LA Weekly

The fate of the Pellicano Gang of Five rests with the jury, now that closing arguments have concluded. Attorney Mona Soo Hoo began the morning by announcing that “This case is about dualities.” She then enumerated a list of dialectical opposites that described perceptions of her client, former phone company field technician Ray Turner. He stands accused of applying wire taps and channeling billing data to private eye Anthony Pellicano – who allegedly charged clients a flat $25,000 fee for this information and other services. It was an intriguing inventory (“Phone guy versus phone-tap guy, presumption of innocence versus assumption of guilt”) that promised court watchers a new side of Soo Hoo, whose habit of signing on to other defense attorneys’ initiatives had earlier earned her the nickname Mona Me Too.

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Today defense attorneys in the racketeering trial of Anthony Pellicano and four co-defendants began their closing arguments, with lead-off hitter Chad Hummel attacking prosecutor Daniel Saunders’ Tuesday closer on two fronts. Hummel reliably tried to exploit the government’s court pratfall of last week, when Hummel impeached a defense witness called to impeach his own client, former LAPD sergeant Mark Arneson. Hummel, employing a classic quote-the-enemy strategy, also used former FBI agent Stanley Ornellas’ testimony to suggest that the Feds didn’t connect Arneson to Pellicano’s alleged wiretapping operation, nor that they considered Arneson’s handing of confidential crime and DMV data to Pellicano an activity that imperiled the safety of Arneson’s fellow officers involved in undercover work.

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“Sitting up there in the second row is a dirty cop. A dishonest cop. A corrupt cop. A man who sold his badge for $2,500 a month.” Say what you will about prosecutor Daniel Saunders, he gets to the point. He uttered these words about former LAPD sergeant Mark Arneson Tuesday morning, early on in the government’s closing argument in the RICO trial of private eye Anthony Pellicano and four co-defendants (including Arneson), who are facing nearly 80 counts involving wire fraud, conspiracy, identity theft and bribery. There may also have been one or two library book fines thrown in there, but after a while I stopped counting.

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Dysfunctional business as usual at Pellicano trial

When we last left the trial of Anthony Pellicano and four co-defendants, the proceedings had been thrown into chaos after attorney Chad Hummel’s cross examination of a “businesswoman” whom the government had called to the witness stand to testify about a bankruptcy petition allegedly filed in 1998 by defendant Mark Arneson. In a coup de jure, Hummel, Arneson's counsel, exposed witness Phyllis Miller as a possible participant in a criminal scheme to defraud Arneson. Court let out early last Friday as lawyers and reporters alike scrambled to make sense of what had just happened and what it could mean for the fate of the trial. At the very least it seemed probable that Arneson would either be removed from the proceedings, either through a mistrial or severance. But could Arneson’s leaving have a domino effect on his erstwhile co-defendants or would his exit merely have oblique consequences?

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Witness shocker throws trial in turmoil

For days Chad Hummel had been uncharacteristically quiet as the trial of famed private eye Anthony Pellicano and four codefendants wound down this week. Normally Hummel’s baritoned objections could be heard ricocheting off the walls on behalf of his client, former LAPD Sergeant Mark Arneson, who stands accused of providing Pellicano with confidential information on private citizens gleaned from law enforcement databases. No more so than last week, when the government pounded Arneson, who testified on his own behalf, with questions about a bankruptcy filing he denied preparing and which he claimed was entered with a forged signature.

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“I was the coder, the implementer. The client was the designer.” So says coder-implementer Kevin Kachikian, private eye Anthony Pellicano’s computer expert who is alleged to have outfitted client Pellicano with an integrated – and illegal – wiretapping software program called TeleSleuth. Years from now Kachikian’s statement may resound like a cyber-age version of “I was only following orders.” Kachikian testified on his own behalf all day Wednesday, stressing that he developed the program under the direction of Pellicano from 1995 to 2002.

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Tuesday was Ray Turner’s day in court, although he elected not to take the witness stand on his own behalf. Turner, the “phone guy” co-defendant in the Anthony Pellicano racketeering trial, easily wears the casual coolness of a BET executive, and sat impassively through most of today’s testimony. His witnesses, orchestrated by attorney Mona Soo Hoo, were intended to show that any number of the retired Turner’s former telephone company colleagues could have placed the wiretaps on L.A. Times journo Anita Busch – taps that eventually led the FBI to Pellicano’s Sunset Boulevard office. Sometimes, when a friend showed up to testify, a smile would spread across Turner’s face.

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Pellicano Defense Finishes Its First Week

It’s a crime to lie to the FBI, so I won’t: The courtroom was bored to tears with Friday's appearance by its former special agent, Stanley Ornellas. A big man with a brutal face and soft voice, Ornellas was the bureau’s lead investigator into the case that began with the fish-and-rose combo placed on the Audi of L.A. Times reporter Anita Busch in June, 2002 – and whose investigation eventually led Ornellas to Anthony Pellicano. Ornellas, assigned to the FBI’s organized-crime unit in L.A., had earlier been tracking a well-oiled bookmaking operation on the Westside, during which he met LAPD vice sergeant Mark Arneson. The vice cop would later be accused of being a paid confederate of Pellicano’s, one who ran thousands of computer inquiries through law enforcement and DMV databases on Pellicano’s behalf.

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Pellicano Briefs

Team Pellicano is now taking its turn at bat, but the past few days of the defense’s case have seemed like prosecution by other means. Last Friday co-defendant Mark Arneson took the witness stand on his own behalf and the affable, three-hour colloquy between Arneson and his attorney, Chad Hummel, showcased the former LAPD sergeant as a confident professional who was never at a loss for answers. The 54-year-old’s oddly young-sounding voice lent his testimony the ring of youthful clarity.

