Updated  June 30, 2006

June 30, 2006: Retired LAPD detective Mark Arneson's career ended with the Anthony Pellicano indictment. Arneson allegedly took bribes from Pellicano to tap into confidential police data-bases. For nearly 20 years he served in the Vice and Homicide Squads. And it's the prospect of broader wrongdoing on his part -- spanning other cases -- that sources say has the LAPD worried. There is currently a civil lawsuit against Arneson for allegedly sending and innocent man, Harold Hall, to jail for 19 years. LAPD Internal Affairs has investigated Arneson's conduct several times and in 1993 a judgement was won against him for an unlawful search. It appears that the LAPD is actively investigating Arneson and those he was involved with now.

June 28, 2006: U.S. District Court Judge Dale Fischer in Los Angeles unsealed three search warrants that investigators used to raid Anthony Pellicano's detective agency and seize evidence over four years ago. The first warrant, on Nov. 19, 2002, covered records that could illuminate Mr. Pellicano's involvement in threats that summer against Anita Busch, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, and Ned Zeman, a writer for Vanity Fair; both were working on articles about the actor Steven Seagal's possible ties to organized-crime figures. When investigators found explosives and firearms in a safe in Mr. Pellicano's office, they went back two days later with a warrant for more evidence of violations of explosives laws. A few days later, the warrants show, Ms. Busch told the F.B.I. that she had discovered, in repeated calls to the phone company about trouble on her lines, that her phones had been tapped for months, and that the phone company could not explain the taps. On Jan. 14, 2003, the F.B.I. returned to Mr. Pellicano's offices specifically combing through his files, computers and other equipment for all wiretapping evidence. In a January 2003 affidavit, Ornellas said he had spoken to an agent who had participated in the earlier search and was told that nothing was taken from the audio lab at Pellicano's offices. "Moreover," Ornellas wrote, "a number of computers located within the audio lab were not searched or seized, as the searching agents in their discretion determined that the items to be seized pursuant to the initial warrant … were unlikely to be found in that portion of the premises."

June 27, 2006: The Los Angeles entertainment legal community has gotten a wake up call from the Anthony Pellicano investigation. Though many attorneys say that the national spotlight on the lawyer-investigator working relationship has done little to change how the entertainment industry uses P.I.s, others think that lawyers will now have increased supervision of their investigators activities. Attorney Larry Feldman says "The lesson of Pellicano is that lawyers have to control the investigators they hire. You can't expect to turn a blind eye and expect to get away with it."

June 26, 2006: Confidential F.B.I. records show that the Anthony Pellicano scandal's tentacles have extended beyond show-business figures to reach people prominent in the rarified worlds of fine art and classical music. Among the government's most important witnesses, the F.B.I. records suggest, are Adam D. Sender, a prominent collector of contemporary art and a wealthy hedge-fund manager, and Jacqueline A. Colburn, an ex-wife of a renowned Los Angeles donor to the performing arts, Richard D. Colburn, who died in 2004. They each listened repeatedly to wiretap recordings according to F.B.I. summaries. With prosecutors still struggling to produce the actual recordings they say Mr. Pellicano made of other people's conversations, witnesses like Mr. Sender and Ms. Colburn who can testify that they listened to such intercepted calls could be crucial to the government's case. Mr. Sender does not directly implicate Bert Fields in any wrongdoing in the F.B.I. summaries, and says he met with Mr. Fields only once, in late March 2001. In that meeting, Mr. Sender said, Mr. Fields urged him to hire a private investigator, and suggested Mr. Pellicano. "According to Fields, Pellicano employed 'unorthodox methods,' " but "got the job done," Mr. Sender told the agents.

June 26, 2006: For all the criticism of the government's case against Anthony Pellicano by defense attorneys, their complaints have not convinced U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer, who has denied several courtroom challenges to the investigation and the evidence it has yielded. Law enforcement sources and others who have glimpsed the government's case contend that authorities have ample proof of wiretapping, witness intimidation and other crimes.

June 26, 2006: Both Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were allegedly blackmailed by the Enquirer, Anthony Pellicano's tabloid of choice, according to his former legman, Paul Baressi.

June 13, 2006: A profile of another well-known Hollywood P.I., John Nazarian. Things have cooled down in Nazarian's line of work since the Pellicano indictment. "I said to the lawyers, all the good wire guys, they've all gone to Chicago for the summer. Anybody who goes out and wiretaps and does bugging now, they've got to be out of their minds." Nazarian said he didn't bug because "I'm too old to go to jail." As a former cop, he insisted he knew how to push the boundaries without going over the line. "Some of the stuff Pellicano did was overboard," Nazarian said. "It was like putting too much garlic in the sauce. He didn't need to do that."

June 13, 2006: One recording the government does have in the Anthony Pellicano invstigation looks like a juicy one. The recording concerns the divorce of Los Angeles private equity billionaire Alec Gores from his wife Lisa in 2001. Gores admitted to hiring Pellicano in 2000 to investigate whether his wife was cheating on him with his younger brother, Tom, another private equity billionaire. Pellicano’s wiretaps — which reportedly recorded a conversation between Lisa and brother Tom just hours after they had met at the Beverly Hills Hotel — apparently confirmed Alec’s suspicions. Prosecutor Saunders alleged the recordings include "at least one" illegally intercepted conversation as well as "hundreds of calls" in which Pellicano allegedly spoke to clients about wiretaps. Saunders also said there was evidence from dozens of witnesses alleging that Pellicano had engaged in wiretapping. Saunders did not provide details on the techniques used by the FBI to decode the encrypted recordings but acknowledged that the methods were not ones that the government would want to share in open court.

June 12, 2006: Defense attorneys in a Anthony Pellicano wiretapping case scolded federal prosecutors on Monday for not turning over evidence. Part of the delay has come from difficulty decrypting audio files made by Pellicano of his telephone conversations with clients and others, prosecutors said. If defense attorneys "are so eager to get the tapes decrypted, the one man who has the password is sitting right over there," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders, referring to Pellicano.

June 11, 2006: In an unmonitored jailhouse phone interview with the Los Angeles Times despite his no-bail status, 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." Pellicano also insisted that he'd never rat out anyone and that of course he was innocent.

June 11, 2006: Pellicano is the kind of private eye Hollywood invented. "He's like a character, very minor character in 'The Sopranos.' He's a pain in the ass," says Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart. Anthony Pellicano first made his name in Los Angeles helping make drug charges against automaker John DeLorean disappear even when the feds had DeLorean on tape with cocaine.  Then, after the overdose death of comedian John Belushi, Pellicano helped lawyers get reduced charges and prison time for the woman who admitted giving the fatal injection. "He is a B movie," Bart adds. "He's sort of a jerk, really." Bart explains that people hire Pellicano for the purpose of intimidation. "He became a scary figure," Bart says.

June 7, 2006: Anthony Pellicano had the checks run on George Mueller, an investigator with the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, and five others connected to the probe of a Frenchman named Christopher Rocancourt, prosecutors said in court papers. While investigating Rocancourt in the mid-1990s, Mueller said, Rocancourt called him to boast of a contact with access to confidential law-enforcement information. "Knowing that a suspect in a case that I'm tracking has my personal information is pretty alarming," Mueller said. Authorities in Los Angeles were investigating Rocancourt in connection with several alleged crimes, including bribing federal workers to provide him with a phony U.S. passport. Rocancourt pleaded guilty in March 2004 to passport fraud conspiracy in Los Angeles County Superior Court and was sentenced to five years in prison.

June 5, 2006: John McTiernan is set to helm the new action film, Deadly Exchange, the first directing deal he's signed since pleading guilty and agreeeing to a plea bargain in the Anthony Pellicano scandal. McTiernan is preparing the film for a scheduled start later this summer in Shreveport, Louisiana.

