It says a lot about the week that was in the Anthony Pellicano racketeering trial that material involving boldface names was so sparse that a number of reporters and bloggers found themselves fascinated by the news that CAA uber-agent Bryan Lourd was driving a mere 1997 Ford in 2001. But the real interest has come from the stories of the humbler citizens who got swept up in the mess.

The prosecution's opening argument, as it turns out, neglected to forecast just how many tears would be shed on the stand. In each session, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Lally and Saunders run their finger down the pages of their three-ring binders and ask their questions with a certain clinical reserve--but the witnesses rummage through their memories, now reduced to page references and overhead projections of court documents, with real pain.

(Loyola Marymount law professor--and sometime federal prosecutor--Laurie Levenson finds the government's presentation thus far to be handled "without any missteps by a very professional prosecution team, and the net result is [Pellicano seems] exactly the guy the prosecution says he is. But having said that, we haven't heard all of the prosecution's case"--the government says it has about two weeks to go once the trial resumes Tuesday--"and we haven't heard any of the defense case, so there's a long way to go in the trial.")

One notable hanky moment in the witness box featured sometime Pellicano employee Tarita Virtue, she of an October, 2003 spread in Maxim magazine, who tearfully told Pellicano she was terrified of him during their workdays together. Another threnody featured sometime record exec Rob Pfeifer, who seemed most afraid of--himself.

The story of what Pfeifer (quite justifiably, it sounds from his account) calls a tumultuous relationship with model-actress-escort Erin Finn was revisited by each of the former lovers with an unexpected grace and forgiveness.

Finn, who was the subject of a Pellicano "investigation" as her relationship with Pfeifer went to hell and back (partly due to a court case in which her testimony helped torpedo his career), described how she quite coincidentally took his name down one day in 1997 when she was answering phones for a dancer friend. Seems she'd just been searching online for an album from his former, Cleveland-based band, Human Switchboard. It was a collection of angry-wonk love songs that Finn, then 26 to Pfeifer's early 41, "had listened to since high school".

Compounding the irony of a band with such a name figuring in a wiretapping trial is the name of the album, Who's Landing In My Hangar, and two Pfeiffer-penned songs "Don't Follow Me Home", and "I Used To Believe In You". An organ-based garage band modeled on the Velvet Underground, the band peaked with that 1980 album, and Pfeifer ended up as an exec at various L.A.-based labels and web ventures, eventually undercutting his career --as Finn testified at the time and again this past week--with indulgences ranging from weed to methamphetamine. He had enough cash to pour some $220,000 into Pellicano's pocket as the p.i. did his usual snooping on Finn, who by then had started a business called Educated Escort.com. ("It was during the dot-com era", she explained in the trial's Holy Spitzer! moment, "It appealed to the socially awkward geek.")

The former lovers' closely sequenced testimony made it clear that Pfeifer had succumbed to a quite relatable form of human bondage, as it was revealed that the statuesque and self-possessed blonde had been taking road trips for hire with high rollers, which she finally confessed to Pfeifer in December of 1999. "And before that you just thought she was your girlfriend?" asked Chad Hummel, defense attorney for Pellicano's LAPD information conduit Mark Arneson, "Your girlfriend is telling you she's a prostitute and you don't remember how it came out?"

Hummel's the defense attorney who most often takes witnesses to the woodshed (though fellow defense attorney Adam Braun's endless and dryly strategic cross-examination of ex-FBI agent Jeff Edwards, the bureau's computer-geek-in chief, almost made the assembled media cry), and had so peppered Pfeifer that the witness ultimately had to be handed a tissue as he said, "I hope the cliche of the truth will set you free holds true. What I have to do is raise my son." Finally, Pfeiffer was moved (or canny) enough to look over miserably at Judge Dale S. Fischer, who's anything but a pushover, and wish out loud that "she gets to know me" and that she would discern, as she determines whether he's been a good enough witness to merit leniency, that he was "remorseful".

Both Lourd and Huvane, there to testify so the prosecution might set the table for describing Pellicano's work for their arch-enemy and ex-CAA boss Mike Ovitz, who's not a prosecutorial target--were quite blithe upon arrival. They cordially greeted a small pack of equally cordial reporters before their fifteen minutes each on the stand. Both explained that their licenses listed not their home address, but the then-CAA headquarters, due to security concerns, and Lourd -though quick to correct this birth year from 1950 to 1960--seemed to have no sense of mortification at driving the `97 Ford "utility vehicle" in 2001.

