I propose a new opening voice-over for Law and Order: “In the criminal-justice system ... nothing ever ends.” Closure, as cops and judges will tell you, is strictly for the movies. Even casual followers of crime stories know that it seems to take forever for defendants to come to trial — and even when a verdict arrives, there follows a dreary drizzle of trial “sequels” in the form of victim civil suits, retrials, malicious-prosecution suits or appeals. The pretrial motions of several big cases in 2008 seemed to promise speedier trials, but these trials soon reverted to form. A very long, drawn-out form.
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In March, federal prosecutors began their conspiracy and racketeering case against one-time Private Eye to the Stars Anthony Pellicano and four other men. The group was charged with wiretapping the business foes or spouses of Pellicano’s clients, and the trial narrative swirled around some very rich and/or famous people, including Michael Ovitz, Bert Fields, Garry Shandling and Chris Rock.
After two months of testimony, jurors brought in a lengthy, repetitive list of guilty verdicts. Pellicano was convicted on all 76 counts he faced. His co-defendants for the most part suffered similar wipeouts: former LAPD sergeant Mark Arneson, telephone-company technician Ray Turner, computer programmer Kevin Kachikian (who developed unique eavesdropping and transcription software for Pellicano) and Abner Nicherie, a shadowy Israeli-American who used Pellicano’s wiretaps to gain advantage over a business rival.
The hard wooden pews of Judge Dale Fischer’s courtroom in the Roybal Federal Building had barely emptied before Pellicano, the judge and prosecutors returned for the trial’s sequel. A second trial was required because earlier this year Century City superlawyer Terry Christensen had sought and won a severance from Pellicano’s first trial. No way was Christensen going to be included in that rogue’s gallery of defendants, a trial setting whose Wagnerian stagecraft more resembled a war-crimes tribunal than the intimate legal habitat Christensen was used to operating in.
And so in July he began trial with his former intelligence contractor, Pellicano, to fight charges that the two conspired and carried out a scheme to wiretap the phone of Lisa Bonder during a scorched-earth child-support battle between Bonder and her ex-paramour, billionaire Kirk Kerkorian. Pellicano, as he had in the first trial, acted as his own attorney; observing him stumble at the podium while cross-examining witnesses was like watching a teenager learn to drive.
The results were the same as Pellicano I: On August 29, both men were convicted of the two counts they each faced. Judge Fischer threw the book at Christensen, giving the disgraced attorney three years in prison plus fines. A month later, Pellicano received 15 years behind bars for his two trials’ combined 78 convictions, and was ordered by Fischer to join Arneson and Turner in paying more than $2 million in restitution. At least Pellicano had saved money by acting as his own lawyer.
Meanwhile, Pellicano’s wife, Kat, and his daughters are pitching cable-TV execs a reality show based on their lives. “Project,” Variety’s Michael Schneider recently wrote, “will revolve around Kat Pellicano and her three daughters — Alana, 21; Tori, 18; and Josi, 17 — as they figure out how to fund their extravagant lifestyle without the family patriarch.” The premise of the show, reportedly, is that it follows the women as they try to reopen the detective agency so they can pay off family debts. (Huh?) No matter — it’s clear that the success of such a show would rest on Anthony Pellicano’s being in prison.
Another trial that promised to be a quick slam-dunk — either way, for innocent or guilty — was the federal obscenity prosecution of scat-porn king Ira Isaacs. The L.A. man had been hauled into court by Republican-appointed prosecutors as part of the culture wars. In a case that was expected to last about a week, Isaacs was accused of distributing films depicting bestiality and women eating feces and being urinated upon. Unfortunately for the government, the trial was taken away from Judge George King, who’d been hearing the pretrial motions, by 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, a loose-cannon libertarian. Kozinski, who speaks in a drowsy Old World accent, decided to try the case himself and, after trial began in June, seemed to enjoy pinching Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Whitted’s cheeks, counseling him to relax more. Defense attorney Roger Diamond joined in on the fun, reminding the serious Whitted that the case was “only a trial.”
Then the L.A. Times, supplied with information by a longtime Kozinski enemy, attorney Cyrus Sanai, disclosed that Kozinski maintained a private Web site whose salacious images and jokes were publicly accessible. Within days, Kozinski recused himself from the trial (but not before jurors had been forced to watch about two hours of bestial horseplay and literal shit-eating grins. Suddenly, to Roger Diamond’s chagrin, the case wasn’t even only a trial. It was in legal limbo.
