Oh, the tear-stained witness stand.
After a few days of dry testimony about telephone circuitry and software encryption, the tears flowed Friday in the federal wiretapping and racketeering trial of Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano and four co-defendants.
Former telephone company employee Teresa Wright finished a second emotional day describing her unauthorized phone record searches, the thousands of dollars she accepted for them and her agreement to help the government with its case against retired phone company technician Rayford Turner by taping her telephone conversations with him. (At every turn of testimony in this trial, someone is supposedly taping someone else for some reason.)
And former client Suzan Hughes told of hiring Pellicano in 1997 to investigate her then-husband, wealthy Herbalife founder Mark Hughes.
Pellicano "had given me an affirmative that my. . . ," she said, pausing as she teared up. "Mark had cheated on me."
Hughes, who wore her long, streaked blond hair pulled back, testified that she continued to pay Pellicano through her subsequent divorce proceedings and that the private detective continued to investigate her ex-husband. Hughes said that, at one point, on a visit to Pellicano's office, he played for her a tape of her sister's husband talking to Mark Hughes.
She said she heard her brother-in-law, whom she believed to be sympathetic to her, tell Mark Hughes, "I'm on your side."
Later, Chad Hummel, the defense attorney representing a co-defendant, former LAPD Sgt. Mark Arneson, quizzed Hughes on whether she knew the origins of the recording of her husband and brother-in-law.
"Did you ask Mr. Pellicano directly how he got it?" he asked.
"I believe so," she said. But she added that she couldn't remember his response. "I was in a state of shock," she said of her reaction to the recording. Hughes also said she never authorized Pellicano to wiretap her husband.
The Hughes' divorce was finalized in 1998. Suzan Hughes said she paid Pellicano the following year to investigate Darcy LaPier (who ended up becoming her ex-husband's next wife) because "I was concerned for my son's safety."
Mark Hughes was found dead in the bedroom of his Malibu home by LaPier in May 2000.
The Los Angeles County coroner's office ruled his death the result of an accidental, lethal combination of alcohol and an antidepressant.