June 2, 2006: Pellicano claimed the government used Sandra Carradine, former wife of actor Keith Carradine, to gather a "fountain of information" about his legal strategy during jail visits last year. Federal Judge Dale Fischer found no grounds to support Gruel's assertion that agents had violated Pellicano's attorney-client privilege by enlisting his ex-girlfriend to extract information. She also said that prosecutors can use all the evidence gathered in a search of Pellicano's offices and that the officers never needed to describe all the crimes that that believed Pellicano may have committed or all of the things that they hoped to find.

May 31, 2006: Two Los Angeles law firms recently raised their first-year associate salaries while facing key partner departures and a federal criminal probe into whether lawyers engaged in illegal wiretapping with Anthony Pellicano. Both Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger, whose top rainmaker, Bertram Fields, has said he is a subject of the criminal investigation and Christensen, Glaser, Fink, Jacobs, Weil & Shapiro, whoxe managing partner, Terry Christensen, is the only lawyer to be indicted in the wiretapping probe, have decifed to raise associates pay suddenly. But the managing partners of both firms said their decisions had nothing to do with either the investigation or their recent departures.

May 30, 2006: Aging seductress, Linda Fiorentino, has gotten herself involved in the seedy world of Anthony Pellicano. Shady "pit bull" attorney, Marty Singer, reportedly double crossed her when she hired him to sue former porn director, Sidney Kiwitt, for a deal that went south. Singer also allegedly represented the director of the failed film project and – while managing to get him a compensatory award – reportedly left the Fiorentino high and dry without remuneration. Fiorentino became obsessed with the idea that Singer might get indicted in the Pellicano scandal. In her effort to dig up dirt on Singer, Fiorentino reportedly befriended the Pelican’s ex-wife, Kat Pellicano. Kat claimed that Fiorentino and she fell out when the actress showed up at her home with a video camera and began suspiciously taping her children and then attempted to hack into their personal computer in an effort to find damning info on Singer. Kat and Fiorentino only reunited a few months ago in a deal around Kat's new tell-all memoir "Listening In." Fiorentino has unofficially attached herself to play Kat in a potential movie to be based on the same project. Source reports that Kat Pellicano now has reservations about the idea of Fiorentino depicting her in a movie because she reportedly exclaimed, “Her [Fiorentino’s] ass got f---ing fat!”

May 26, 2006: Convicted fraudster Daniel Nicherie who was charged with hiring Pellicano to wiretap Israeli businessman Ami Shafrir believes he, too, may have been a victim of Pellicano. According to Jan Tucker, a private investigator working for Nicherie's legal team, Nicherie and his family received death threats in 2000. Among them, says Tucker, was a hand grenade found under the hood of a car belonging to Nicherie's mother. Pellicano offered to negotiate with the threat-makers. Pellicano said they would leave Nicherie alone for $200,000, according to Tucker, who suggests Pellicano led Nicherie to believe an Israeli crime syndicate was behind the shakedown. Tucker now believes that Pellicano was part of the whole plan to extort $200,000 from his client.

May 26, 2006: The Pellicano saga as detailed by a British newspaper.

May 24, 2006: Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles conducting a wide-sweeping investigation of illegal wiretapping have asserted conflict of interest issues involving Terry Christensen, the only lawyer indicted as part of the probe. There's a potential conflict between Robert Shapiro representing a named partner at a firm, Terry Christensen, while at the same time being a partner at the firm because the two interests theoretically could diverge. Another partner, Louis "Skip" Miller (who announced earlier this month that he would be leaving the firm), is representing a potential witness in the wiretapping case, Alec Gores. Christensen denied the conflict issue played a role in Miller's decision to leave the firm.

May 24, 2006: Alexander Proctor's attorney, William S. Pitman, wants everybody to know—especially Proctor's fellow inmates who might be looking for a contract from Anthony Pellicano and friends—that his client hasn't cooperated with the feds: "Alex is the most resolute nonsnitch I've ever met. It's a matter of pride with him. Snitching is against his code of ethics." Pittman states that Proctor dismisses that Pellicano ever ordered a hit on him but he also says that Proctor claims to be innocent of mutltiple drug charges that he had subsequently plead guilty to.

May 23, 2006: The Los Angeles Police Department may soon ban officers from moonlighting as private investigators or having a financial stake in detective agencies. A review of state records by the Los Angeles Times last month found dozens of licensees on the LAPD payroll, probably more than 100, but Cmdr. Kenneth Garner, head of the personnel group, said only 16 officers and one civilian employee were licensed as private investigators. This ban is the result of the indictment of former LAPD Detective Mark Arneson on charges of illegally using law enforcement databases to dig up dirt on people for former celebrity private eye Anthony Pellicano. Arneson was paid at least $189,000 from his work for Pellicano.

May 23, 2006: Federal prosecutors in the Anthony Pellicano investigation said articles citing FBI interviews with Hollywood power brokers didn't start showing up in the New York Times until after information had been turned over to defense attorneys as part of the pretrial discovery process. Because a protective order may have been violated, the U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation to determine who leaked the details. "The protective order was materially breached when at least one of the members of the defense team provided material produced by the government to the New York Times," prosecutors said in court documents filed late Monday.

May 23, 2006: The real targets in the Anthony Pellicano investigation for federal prosecutors are the fraternity of high-priced lawyers who do Hollywood's business from glass towers in Century City. The powerful businesspeople and stars are just collateral damage in a hunt for the real target: what government lawyers see as corruption in a legal system that is suddenly being policed after decades of neglect. They're following one thread — Pellicano — and it turns out that thread is wound deeply and deeply, through and around this entertainment law community. "To the extent that people in various positions have felt that they were immune from prosecution," said George S. Cardona, the acting United States attorney for the Pellicano case, "hopefully, the case will send to those people the message that they're not immune, and if their conduct is uncovered, they will be prosecuted just like anybody else."

May 22, 2006: Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders said in court on Monday that more charges would be filed in the Anthony Pellicano case, but couldn't give a firm date because of ongoing discussions with the parties involved.

May 20, 2006: In their endless push for fame and fortune, some Hollywood power brokers bought into the character and found a real-life private eye with a dubious reputation. Federal prosecutors now say Anthony Pellicano used wiretaps, threats and blackmail to help lawyers and their clients win high-stakes legal disputes. Other private eyes complain the case has confused fact and fiction about their work while showing how far people in Hollywood expect them to go. ''This has perpetuated the myth that investigators can and will do anything'' if they're paid enough money, said Scott Ross, a private investigator who has worked for legal teams defending Michael Jackson and Robert Blake, among others.

May 19, 2006: If Brad Grey looses his current legal motion seeking to quash his testimony in a lawsuit by Scary Movie director, Bo Zenga against LAPD, Pellicano and Detective Mark Arneson, he could wind up testifying in depositions about his involvement in Pellicano’s wiretapping — and invoking his Fifth Amendment privileges.

May 16, 2006: Crime-show czar Dick Wolf is eyeing the exploits of slimy investigator-to-the-stars Anthony Pellicano as an inspiration for "Power," the new TV series he's developing about young hotshot prosecutors going after corrupt Hollywood honchos.  The "Law & Order" creator has brought on board two consultants guaranteed to make sure Pellicano's dirty tricks are portrayed with dead-on accuracy - namely, reporters Anita Busch and John Connolly, both hapless victims of The Pelican's heavy-handed tactics.

May 15, 2006: Pellicano became so wrapped up in the movies that he lost it at the movies. Even with all his delusions of cine-grandeur, he wasn't locked up, or consigned to some park bench. No, he was the go-to guy in Hollywood, the man who made problems go away -- the "sin eater," as his many grateful employers dubbed him.

May 11, 2006: Bert Fields close friend, Susan Estrich, slams the Los Angeles Times for their complete lack of evidence in stories that they've run connected to Fields and the Anthony Pellicano investigation. She does not consider the Los Angeles Times to be either bright or ethical in the journalism that it has been praticing. She accuses the newspaper  of actual malice in trying to destroy people's reputations.

