The manager of a billion-dollar hedge fund, the billionaire head of a buyout firm, and the ex-wives of a television actor and a major real estate developer all will be crucial witnesses at the racketeering trial beginning next week for Anthony Pellicano, the infamous Hollywood private eye.The four will testify that they paid Mr. Pellicano to wiretap their adversaries illegally and listened as he played back the results, the prosecutors say. Former employees and co-conspirators will testify that he built a network of corrupt police officers and telephone-company workers to live up to his image as someone “who reliably obtained information that other investigators could not,” according to a 129-page trial brief filed late Thursday.

Prosecutors have zeroed in on a dozen matters to make their case, apparently setting aside cases involving such onetime Pellicano clients as Chris Rock and Courtney Love and the actor Sylvester Stallone, who Mr. Pellicano investigated. Instead, the government says it will call, among others:

*Adam D. Sender, a noted art collector and the manager of Exis Capital, , a hedge fund at one time valued at $1.5 billion, to testify that Mr. Pellicano wiretapped a movie producer he accused of bilking him out of more than $1 million. Mr. Sender will admit listening to five to 10 wiretapped calls.

*Alec E. Gores, the wealthy head of the Gores Group LLC, a buyout company, to testify that Mr. Pellicano wiretapped his wife and his younger brother to confirm his suspicions about the nature of their relationship, and that he listened to wiretapped calls three times. The wife and brother will also testify.

*Sandra Will Carradine, the ex-wife of the actor Keith Carradine, to testify that she listened to Mr. Pellicano’s illegal recordings of Mr. Carradine’s phone calls during a property dispute in her divorce case.

*Susan Reddan Maguire, the ex-wife of Robert Maguire, a developer of skyscrapers in Los Angeles and many other cities, to testify that Mr. Pellicano wiretapped her ex-husband during their divorce. She will testify that Mr. Pellicano played intercepted calls for her including conversations Mr. Maguire had with his psychiatrist and girlfriend.

Mr. Pellicano, who is representing himself and remains jailed without bail, faces trial alongside a former Los Angeles police detective, Mark Arneson; a retired phone-company worker, Rayford Earl Turner; a computer programmer, Kevin Kachikian; and a businessman, Abner Nicherie.

Mr. Arneson, prosecutors say, illegally searched law-enforcement databases some 2,500 times. Mr. Turner installed wiretaps. Mr. Kachikian designed and built some 50 devices for recording and speedily analyzing wiretapped calls – which he and Mr. Pellicano even tried to trademark under the name “Telesleuth.” Prosecutors say Mr. Nicherie was a minor player who hired Mr. Pellicano to wiretap an adversary and then personally translated the eavesdropped calls, many of them in Hebrew.

Talks between the government and Mr. Arneson, Mr. Turner and Mr. Nicherie did not produce any last-minute pleas this week. Mr. Kachikian, who is accused of destroying the Telesleuth software to stymie investigators, maintains he believed Mr. Pellicano intended to sell it only to law-enforcement agencies.

Terry Christensen, the head of a Hollywood law firm, will be tried separately on charges that he paid Mr. Pellicano $100,000 to wiretap the ex-wife of his biggest client, the billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, during a child-support dispute. Prosecutors still hope to use recordings of Mr. Pellicano and Mr. Christensen discussing the wiretaps as evidence of the wider conspiracy.

Source: The New York Times

Here’s a big surprise. The FBI is given the ability to obtain private information about US citizens without a warranr or judicial oversight through the use of so called “national security letters,” and abuses the privliege and violates the law.  The whole notion of federal law enforcement becomes mopre and more noxious by the day.

In the January issue of Reason (again), Julian Sanchez has a very interesting, and very disturbing, article about the increasingly sophisticated uses to which technology can be put in the search for illicit conduct (or, more accurately, conduct that someone in authority has decided ought to be illicit), and the serious risks that this poses for our privacy rights. I guess the moral of the story is to be careful not to peek on the internet that the local constabularly has decided on its own might constitute child pornography. Silly? You bet.

Jacob Sullum, of Reason Magazine, has posted this very insightful op-ed explaining why the 9th Circuit’s recent decision allowing the government to rifle through reams of electronic files in the pursuit of, presumably, Barry Bonds, is a bad omen for privacy rights.

Hat tip: Tom Kirkendall, of the always thought provoking Houston’s Clear Thinkers

There is a very interesting story up on ABC’s website ( I assume the story ran on 20/20, but I did not see it) about the random street murder of a woman in Philadelphia (my home town) in May 2005. The story recounts the efforts of Phialdelphia police to track the killer using variously placed outdoor surveillance cameras. Some at the Post Office near where the crime occurred, some from the parking garage across the street, and others from various banks, department stores and the like. The story of how the Police pieced together what happened, where the path by which the suspect fled and more is a fascinating bit of forensics. I was as appalled as any other Philadelphian when this crime occurred. The randomness of it was chilling. But still, reading the ABC story, I can’t help but think about how litlle of our lives are private anymore.