Jury told of Pellicano secrecy, methods

Offering new and colorful details about the clandestine world of indicted private investigator Anthony Pellicano, his former assistant told a federal jury Friday that his once-thriving business relied on high-tech snooping and delving into confidential police records to dredge up nasty secrets for his clients.

Testifying under a grant of immunity, model Tarita Virtue described Pellicano’s now-shuttered Sunset Strip offices, which she said included a “war room” where as many as half a dozen computers -- with a sophisticated software program dubbed “TeleSleuth” -- captured wiretapped conversations of the investigator’s targets.

Those conversations, Virtue said, would then be transcribed or summarized in painstaking detail so they could be used by Pellicano in his business, which catered to the rich and famous.

Pellicano is on trial with four codefendants on charges including racketeering, conspiracy and wiretapping. All five men have pleaded not guilty.

Although Pellicano operated under extraordinary secrecy, Virtue testified under questioning by Assistant U.S. Atty. Daniel Saunders, the private investigator took her into his confidence within weeks of hiring her in early 2000.

Starting out as a $30,000-a-year investigator-in-training, Virtue said, she soon gained enough access to Pellicano’s operation to be given passwords for his closely guarded computers. As such, she said, she learned that the software would mark the exact time of wiretapped statements and translate telephone touch-tones into numbers so that Pellicano could obtain valuable confidential financial information, such as a target’s bank account or credit card numbers.

As Pellicano sat impassively, Virtue described other steps she said he took to secure his business from everyone, including law enforcement.

For example, she said that the door to each room in his suite of offices could be secured with a punch-code lock because he believed the extra security would prevent the premises from being searched if he was ever raided by the FBI.

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greg.krikorian@latimes.com