06.11.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, crimes, mass media at 12:11 am by Administrator
Hollywood has become the City of Slander and Character Assassination, and it’ll stay that way until someone has the courage to place integrity and decency before self-interest. Anthony Pellicano, the Man in Question, has not only revealed his true nature, he’s shown the true face of the entire movie industry. Why wouldn’t we use this as a teaching moment?
Why? Because Our Favorite Private Dick in the Slammer isn’t an exception - he’s the norm. There are dozens of movie industry producers, directors, actors and lawyers who are every bit as hateful and as vile as Mr. Pellicano. Dirty if not disgusting “tricks” has become the industry’s norm, and it’s time to put it to a stop.
Media scribes may be getting frustrated that they’re not yet selling so many books because of the scandal, but I can live with that. The people who’ll eventually buy those books will never be Pellicano’s victims, anyway. There’ll assuredly be some rich and famous Tinseltown celebs and their attorneys though lining up to buy the books first to see if they have to file hasty lawsuits to get the shelves filled back up with the usual trash. And I have no problem seeing these great men of Los Angeles fork over their spare pocket change in this case. They’re performing a great public service and helping to employ Americans locally where otherwise their industry is outsourcing projects to Eastern Europe and Canada with only one or two American actors at the helm.
And mind you, this piece isn’t about our hometown mass media as truth seekers. It’s about the startling relevance of the social hypocrisy in this city of ubiqitous pseudo-liberalism. The diameter of said pseudo-liberals’ joie de vivre is, needless to say, less than the diameter of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.”
Of course, our glitzy intelligensia will be kissing Tony and holding his hand all along during his trial. Bert Fields may even come to the show and administer a warm spongedown - without a sponge - to keep Tony from opening his mouth (which could endanger the wallets of our movie industry tycoons — Oh the horror!). Wouldn’t this be a good time to remind the world about that, too? Ummn, perhaps make a movie or simply issue some press releases about how the evil federal prosecutor on the case, Daniel Saunders, initially came here to be an actor but failed.
And I think the worm is turning for these vile creatures. At least, I believe it could, if us normal people in Tinseltown (and yes there are normal people in this City of Broken Dreams but we do tend to keep in at night and blog on the Internet) stay on the case. But don’t worry, Brad, Ron, Bert, Marty, Jerry, et al.. Let the all mighty dollar have the last word - because as long as a producer somewhere can still make box office gold, there’s somebody somewhere who’ll tidy up your little indiscretions and indecencies. I promise. Now would I lie to you?…
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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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05.12.06
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 Meyers] gave him 18 brand new prints of Disney cartoons and [Goebbels/Meyers] reported that [Hitler/Pellicano] said it was the best birthday present he ever had…
[Maria Von Trapp/Kat Pellicano] tells an anecdote about [Hitler/Pellicano] laughing hysterically, gasping for breath for laughing, at a [gross joke/once-weekly-rub-down]…
[Hitler/Pellicano] had no sexual attraction for men but he loved male companionship, particularly with the guys who were the early [fighters/celebrity lawyers/producers] who were with him in [Munich/Hollywood] in the [twenties/eighties/nineties] and were responsible for [the revolution/his making hundreds of thousands of dollars]…
[Hitler/Pellicano] had affairs but he was not promiscuous. There were lots of women, particularly older women, who were madly in love with [Hitler/Pellicano] and wanted to take care of him. He cultivated that and got a lot of money from them…
The real question is, ‘Were people who did not resist [Hitler/Pellicano] collaborators with the [regime/wiretapping/crimes]?’ It’s a difficult question, predicated as always on a sense of moral superiority. It’s easy to look back [sixty/twenty] years and appoint moral standing or deny it to someone else.”