May 11, 2006: Comedian Mike Myers had hired Anthony Pellicano in 2000 to dig up dirt on film director Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer in a nasty legal battle with Universal Studios. Myers and his attorney at the time, Marty Singer, declined to confirm or deny their hiring of Pellicano.

May 10, 2006: Summaries written by F.B.I. agents of their interviews with Sandra Carradine, Anthony Pellicano's old girlfriend turned government witness, describe her accounts of Pellicano not only ordering a mob hit on Alexander Proctor but a series of threats against government investigators and others. According to those summaries, Ms. Carradine heard Mr. Pellicano speak of his ties to organized-crime figures in Chicago. They also say she heard him claim to have murdered people in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles, and make threatening statements about the law-enforcement officials pursuing him.  In May 2005, Mr. Pellicano railed against the F.B.I. agents who were searching a storage unit in which he had locked away a computer and a cache of disks, Ms. Carradine told Special Agent Stanley E. Ornellas. Mr. Ornellas wrote: "Pellicano said if he could, he would douse 'them' with gasoline and set them on fire and after they were burning, he would pour more gasoline on them." Mr. Pellicano also threatened Daniel A. Saunders, the assistant United States attorney in charge of the case, during at least two of Ms. Carradine's jailhouse visits. She said that on Oct. 3 Mr. Pellicano had described seeing "images of being in a courtroom and lunging across a table towards Saunders." And Ms. Carradine added that on Oct. 6 Mr. Pellicano had vowed one day to "take Saunders's life like he took mine," according to Mr. Ornellas's notes. In the same F.B.I. interview, Ms. Carradine expressed concern for her safety once Mr. Pellicano learned of her cooperation, according to the summary.

May 10, 2006: Ross Johnson wonders 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.'"

May 10, 2006: Nikki Finke demonstrates that the Los Angeles Times knowingly did not reveal key facts as they cherry picked the truth in their recent story about Cindy Garvey's claim against studio chief Ron Meyer, who allegedly hired Anthony Pellicano  in 1988 to intimidate her into withdrawing claims of spousal abuse.

May 10, 2006: Pellicano was aware that all his mail was intercepted and read by the Bureau of Prisons personel and he warned people that he corresponded with from prison. He was quite selective in what he wrote to another P.I. in some letters that his one time legman, Paul Baressi, has obtained and distributed to the press.

May 10, 2006: Bert Fields' criminal defense attorney, George Keker, railed against Vanity Fair's portrayal of his client but doesn't have anything bad to say about the recent LA Times piece about the "rise and fall" of Field's legal career. The Vanity Fair article detailed Field's long-term, close and mutually beneficial relationship with Anthony Pellicano. Fields as a frequent client of Pellicano, knew not to make the mistake of talking with the P.I. on the phone since the detective's propensity to tape conversations was widely known. As a result, prosecutors have not been able to indict Fields as easily as they did with celebrity attorney Terry Christensen earlier this year.

May 9, 2006: Federal prosecutors said that Anthony Pellicano recently conspired with known mobsters in Chicago to put a prison "hit" out on Alexander Proctor, the man he hired to threaten reporter anita Busch. " 'If something happens to Proctor, he couldn't testify against me,' " U.S Attorney Saunders quoted Pellicano as saying to his ex-girlfriend Sandra Carradine, who had become a co-operating government witness unbeknownst to Pellicano at the time he had told her the information.

May 9, 2006: The FBI is currently analyzing audio tapes made by tabloid reporter Jim Mitteager of Anthony Pellicano in January 1994. According to the tapes he seems to have singled out certain celebs, like Oprah Winfrey, for special scrutiny. Pellicano was apparently seeking personal contact information on celebs and supermarket-publication types from Mitteager and was willing to pay $1,000 for the information. Pellicano's targeted celebrities names — along with those of intimates who allegedly dished on them — show up on the tapes. Alleged tabloid sources, included Winfrey's niece Alisha; Paula Abdul's unnamed massage therapist; Cher's daughter, Chastity Bono; Al Pacino's father, Sal; Sylvester Stallone's mother, Jackie; an unnamed assistant of Kirk Douglas; an unnamed girlfriend of Magic Johnson, and "insider" informants on Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg.

May 7, 2006: The toppling of Bert Field's legal empire began in November 2003, Fields broke the news to his collegues that he had been questioned by federal investigators about his use of Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano in his legal practice. Fields also told them that he was the subject of a wiretap investigation, that he could be charged in Pellicano's alleged illicit wiretapping and spying. Since that time his once legendary firm has started to fall part with named partners leaving and the remaining attorneys hiring full time counsel just to defend them against the onslaught of new accusations.

May 5-6, 2006: Private investigator Anthony Pellicano likely knows things about Universal Pictures president Ron Meyer that could embarrass the studio chief if they were to come out. Pellicano may have also used his strong arm tactics to assist Meyers in the past. When an ex-girlfriend of Meyer accused him of spousal assault in 1988, she received a threatening phone call from a man telling her not to pursue charges. When a former neighbor of Meyer had not repaid a $300,000 loan to Meyer, that man was threatened through his attorney by Pellicano in a phone conversation that the FBI now has that was recorded. Howard Weitzman, who frequently employed Pellicano and was Meyer's attorney at the time, says that Pellicano was probably hired at the time to help do things like "interview witnesses."

May 4, 2006: Private eye Anthony Pellicano's former wife of 20 years is shopping a book. Kat Pellicano, who has testified before a grand jury in her ex's wiretapping case, promises she'll talk about his famous clients in her memoir, "Listening In." Vanity Fair writer John Connolly, who has recently clashed with Kat, says: "I would suggest that whoever publishes her book do some serious vetting."

May 3, 2006: 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?" 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. The paper informally has denied hiring Pellicano.

May 3, 2006: Pellicano has lost about 30 pounds since he's been jailed on February 6, 2006 on a no-bail hold in the Metropolitan Detention Center, and looks like he could croak at any minute. His mail and phone calls are heavily monitored yet federal prosecutors have relayed a whole slew of alleged jailhouse threats from Pellicano since he was arrested on possession of illegal explosives in November 2002 including against Vanity Fair editor John Connolly.

May 3, 2006: In the acrimonious divorce five years ago of Jude Greene from now dead multimillionaire financier Leonard Green, Jude remembers, "One of the first attorneys I hired came right out and said, 'Dennis Wasser just told me down at the courthouse that Pellicano's on your case,' " Green said, recalling the lawyer's cautionary advice: "You need to get a cross-cut shredder because he's going to be going through your garbage and he's going to be checking your background. And you'd better get your house swept because your phones are probably tapped as well." Jude's ex-husband had also hired Pellicano himself earlier in the couple's seperation. She was physically threatened at that time by man that she now believes to be Pellicano. Jude had even received a telephone call that she took as a death threat. "Keep your mouth shut, for your sake and for your family's sake — or else," the caller said and then hung up, according to police and court records. At one point her attorneys were told that they could pursue settlement with either the law firm of Jaffe and Clemens or Pellicano. Jude Green had testified before the federal grand jury in 2003 and her tires were slashed two days later. She says of her run ins with Pellicano, "I'm not afraid of him, and I'm not afraid of the bully lawyers and the judges…. And I'm going to go to my grave knowing I told the truth."

May 2, 2006: Kat Pellicano, one of Anthony Pellicano's ex-wives claims that she ran his shady business and sat in on meetings with celebrities including Michael Jackson and others during their twenty year marriage.

May 2, 2006: Attorney Louis "Skip" Miller is leaving Christensen, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Glaser, Weil & Shapiro. He helped start the prominent Century City law firm in 1988 with Terry Christensen. Miller's departure is due to the scandal surrounding the indictment of longtime partner Terry N. Christensen in the Anthony Pellicano wiretap scandal.

