A Valencia businessman admitted Friday to conspiring with Anthony Pellicano to illegally dig up information about a teenager who had accused him of sexual assault, becoming the latest witness cooperating in the federal probe of the indicted private eye.
"I hired Mr. Pellicano because he told me he could listen in" to the young woman's phone calls, a shaken George Kalta, 37, told U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer, as he entered his guilty plea. "That was the only reason I hired Mr. Pellicano."
The plea makes Kalta the fourth person to acknowledge that they hired -- or helped -- Pellicano to illegally investigate others using wiretaps, confidential police record searches or other methods.
Once one of Los Angeles' best-known private investigators, Pellicano is at the center of a wide-ranging FBI investigation that has shaken Hollywood and its legal community. To date, 13 people have been charged, including an entertainment attorney, a record company executive, two former police officers accused of selling him confidential data and several telephone company employees.
Without exception, the many attorneys and celebrities who hired Pellicano over the years have said since his indictment that they were unaware that his alleged hardball tactics may have crossed the line into lawlessness.
But criminal defense attorney Leslie Abramson, representing Kalta, said outside court on Friday that Pellicano bragged to her client about listening in on other people's conversations and about having connections within law enforcement. The connections included "a contact" in the Los Angeles County district attorney's office and a police officer who he said could get him a district attorney's memo for $5,000.
"He bragged about how he did this [wiretapping] for other clients," Abramson said. "He said that is why people pay him so much."
Abramson said Pellicano also boasted of his celebrity clients, including Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson.
Kalta, owner of a lighting manufacturing company, was charged by the district attorney's office in early 2002 with sexual battery by restraint and false imprisonment.
County prosecutors said his victim was an 18-year-old woman who was assaulted in October 2001, when she was making a delivery to Kalta's Canoga Park store.
Kalta eventually pleaded guilty to felony assault without a deadly weapon and was granted probation. The charge was later reduced to a misdemeanor and dismissed, Abramson said.