**Goodwin: (verb) Internet slang for being the first one to usurp an online discussion by raising the spectre of Hitler.
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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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05.05.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, los angeles times, crimes, mass media at 3:50 am by Administrator
An uneventful news day on the Anthony Pellicano debacle let’s me highlight an email I was sent recently:
There was an article in the Los Angeles Times yesterday about some rich bitch who was “wronged” by “3 inch Tony,” Boy what a slam. It pissed me off so I am writing the Times about getting real with their collective reporting, and report on regular people who were screwed by “Big Boy.” I am referring to you by initials only, but they will know. Hope it is OK. I just want to raise a few eyebrows down at the Times.
Then this very same person sent the following letter to the Los Angeles Times today:
To: letters@latimes.com
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 11:10 AM
Subject: Jude Green, Divorce Pellicano Style 5-3-06
Dear Editor,
It is articles like this that make me wonder why I still subscribe to your paper. Why not have impotent reporters like Chuck Phillips do some introspection and repent their collective sins of the past with Anthony Pellicano? Why doesn’t your paper write about real people who were ruined, I mean really ruined by Pellicano. This would be some real reporting, who knows Phillips could actual earn an award for investigative reporting, seeing as the last one was for unofficially acting as a press information officer for both Pellicano and the California Medical Board. Yes, that is correct. In the matter of NJF, M.D. Phillips wrote a series of articles which contained privileged and confidential information regarding her case before the Medical Board. It seems that at the most inopportune times articles by Phillips would appear hashed and rehashed, saying the same not factual drivel. All of this seemed to coincide with hearings, or after hearings before the Medical Board.
Believe it or not, Anthony Pellicano, had a major hand in this charade. You see Pellicano worked for Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, at different times, and god knows what his role was but the fact is one of his geek workers, with the initials of T.M. found the bodies of Steve Ammerman, M.D., and approximately six months later found the body of Don Simpson. Both deaths as you know occurred at Simpson’s Bel Air estate. What are the statistical odds of this fact? During her short professional relationship with Don Simpson, NJF, M.D. saw some things she was not supposed to see. This caused some big people, including Pellicano some real ethical, and possibly criminal exposure. So what happened next is a chapter out of Pellicano’s book of dirty tricks. NJF, M.D. was the recipient of your papers one sided wrath. The relationship between Chuck Phillips and others within the Times, and Pellicano cannot be ignored. Thanks to the Times reporting, and an unethical one-sided administrative hearing, NJF,M.D. lost her license. It took several years for this phony kangaroo court decision to be corrected by an appeals court, and her license has been restored.
Time has funny way of correcting sins of the past. If you live long enough, you will see justice done. Today NJF, M.D. is putting her professional life back together after having it ripped apart by Pellicano, Chuck Phillips, and the Medical Board. Pellicano is in jail, where he belongs. And a few dirty cops will be hitting the slam with him. However, I do not think the feds have found them all. I worked for NJF, M.D. as an investigator, and it has always been my contention that there were, and are more dirty cops to be found from her case who were connected to Pellicano. Maybe the feds should be talking to Chuck Phillips and your legal department. I think they should. It would make a real good story. I think it is time for the Times and Chuck Phillips to come clean, before you read about it in the New York Times, or Vanity Fair.
Regards,
James Ellis, LAPD retired
Orange County, California
I did commisurate with Jim (who requested his real name be used for this post) that I doubted the LA Times would even answer or ever publish his very excellent letter to their editor because life is just the way it is sometimes.
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05.04.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, los angeles times, mass media at 12:46 am by Administrator
This week’s award in the Anthony Pellicano fest goes to Page Six of the New York Post so far. Page Six reporters slammed the Los Angeles Times for their feeble coverage of the Pellicano investigation as only Page Six can.
