Pellicano found guilty of racketeering and conspiracy

Private eye Anthony Pellicano was found guilty today of scores of federal charges for conspiring to wiretap and intimidate dozens of celebrities and business executives, including Sylvester Stallone, Garry Shandling and developer Robert Maguire

The jury also delivered guilty verdicts against all four of Pellicano’s co-defendants who played various roles in the private eye’s sophisticated and illegal scheme to gather personal information on people, which he often used to gain advantages in the courtroom or in business dealings. The co-defendants were former Los Angeles Police Sgt. Mark Arneson, former telephone company field technician Ray Turner, computer expert Kevin Kachikian and businessman Abner Nicherie.

Before the verdicts were read, Pellicano seemed at ease, grinning and scanning the room. But when he realized the jury had found him guilty, he crossed his arms, took his glasses off and looked around with a blank expression. A woman on the jury dabbed her eyes with a tissue.

The verdicts come after a six-year federal investigation and a nine-week trial that laid bare the ruthless side of the rich and famous, who thought nothing of having their adversaries and irritants investigated by an equally ruthless private eye.

Even after the trial, mysteries remained: How much did Pellicano really tell his clients and the lawyers who hired him about his illegal tactics?

This all started with a dead fish on a car. An FBI search in 2002 of Pellicano’s offices for evidence relating to that cryptic threat mushroomed into a case poised to implicate billionaires and Hollywood power brokers and put them on trial alongside the private detective they had hired. The powerful would fall, some thought–a cautionary tale for the industry.

But that didn’t happen. Pellicano’s Hollywood clients – including Ron Meyer, Michael Ovitz, Brad Grey and Freddy DeMann – were questioned but never charged. The same held true for Bert Fields, the venerable lawyer to the stars, who hovered like a ghost over the proceedings – often invoked, as Pellicano’s frequent employer and mentor, but never heard or seen.

Fields acknowledged long ago that he had been a subject of the government’s probe, but he was not indicted. Still, observers waited breathlessly for Fields to appear as a witness, wondering what he knew. In the end, the closest Fields got to the witness stand was the courthouse cafeteria, where he waited to be called by Chad Hummel, the defense attorney for Arneson, who in the end decided against using his testimony.

Pellicano and his four co-defendants initially faced 111 criminal counts, reduced to 79. The jury deliberated on 78. The final count, on forfeiture of profits from racketeering, is to be decided after the other verdicts.

No one in the group was likely to be spotted dining at the Ivy or skiing in Aspen. The cast included a former police sergeant, a computer whiz, a retired phone technician and a cherub-faced former Vegas businessman (who spent a good portion of the trial snoozing, his chin down on his chest).

“This case is not about Hollywood,” the lead prosecutor, assistant U.S. Atty. Daniel Saunders, told the jurors in his rebuttal–or his “final word,” as he liked to call it. “It’s not about Sylvester Stallone … or Mike Ovitz or Brad Grey. This is a case about corruption, about cheating, about greed and arrogance and the subversion of the justice system. It just happened to take place in Hollywood.”

The defendants took their places in an expansive Roybal Federal Building courtroom constructed in 1999 to accommodate the teeming defendants and lawyers in a Mexican Mafia trial. With its marble accents and three tiers of long tables along one wall, the room took on the look of a United Nations chamber.

Much of the evidence for the prosecution came from the 2002 FBI raid on Pellicano’s offices high above Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. Explosives found in a safe sent Pellicano to federal prison in November 2003 for a 30-month term for illegal possession.

Agents stumbled on something even more unexpected: a recording of a wiretapped conversation. They found only one. By the time the FBI returned a few months later, Pellicano had cleaned house, prosecutors alleged.

But, on computers seized during the first raid, authorities also discovered tapes of phone conversations between Pellicano and his clients. The tapes, many of which were played in court, caught Pellicano talking about wiretapping, prosecutors contended. And that was just as damning, prosecutors contended.

“I can’t even listen to it all. It’s too much,” Pellicano whined to one client, action movie director John McTiernan, in a phone call that prosecutors said was a discussion of the private eye’s wiretaps on producer Charles Roven. ” … He’ll call his secretary and she places calls for him and she may make 15 … calls. I’ve got to listen to every one of those to determine who he’s calling for what.”

McTiernan was one of seven people who pleaded guilty before Pellicano’s trial to charges connected to the case. That group also included actor Keith Carradine’s ex-wife, Sandra.

