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Episode Two: B.Y.O.B.

Is there a way for one man to tell the Pellicano story by writing stories based not on conjecture, but on facts contained in public documents? Drooling at the kneecaps of prosecutors in an attempt to get the official announcement story one day before it's official is popular right now. But as the New York Daily News is learning the hard way in the Jared Paul Stern/Page Six/Ron Burkle clusterf**k, federal prosecutors are unique, political animals who don't always follow the route they say they're going to follow.

Sometimes, you go with what the lawyers have already thrown down in court, not with what they've promised.

On March 16, 2006, I had a funny feeling that it would be wise to swing by the public viewing stacks of the U.S. Central District Courthouse at 312 N. Spring St. I knew that Anthony Pellicano's lawyer was about to launch a counter-attack on March 20, a counter-attack based on documents in the file related to Pellicano's possession-of-explosives conviction in 2003.

When I filled out the paperwork to see the file, I was in for a surprise.

"We put those files on the truck today. They're being shipped tonight to the National Archives in Perris, California," said the clerk.

Perris is a good seventy miles away in the hinterlands of Riverside County. A journalist has to make an appointment to see the files archived there. It was a hell of a time to pull those files off the shelves.

Maybe in the movie version of the Pellicano story, there will be a scene where an angry journalist grabs the records clerk by the collar, spits in the face of the clerk, and gets the dope.

In real life, I begged, whined and groveled. The clerk then went out to the truck, and actually pulled six volumes of court records for me to copy in the 90 minutes before closing time.

I launched a Web site, LA Indie (www.laindie.com) devoted to crafting stories around those Pellicano case court documents. But here is a filet for Movie City News readers.

Five weeks before the FBI raided Pellicano's offices on November 21, 2002 in search of evidence about the threats against former Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch, Pellicano knew the FBI was after him. The whole prosecution of the 14 individuals who've been subsequently charged with wiretapping, computer fraud, perjury, racketeering, etc., in the Pellicano case was made possible because Pellicano never cleaned out his offices during those five weeks.

The FBI found almost zero evidence in that raid that Pellicano was involved in the threats against Busch, but it found all the leads that November day that it would need to start an investigation of wiretapping.

Why didn't Pellicano dump all the incriminating evidence when he had the chance?

Victor Sherman told me that Pellicano was an idiot and stupid and arrogant, and that arrogant people like Pellicano make the sort of mistake of leaving tons of incriminating evidence for the FBI to sort through.

Sherman is Pellicano's former lawyer.

At the end of the day, Pellicano suffered from a malady common to Hollywood's leading men. B.Y.O.B, or Believing Your Own Bullshit. He was Tony Pellicano! Running bud of Don Simpson and Bert Fields! A self-proclaimed genius at forensic audio analysis that counted many a prosecutor as his good friend (after Pellicano said whatever was needed to be said in front of a jury)!

I hate to give advice, because half the time I don't follow my own. But the next time you, dear reader, think that you know more than the next guy on something that's not going to contribute to the betterment of the human race, or you think that you can get away with something after the fallacy of your first supposition has been exposed, think of Anthony Pellicano.

He's sitting in the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles on a no-bail hold. He's preparing to defend himself at his upcoming trial. (Pellicano's current attorney, Steven Gruel, is just helping Pellicano file motions. Gruel lives in San Francisco and has no intention of repping 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.

Hey, when you're Tony Pellicano, what does some judge know?

- by Ross Johnson
April 20, 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. You can reach him by e-mail here.

 

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