Quite right, too. A moment's reflection serves to remind us that 2001 was a year when rap gods like Puffy could best represent with big honking SUV's. (Exhibit A: the Lincoln Navigator in which Puff Daddy and J Lo zoomed through Manhattan in one night in 1999 when they fled a club after shots rang out. The rap star, born Sean Combs and more recently self-renamed as P Diddy, was a major newsmaker last week after a misbegotten and later retracted Los Angeles Times story--derived in apt from bogus documents from a jailbird named James Sabatino--sought to implicate him in the 1994 wounding of rapper Tupac Shakur.) The then-Puffy was acquitted of gun and bribery charges by a jury, but the point is that in `01, before rap and hip hop largely lost their way as bellwethers for Hollywood's pop culture-savvy operatives, Lourd's car was cool. A mobile monolith, probably black--the buttoned-up CAA declined to name the make and model-- gas-sucking hunk of Detroit iron, after four years of museum-quality detailing, was a perfectly hip ride in those days. (Remember that pre-Prius world, when Humvees were stupid fresh for ten minutes? Heck, Snoop Dog arrived for at least one function in an armored van with gun ports.)

Pellicano, in recent days more given to sardonic grins than earlier in the trial, arrived at the podium for cross-examination looking cagey, asking Huvane to name the founders of CAA (thus Ovitz's name was heard once again in the courtroom) and wondering if the agent had ever hired an investigator. The government quickly objected ("Irrelevant") and was sustained, as they were--after the day's longest pregnant pause--when Huvane was quickly asked if he knew the name Richard DiSabatino.

The implication Pellicano was surely trying to build, perhaps based on his friendly acquaintanceship with DiSabatino at he time, was that CAA had their own ways and means of evening the odds when conflicts arose in town.

"I'm not accustomed to commenting about clients either future or past," said DiSabatino, amiably enough when reached to speak about the query, though he did confirm reports that he had been retained by Nicole Kidman's lawyer when Tom Cruise, represented by Dennis Wasser, was "To answer hypothetically, I am known in the community for [electronic] countermeasures--including sweeping for wire taps, transmitters, what have you."

The investigator, whose primary field is the kind of national security and government agency work that caused Michael Mann to initiate a (now-dormant) project on his career did confirm that he'd consulted for Nicole Kidman when she and Tom Cruise (represented by Dennis Wasser, who's collaborated with Pellicano co-defendant Terry Christensen as describd in our earlier post) were divorcing. "So I put her on scramblers immediately," DiSabatino told ABC News,. "So that, uh, if there was anybody who was eavesdropping, it wasn't gonna happen."

Trained as an en expert in using and foiling surveillance hardware and a frequent consultant to government agencies, DiSabatino
(Though he's by now consulted on a number of projects, including Heat after contacts within the Drug Enforcement Agency recommended him to Mann, DiSabatino backed into the film business only after Robert DeNiro, impressed with his techniques,

Explained to me what you do for foreign governments and what you do for people why can't you do it for people in Hollywood and if I said well if it was high profile enough where I could be of service to them to attack it more in a strategic team manner on an intelligence basis versus doing it like a p.i."

Pellicano, during his heyday, sought his operatives out ("I think it was that I'm from back east, with an Italian name," jokes DiSabatino, "a drink or dinner with him was totally amusing, but I look back in hindsight and thank god I never did any work with him.
After he got divorced, I ran into him more often. I think I was one of the only single guys he knew. We befriended each other, though you can never be his friend. He's the type of guy who looked at everything compartmentalized; he never told anybody the whole thing on anything. So it just made it easy to go out to dinner with him because he never talked shop.

Most people doing intelligence gathering, p.i. work are only as good as their contacts, as good as the street" Seeing the self-proclaimed Sicilian p.i.'s track record, "I had thought [Pellicano] must have strong contacts, must have the city sewn up---and now I understand why the guy never left his office; now it all comes out."

All this leaves DiSabatino somewhat mystified as to how his name was brought up. Ineptly acting as his own defense counsel, says DiSabatino, Pellicano "doesn't seem as sharp as he once was--doesn't seem sharp at all." He then reflects, "I am also known in the community for my countermeasures work--sweeping for wiretaps and transmitters and what have you. If Huvane were to answer, it could almost be taken as detrimental to Pellicano--you never know. Hypothetically, it would have been, `Yeah, I hired him to do countermeasures for guys like you."

(CAA's young Turks in 2000. From left, Richard Lovett, Kevin Huvane, Doc O'Connor and Bryan Lourd; photo by Chris Weeks/Getty Images)