THE Los Angeles Times has never been known for aggressive coverage of Hollywood’s dirty laundry, but its out-to-lunch performance in the Anthony Pellicano case has Tinseltown folks scratching their heads. The paper has been scooped regularly in its own back yard by the New York Times. “This is the biggest scandal in the history of the entertainment business, and the L.A. Times has completely dropped the ball,” said an insider. “Is it just that they are lame, or have important people leaned on them to lay off?” Private eye Pellicano was arrested in 2002 after FBI agents raided his office and found explosives in his safe. The feds also confiscated a huge cache of illegal wiretaps, which has led to the indictment of 14 others. Some of the biggest names in Hollywood have been questioned and may face charges. The N.Y. Times, which has been leaked transcripts of FBI interviews, has detailed Pellicano’s relationships with CAA founder Michael Ovitz, lawyers Bert Fields and Dennis Wasser, Paramount boss Brad Grey and Universal chief Ron Meyer. The L.A. Times hasn’t broken any stories. There was a rumor the paper was hamstrung because it had a relationship with Pellicano, but a spokesman told us, “The Los Angeles Times has never hired Anthony Pellicano.”
The LAT had previously denied hiring Pellicano to Nikki Finke. Actually that only partially answers one of the many questions about the relationship the newspaper and their reporters had over the years with Pellicano. It is true that nearly everyone here in Tinseltown now is denying they were EVER anything but poor victims of the gumshoe, and of course we believe all of them. Credit must be given to supermarket billionaire Ronald W. Burkle’s legal team for being the first to come up with the victim shtick and the beautifully Christian variation on the forgiveness theme that Burkle demonstrated by showering gifts and special favors on Pellicano after Pellicano had threatened to investigate him for his rival in crime, Michael Ovitz.
Did the LAT perhaps have one of those mutually beneficial deals with the incarcerated P.I. in the vein of Burkle? Were gifts and favors exchanged between the LAT and Pellicano in exchange for certain services? Did Pellicano have a strong presence in decision making about what stories the newspaper would ultimately give coverage? In exchange, had Pellicano provided certain scoops on other juicy items and a special venue with some very important people in the biz who controlled the LAT’s prized advertisers?
Perhaps the newspaper’s final exculpatory statement will be more along the thinking of Cigarette Man from the X-Files, “We never, ever hired Anthony Pellicano, we only kept our friends close, and our enemies closer.” Nope, for that novel line of defense to work successfully the LAT still would have to acknowledge just how close they had really been with Pellicano in the past, so they’ll most likely go on denying that anything ever happened for the time being. Is all this starting to bring back fond memories of Bill Clinton’s famous discourse about what the ‘meaning of “is” really is’ right about now to anyone else here?
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04.29.06
Posted in anthony pellicano, pellicano, los angeles times, crimes, mass media at 9:32 pm by Administrator
Seems like Chuck Philips, Anthony Pellicano’s old beat reporting friend at the Los Angeles Times, is working on a special piece about the incarcerated P.I. Consistent with Philips’ cozy relationship with Tony, he wants to do more of an up close and personal profile to really show the true man. Philips must also be getting a little desperate lately for something to write about. He hasn’t gotten any real scoops since 2002, when his favorite anonymous source was sent off to prison. Philips and the LAT feel that the rest of the media has just been too hard on poor old Tony as they try to help recreate the gumshoe’s halcyon glories.
Philips is busy contacting many of Pellicano’s former co-workers and clients to obtain some warm and fuzzy anecdotage about the gumshoe’s quirky traits. In one of these conversations, Philips derided that recent threat Pellicano had made against journalist John Connolly’s safety when the explosive Vanity Fair article premiered.
According to Philips, both he and his newspaper don’t believe that Pellicano would physically threaten journalists as had occurred with John Connolly, Anita Busch and Ned Zelman. In fact, he added, at the LAT they never believed “any of it” and that’s why they haven’t given “anything like that” real coverage. Philips wouldn’t leave well enough alone in singing Tony’s praises (which really isn’t the wisest thing to do, Chuck old boy, when trying to get information out of sources who might disagree with you right now). Philips opined that Tony could never/would never do such terrible things to people. Philips and the LAT had worked with Tony for years and they both respected and admired the man and his work.
Well, duh, so there’s the explanation for the LAT’s peculiarly positive bias and soft coverage of the Pellicano case in a nutshell. Does anyone else wonder if some of that newspaper’s staff has been called yet to testify before the Grand Jury? Let’s all be patient and the New York Times will tell us.
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04.28.06