But for the most part, if Pellicano’s wealthy clientele showed up at all, it was to testify under limited-use immunity agreements that protected them from prosecution for what they said. After their turns on the stand, they rushed out of the courtroom trailed by their own private lawyers, off to work, off to Europe.

So maybe the trial wasn’t about Hollywood–but it was very Hollywood.

The plot lines were as melodramatic as a Lifetime cable movie. The tapes that were played in court – or leaked earlier – revealed the uncensored, tawdry and vain musings of his posh clientele as they were alternately coddled by Pellicano (“I’m working really hard for you,” he tells Stallone’s ex-business manager) and harangued for more money.(“You’ve spent a tremendous amount of money and you’re going to have to send more money,” he tells beleaguered financier Mark Cohn.)

Pellicano wiretapped Stallone (a.k.a. “Johnny Friendly” in his phone company records) for his ex-business manager, Kenneth Starr (not the Clinton prosecutor.) And he tapped Carradine for his ex-wife, she testified. (She also dated Pellicano.)

Ovitz, co-founder of the powerful CAA talent agency, told the jury that Pellicano never abandoned ship during a stormy period of lawsuits and bad press. Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey said he felt “very comfortable” with Pellicano. Both men denied knowing that the private eye was doing anything illegal.

Their targets, however, painted a more malignant picture of Pellicano. Grey hired Pellicano to help him after comedian Shandling sued his former agent for $100 million. Shandling testified that the detective orchestrated a media smear campaign against him and illegally accessed information on his friends.

Ovitz unleashed Pellicano on two people suing his company and on two reporters, Anita Busch and Bernard Weinraub, who wrote stories he objected to for the New York Times.

After Pellicano entered her life, it became a nightmare, Busch said.

In June 2002, Busch – who by that time was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times – walked out to her Audi outside her home to find a dead fish under a pan, a hole in the windshield, and a note saying “STOP.” A couple of months later, she was almost run down by a car. Phone company staffers twice found a suspicious “half-tap” on her phone lines – a wire that can be used for legitimate repair reasons or for wiretapping.

“I was scared 24/7,” Busch testified on the stand.

Pellicano performed other nasty chores for his clients, trial witnesses said. Ivan Kaufman, CEO of a Long Island-based commercial mortgage banking company, hired the P.I. to run interference with a young Los Angeles woman, Timea Zsibrita, who said she was carrying Kaufman’s child.

Pellicano drove Zsibrita to an appointment for an abortion– and then presented her with the $125,000 check her lover had promised her in exchange for keeping quiet.

Pellicano “was like a mediator trying to resolve our problems,” she told the courtroom in a soft, lispy voice.

Timea and her sister, Monica, had a knack for bedding powerful men: Monica Zsibrita, a model, demanded money from comic star Chris Rock because of her pregnancy, he testified reluctantly. (He was not the father.) Rock hired Pellicano to investigate her.

The fact that most of Pellicano’s clients were not prosecuted wasn’t lost on defense attorneys. During his closing argument on behalf of Arneson, who admitted that he made thousands of unauthorized checks on law enforcement computer databases, Hummel ticked off a list of seven people who testified they had listened to wiretapped conversations – but were never criminally charged. Prosecutor Saunders, the model of high dudgeon during the trial, scoffed in his rebuttal: “As if that makes his client any less corrupt.” The statute of limitations for prosecuting wiretapping had run out in some cases, Saunders noted.

Pellicano chose to represent himself in court, in a sometimes canny, sometimes cryptic and often bumbling performance whose oddness was framed by the court’s requirement that he refer to himself as “Mr. Pellicano.”

Pellicano told the jury he was just a P.I. trying to get information. But he never revealed his secrets.

After publicly toying with testifying, he told the judge he would never discuss his clients. “It’s not going to happen ever, no matter what the consequence,” he said.

The trial was laced with references to Pellicano’s self-styled operatic sense of loyalty, which he seemed to have borrowed from “The Sopranos.” One of the several pass codes necessary to get into his highly secured computer system was omerta–the Italian word for the Sicilian code of keeping silent about crimes and refusing to cooperate with the police.

Prosecutors played in court a conversation between Pellicano and a man whose brother was charged with bookmaking. The private detective tells the man: “If you’re a rat, don’t even come anywhere … near me. ‘Cause I will hurt you. I don’t deal with rats. I am an old-style Sicilian, you understand, and I don’t want to have nothing to do with any … rats.”

Of course, the words rang out in an open courtroom for all the world to hear.

 carla.hall@latimes.com