05.31.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, crimes at 9:57 pm by Administrator
Anthony Pellicano has a real big shot former U.S. Attorney from San Francisco as his counsel now, Steven Gruel. Officially Steven Gruel is not being paid by the government to represent Pellicano. Okay that doesn’t rule out pro bono work by the magnanimous Mr. Gruel, but somehow that latter possibility seems a tad far fetched don’t you think? So, how is a supposedly bankrupt convict in the slammer coming up with the sort of cash that will cover his legal expenses? The answer, as the talk goes, is that some secret and rich friend is footing the bill for old Tony and there are quite a few of them here in Tinseltown who could easily fit the ticket.
The first and foremost candidate to consider for Pellicano’s clandestine sugar daddy is Bert Fields. A year or so ago both Gruel and Fields’ lawyer Keker were working different aspects of the same case. It had something to do with political corruption in San Francisco. On the warm and fuzzy side, Fields attempted to start that slush fund a while back to support Tony’s wives and kids while he was up the river. Fields, who is a person of interest in the current investigation, seems to have the most to gain if Pellicano is adequately taken care of and doesn’t begin to squawk to the prosecutors for a deal. The two of them also had that strong bond of comraderie where Tony was willing to convert to Judiasm to please Bert or something.
Another enamored buddy was Ron Meyer. Wasn’t he the one making those treks upstate to the federal pen to visit Tony in solitary around Christmas? Brad Grey also is in the running. Grey was so smitten with Tony’s juvenile bravado and bogus masculinity that he was trying to sell a television series to HBO based on the Pelican’s exploits a few years back. Brad seems to be in denial lately that all this bad stuff is really happening to him but that could be due to his inspired performance of a deer caught in the headlights.
Marty Singer, an A-list type Hollywood entertainment attorney who has all but disappeared from view in the legal community, was once a frequent flyer on the Pelican. The buzz is that Singer hired Tarlow & Berk, two Beverly Hills big-time criminal defense attorneys, and now good old Marty Boy has taken a plea deal from the feds. If that turns out to be more than rumor, it’s unlikely that Marty is Tony’s mysterious benefactor.
To avert my having to recite an endless and tedious list here of Tinseltown’s elite who have a vested interest in keeping Tony happy, please ask yourselves “Who’s desperate enough to shell out millions of dollars to keep Tony from talking right now?” According to self-serving legal ethics, Mr. Gruel doesn’t ever have to publicly divulge where his check actually comes from. If one of Tony’s former illustrious clients though is trying to cover his criminal butt by footing the Pelican’s bill, Mr. Gruel may indeed have to spill the beans eventually. It may not be spelled out “conflict of interests” but how about “obstruction of justice?”
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05.24.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, los angeles times, crimes, new york times at 8:04 pm by Administrator
You thought you was the cool fool,
Never could do no wrong.
You had everything sewn up tight.
How come you lay awake all night long?
Just one thing I ask of you,
Just one thing for me.
Please forget you knew my name,
My darling [Sugaree/Anthony].
Shake it, shake it [Sugaree/Anthony],
Just don’t tell ‘em you know me …
- Many apologies to Robert Hunter
You have to wonder right about now, how many Tinseltown attorneys are wandering down Rodeo Drive humming the revised version of that old Grateful Dead song. If they hadn’t managed to hear it somewhere yet, they might want to learn the lyrics pronto.
“Please forget you knew my name…Just don’t tell ‘em you know me.” Catchy ain’t it?
The saga of the broadening Anthony Pellicano wiretapping scandal, coupled with the still-burning Pellicano/celebrity attorney influence-peddling scheme, coupled again with the wide legal fallout from the unending demise of both Bert Fields’ and Terry Christensen’s firms, has a crowd of people in Tinseltown wondering when there will be a Federal knock on their door. There are a lot of names on the roll call for this combined mess, and many of them sit as named partners in Century City law firms and on the board of major movie studios and talent agencies.
All of this might be simply written off as just another torrid example of the tired adage that absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely, and it does seem at the Los Angeles Times that these stories are going straight into their circular file. The studio A-listers are corrupt? Naw, that’s just an ugly rumor that the esteemed newspaper won’t give any ink or air time these days while they cover the salient issues like whether Alexander Proctor is really a snitch for the feds. Praise the Lord for the rumor mongering lately of the old grey lady.
