Jury begins deliberations in Pellicano wiretap case
The Hollywood private eye and an attorney for billionaire Kirk Kerkorian are accused of illegally bugging opponents in a child support case.
Jurors started deliberating today in the criminal trial of Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano and attorney Terry Christensen, who is accused of hiring the investigator to illegally wiretap his opponents in a child support court battle he was fighting for his billionaire client, Kirk Kerkorian.
Prosecutors in the case played for the jury 6 1/2 hours of recordings Pellicano secretly made of his phone calls with Christensen.
In their closing arguments this week, a federal prosecutor told the jury those recordings showed Christensen was a scheming conspirator in an illegal wiretap. Defense attorneys, on the other hand, said the same recordings proved Christensen was a clueless victim who knew of no crime.
Assistant U.S. Atty Daniel Saunders told the jury the recordings provided ample proof from Christensen's own mouth that he clearly knew of and was directing Pellicano's illegal taps into the phone conversations of Lisa Bonder Kerkorian, who was seeking $320,000 in monthly child support from the billionaire.
Pointing to a recording where Christensen tells Pellicano, "The people related to me don't want to do this," Assistant U.S. Atty. Daniel Saunders asked the jury: "Ladies and gentlemen, ask yourselves, what is the 'this'?"
"All the secrecy and omerta is not about what information they were getting, it's about how defendant Pellicano was getting it," Saunders said.
Christensen's attorney Patricia Glaser said in her closing argument that her client was "not running away from" the recordings, and that the contents of the conversations actually vindicated Christensen.
Glaser said the recordings showed Pellicano was lying to Christensen, and failing to convey critical information he should have known if Pellicano indeed was wiretapping Lisa Bonder Kerkorian. She also said Pellicano referred to many other sources, such as e-mails, files, records or spies in his conversations with Christensen.
"Ladies and gentlemen, context, and common sense. This is not a wiretap case," she said.
Prosecutors in their case called to the stand attorneys who represented Bonder Kerkorian in the child support matter, who testified that the information Pellicano was telling Christensen was from privileged attorney-client conversations that happened over the phone.
Prosecutors do not have any of the alleged wiretapped calls of Bonder Kerkorian, or transcripts or summaries of those calls.
Glaser said when Christensen and Pellicano used expressions such as "listen for" or "hear some more," they were merely using figures of speech to refer to the results of Pellicano's investigations.
Saunders, in his rebuttal argument today, called Christensen a "disgrace to his profession" and said Christensen was a lawyer that was not interested in fairness and justice, but only in winning at all costs, even if that meant breaking the law.
"You can let them know justice is not available to the highest bidder," Saunders said to the jury. He then gave Christensen and Pellicano the last word, playing the most incriminating excerpts from their phone conversations.
victoria.kim@latimes.com
