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.

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.

“douse ‘them’ with gasoline and set them on fire and after they were burning, he would pour more gasoline on them.”

Although I’ve had experience working as a shrink in prisons I’m never quite certain if I have the right notion about the emotional stuff that really goes down when men are locked behind bars. I’ve always had the key to get out at night and I am female, that does change one’s perspective a tad, so I sought out the opinion of a few guys who had spent time in the “Big House” and a police officer famous for the arrest of a big Mafioso who wound up committing suicide when faced with an indeterminable federal sentence.

What these men, from very disparate backgrounds, all agreed unanimously about was truly fascinating. Everyone corroborated each other’s assessment that Pellicano was really going nuts at this point in prison, though the probable reasons for the mental deterioration varied from the lack of a sufficient audience for Tony’s infinite grandiosity or whatever, to having to be someone else’s er…bitch too much of the time. However, the fact that Tony could really not be in our commonly accepted reality anymore didn’t make his violent mouthing any less important in these experienced men’s eyes, in fact it actually made Tony more lethal and his threats more to be feared.

When the guys tried to explain this concept to me I finally had to throw away several academic studies which I tenaciously had clung to, that professed the mentally ill are actually less likely to commit violence than normal individuals, and let myself just listen to the much more pragmatic street wisdom that was being offered up gratis.

The distillation of what these gentlemen said was that Pellicano, right now, is far more dangerous than a poor dog with rabies. His actions are totally unpredictable because he’s beginning to feel that he has no avenue of escape and therefore nothing to loose…so what the hell, take everyone down with him and go out in grand style. If you’re having problems grasping this very wise assessment, please try considering that Pellicano has the mentality of a suicide bomber after being so long in prison with no hope of release anytime soon. Suicide bombers are known to do really horrific things. They don’t just idly threaten now, do they?