Private Detectives

After determining that eight members of the Los Angeles Police Department are moonlighting as private investigators, Police Chief William Bratton has ordered a study to determine whether his department can legally deny its officers that kind of outside work. In a letter to the Police Commission released Friday, Bratton also recommended that the department gather more information about officers who moonlight so that their superiors can decide whether to grant them a work permit.

As federal authorities move closer to issuing new charges in the Anthony Pellicano investigation, a dozen people -- including the ex-wife of billionaire Kirk Kerkorian -- are weighing civil lawsuits against the indicted private eye, his alleged accomplices and their former employers. In recent interviews, attorneys representing potential plaintiffs also said they may target law firms and celebrities who hired Pellicano.

Los Angeles Police Commission members on Tuesday questioned whether LAPD officers should continue to be allowed to work off-hours as private investigators, with commission President John W. Mack expressing "serious reservations" about a practice he said "raises highly questionable ethical issues." The commission has asked the department and the Los Angeles city attorney to determine whether it can prohibit officers from working as private investigators. LAPD Cmdr. Kenneth O.

A judge ruled Wednesday that prominent entertainment attorney Terry N. Christensen can continue to represent billionaire Kirk Kerkorian in a bitter child-support dispute with his ex-wife, despite the lawyer's indictment in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping case. Attorneys for Lisa Bonder Kerkorian argued that Christensen should be disqualified from the case because he was indicted last month on wiretapping and conspiracy charges.

Los Angeles police did not need any fancy computer program the time they turned the tables on private investigator Anthony Pellicano and secretly taped him in one of their own station houses. Pellicano had requested a meeting with the police detectives investigating his client -- accused "limousine rapist" John Gordon Jones -- so they told him to come to the Hollywood station at 1 p.m. on Dec. 9, 1998.

A Los Angeles City Council member warned LAPD officials Thursday that they must ban officers from moonlighting as private investigators, or he will push the council to do so. "We need to ban all outside work as private investigators. We need to ban officers working for private investigators," Councilman Jack Weiss said at a meeting of the council's Public Safety Committee.

A Valencia businessman admitted Friday to conspiring with Anthony Pellicano to illegally dig up information about a teenager who had accused him of sexual assault, becoming the latest witness cooperating in the federal probe of the indicted private eye. "I hired Mr. Pellicano because he told me he could listen in" to the young woman's phone calls, a shaken George Kalta, 37, told U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer, as he entered his guilty plea. "That was the only reason I hired Mr. Pellicano."

Several weeks ago, after federal agents had been investigating prominent entertainment attorney Bert Fields for more than two years, his attorneys and federal prosecutors found some common ground: It did not make sense for the two sides to immediately go to war in court. So, they agreed to extend the deadline for prosecutors to decide whether to file charges against the 76-year-old Fields, one of the most successful lawyers in Hollywood.

Anthony Pellicano's attorney on Monday challenged the federal government's search of the indicted private eye's office, claiming that authorities misled the courts about their reasons for going after the investigator's records.

A former Los Angeles police sergeant invoked his 5th Amendment rights Friday, refusing to answer questions about an alleged scheme to extort $100,000 in exchange for dropping a bookmaking investigation. During a court hearing on Eric Portocarrero's petition to overturn his bookmaking conviction, former Sgt. Mark Arneson refused to answer half a dozen questions, including whether he used his position to "interfere with the administration of justice" in the case.