There’s a question that needed to be addressed that the New York Times artfully attacked recently. The Pellicano scandal highlights a situation that plows right through “business as usual in Tinseltown” before parking itself next to the curb of “corruption in the entertainment legal system.”
That’s right, “corruption in the entertainment legal system.” That issue the LAT is so terrified of because so much of their revenue comes from those advertisements placed by the major studios.
Over the last several months, the LAT has moved mountains to make sure that the myriad Pellicano catastrophes are blamed on someone else. Their favorite whipping post has been the LAPD. Pellicano happened because of law enforcement failures to police their own moonlighting cops-on-the-beat. So even though only two detectives have been found to be Pellicano snitches this entire morass was due to failures of the police department. Not the studio’s fault or the celebrity lawyers, folks. Two bad cops and one delusional aging P.I. were responsible for all this. Let’s not forget that the federal prosecutors are way overreacting to all of this as well.
The same LAT who lament the shabby state of our town’s law enforcement have been enjoying handsome cash advertisements by covering for the studios with their reporting.
If a newspaper is going to save their own economic bacon with their failure to report on a news item happening on their very own doorstep for the past two decades, the least they could do is not obfuscate the matter further by diverting attention where it doesn’t belong.
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05.23.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, crimes, blogs at 9:15 pm by Administrator
There’s sure some phantasmagoric blogging on the Internet these days about the Anthony Pellicano debacle. It seems that one of the defendants who is currently residing at a federal detention center in Los Angeles, Daniel Nicherie, has taken his case to the court of public opinion in the MySpace forum. He writes there that he was charged with crimes that he did not commit. Daniel goes on to state that his attorneys have apparently been quite busy seeking information about everything from the Israeli Mafia to Ramparts scandal affiliated officers who all somehow colluded to make him the fall guy in this mess. He further elaborates that the real reason for the federal raid on Pellicano’s offices back in 2002 was the government’s search for a tape recording in which two “G-men” are discussing “a bribe that they are being offered to bump (him) off.”
To augment the veracity of Daniel’s assertions, a woman called J.J., who claims to be a paralegal in the law firm handling Nicherie’s federal case, has also started posting odd tidbits about his case on her MySpace page. She blurts out that her firm just “had a meeting with some LA Times writers who, for the first time, have become privy to some jaw-dropping information that will ignite this brewing saga into the biggest headlining story in this decade”. Ummn, perhaps as the lead paralegal J.J. hasn’t yet been informed of a certain court order by the Honorable Judge Dale S. Fischer about leaking information.
If all this weren’t mind-melting enough, Nicherie’s P.I., Jan Tucker, has a bizarrely pastel colored page with the complete run down of Daniel’s err…saga of “innocence”. To save you all from going crazy blind looking at the pastel colors and interpreting all the hypotheticals, here is a short summary of what was said: An unethical criminal defense attorney representing Daniel Nicherie for drug dealing hired a hood and an associate of the JDL to generate death threats against Nicherie to fleece him out of a few hundred thousand of ill gotten drug money. Nicherie paid off the money but by doing so became entangled in some mess wherein “Black rappers” were also getting death threats from the Jewish mob.
Sheesh, just think of it guys, if you hadn’t perused the Internet today you never would have known any of this…..
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05.20.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, los angeles times, crimes at 3:38 am by Administrator
This blog about Anthony Pellicano has gotten numerous emails since starting a few months ago, and surprisingly none of them have been critical or even from an attorney as yet. Since the site’s visitors have been going over 120,000 a month, people are definitely reading things here. What’s most interesting of all these great letters are those ones concerning the incestous relationship that exists to the present day between the Los Angeles Times and the major Tinseltown studios. This dishonest journalistic collusion seems to be rapidly emerging as the primary reason that the LAT steadfastly refuses to cover the Anthony Pellicano investigation and trial in a truthful and unbiased manner.
Here are a couple of particularly fascinating emails that hopefully will resonate with some of you as well. (Again, the name of the author of any correspondence is always withheld unless he or she specifically requests that it appears here).
I enjoy a lot your web blog.
I’m a director, who had a huge legal battle with Warner Bros. in 1992-1995.
You bet the studio hired Pellicano to wiretap my phones, and tried to murder me on three different occasions. The legal battle is still on, the FBI know about the matter, and the LA Times who covered the lawsuit in 1992 has all the recent court documents. But of course they don’t have the guts to cover it now, partly because in the process, Warner Bros. corrupted a dozen or so federal judges.