May 2, 2006: Troubled by leaks to the media, a federal prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders, said that he would delay filing grand jury transcripts and other crucial documents with the defense in the case of the indicted Hollywood private eye, Anthony Pellicano, because he fears the material will ''end up on the front page.'' Although the U.S. Justice Department had launched an investigation to determine who leaked confidential FBI reports from the case to The New York Times,Judge Dale Fischer said she was not convinced there had been a violation of her protective order limiting access to the information to prosecutors, investigators, defense attorneys and their clients. Fischer added however that prosecutors were under no particular timetable for turning over grand jury testimony and other evidence, including prior statements by witnesses. Attorney Carmen Trutanich asked Fischer to keep search warrant affidavits sealed on behalf of her clients, Steven Segal and John Rottger. Federal authorities, delayed plans to unseal three of six searches conducted by FBI agents at Pellicano's Sunset Boulevard offices and one of the private investigator's storage lockers.

May 2, 2006: A good brief profile of Anthony Pellicano's career appearing in his hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune.

May 1, 2006: Ron Meyers, the president of Universal likes to visit Anthony Pellicano in prison and makes no apologies. The only heavy hitter known to have visited Mr. Pellicano behind bars was Mr. Meyer. Meyer has been friendly with Pellicano for at tleast fifteem years. Mr. Pellicano often sent cards and gifts to the Meyers. Mr. Meyer acknowledged to the F.B.I. that he had once retained Mr. Pellicano to collect a debt from a neighbor. In 1997, Mr. Meyer lent $300,000 to Bilal Baroody, a businessman with homes in Malibu and Spain. According to the F.B.I., Mr. Meyer later mentioned this to Mr. Pellicano, who offered to collect the debt, saying he had "guys in Spain." Mr. Meyer assumed Mr. Pellicano would find him and "pester" him, but Mr. Pellicano "never discussed the methods he would employ." Mr. Meyer wrote a check for Mr. Pellicano's $25,000 retainer, and also offered to split with him any money collected. On March 15, 1999, prosecutors have charged, Mr. Pellicano had a police source illegally run a criminal background check on Mr. Baroody, who could not be reached for this article. Mr. Meyer told the F.B.I. that he heard nothing more of Mr. Baroody until June 2002, when he received a letter in which his former neighbor promised to repay the debt someday. In early 2003 — after Mr. Pellicano's arrest but before his incarceration — Mr. Meyer told the F.B.I. that he was asked by Bert Fields, a lawyer and a friend, to give money to a trust for Mr. Pellicano's family. Mr. Meyer agreed to help, promising gifts of $20,000 a year for two years. Mr. Meyer urged Mr. Pellicano to "drop a dime" on Mr. Ovitz, according to a person close to the investigation who refused to be identified to avoid angering prosecutors.

May 1, 2006: Steven Seagal and his friend from the Navy Seals, John Rottger both figure prominently in the 11/21/02 search warrant affidavit prepared by FBI Special Agent Stanley Ornellas. Seagal and Rottger were initially major suspects in the threats against journalists Busch and Zeman along with Anthony Pellicano.

May 2006: Los Angeles Magazine named Anthony Pellicano Web Links "Web site of the month" in their May issue. They recommend going to http://sinhablar.com for a crash course on the hot Hollywood topic that is fallen celeb private eye Anthony Pellicano.

April 30, 2006: Brad Grey's name has surfaced in front-page accounts of a federal probe of private eye Anthony Pellicano—the subject of a sweeping federal indictment in February alleging that, among other things, he bugged the Hollywood enemies of Grey and other clients. "We wish it all would just stop," says John Lesher, head of Paramount's specialty film division. True-crime stories likely weren't part of Grey's script for recapturing the glory days of Paramount, Hollywood's oldest studio. "The most important thing ... is the turnaround of the studio," said Grey—who won't discuss Pellicano—in a statement. But now the Affair Pellicano is stealing some spotlight. However, business associates of Grey told NEWSWEEK that they've been advised that the statute of limitations has run out on any possible misconduct related to Pellicano's work on Grey's behalf wiretapping Vincent Zenga, so they aren't worried. Grey, his handlers argue, is a victim of unflattering innuendo and inaccuracies in the media. Pellicano, they add, was really hired by Bert Fields, Grey's lawyer.

April 30, 2006: Bert Fields is refusing to be interviewed now about his invovlement with Anthony Pellicano. Only his spokesperson, Brian Sun is speaking to the press. To charge Fields, prosecutors would likely need taped conversations between the two men or testimony by Pellicano against Fields. Fields has worked with Pellicano since at least the early 1990's on numerous cases. Fields seems to have a very similar work ethic to his incarcerated friend. In a 1989 interview with American Film magazine, Fields issued a warning to his legal opponents. "When somebody does something to one of my clients, I tend to become very angry and turn it into what I call a 'holy war.'" Fields so admired Pellicano that the P.I. appeared in both of his two novels. Written under the pen name D. Kincaid, a high-profile Los Angeles lawyer named Harry Cain is buddies with  another character private investigator Skip Corrigan who uses shady methods to get him valuable information.

April 29, 2006: Federal authorities have begun a criminal investigation into who leaked confidential FBI documents in the probe of private eye Anthony Pellicano in violation of a judge's protective order. The investigation will be conducted by the U.S. attorney's office in San Diego because prosecutors and FBI agents in Los Angeles are among those who have access to the compromised information. Attorneys representing Pellicano and six others under indictment in the wiretapping scandal also had been given FBI investigative reports known as "302s" and other documents in the case prior to the leak in the press and they too are under investigation.

April 28, 2006: The FBI has a tape of what may be a 2001 conversation between the then-divorcing Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman has entered the picture in the Anthony Pellicano scandal. Bryan Burrough, co-author of the controversial Vanity Fair expose on the incarcerated gumshoe said, "We know Tom Cruise, via his attorney, hired Pellicano on at least two occasions. And it got so bad during the divorce with Nicole Kidman that Nicole widely assumed that she was, in fact, being taped. We don't know that she was. But she would get on the phone during conversations and say, 'Tom, are you listening? Am I saying the right thing?' And eventually, we're told, investigators did find a single tape of her on the telephone. We don't know where that came from."

April 28, 2006: Brad Grey and several former clients, including Brad Pitt and Adam Sandler, as well as a rep for the late Chris Farley, have come forward with claims that Vanity Fair's story on the Anthony Pellicano scandal is inaccurate in describing their relationship to the disgraced private investigator.

April 27, 2006: According to LA Indie, Frederick DeMann, Madonna's former manager, stood up for Pellicano at the bond hearing after Pellicano was indicted for illegal weapons possession in 2002. In his letter of support to the court he wrote that, "Anthony Pellicano has been a friend of mine for more than 20 years. In my mind, he is the most upstanding, honest and integrity-filled person I know."

April 27, 2006: Nine more people have filed claims against the cities of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, saying two police officers ran their names though government databases at the behest of indicted private investigator, Anthony Pellicano. Attorney Neville Johnson filed all nine claims. Claims usually are  precursors to lawsuits.

April 27, 2006: Sandra Carradine and her attorney, Peter Knecht, were informed from the get-go in their initial meetings regarding cooperation, that Ms, Carradine was not to provide the government with any information concerning communications between Pellicano and his counsel. In subsequent contacts with Sandra Carradine, Special Agent Ornellas specifically reminded her, on more than one occasion, not to provide him with any information concerning such communications. Ms. Carradine and her attorney concurred that she never had.

April 27, 2006: Pellicano's attorney, Steven Gruel, has filed motions claiming that the prosecutors spied on Pellicano while in jail through his girlfiend at the time, Sandra Carradine.

