pellicano notebook
And so it ends: The long local nightmare that was the Anthony Pellicano trial has ended with essentially the same whimpering inertia that marked its duration. Those early reports of Pellicano's convictions have fleshed out in the hours since: guilty as charged on 76 of 77 counts of racketeering, conspiracy, wiretapping, wire fraud and identity theft, yet acquitted of "a single count of unauthorized computer access," according to The New York Times. (His four co-defendants were convicted of racketeering and racketeering conspiracy.) Pellicano will be sentenced Sept. 24.
The LA Times's Carla Hall, meanwhile, has courtroom sketches:
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After having a
Bert Fields-shaped carrot dangled before them, Pellicano trial-watchers will be disappointed to learn the famed Scary Hollywood Lawyer will not be testifying. Reports
THR, Esquire: "Co-defendant Mark Arneson, a former LAPD sergeant, planned to call Fields, and the veteran entertainment attorney even showed up to court twice this week to take the stand. But he was never called, and today a spokesman for Fields said Arneson's attorney decided not to call him after all." With a witness list quickly running dry of A-list celebs and Hollywood power-players, we fear we'll soon go back to not caring again. Is there any way we can get someone fun on the stand? Maybe Bruce Vilanch in a "What, Me Worry?" T-shirt? [
THR Esq.]
pellicano notebook
The
Anthony Pellicano saga accidentally became interesting again when a disgruntled hedge-funder testifying Tuesday in the private investigator's wiretapping trial recounted that one time Pellicano offered to whack a producer who ran off with his money. After a $1.1 million investment with talent agent-turned-producer
Aaron Russo resulted in exactly no movies and a full year of Russo's evasions, Exis Capital owner
Adam Sender turned to Pellicano upon lawyer
Bert Fields' recommendations. After the jump, a
courtroom report in
The NY Times and
phone recordings at
The Huffingon Post reveal how
that could have gone better.
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The Bert Fields Chronicles. Chapter the Third: The Fifth Amendmenting: HuffPo's Allison Hope Weiner stands by the story she broke about Scary Hollywood Lawyer Bert Fields taking the Fifth at the Pellicano trial. Standing in direct conflict to
Fields's rep's statement to us that Fields had not received so much as a Hanukkah card from the government "in five years," Weiner reports that prosecutor Daniel Saunders "said again this afternoon that the government had been notified by Mr. Fields' counsel of his intent to take the Fifth Amendment if called to testify." Saunders added that "Mr. Fields invocation of the 5th would be improper because the statute of limitations has long run on any of Mr. Pellicano's alleged crimes with respect to Bert Fields." [
HuffPo]
pellicano notebook
We just got off the phone with Lonnie Soury, a rep for Greenberg Glusker Fields, who tells us there's nothing to HuffPo's report that Bert Fields would be taking the Fifth at the Pellicano trial. Soury tells us that "Bert has not talked to the government in five years," that he has "not been called as a witness," and that if he is, "he will testify. He won't be taking the Fifth. He has nothing to hide...That comes from Bert himself." Where, then, did HuffPo reporter Allison Hope Weiner get the idea that Fields would be taking the Fifth? According to Deadline Hollywood Daily's own "Extra! Extra! Bert Fields Has Nothing to Hide!" story, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders told the judge at a pre-trial hearing today that "one of our witnesses" would plead the Fifth. A Pellicano attorney asked who, and Saunders replied, "Bert Fields." Developing...
pellicano notebook
A round-up of several delicious developments in the Anthony Pellicano Wiretapping Trial of the Century:
· The biggest news by far is that the Scary Hollywood Lawyer at the center of this sordid affair, Bert Fields, has invoked the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination. Unfortunately for Fields, no amount of scarily worded cease-and-desists printed on firm letterhead and delivered by Krav Maga-trained assassin-couriers will serve to lessen the culpability implied by such a bold legal action. [HuffPo]
UPDATE: Bert Fields will not be taking the Fifth, and "has nothing to hide," a rep tells us.
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unauthorized biographies
The now-peaceful world of onetime international megastar Tom Cruise, who had recently settled in to a quiet life of running a studio that could produce the kind of personal, little-seen vehicles that would help reduce his public profile enough to free him up to attend Redskins games and personally accompany daughter Suri to her ball-crawl romps at the Celebrity Centre's in-house Gymboree, has been temporarily rocked by accusations made in the new Andrew Morton tell-all Tom Cruise: An Unauthorised Biography, explosive excerpts from which were published in The Daily Mail this weekend. Scary Hollywood Lawyer and Designated Protector of the Cruise Brand Bert Fields was already hurling himself upon the grenades Morton had lobbed in the direction of his prized client (whom the author says has ascended to the position of the vice-pope of Scientology), especially a headline-grabbing, "sick and bizarre" section that claims some Scientologists believe that Suri is L. Ron Hubbard's baster-baby, according to the Mail:
[Fields] criticised a passage in which Morton claims some "fanatical" Scientologists believed Suri Cruise was actually the result of a sperm donation by Scientology's dead founder, L. Ron Hubbard.
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tom cruise
Hollywood Interrupted recently published a chapter from a "book-in-progress" by
Anthony Pellicano-heavy/gay porn producer/general skeazebag-about-town Paul Barresi. In it, Barresi writes of the time a gay hustler known as Big Red approached him between takes on a porn set, offering up many anecdotes of lusty, same-sex encounters with paying celebrities, most notably among them a detailed account of a wrestling mat tryst with
Tom Cruise. (The chapter is
here, though you'll find yourself rummaging under the kitchen sink for industrial solvents and SOS pads to scrub yourself with once you're done.) The Scoop approached Scary Hollywood Lawyer Bertram "Bert" Fields for
his response:
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tom cruise
FindLaw columnist Julie Hilden asks the
Tom Cruise Legal Question That Dares Not Speak Its Name, using the occasion of t
he recent South Park episode in which an animated, fictional Cruise quite literally finds himself "Trapped in the Closet" to wonder if the actor could (or even should) sue over the show's thinly veiled (OK, completely transparent) questions about his sexuality. Hilden raises this fascinating parallel argument about whether being accused of being gay should even be considered defamatory:
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tom cruise
Today's Page Six reports that the beautiful friendship between
Tom Cruise and
Steven Spielberg may be over, as the director was less than pleased that Cruise used the
War of the Worlds publicity tour to evangelize for Scientology and personally—
personally! God, that never gets old—launch an invasion against the harmful street drug Ritalin, which Spielberg thinks has helped children he knows. (We shudder to think what would happen to the market for Vicodin should the Scientologists succeed in removing this important gateway drug from Hollywood.) Cruise's lawyer,
frequent Defamer
penpal Bert Fields, got wind of the story and
immediately fired off one of his signature love notes:
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media
The LAT profiles industry uber-lawyer Skip Brittenham, who, it turns out, is more than merely one of the industry's most powerful behind-the-scenes players. ("All roads lead to Skip" declares Sony's Amy Pascal! "If you're going to have just one new Lew Wasserman this year, make it Skip Brittenham!" says Harvey Weinstein of the
The Weinstein Company Gazette! etc etc.) He's also a dedicated dad, devoted fisherman, and, it seems, an amateur comedian. Humanizes the
Times:
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Defamer
Moments after grumpy, 168-year-old Viacom mogul 
Defamer's Special Liaison to 