Pellicano a 'thug,' attorney tells jury

In several examples, Saunders noted how "the enterprise worked in sync:" A few days after super agent Michael Ovitz paid Pellicano to find "embarrassing information" on two reporters -- Anita Busch and Bernard Weinraub -- Arneson rifled through the journalists' official confidential records. Phone company information that Turner obtained went to Pellicano around the time Arneson was accessing information from law enforcement databases on the reporters, Saunders said.

Saunders easily recapped his evidence that Pellicano is guilty of the wiretapping charges. "If I have to spend a lot of time explaining that defendant Pellicano is guilty of wiretapping," he told jurors, "then the government hasn't done its job or you haven't been paying attention."

For backup, he cited witnesses who testified that Pellicano played them wiretapped conversations or -- in the case of a former employee -- had her transcribe wiretap recordings. There was also, Saunders told the jury, "one indisputable wiretap recording in this trial" -- the intimate telephone conversation between Lisa Gores and her former brother-in-law, Tom Gores. Saunders noted that the first Pellicano search warrant didn't authorize the government to look for wiretaps. By the time a second warrant cleared investigators to hunt for wiretaps, Pellicano had cleaned house, Saunders explained. The Gores tape was found in Pellicano's office by accident, he said.

But the government ended up with something better, Saunders said -- Pellicano's secretly recorded conversations with clients and co-defendants, relating "the contents of the intercepted conversations that he is listening to."

Saunders noted that what Assistant U.S. Atty. Kevin Lally said at the start of the trial bore repeating -- those recordings make "defendant Pellicano the biggest government informant in this case."

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carla.hall@latimes.com