On the telephone, the man and the woman plot to keep her husband from discovering their illicit romance. Only hours before, they had rendezvoused at a villa at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Who was the man they saw lurking outside? Her mind races:
Worst case, he had someone following me. So I went to a hotel -- big deal.
But it had to be her husband's doing, the man on the phone says:
Gotta be honest with you. Nobody else would follow you.
Still, their relationship was their secret, the woman insists:
This is the bottom line, Tommy. No one was in the room. No one knows what's going on.
These words, from a wiretap presented at private eye Anthony Pellicano's recently concluded trial, rang out eerily in a hushed courtroom -- the portal, ironically, to everyone knowing.
Lisa Gores was captured on that tape talking to her then-husband's brother, Tom Gores. Pellicano had wiretapped Lisa for her former husband, billionaire businessman Alec Gores.
With that wiretap evidence, and other secret recordings Pellicano made of his own phone conversations, federal prosecutors on May 15 won guilty verdicts against the private eye to the stars, effectively changing his handle to convicted wiretapper and racketeer.
But the Pellicano trial also opened a window onto a rarefied and creepy world in which that click on the line really did mean someone was listening.
In an age when people have moved on to worrying about identity theft, intrusions into medical files and how much those body imaging airport scanners really show, the trial brought back classic, movie-thriller paranoia: Am I being bugged?
Even with Pellicano convicted and his detective agency defunct, fear of the phone persists among those who know firsthand what it is like to be wiretapped.
"That kind of invasion really sticks with you," said movie and TV actor Keith Carradine -- over a phone -- from Iowa, where he is shooting the movie "Peacock."
Carradine's ex-wife, Sandra, pleaded guilty to lying about hiring Pellicano to snoop on her ex-husband amid a bitter 2001 child support dispute.
Pellicano tapped the phone line in the Airstream trailer where Carradine was living.
He also intimidated and harassed the actor's then-girlfriend, now wife, Hayley DuMond, and her family, Carradine said. Carradine and DuMond, also an actor, have a home in the San Fernando Valley now. "We have hard lines, but I don't trust them," Carradine said. "I don't have any kind of a serious business or personal conversation without thinking twice about what I'm saying."