April 27, 2006: Nikki Finke was informed that Vanity Fair's contributing editor John Connolly "heard from the U.S. Attorney’s office who told him that they were obligated to inform him that Anthony Pellicano had threatened his safety." Connolly has written about the Pellicano scandal since 1994, including the recent Pellicano expose in Vanity Fair's June issue, Inside Hollywood's Big Wiretap Scandal. Connolly had also just contracted to do a book on Pellicano called "The Sin Eater" for Simon & Schuster. This appears to be Pellicano's third violent threat against a journalist in recent years. Pellicano first threatened Ned Zelman and then Anita Busch. Kat Pellicano has also told Finke that she was misquoted in the recent Pellicano expose in Vanity Fair about such things as Pellicano's wanting to convert to Judaism to please Jewish lawyers including Bert Fields. Kat Pellicano claims that her ex-husband wanted to convert because he "believed in Judaism more than their own faiths."

April 26, 2006: Nikki Finke found out that the name of the "studio president" who contributed money to an effort to raise money for Pellicano's kids when Pellicano was arrested in November 2002 -- even after word of the P.I.'s wiretapping got out, is Universal Studios President/COO Ron Meyer. The "producer" who also contributed is Madonna's one-time manager Freddie DeMann. Attorney Bert Fields spearheaded the fund-raising. There were twenty to thirty people on the list including Michael Ovitz and Jerry Bruckheimer.

April 26, 2006: Dennis M. Wasser, divorce lawyer-to-the-stars who frequently hired the private detective Anthony Pellicano was aware of at least one instance of his illegal wiretapping, an F.B.I. agent has said in a confidential investigative summary seen by The New York Times. Wasser, whose clients have included the actor Tom Cruise and the MGM mogul Kirk Kerkorian, is among the most prominent Hollywood figures under scrutiny in the nearly four-year federal investigation of Mr. Pellicano, who was charged in February with wiretapping and conspiracy. Mr. Wasser and Mr. Pellicano could be heard speaking about Mr. Kolodny, a lawyer in an opposing case, on the phone in tape gotten from Pellicano's offices in 2002. What was said on that call revealed "Wasser's knowledge of an illegal wiretap conducted by Anthony Pellicano,"a F.B.I. agent wrote after a follow-up interview in October with Mr. Kolodny. During that interview with the F.B.I., Kolodny  reportedly called Pellicano’s wiretapping “the worst-kept secret in legal circles within Los Angeles.” Kolodny said he urged Wasser not to hire Pellicano, but that Wasser responded that “Pellicano could get anything you needed, [including] ‘tapping phones,’ ‘planting bugs’ and ‘doing cameras.’ ”Another witness who has implicated Mr. Wasser, according to F.B.I. notes, is Sandra Will Carradine, who later became Pellicano's girlfriend. And when Mr. Pellicano asked friends and clients to show up in court for a bail hearing in 2002, Mr. Wasser was one of those who attended.

April 26, 2006: The federal probe into Hollywood gumshoe Anthony Pellicano is nowhere near winding down. A source connected to the investigation says prosecutors have listened to only 25 percent of the hundreds of hours of tapes made by Pellicano -- a fact that will send chills through a Hollywood community desperate to put the case behind it.

April 26, 2006: Federal prosecutors and defense attorneys in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping case are pointing fingers at each other after confidential FBI memos turned up in news reports. Sources close to the case said the Justice Department and the FBI will soon launch investigations into who leaked memos of interviews with supermarket magnate Ronald W. Burkle, Paramount Pictures head Brad Grey and former Disney president Michael S. Ovitz.  The leaked memos were quoted in two New York Times stories shortly after they were made available to defense lawyers, prosecutors said. U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer had issued an order that the memos be kept confidential. Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel A. Saunders, the lead prosecutor on the Pellicano case, notified Fischer that her order was violated a week after the memos were turned over to the defense. Pellicano attorney Steven F. Gruel then fired off a letter to prosecutors, saying he did not appreciate the insinuation that defense lawyers had leaked the memos.

April 25, 2006: Pellicano's lawyer Steven Gruel, for pretrial motions and discovery in his case presently, filed a declaration in Los Angeles federal court stating that Pellicano, who’s been held in the Metropolitan Detention Center as a flight risk since his indictment on February 6, 2006, should be granted a bail hearing immediately on account of “outrageous conduct” by the government in relation to its use of a Pellicano ex-girlfriend as an informant. Gruel also detailed a claim that lead FBI agent Stanley Ornellas has made a series of misrepresentations and omissions that will lead to an upcoming Gruel pretrial motion to get Ornellas and lead prosecutor Daniel Saunders tossed off the case.  Pellicano refused to appear to a subpoena on May 1, 2002 , seven weeks prior to the threat against Anita Busch. The subpoena demanded that Pellicano produce to a grand jury, by May 14, 2002, “any consensual or nonconsensual recordings…of any federal or state law enforcement personnel” in a matter that the Los Angeles Times has previously reported involved the possible Pellicano wiretapping of an unnamed FBI agent.

April 25, 2006: The famous comedian, Chris Rock, hired Anthony Pellicano when a Hungarian model/Perfect 10, Monika Zsbrita, slapped Rock with a paternity claim in 1999. Rock's publicist, Matt Labov, said that Pellicano, at the time he was retained, had an "excellent reputation" as an investigator and that no one associated with Rock had any idea the private investigator would illegally access police files. The February 2006 indictment accuses Pellicano of using his connections with LAPD detective, Mark Arneson, to illegally run a background check on Zsibrita on July 30, 1999. Zsibrita claims that she was also stalked and her house was broken into at the time. She is intending on filing a lawsuit now against the

April 24, 2006: Nikki Finke reports that Patty Glaser, who is herself the subject of whispers in the Anthony Pellicano case, will be the disaster control executive for her fellow law partners at Christensen, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Weil & Shapiro, as the firm deals with the Pellicano scandal fallout from the February indictment of lead partner, Terry Christensen. Garry Abrams of the Daily Journal likens her job to "arguing over the condition of Humpty Dumpty after that ovoid's unfortunate contest with gravity. Is the big egg an omelet or merely missing a couple of pieces of shell that can be glued back on?"

April 24, 2006: The buzz about the Anthony Pellicano scandal has even spread to freshmen on the campus of the University of Wisconsin.

April 22, 2006: Pellicano's m.o. was to go dig up embarassing information about his enemies and that information was sex, drugs and rock and roll. Veriety reporter, Janet Sprintz, talks about Pellicano on NPR.

April 21, 2006: Michael Viner, the publisher who brought us Faye Resnick’s trumped up “Diary” of her days with the late Nicole Brown Simpson; a memoir by four call girls called “You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again”; and disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair’s “Burning Down My Master’s House”, had had a deal with Anthony Pellicano, before Pellicano went to prison, to write a novel about his experiences for Viner. Viner hired Pellicano in his nasty divorce from actress Deborah Raffin. Prior to his incarceration, Pellicano also shopped a TV series based on his life to HBO. Brad Grey, then a talent manager and producer of “The Sopranos,” was the one who brought it to the cable network. The Pellicano series didn’t sell, and Grey dropped it. Viner’s latest idea is to turn Pellicano’s novel into a movie and apparently Larry King and the William Morris Agency are interested.

April 21, 2006: The potential conflicts for the officers have been underscored by the ongoing prosecution of Anthony Pellicano, the so-called private eye to the stars. He is accused of employing a veteran LAPD detective, Mark Arneson, to gain confidential information for his clients. It has since been determined that more than 100 police officers in the LAPD are licensed as private investigators, although the department still does not have a firm figure. LAPD Cmdr. Kenneth O. Garner said the department is considering banning officers from working as private investigators, and will investigate whether any officers abused their LAPD positions while working as investigators.

