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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06.11.06
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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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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05.31.06
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