However, the Feds are looking into the matter, and if it’ll come out, it will be huge scandal.
Why I’m sharing this information with you? Because you’re on the right track when it comes to the reasons as to why the LA Times is not more aggressive in covering the Pellicano matter. You should also know that some of the journalists covering the Pellicano scandal are personal friends of powerful people at the studios. So hiding behind their “three independent corroboration necessary to publish a story” excuse, they are not eager at all to come up with a new angle.
Keep up the good job.
Well that one was completely intriguing. It seems as if the FBI may be going back even further than 1997 in Pellicano’s massive computer databank of wiretaps and that a new facet of our current Pellicano debacle could well be emerging.
My personal favorite however, which was far less informative, is the following because it was just so damn succinct in message.
I think that the LA Times is so politically correct and beholden to the film industry that they wouldn’t write the word crap if they had a mouthful.
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05.18.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, los angeles times, crimes, mass media at 12:01 am by Administrator
There are political consequences of the Los Angeles Time’s failure to report on the “why” of the Anthony Pellicano disaster. The LAT continually asserts that nobody out there thinks the problems are with the major players at the studios but rather with a handful of corrupt local law enforcement.
Nobody out there thinks that? Why would that be? Could it have anything to do with the LAT’s pusillanimous reporting on Hollywood they’ve been absorbing for a decade plus, even from the “committed” investigative journalists over at the City Desk and in Entertainment, that continues to leave out the context of the disaster and the suffering–i.e., the massive negligence by our ever-more powerful fourth estate to keep watch on the entertainment industry.
The LAT doesn’t seem to be deflecting off attention from individual A-list Tinseltown types so much as circumventing a potential investigation into the overall studio industry’s involvement. How often have the studio heads and major producers been sued by their lowly urchins for violating the terms of contracts and sexual harassment yet been awarded more and more in revenues by the public? What we’re reading in the LAT about the Pellicano debacle is akin to a laundry cycle: spin, spin, spin, repeat… Follow the $$$$ and ignore the talking head words please.
It is important to remember that Anthony Pellicano’s enterprise was in fact a series of “grassy knolls” where some have claimed “rivulets of corruption” may have emerged from, though details are scarce and occluded. Also, no one in a position of power investigated thoroughly the phenomenon known as “Wiretapper’s Remorse” a scenario which suggests that if everyone in Los Angeles were simply talking on their phones simultaneously it could have in fact caused the flooding of Pellicano’s computers, a flooding curiously timed to coincide with Anita Busch finding that dead fish and the rose thing that she made such a damn fuss about. Lastly, the incremental abuse of cell phones by the overall community had been a major source of concern for years with Mr. Pellicano and was causing him undo hardship just trying to keep abreast of the latest technological advances.
On second thought, maybe it was only one or two bad cops and disgruntled SBC employees who were involved in any real way with the whole Pellicano scandal-of-the century. Ummn…perhaps you believe in the awesome power of invisible pink unicorns too?
What the media reports, or fails to, has consequences. Do we now presume that the LAT will report on the alleged consequences of their own lack of reporting? No, they are flesh and blood versions of the Cowardly Lion of Oz, driven by the fear of saying the wrong thing about the studios, of offending someone important at the studios and going out on a limb against the studios. If I wasn’t verging on apoplexy, I’d be getting real nauseous right about now from the scent of “Eau de Media Poltroon.”
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05.17.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, los angeles times, crimes, new york times at 3:22 am by Administrator
The Los Angeles Times’ staff seems to be following their normal protocol with their lackluster and bizarrely slanted coverage of the Anthony Pellicano case, at least according to an article by Jan Golab in Front Page Magazine from 2005. The dynamic duo of Pulitzer Prize winning LAT beat reporter, Chuck Philips, and his apparent protégé at the City Desk, Andrew Blankstein, apparently made a similar incredulous appearance reporting on the Biggy Small fiasco. The following excerpt raises some intriguing similarities in the quality, or lack there of, for the LAT’s authenticity. Please take the liberty to substitute the word appearing second in the parentheses in bold for the text in the original writing and the resemblance to the Pellicano case will become more apparent hopefully.
