Celebrity Private Eye Goes to Trial in Los Angeles

It started with a dead fish left on the windscreen of a reporter's car. Now, almost six years later a case that has by turns enthralled and terrified some of the biggest names in Hollywood has finally come to trial.

Today, jury selection got under way in a Los Angeles court in the trial of private investigator Anthony Pellicano and four other defendants on charges of racketeering and wiretapping.

But what might have been a humdrum case of a private eye who went too far in finding out about his clients' adversaries has became a cause celebrity as the names of some of those clients became known.

A jury questionnaire designed to weed out any conflict of interest among potential jurors gives a hint of the flavor and the reach of the case. The document includes a list of 244 names of "individuals related to this case". It is gossip columnist heaven.

Sylvester Stallone, Keith Carradine, Garry Shandling, Chris Rock, Steven Segal, Hollywood super agent Mike Ovitz, studio big shots Brad Grey and Ron Meyer, and Tom Cruise's long-time lawyer Bertram Fields all feature on the list.

But just what their connection is to Pellicano's investigative work remains obscure, and whether any of them will actually testify at the trial is unknown.

The air of unpredictability surrounding the trial has been heightened by the long delay in bringing the case to court, and by the defendant's decision to jettison his lawyers and represent himself.

Shuffling into court clad in prison-issue green clothing, carrying his papers in a plastic bag, the 63-year-old Pellicano cuts a far different figure to the fixture of the Hollywood circuit, friends with Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Tom Cruise, who always prided himself on being immaculately turned out in the sharpest Italian silk suits.

Deemed a flight risk, he has been denied bail and has to work on his case from his cell.

It is a complex, mammoth case, involving thousands of hours of transcripts, a phone tapping computer program called Telesleuth and an insight into the workings of Hollywood's rich and powerful.

Pellicano and four others - a computer wiz, a former LAPD officer, a Las Vegas businessman and a phone company employee - are accused of illegally bugging telephone calls and passing the information they gathered to interested parties.

During his more than 20-year career as the go-to private eye in Hollywood, Pellicano assembled an impressive list of interested parties who might want to hear what he had found out. But the case has faltered on whether Pellicano's clients knew that he was gaining his information illegally.

Almost all of them have denied any knowledge of Pellicano's illegal techniques, including phone bugging. The exception to date has been Die Hard director John McTiernan, who was charged with deliberately lying to investigators about his knowledge that Pellicano was illegally bugging one of his former producers.

Sandra Will Carradine, ex-wife of the actor Keith Carradine and ex-girlfriend of Pellicano, has also pleaded guilty to lying to the authorities about the investigators methods during her divorce from the actor. She is expected to testify at the trial.

The trial is expected to last eight weeks. If found guilty, Pellicano faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.