Private eye to the stars is guilty

The jury also delivered guilty verdicts against all four of Pellicano's co-defendants, a cast of characters who were decidedly un-Hollywood. There was Mark Arneson, the former LAPD police sergeant; Ray Turner, the former telephone company field technician; Kevin Kachikian, computer expert; and Abner Nicherie, a businessman-turned-nursing student who spent a good portion of the trial snoozing, his chin down on his chest.

"This case is not about Hollywood," the lead prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Atty. Daniel Saunders, told jurors in his closing arguments. "It's not about Sylvester Stallone . . . or Mike Ovitz or Brad Grey. This is a case about corruption, about cheating, about greed and arrogance and the subversion of the justice system. It just happened to take place in Hollywood."

The four co-defendants, who remain free on bail, are scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 24. Pellicano, meanwhile, was ordered to remain in federal custody until sentencing.

Jury foreman Terri Winbush, an L.A. Unified employee, said "justice has been served because people's lives, their identities, were violated."

As the prosecutors predicted, Pellicano's own secretly taped phone conversations -- played in court -- were some of the most incriminating evidence against him.

"He did a lot of code talking. . . . We figured it out," said Winbush of the taped phone conversations.

In an odd way, Pellicano's downfall started with a dead fish. It was left on a reporter's car and apparently intended as a cryptic threat and later linked to the private eye. That led to an FBI search of Pellicano's offices in 2002. The agents found explosives, which sent Pellicano to prison in November 2003 for a 30-month term for illegal possession. But the agents also stumbled upon something else during their search: a recording of a wiretapped phone conversation and tapes of phone conversations between Pellicano and his clients. The tapes caught Pellicano talking about wiretapping, prosecutors contended.

"I can't even listen to it all. It's too much," Pellicano told one client, action movie director John McTiernan, in a phone call, played in court. Prosecutors said they were discussing wiretaps on producer Charles Roven. "He'll call his secretary and she places calls for him and she may make 15 . . . calls. I've got to listen to every one of those to determine who he's calling for what."