During the [Biggie/Pellicano] [trial/continuing coverage of the indictment] this [summer/spring], the Times’ overt bias became a hot topic of conversation among [court watchers/journalists and bloggers]. [This reporter/Yours truly] [covered/read about] the [trial/preliminary hearings] [for an October 2005 cover story in XXL Magazine/ in every article that has appeared in both the New York Times, Vanity Fair and the Associated Press]. “Am I [involved in/reading about] the same trial that the LAT is covering?” an incredulous [Perry Sanders/me] asked at one point. [Sanders/Saunders] confronted Times reporter Andrew Blankstein, Chuck Philip’s apparent understudy, for including a gratuitous smear against the [Wallace attorneys/federal prosecutors] in a story about the [LAPD’s hiding of evidence/leaking of secret FBI interviews to the NYT]. Blankstein told him: My editor made me put that in there. The L.A. Times was described in one [Wallace/U.S. Attorney’s] motion as a blatantly one-sided critic of the [Wallace law suit/federal indictment]. [One out-of-town reporter/Me again] commented: I’ve heard stories about The L.A. Times (agenda-driven) reporting on this story, but I didn’t believe it. Now that I’ve been [sitting in court/reading other newspapers] everyday and [reading/thinking about] their stories, I have to wonder.
[Detective Russell Poole* believes/ A whole lot of excellent journalists from Nicky Finke in LA to the New York Post’s Page Six team believe] the Times coverage is simply part of the widespread political pressure to protect the [former chief (of police)/forget it, this might be true without any alteration]. They (The L.A. Times) just don’t have credibility, [Poole/Most of the journalistic community] commented following [the mistrial this summer/the LAT’s coverage of the Pellicano case thus far]. They take some truth and intertwine it with propaganda, which is basically what the LAPD was doing with the whole Rampart scandal. Somebody needs to ask the tough questions about who is responsible for all this. Poole likened Chuck Philips to [Detective Steve Katz, the LAPD detective who forgot the jailhouse confessions and other evidence he left in his desk drawers and which led to the mistrial/a mendacious turd blossom]. His career is shot. If you lie one time and you get caught, there’s no way you can [testify/report] in another case. You’re not reliable.
Life always proves to be stranger than fiction and both Chuck Philips and Andrew Blankstein are key reporters for the LAT on the Pellicano fiasco as well. Do you think the adage “History tends to repeat itself” or a “A leopard doesn’t change its spots” is more applicable in this situation? Let’s go with the leopard thing, shall we?
*Detective Russell Poole was one of the good guys in the infamous Ramparts scandal who Philips ostensibly misquoted.
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05.16.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano at 1:28 am by Administrator
There’s buzz going on around Tinseltown that “Pellicano: The Movie” is already in preproduction. Though the “Pellicano: The Movie” poster contest hasn’t officially been announced by any major studio as yet, I was eager to dash off two submissions for what is sure to be a riveting piece of cinema verite. If other erstwhile graphic artists are interested in contributing to the creative endeavor, please send your work to this email and the pics will be posted in the order in which they are received.
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05.12.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, mass media at 12:21 am by Administrator
Ross Johnson provocatively wondered why Hollywood was ever scared of Anthony Pellicano: “Despite all his posturing with bimbos and outright lying to reporters about his prowess with a Louisville Slugger, Pellicano has always been a punk from Chicago who, as attorney Stephen Yagman is fond of saying, ‘escaped his punkdom and moved to L.A., where nobody knew he was a punk.’”
Rather than dismissing Anthony Pellicano as an unworthy Public Enemy No.1 because of his current fallen chaotic state in prison, I’m going to Goodwin** the discussion by comparing the present distortions going on in our perceptions of the Pelican debacle to the continued difficulty most of the world has in putting the Hitler era into any cogent and meaningful perspective. Please take the liberty to substitute any name provided at the appropriate points in these excerpts from the excellent interview that Luke Ford did with William Grange, the author of the new book “Hitler Laughing: Comedy in the Third Reich.”
“People don’t like to think that [Hitler/Pellicano] was like everyone else. He liked to laugh. He liked to see plays. It’s true that [Hitler/Pellicano] was a little strange, but in many ways, he was just like you and me. People try to heroize people who stood up to [Hitler/Pellicano] as morally superior and when you get into those kinds of debates, then you look at somebody like [Hitler/Pellicano] as defective. But he wasn’t defective at all. He was an evil genius…
We know that on [Hitler/Pellicano]’s 50th birthday, [Joseph Goebbels/Ron