Hollywood's near-scandal

The Pellicano case is now in the hands of the jury - and Allison Hope Weiner, who has been covering the trial for the Huffington Post, sums up her feelings this way:

The prosecutors and the defense attorneys have shaken hands and I'm sitting in the hallway wondering about how so many people who broke the law walked away from this mess without so much as a scratch.

That's really the nub of this thing. For all the chatter about what big-time lawyers and their celebrity clients may have known about the wiretapping, the government could never get beyond Pellicano and his coterie of assistants (and now co-defendants). Nobody knew nuttin.

The people who abused the system and paid millions to keep the Pellicano machine functioning - and that would be the people who basically make up the very top echelons of society on both coasts and particularly here in Los Angeles including many of the town's top attorneys - all of those guys and gals are never going to do anything illegal again because they now know that they'll end up punished. Oh wait, that's not true. They now know that they're free to go and find themselves another criminal enterprise and get back to business as usual since none of them got prosecuted.

All [prosecutor Daniel] Saunders had to do to understand how little effect this trial has had on the people who hired Mr. Pellicano is to spend one evening at a Westside party listening to them chat about how they're still hiring many of the attorneys who they know clearly used Mr. Pellicano for wiretapping. Some of these wealthy movers and shakers in Los Angeles think, if anything, that those attorneys that used Mr. Pellicano are the kind of advocates they want working for them -it's almost as if using Mr. Pellicano has been come a calling card for additional business for some of these litigators.

So we're left with the old "nothing ever changes in this town" lament. It almost reminds me of those old-time mob trials where the thugs either just take the 5th or express amazement that their businesses had been infiltrated by a criminal element. Shocking!

The thing that's really annoying about this case and seems to be lost on everyone is that the people who perverted this system along with Mr. Pellicano--those rich and famous upstanding citizens of this community--very few of them have publicly expressed any remorse for what they'd done to their enemies or in some cases, even admitted to doing anything wrong at all.