real-life Hollywood drama featuring sex, lies and tons of money, is missing one essential: a tape.
Alleged wiretaps of a billionaire's ex-wife that led to criminal charges against prominent lawyer Terry Christensen and notorious private eye Anthony Pellicano are nowhere to be found.
A prosecutor suggested as the trial opened Thursday that the government didn't find the tapes because Pellicano allegedly recorded them away from his office.
But Christensen's attorney told the jury they will hear no wiretaps because there were none.
"You will hear outright lies by Mr. Pellicano," defense attorney Patty Glaser said of recorded conversations between Christensen and Pellicano which the government plans to play for jurors. "Never once is there a mention of wiretapping."
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Lally told jurors that Pellicano's business was wiretapping and suggested that and his tough-guy reputation were the reasons Christensen chose him for the high-stakes child-support case between billionaire MGM mogul Kirk Kerkorian and ex-wife Lisa Bonder Kerkorian.
Prosecutors say Christensen paid Pellicano thousands of dollars to wiretap phones of Lisa Bonder Kerkorian in 2002.
Lally said Pellicano often used code in his files and his conversations and a constant code word was "omerta," the Sicilian word for silence. One file in the Bonder Kerkorian case was dubbed "Lisa Bonder omerta," he said.
"It was a case you will hear defendant Christensen refer to as a war," Lally told jurors.
The child-support case involved a girl fathered either by Kerkorian or movie producer Steve Bing.
Lally told jurors that Bonder Kerkorian lied by telling the billionaire the child was his. They were married and divorced in the space of a month in what Lally referred to as "a legally contracted marriage" after Kerkorian accepted that he was the father.
But in truth, Lally said, Bonder Kerkorian had taken a DNA sample from one of Kerkorian's older children and submitted it to testing to prove the baby was his. The attorney said later tests showed movie producer Bing was the biological father of Kira Kerkorian.
In a separate case earlier this year, Pellicano, 64, was convicted of illegal wiretapping and racketeering, helping attorneys to get dirt on various celebrities for use in court cases.
In the current case, Lally said Christensen entered the scene when Kerkorian and his ex-wife became embroiled in the child-support battle. The mogul, now 91, initially agreed to give her $50,000 a month, Lally said, but she later returned to court demanding $320,000 a month so her daughter could live in the style of a billionaire's child.
He said Kerkorian hired Christensen, head of a high-powered legal firm, to challenge the request and ensure that Bonder Kerkorian would not keep coming back for more money.
He said Christensen's strategy was to identify the true father and to have him start contributing to child support.
"It was a strategy that escalated into wiretapping," Lally said.
He said Christensen paid Pellicano $25,000 up front and promised $100,000 more if he could identify the true biological father.
To complicate matters further, Lally said that Bing was also a client of Pellicano.
"There are 34 recordings that go over six hours and you are going to hear them in the next week," Lally told jurors, describing them as conversations between Christensen and Pellicano about information that "caused them to cackle about what they were learning."
"You will hear Pellicano refer to himself as a soldier doing the bidding of Christensen," he said. He promised they would hear the investigator tell the lawyer, "Be very careful because there's only one way for me to know this."
Glaser, a top member of Christensen's law firm, spoke for nearly two hours but her statement returned repeatedly to a theme: "There are no wiretaps of Lisa Bonder. Everything else is circumstantial."
She said Christensen had no idea that his conversations with Pellicano were being recorded and said, "Pellicano had his own agenda, the Bing agenda."
She said that Christensen was a victim of Pellicano, that the investigator may have digitally altered the tapes of his phone conversations with the lawyer. She concluded that there will be no proof that Christensen agreed to wiretap Bonder Kerkorian and said that Kerkorian himself may come forward to testify in the trial.