April 20, 2006: Anthony Pellicano is goingto defend himself at his upcoming trial. Pellicano's current attorney, Steven Gruel, is just helping Pellicano file motions and has no intention of representing Pellicano at trial. The judge in Pellicano's case warned him on March 20 that it was almost invariably a terrible decision for a client to hire himself as a lawyer. The judge was willing to assign a federal public defender to Pellicano and bill the taxpayers for the cost. Pellicano said that was not necessary. Even though he would only have three and one-half hours a week in the MDC law library to prepare for his defense, Pellicano told the judge that he was confident that the best lawyer for Pellicano was Pellicano.

April 19, 2006: Nikki Finke reports that when the Devil came calling, in the lumpy pudding face of Anthony Pellicano, many Industry power players hired him, especially when in the throes of professional or personal wars they wanted to win at all costs. Anthony Pellicano was one heck of a signer. In 1982, right after Bernie Brillstein's client John Belushi OD'ed Pellicano comes calling at the Brillstein office and asked, "Is there anything you want me to do?" To which the grief-stricken Brillstein responded, "Tell me, what can you do when the poor guy is dead?" 

April 19, 2006: There exists a wide range of opinions on whether or not Pellicano will broker a deal with the prosecutors that sells out his former clients. Two years ago, Bert Fields (the attorney who ramins a person of interest in the federal investigation has worked with Pellicano for over 20 years) told Vanity Fair, "I would bet my life and my child's life that Anthony would never betray someone he was working for." Others are not so sure. "He'll roll over," says Ernie Rizzo, a Chicago private eye and contemporary of Pellicano's. "He's in his 60s. He can't afford 10 years in jail."

April 19, 2006: There seems to be similarities between the Jack Abramoff and Anthony Pellicano scandals. Like Abramoff, Pellicano went that extra mile for his clients. At issue in the FBI's ongoing investigation is whether the agents and studio executives who hired him to gain the upper hand in their various negotiations and lawsuits understood his criminal methods. Following the Abramoff pattern, Pellicano is more illustration than aberration. It may be far from routine for Hollywood muckety-mucks to sic spies on their enemies or send goons to intimidate prying journalists. But the ruthlessness and aggression that prompted producers, agents, and L.A. lawyers to hire Pellicano are perfectly normal in Hollywood. He was merely a hyperbolic expression of the narcissism and paranoia that characterize the movie mogul's relentless drive for dominance in pursuit of mediocrity. Pellicano also personifies that industry's eternal tendency to confuse life and art. He's a real-life character based on a Mickey Spillane movie: the hot-tempered Chicago gumshoe serving as the studio chief's strong arm. This time, Hollywood wrote him into its private script.

April 19, 2006: According to Nikki Finke, Geraldo Rivera, of Fox News is planning to cover the Anthony Pellicano case in his new show "Geraldo at Large" with once- or twice- weekly panel discussions about the developments and details of the ongoing scandal.

April 19, 2006: The conspiracy and racketeering trial of indicted private-eye Anthony Pellicano and six co-defendants, who ars still pleading not guilty, will be postponed six more months until October, U.S. Dist. Judge Dale S. Fischer judge decided. This delay is to to allow defense attorneys reasonable time to review the evidence still being compiled by the government.

April 18, 2006: Even though the law firm of Greenberg, Glusker, Fields, et al. may be off the hook with the government in the Anthony Pellicano scandal, it appears that Bert Fields is being separated from his firm in the press by the firm’s own spokesman, Brian Sun.  Two articles recently appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Daily Journal that were both masterminded by Sun. Sun seems to be planting these stories with more to come to sacrifice Fields for the good of the company.

April 18, 2006: Despite the persistent rumor that Los Angeles Times itself may have hired Pellicano and the fact that there's even a name of who did the hiring being floated, David Garcia, the LAT's director of media relations, said this morning: "The Los Angeles Times, including its legal department, has never hired Anthony Pellicano ever. This includes in-house legal counsel as well as any outside legal counsel working on behalf of the Times." However, sources tell Nikki Finke that the LAT is playing "a semantics game."

April 17, 2006: According to Nikki Finke In the ongoing Los Angeles Times vs New York Times bitch-slap over Pellicano coverage the NYT is winning and the LAT is losing. In fact, this is shaping up as not even a fair fight. This is a story in the LAT's backyard, not to mention the biggest scandal to trip up and tintillate Hollywood in recent memory. The Los Angeles Times' inability to hit hard at the Hollywood types caught up in the Pellicano mess thus far has given rise to some major rumors. The newspaper itself may have hired Pellicano to do some work for the legal department in the past. There's even a name of who did the hiring being floated, but nothing about why. Right before Easter weekend, the New York Times broke that big story about what Grey and Ovitz actually said to the FBI. So what was the Los Angeles Times' reaction? A lame defense of Grey's two accounts to the FBI of the extent of his acquaintance with Pellicano, including statements by Grey's attorneys claiming there was nothing inconsistent about that.

April 17, 2006: Dan Webb, one of the nation’s top white-collar criminal defense lawyer, will head the defense of entertainment attorney Terry Christensen, indicted in February in the federal investigation of private investigator Anthony Pellicano. Mr. Webb, 60, a former federal prosecutor practicing at Winston & Strawn LLP, wasn’t able to win acquittal on any of the 18 fraud and racketeering counts against former Illinois governor George Ryan, who now faces a long prison sentence.

April 17, 2006: "Die Hard" director John McTiernan, the biggest name indicted so far in the Hollywood wiretapping scandal involving disgraced celebrity sleuth Anthony Pellicano, pleaded guilty on Monday to lying to federal agents. McTiernan is the sixth person to plead guilty in the pellicano investigation. Appearing before U.S. District Court Judge Dale Fischer after reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors, the 55-year-old director admitted that he had lied to agents when he said that he had not asked Pellicano to wiretap producer Charles Roven, with whom he worked on the 2002 film "Rollerball." The speed with which McTiernan entered his guilty plea came as a surprise. It is believed he will be a cooperating witness in the government's investigation but that wasn't revealed. There's another hearing for McTiernan on April 24th and sentencing takes place on July 31th. Prosecutors asked that details of his plea agreement be sealed. U.S. Attorney Dan Saunders said that McTiernan's case probably would be combined with others involving Pellicano.

April 16, 2006: Last Friday, two days after his NEWSWEEK interview and the day after a dinner with Grey and others, Redstone awoke to a front-page story in The New York Times further detailing Grey's involvement with Pellicano. Redstone said later that Grey still had his support. "I have read The New York Times, and I still say I saw nothing in it that would make me change my opinion," he said.

April 14, 2006: Today's NY Times nudges the Anthony Pellicano Wiretapping Trial of the Century incrementally closer to embattled Paramount emperor Brad Grey's doorstep, reporting that when the studio chief told the FBI that he was "casually acquainted" with the "colorful" Pellicano, he probably meant something slightly cozier than just nodding a "What's up?" to the detective across the room at a cocktail party. Unsurprisingly, Grey's attorneys have already rebutted in the LA Times, intoning their "Why is everyone so whooped up? Brad's only a witness!" mantra, and assuring that there is no inconsistency between Grey's "I hardly know the guy! Who are we talking about again?" and "We had lunch five times" accounts because of Grey's waiving of his attorney-client privilege in his second FBI interview. The NY Times article suggests that the government’s questioning of Grey and Ovitz indicates they’re homeing in on entertainment lawyer Bert Fields despite that earlier this week the Los Angeles Times reported that Field's firm may not be indicted.