All that changed when Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders took over and focused on Arneson’s eagerness to provide a civilian (private investigator Anthony Pellicano) with privileged cop and DMV data about his clients’ enemies – some of whom were “enemies” simply because they were plaintiffs in lawsuits. Suddenly Arneson’s easy chair demeanor vanished – and much of his memory with it. That youthful voice of his now only made Arneson sound like Eddie Haskell trying to weasel out of admitting responsibility for playing a prank.

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Sparky remembers to forget

On Thursday the prosecution’s guns in the racketeering trial of Anthony Pellicano and four co-defendants fell silent as the government rested its case-in-chief that afternoon. Friday morning came and spectators filled Courtroom 890 in the Roybal Federal Building to watch the defense return fire. If visitors were expecting Pellicano to open up with heavy artillery they were quickly disappointed. Pellicano called on a single witness, FBI computer expert Donald Schmidt Jr., a short, goateed figure who, with other federal geek squad members, had worked long hours to unpack the contents of hard drives seized in a November, 2002 raid on Pellicano’s Sunset Blvd. office. Those hard drives allegedly contained esoterically encrypted audio files containing hours of wiretapped telephone conversations – files that had at first baffled Schmidt and other cyber sleuths who were unable to unlock their secrets.

As he did with many of the prosecution’s own computer experts over the past five weeks, Pellicano, acting as his own attorney, seemed to be trying to out-dweeb his witness by showing off his technical know-how and splitting hairs over terminology. Still, I was told by someone well acquainted with this aspect of the case that Pellicano is pinning his hopes on catching a moment in the FBI’s timeline in which the bureau worked on copies of his files and his proprietary snooping program, TeleSleuth, before it had the legal authority to do so.

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For once Chris Rock played the straight man. From the moment he stepped into court Friday to testify at Anthony Pellicano’s racketeering trial, Rock appeared somber and apprehensive. With hands clasped behind his back, he looked like a condemned man walking to the electric chair. Rock, wearing a dark suit and indigo shirt opened at the collar, took the witness stand at 8:04 a.m. When asked to state his name, he quietly said, “Uh, Chris Rock . . .”

“Mr. Rock – project!” ordered Judge Dale Fischer, but her light-hearted admonition drew no smiles from the comedian.

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The Pellicano trial turns into divorce court

Who’s that tapping, gently wiretapping, at my trailer door? actor Keith Carradine may well have wondered in April, 2001, as he and his girlfriend Hayley DuMond began noticing telephone problems and other odd events occur in Carradine’s Valencia RV park home. At the time, he related in court Friday, life was not as easy as Sunday morning for The Long Riders and Nashville star. For one thing, he was in the midst of a bitter child-support fight with his former wife, Sandra Will, who wanted to move the legal proceedings from Colorado, where Carradine had his formal residence, to California, where he was staying at the Valencia Travel Village. For another, DuMond had her tires slashed in Valencia while her parents in Sherman Oaks were receiving creepy phone calls in the dead of night.

Carradine, who appeared in a conservative suit and red tie, his hair shorn short, is one of a conga line of government witnesses to testify how their privacy had been invaded by Anthony Pellicano – who, in this matter, had been hired by Will to spy on her ex. He told U.S. attorney Daniel Saunders that at one point his landline phone in the RV park went dead and that an attempt to break into his trailer and truck occurred while he was filming on location in Australia. Meanwhile, DuMond, whom he eventually married, was being “aggressively followed” and, once back in the states, he received an unexpected call – on his cell phone.

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Cheetahs never prosper

In a Dickensian twist, Anthony Pellicano was confronted this past week by women whose lives he had touched over the years – although the ladies in question might claim “blighted” is a more appropriate word. Tuesday saw L.A. assistant district attorney Karla Kerlin take the stand. Kerlin, who had worked as a Las Vegas showgirl before trying criminals in Los Angeles, sensed her phone was being tapped in 1999 when she was prosecuting John Gordon Jones, the so-called Limousine Rapist.

“You always seemed to know what I was doing,” she told Pellicano when the alleged racketeer, acting as his own attorney, cross-examined her. Even years after her brief dancing career, Kerlin presented a striking figure in a dark outfit with a bright smear of tulip-red lipstick on her mouth. She good-naturedly deflected Pellicano’s ineffectual attempts to portray himself as being on her side during the Jones trial, like a mother denying a naughty kid his allowance.

“Yes,” she said smiling, “I believe you were investigating me . . . [a] detective and I believed you were going to blackmail us.”

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Anthony Pellicano discovers Tarita Virtue is her own reward

For four days ex-Pellicano employee Tarita Virtue wore black to court as she testified under an immunity grant. And why not? It wasn’t her funeral, but that of her ex-boss, “P.I. to the Stars” Anthony Pellicano, who, with four others stands accused of Federal wiretapping and racketeering charges. Day after day Virtue described in damning detail the eavesdropping shenanigans of the Pellicano Investigative Agency, Ltd., while shedding light on the pressure-cooker work environment at 9200 Sunset Boulevard.

“Everyone working for Anthony is a personal assistant,” she said.

Women employees, Virtue recalled, were required at the end of each work day to stop by Pellicano’s office to give him a kiss and good-bye hug, and all assumed their private calls at work were tapped. Needless to say, none of the 14 rooms that have been diagramed at trial of Pellicano’s Suite 322 contained an HR office. One particularly revealing incident involved Pellicano’s response, in 2000, to Virtue’s speaking aloud while he was trying to concentrate on a matter.

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