretapping -- described how phone company databases are filled with information about customers’ phone numbers, addresses, toll calls and locations of their cable wires. He also described the methods that phone company technicians use to monitor the lines or change cable routing in the course of legitimately servicing phone customers.

When Lopes was asked to peruse a bin of items the government seized from a storage unit belonging to Pellicano, the phone company official inventoried what appeared to be a treasure trove of telephone line testing equipment, cords and clips.

“Is there any reason why a non-SBC employee would have all that besides listening to telephone lines?” asked prosecutor Daniel Saunders. Lopes said there wasn’t.

Rayford Turner, a retired phone company technician and co-defendant, is alleged by the government to have helped Pellicano with the wiretaps.

Former SBC sales support manager Teresa Wright testified that she surreptitiously supplied Turner -- a longtime friend of hers -- with confidential information on people the government alleges Pellicano was wiretapping. Among them were writer-producer Bo Zenga and now-deceased Herbalife mogul Mark Hughes.

Accessing that information without a valid service reason violates the phone company’s code of ethics, the jury was told.

“How many requests did he make?” Saunders asked.

“Hundreds,” said Wright, whose voice trembled through most of her testimony. When she started to cry, the judge handed her a box of tissues.

Wright has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and is cooperating with the government in hopes of a sentence reduction, she confirmed in court.

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carla.hall@latimes.com