April 14, 2006: Brad Grey, the chairman of Paramount Pictures, and Michael Ovitz, a onetime Hollywood superagent, had far more direct dealings than they have acknowledged publicly with the celebrity detective at the center of a rapidly expanding wiretapping scandal, according to government evidence. Brad Grey told the F.B.I. that he spoke with Anthony Pellicano about two lawsuits in which Mr. Pellicano, a private detective, was working on Mr. Grey's behalf, and that he learned information about his legal opponents directly from Mr. Pellicano. A former employee of Mr. Pellicano, Lilly LeMasters. who was charged in February with wiretapping and conspiracy, separately told the F.B.I. that Mr. Grey had met with the detective at least five times. Publicly, Mr. Grey has said that he was only "casually acquainted" with Mr. Pellicano, and that his lawyers were responsible for hiring and overseeing the detective. Michael S. Ovitz acknowledged to the F.B.I. that he paid Mr. Pellicano in April or May of 2002 to obtain information on 15 to 20 people who were saying negative things about him. They included former business associates and Bernard Weinraub, then a reporter for The New York Times who was reporting on the demise of a company Mr. Ovitz started after he left Disney, and Anita Busch, a freelance reporter who wrote with Mr. Weinraub. Summaries of F.B.I. interviews seen by The New York Times — documents that are routinely compiled as the raw material of investigations — give no indication that Mr. Grey or Mr. Ovitz knew Mr. Pellicano had used illegal means. But they paint a picture of their hands-on dealings with the disgraced detective. Mr. Fields, the entertainment lawyer, has acknowledged being a subject of the investigation, but, like Mr. Grey and Mr. Ovitz, has said he had no knowledge of illegal activity. In Mr. Grey's F.B.I. session, he expounded upon Mr. Fields's ties to Mr. Pellicano, saying "Fields and Pellicano shared a 'key relationship,' that Pellicano was frequently used by Mr. Fields, and that Mr. Pellicano was 'part of Fields's team.' "

April 13, 2006: Though still weighing charges against individual attorneys, federal prosecutors may have decided not to seek an indictment against the largest law firm linked to the ongoing investigation of Hollywood private detective Anthony Pellicano, Greenberg, Glusker, Fields, Claman, Machtinger & Kinsella. The decision against prosecuting the firm at this time does not preclude prosecutors from filing charges against individual attorneys who work there if they can prove that the lawyers knew that Pellicano was allegedly wiretapping their adversaries and improperly accessing confidential information to help win cases. Nor does it preclude prosecutors from filing charges against the firm in the future if new evidence arises. It was unclear whether authorities decided not to bring charges against Greenberg Glusker because it was cooperating with the investigation, or because evidence was insufficient to prosecute the firm — or both. Even without a federal criminal investigation looming, Greenberg Glusker's legal troubles are not over. They still face civil lawsuits filed by those named as "victims" in the indictment who now allege that the firm was responsible for Pellicano and his associates allegedly violating their civil rights through wiretaps and illegal background checks. And, what, exactly, spared the firm? It could have been, well, that it’s a law firm. Legal experts told the LA Times that law firms make difficult criminal targets. “How do you prove that a group of lawyers, officers of the court, got together and conspired to engage in illegal conduct?” asked attorney Diane Karpman, a legal ethics expert. “It’s virtually impossible.'’ This is why people become lawyers, so they can commit crimes with impunity without consequences. NSA can’t wiretap terrorists without a firestorm of protest, but attorneys can hire PI’s to do so with impunity.

April 12, 2006: Pellicano is due to go on trial next week, but that may be postponed until the end of May or even later. More indictments are expected. Most alarming for Anthony Pellicano's clients is that the sleuth seems to have taped not only their enemies but also their own discussions about how he would glean information. “There's nothing unusual about a Hollywood law firm hiring a private detective like Pellicano,” says Edward Jay Epstein, the author of a book on Hollywood called “The Big Picture”, “but it's unheard of for one to deliberately entrap his own clients.”

April 12, 2006: Nikki Finke reports that Bruce Feirstein, the screenwriter who pens the New York Observer's "New Yorker's Diary" from Los Angeles writes: "The Pellicano Case: Recently, I met with a talent manager who hired Anthony Pellicano during the mid-1990’s, on behalf of a movie-star client with a female-stalker problem. As the manager recounted it, their first meeting eerily foreshadowed Jared Paul Stern: 'Pellicano offered us a laundry list — a menu — and asked exactly how far we wanted to take this,' the manager said. 'Nobody can plead naïve here. We all knew exactly what we’d bargained for and what we were getting billed for.'...As the manager put it, 'Everybody’s going to turn. These are wimpy white guys; they’re not going to jail.' 

April 11, 2006: Bob Pfeiffer, is out on $1 million bail after pleading guilty in Los Angeles in connection with the Anthony Pellicano case. Back in 1995, during his three-year tenure as president of the label, Pfeiffer had been sued for sexual harassment by one of his employees. According to the government's indictment of Pellicano last February, the woman in question was illegally wiretapped and spied on by the private detective. Pellicano was working for Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer's ex-wife had turned over an e-mail he had sent her in January referring to the Pellicano investigation. "Hypothetically, I am assuming I will not have the money to fight this if it escalates; I am not going to jail. You see me. I wouldn't last a night," he wrote. "I have two alternatives then to run or commit suicide... " Pfeifer admitted he paid Pellicano $125,000 to snoop on Erin Finn in 2000 because she had given a negative deposition in a case involving Pfeifer's ex-employer. He faces between one and five years in prison.

April 11, 2006: Acting U.S. Attorney George Cardona says the racketeering charge was prompted by Pellicano paying police officers to give him information on his targets. "It's been going on for years and years and years, apparently," Anne Thompson of the Hollywood Reporter notes. "So, when did all these powerful people think that it was OK?" Anthony Pellicano is "like the J. Edgar Hoover of Hollywood," defense attorney and CBS News legal consultant Mickey Sherman says. "Supposedly, he's got all the dirt on everybody and, now that he's being targeted, everybody's in trouble." 

April 11, 2006: Pellicano was a chump change play. But he got some men who were a whole better educated than him to do some incredibly stupid things. He convinced himself too. Pellicano was arrogant enough to believe he was above doing the scut work a good P.I. has to do. He also thought he was entitled, because of his prosecutor contacts in the justice system, not to be prosecuted by that system even when he knew the FBI was on his tail.

April 9, 2006: Letters from prosecutors gush about the testimony and analysis that Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano provided as an audio forensics expert since the 1970's. Even Pellicano's current defense attorney, Stephen Gruel, a former federal prosecutor, had used him as a witness to refute claims in an organized crime case that a recording by an undercover FBI agent might have been altered. Pellicano is accused of bugging phones and bribing police to get information on celebrities and others at the same time he was providing expert testimony for prosecutors. His alleged habit of playing both sides of the law raises some serious questions. G. Douglas Jones, a U.S. attorney in Alabama had used Pellicano to analyze an undercover FBI audiotape of former Ku Klux Klan member Thomas Blanton Jr. as part of an investigation into the 1963 killing of four black girls in the bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Ala. Jones said he had checked out Pellicano's credentials with other federal prosecutors before using him. "Regardless of what his other practices were, we had no complaints of what he did in our case," Jones said. That conviction could now be thrown out. Mac Cauley, the U.S. attorney who used Pellicano in the Aisenberg case couldn't recall anymore why Pellicano had been used in the case.

April 7, 2006: In light of court documents, Pellicano may have had a reason to feel a touch of arrogance when it came to being investigated by law enforcement. Some prosecutors really loved the guy – especially when he was testifying for them. An examination of court files pertaining to his November 2002 felony indictment for possession of explosives shows that Pellicano’s widely-reported boasts of “having friends downtown” was not idle chit-chat. Long after being accused in the national media of being a thug who terrorized Hard Copy reporter Diane Dimond, lying to the press repeatedly for clients Michael Jackson and lawyers Bertram Fields and Howard Weitzman, and for being way too close to the allegedly sick behavior of the late producer Don Simpson, Pellicano was a legal expert-for-hire. When former L.A. mayor James Hahn was running the City Attorney’s office, one of his prosecutors lauded Pellicano for his  “courtesies and professionalism.” Even the U.S. Navy enlisted Pellicano. Pellicano never testified for any federal prosecutor in the Central District of California (the office that is now prosecuting him for wiretapping). Prosecutors who used Pellicano in the past may meet up with him again in federal court. According to Stephen Yagman, a veteran L.A. attorney, Pellicano has every right to call them to testify if he goes to trial on wiretapping charges.

