06.12.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, los angeles times, crimes at 4:03 am by Administrator
Oh my, there’s not much to say about Chuck Philips unmonitored jailhouse interview with Anthony Pellicano except, “Oh my!” How did the Men’s Detention Center (MDC) in Downtown Los Angeles ever allow an unmonitored telephone call with one of their incarcerated wards, on a no-bail status no less, with anyone other than their attorney? In Mr. Pellicano’s case that would have been Steven Gruel.
According to a source in law enforcement some folks are none too pleased:
DMC does NOT allow third party calls from an inmate to his lawyer to a third party. Was the call legal? Did Gruel break the rules for Pelllicano? Did someone at MDC look the other way as a favor or for a payoff? I cannot believe that MDC or the prosecutors would allow Pelicano an unmonitored call? If so, he could very well have ordered a hit along with his chat with his pal Phillips.
Well, big “Oops” on someone’s part. Perhaps Mr. Gruel thinks this is one of those Grade B movies where he’s worked as an extra and he’s gotten a bit over involved with fuzzy boundaries there.
In terms of any other comments about Mr. Philips ethically challenged pseudo-journalistic writing, some readers of this blog said it best in their emails today. There were the visceral reactions:
Wow. The Phillips article is really a piece! A mouthpiece for Pellicano!
Felt as though I was reading some sort of poorly encrypted message from Antonio to Hollywood with Love. LOL. With Phillips amplifying the point: “Pellicano’s vow of silence is not lost on…future indictments depend on…”
When did Pellicano become a juvenille deliquent jailhouse counselor in addition to his other heroic feats for society? …What a MAN! And his advice to the downtrodden youth that everyone has to “pay for their mistakes… .” It’s eerie. Chuck Doll, brrrrrr.
Ummn, “vow of silence” makes one wonder is there really something else here that we don’t know about that is keeping Pellicano from talking? Unfortunately, Mr. Philips never quite brings up this salient point. As another reader succintly noted:
Good Grief! Philips is at it again.
As for a literary critique there was the statement:
I’m still reeling over the Philips article. It’s so transparent to professional writers or anyone who knows the real story but to the Average Joe it may be oblique.
And then there was the philosophical commentary:
This will all sort itself out.
Nuff said for sure and by many others, especially Nikki Finke in her terse review with special attention to our favorite incarcerated private dick wanting out of the slammer to chase Osama for good old George W. .
Anthony Pellicano indicated that the feds should stop investigating him and go after Al Queda. “Chasing terrorists is what the FBI is supposed to be doing. I’ve got to tell you, if instead of keeping me behind bars here, they gave me the job of finding Osama bin Laden, I guarantee you I would find him.”
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06.10.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, los angeles times, crimes at 2:47 am by Administrator
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Damn, wish I’d written that. But Justice Louis Brandeis was the orator of that brilliant gem and not I. And look how true it is in the Anthony Pellicano/Tinseltown scandal. I say, keep the story on the front page no matter how tedious it appears to be getting. I don’t ever want Tony spreading his bile in secret again in this town. I want it out in the open where we can all get a good look. This kook did us all a favor with having too many cajones to count. Not because he showed us what he thinks about in private — who really cares what he thinks about? No, he showed us what the Hollywood power elite who paid through the nose for his “proprietary” services think about in the seclusion of their Bel Air estates and Malibu enclaves. He gave us the barest glimpse into the dark, damp room where persons like himself sit and dream up new ways to hurt people to remain at the top of their heap.
Bravo. I mean it. That kind of acidic waste should be seen and heard apart from poorly written made-for-television movies.
This is a real story ripped from the headlines about one pasty-faced, delusional, middle-aged private dick and the avaricious wealthy nerds in Tinseltown who employed him. Tony never would have been able to have all those Los Angeles policemen on his payroll if there weren’t an eager line of high rolling takers for his very exclusive information. It wasn’t just juicy tidbits that he’d sell either, he could also make irritating situations go away by hook or by crook for upwards of $100,000. Was there a business dispute? Drug overdose? Murder? Rumor of gay sex? Nagging ex-lover? Divorcing spouse? Rape victim? Child molestation? No problem! Presto-chango and it vanished along with some of your cash. Simple, clean and good fun.
And we were and remain collectively in denial and minimizing the extent of things. Ahh, the power of the sun — shines a light and brings the heat.
Honorarium: I would like to thank both the Los Angeles Times and Variety for the inspiration that they have provided me with in writing this post through their continued lack of coverage of the Anthony Pellicano debacle.
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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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05.20.06
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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05.08.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, los angeles times, crimes, mass media at 7:41 pm by Administrator
Here in Tinseltown, there are a lot of folks having problems understanding that the crimes which went down in this city during Anthony Pellicano’s mob-style reign were very real and not just some laughable escapade of a balding middle aged Italian man trying to regain his inner Tony Soprano. These are the very same people who produce the scripts that become our media driven concepts of reality. They must have gotten too used to just red lining any distasteful dialogue as they churned out their own press releases. This Hollywood Boys’ Club appears to still be attempting to do some aggressive positive re-branding of the Anthony Pellicano image despite an abundance of forever burgeoning evidence to the contrary.
Of course many involved in the media cover-up in Los Angeles are just looking out for their own guilty butts due to the collusive relationship that they once had with the ‘Pelican’. Then there is that element who truly believe that if it’s not sex, drugs and rock and roll, or at least larger-than-life, it won’t sell. Most, though, simply have genuine difficulty recognizing where fantasy play ends and reality begins. I’d like to remind these guys that the Pellicano saga was a bit more like a modern graphic novel than a D.C. comic book per say, except all the blood had this sickening human stench to it and didn’t really glow fluorescent yellow.
Pellicano was not only a bit off-balance, he was physically violent, a bully and a coward. Prototypically, men like that either go pretty far in society or wind up in prison. Well, Pellicano has managed to do both within one brief lifetime. That man always did say he was the “best”.
The other notion that these frustrated silver screen writers of reality seem to be unable to give up is that truly bad things don’t ever happen to nice people, though they privately revel in watching the rich and powerful tumble from grace. Repeatedly lately, the Los Angeles Times has been profiling select Pellicano victims in such a way that their despicable plights could easily arouse contempt. The LAT’s eulogies for Pellicano’s collaborators, the latest and greatest being to Bert Fields on Sunday, read like Greek tragedies as we watch heroes fall when their mortal weaknesses are revealed. Well, this is all just pure unadulterated garbage and there’s no reason to politely mince words about it.
Unless you’re secretly a pimply adolescent whose been trapped for years in his mother’s basement on the Internet only to emerge a forty something studio executive, you realize that bad things do happen to nice people all the time. A person absolutely didn’t have to deserve it to have their life destroyed by Pellicano. Most of the victims that I’ve met were only guilty of knowing or doing something that inconvenienced Pellicano and one of his clients. As for Pellicano’s A-list cohorts being simply poor, misguided, grateful recipients of his illegal spoils….yeah….right. Let’s try coming up with some better fiction please or at least a more plausible treatment. Ummmn-kay boys?
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