..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Episode One: A&E

This is the time in the news cycle when intelligent people ask this question:

"Why should I give a rat's ass about Anthony Pellicano and his paid-off scumbag lawyers/cops/bimbos/assorted movie directors-producers who allegedly ginned the legal system via warrant-less wiretaps?"

Let's call a spade a spade. As a true crime story, the tale of private eye Pellicano has serious issues. Nobody gets killed in this story except the fish that was dumped on Anita Busch's windshield. The biggest movie star involved is Steven Seagal, and he was buried at sea five seconds after the "'Die Hard'-on-a-battleship" genre went down for the count. And though the pity party press posse lined up a while back to give the grand old man of Hollywood litigation, Bertram Fields, a shoulder to cry on while mean FBI agents with guns came to his office (since when do FBI agents NOT carry guns?), it's almost immaterial to those who want to see Fields suffer for the sheer Schadenfreude angle.

Fields is 76-years-old! Nowadays, it's highly doubtful, even if he escapes prosecution, that he could get dusted off for even a Clarence Darrow moment. And it's not like Fields or indicted lawyer Terry Christensen are going the ball-and-chain route to Leavenworth. Terminal Island, maybe, but I hear the writers' program there is excellent, and anyone who's actually tried to get through one of Fields' literary fiction efforts knows that Fields is one author who could use continued education.

But at the end of the government torch lighting, there is a reason why intelligent people should give a rat's ass about Pellicano and his indicted and suspected benefactors: Pellicano's story is all about the bane, and fuel, of the Hollywood movie business -- arrogance and entitlement.

Webster's defines arrogance as a "feeling of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or presumptive claim." For entitlement, the definition is "a right to benefits specified, especially by law or contract."

There is such a thing as good arrogance and entitlement.

It took a world of arrogance for Quentin Tarantino, retired video store clerk and hack actor, to believe in 1991 that the world would care anything about the Reservoir Dogs visions he had in his head. And it took his producer, Lawrence Bender, to convince Tarantino that the writer-director was entitled to have a great cast telling his tale.

Look at the conceptual artist Christo. His mammoth installations of umbrellas and running fences breathe arrogance, and they exist because he has convinced himself he is entitled to the millions of dollars in arts funding that he sops up to make the installations come to life.

If it weren't for arrogance and entitlement, there would be no Citizen Kane or Apocalypse Now or 8 1/2. Adults would have to settle for movies like Care Bears or Bad News Bears or Brother Bear or anything with a tyke and a furry animal.

Our culture is right to worship the arrogance and entitlement of some artists, because they give us so much in return.

Then there's Pellicano.

Here is a man who is accused of breaking the fundamental principle of the American civil judicial system: that two parties who can't resolve their differences can turn to a court and a judge who will attempt to fairly resolve that difference.

Pellicano and at least one lawyer, Terry Christensen, are accused of using phone intercepts to completely circumvent that fundamental principle.

If these wiretapping allegations are true - Pellicano and Christensen have both pleaded innocent - this is probably one of the most supreme acts of arrogance in the history of the Hollywood business, a business that's seen more than its share.

But when the entitlement card is played, not only does the conceit of Pellicano go off the charts, so does entitlement issues surrounding certain lawyers in this town.

In the late 1990s, and in the early part of this decade, I helped assemble a slew of "Hollywood Power" lists, the aggravating aggregation of pundit choices and puff quotes designed to ingratiate a publication with sources, all in the guise of factually proclaiming who truly has power in this town called Hollywood.

Invariably, when I got to writing up the lawyers, those involved in litigation would loudly proclaim that they were not getting paid the money they deserved.

Litigation attorneys, like the attorneys who've been bandied about in the Pellicano story, are paid by the hour. Their income is all direct, unlike deal making attorneys like Jake Bloom who get a piece of the action on the deals they do for their clients, and, thus, earn passive income while they sleep at night as the client's intellectual property plays out somewhere in the universe.

It's almost impossible for a litigation attorney, after expenses, to clear more than $1 million a year working by the hour, even if the gross rate charged is $500 an hour.

There are a lot of men and women I know who would love to clear $1 million a year in hourly fees. But when your job is saving the asses of men who you feel have half your smarts and education, and one hundred times your wealth, some attorneys start to believe they're getting the short end of the stick, and anything they do to keep their measly million dollars a year coming in is excusable.

And if that means kicking Pellicano a hundred grand now and then to cheat, that crime pales in comparison to what a Master of the Universe does with the stock market or a pension fund or anything else shaky engendered by your typical multi-billion dollar conglomerate swap.

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, allegedly, 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.

A&E. Playing 24 hours a day at The Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles.

- by Ross Johnson
April 11, 2006

Ross Johnson is a veteran Hollywood journlaist and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire magazine, New York magazine, Los Angeles magazine, Premiere magazine, and USA Today. He has recently created a website called LA Indie which houses analysis of documents relating to the Pellicano case.

.