April 7, 2006: Robert Pfeifer, a former music company executive of Disney-owned Hollywood Records, pleaded guilty to paying  Anthony Pellicano at least $125,000 for illegally wiretap an ex-girlfriend, Erin Finn, who had testified against him in a business dispute. He was charged by a federal Grand Jury with witness tampering and wiretapping. He had remained in federal custody since his arrest but bond is now set at $1,000,000 since his cooperation. Pfeifer "was fully aware of the wiretap and discussed with Pellicano the interception of Finn's telephone calls," court documents said. Pfeifer told U.S. District Judge Dale Fischer that Pellicano's "investigation included wiretapping, and we gained knowledge from that." His attorney, Evan Jenness, said that if Pfeifer meets government obligations, the remaining count would be dismissed. The admission makes Pfeifer the fifth person to plead guilty to federal charges in the ongoing Pellicano investigation.  Four others have admitted a variety of charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy. Earlier this year, former Beverly Hills police Officer Craig Stevens and Pellicano's onetime girlfriend, Sandra Will Carradine, pleaded guilty to lying about Pellicano's use of illegal tactics. At present, Pellicano and eight others still face charges.

April 7, 2006: Nikki Finke reports that Anthony Pellicano used to boast from jail to friends that no one would ever be able to crack his wiretapping encryption. Pellicano believed that his modern encryption system was uncrackable even by the feds' combination of heavy-duty hardware and clever code experts. However, an encryption protocol officer in a private computer security firm told The Recorder that several federal agencies have designed systems to figure out passcodes to gain access to the drive, generally by inputting detailed data about an individual into a computer to get a psych profile that can suggest possibilities. The Recorder legal paper on Feb. 27th quoted an FBI spokeswoman confirming that "FBI technical expertise certainly was utilized" during the investigation. Possibly expertise from the NSA was utilized too.

April 6, 2006: Ten Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman Machtinger & Kinsella lawyers will leave by the end of the month to form Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert, a business and entertainment litigation firm in Santa Monica, Calif. The new firm will likely consist of up to 15 lawyers, including some from other firms. The Greenberg Glusker attorneys leaving the firm as early as April 17 include Dale Kinsella, Howard Weitzman, Lawrence Iser, Michael Kump, Gregory Aldisert, Alan Kossoff, Gregory Korn, Kristen Spanier, Jennifer McGrath and Gregory Gabriel. "We decided to practice in a smaller environment because we think we can have more fun and provide great services for clients," Weitzman said. He denied that the departure had anything to do with the ongoing investigation into the firm's use of Anthony Pellicano. It was Howard L. Weitzman who brought Pellicano to Los Angeles from Chicago in the first place. The Pellicano story begins with Weitzman, who used the detective to dig up dirt when he defended John DeLorean in the early 1980s. This is the very same Howard Weitzman, by the way, who was O.J. Simpson’s defense lawyer for two whole days in June 1994. In 1993, when Michael Jackson needed a criminal attorney, Bert Fields —his entertainment lawyer — had turned to Weitzman. Weitzman in turn brought along Pellicano. When Weitzman got out, and passed Jackson’s criminal matters to Johnnie Cochran, Pellicano stayed on the case. Weitzman continued to defend Jackson in other cases, however, including some brought by former Neverland employees. Weitzman has obviously been planning an escape from Greenberg Glusker for a while. Weitzman left the practice of law. For a decade, from 1995 to 2005, he stayed out of the Hollywood limelight. But in May 2005, less than a year ago, he returned to the business by partnering up with his old pal, Bert Fields. Now it’s over. To combine two clichés: Weitzman sees the writing on the wall because he knows where all the bodies are buried. He helped Fields bury them, after all.

April 6, 2006: Tom Cruise’s lawyer, Ricardo Cestero, his point man in Bert Fields’ Hollywood law firm Greenberg, Glusker, et al., worked for years for none other than jailed private eye Anthony Pellicano before obtaining a law degree. Ricardo Cestero’s name crops up in nearly every story about Cruise’s legal issues in the last seven years. Notably, Cestero represented Cruise in a defamation lawsuit involving a gay man who claimed to be Cruise’s lover. Cruise wound up winning $10 million. But what most people don’t know is that before he went to law school and came to work for Fields, Cestero labored in the office of Anthony Pellicano as a private investigator.

April 6, 2006: Ex-porn actor and Anthony Pellicano legman, Paul Barresi, is now working for Bertram Field's legal defense. John Keker, Field's criminal defense attorney, asked Barresi over this past weekend if he knew anything to potentially discredit a potential government witness against Fields. While Field's clients like Michael Ovitz and Brad Grey are telling prosecutors that only their lawyers hired Pellicano, the attorneys' defense team are now cautioning prosecutors that the clients may have engaged Pellicano on their own.

April 5, 2006: Howard Weitzman is the lawyer who worked hand-in-glove with Anthony Pellicano on the John DeLorean cocaine case in the early 1980s, and for years after. The attorney and the P.I. had a falling out in the late 1990s. Weitzman must not have been really shocked at Pellicano’s connection to his law partner Bert Fields. Weitzman is contemplating writing an autobiographical book. He’s talked to Allison Hope Weiner about writing the book with him. Weiner, a lawyer, had been an associate at Wyman Bautzer when Weitzman was a managing partner there, he said. Weiner is now half of The New York Times’ Pellicano reporting team that has written extensively about Fields’ involvement with Pellicano — but nary a word about Weitzman’s.

April 5, 2006: A book by Vanity Fair journalist, John Connolly, called The Sin Eater will be coming out about Anthony Pellicano. Print rights have just been bought by Atria Books.(Editor Wendy Walker acquired the book directly from the author.) It's been 12 years since Connolly first (and was the first to) claim that the shadowy private investigator was wiretapping phones, homes and offices on behalf of bigwig clients waging internecine war against each other. The author is said to have been threatened in the past by Pellicano for his aggressive reporting, allegedly saying he would “beat up” the meddlesome writer. Connolly promises that explosive new details in the case are still to come. “This thing is so much bigger than even I thought,” Connolly told the New York Post in February. “Aside from the names people think they know, there are going to be a number of big surprises. Some very important lawyers in California whose names haven’t even been mentioned yet are going to be indicted.”

April 5, 2006: Nikki Finke reports that Viacom Inc.'s general counsel has sent the New York Times a toughly worded letter fat with attachments refuting large portions and many details of that March 13th Page One story loosely linking Paramount boss Brad Grey to Anthony Pellicano.  The letter, received within a week after the article was published, complains among other things about the so-called uncorroborated statements from the article's primary source, Grey ex-client Garry Shandling's ex-girlfriend Linda Doucette. This does put a new twist that wasn't reported by the Los Angeles Times on that strange statement they printed from Viacom Inc. chairman Sumner Redstone. "I have the utmost faith in the integrity of Brad Grey...But can anybody be certain of anything but life and death?"

April 5, 2006: Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO Brad Grey was given a vote of confidence by executives of parent company Viacom Inc. despite his link to an indicted private investigator. Paramount spokeswoman Janet Hill acknowledged that Grey has testified before a grand jury in connection with the Pellicano case and has been interviewed by FBI agents.

April 5, 2006: Suzonne Stirling, a witness in a murder case involving the stepson of John McTiernan said that Anthony Pellicano accused her of "obstructing justice" and apparently had investigated her as well. "Mr. Pellicano made several comments to me which made it clear to me that he knew several personal facts about me, including where my grandmother lived," Stirling said.