04.13.06
Who didn’t know what Pellicano was doing?
The Pellicano Case: Recently, I met with a talent manager who hired Anthony Pellicano during the mid-1990’s, on behalf of a movie-star client with a female-stalker problem. As the manager recounted it, their first meeting eerily foreshadowed Jared Paul Stern: “Pellicano offered us a laundry list—a menu—and asked exactly how far we wanted to take this,” the manager said. “Nobody can plead naïve here. We all knew exactly what we’d bargained for and what we were getting billed for.”—Bruce Fierstein, New York Observer
It’s not that this revelation about Anthony Pellicano is exactly new but it’s beyond the imagination as to why more reporters in Los Angeles aren’t mentioning it. Not withstanding the complaints of his victims but Pellicano’s very own clients have publicly admitted using his wiretapping services since at least 1993. Howard Wietzman was the first one to laud the disgraced P.I.’s skills in the area. When Pellicano illicitily taped a phone conversation with attorney Barry Rothman, who represented the accuser’s father in the 1993 Michael Jackson sexual abuse scandal, Weitzman said that although Rothman was not informed that the 25 minute conversation with Pellicano was being taped, Pellicano was not breaking the law because it permitted secret taping in cases of suspected extortion. The Jackson camp subsequently purported to have other tapes, most of which didn’t involve conversations with Pellicano. I asked not just a few people about the veracity of what Weitzman had mentioned about the legality of the wiretaps, and suffice it to say that they had a very different opinion of what the laws on wiretapping were in California back in 1993.
In the Gordon Jones multiple date rape case, both Jones’ attorneys, Ronald Richards and Daniel Davis have publicly acknowledged listening to illegal tapes made by Pellicano, but they denied authorizing the taps. Pellicano’s recordings included more than 30 phone calls made by Jane Doe No. 3, one of Jones’ alleged victims. Davis’ bail motions included portions of Jane Doe No. 3’s taped conversations that could only have come from illicit recordings. According to a memo written by Davis, Richards suggested that one of the rape victims be pressured not to cooperate with prosecutors, but Davis worried that the alleged victim would ask the D.A. to start a “formal inquiry.” Richards had told Jane Doe No. 3 the defense had tapes of her phone calls. Davis told Richards that the tapes “would not legally be admissible” in court, and that they could “implicate Pellicano and Richards in a conspiracy to illegally tape conversations.”
D.A. Steve Cooley admitted that the Garcetti administration investigated Pellicano’s activities in 1999. Court documents and police records from the Jones case reinforce the notion that prosecutors knew about the illegal wiretaps in 1999 as well.
So the question is not who knew what Pellicano was doing, but who didn’t?
