By Jordan Vega · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Dan Cox on FishbowlLA, December 2008
In mid-December 2008, former LA Times journalist Anita Busch addressed Anthony Pellicano at his federal sentencing for wiretapping, wire fraud, and racketeering. Busch had been a primary target of Pellicano’s surveillance operation, including the notorious 2002 fish-and-bullet-hole-in-windshield episode at her car. The original FishbowlLA framing, drawing on private investigator Paul Barresi’s courtroom report, captured Busch’s “last laugh” at the man who had spent years intimidating her. Judge Dale Fischer was set to deliver the sentence later that day.
Then
The Pellicano investigation had been one of the most-cited LA-criminal-justice and Hollywood-press-freedom stories of the 2000s. Pellicano had been the Hollywood private investigator who had operated for years out of his Wilshire Boulevard office, conducting wiretapping and surveillance operations on behalf of entertainment-industry clients. The federal investigation that produced his 2008 conviction had documented an extensive pattern of illegal surveillance directed at journalists, lawyers, and other parties involved in entertainment-industry disputes.
Anita Busch had been one of the primary journalist targets. Her LA Times reporting on Pellicano-adjacent matters in the early 2000s had produced the famous June 2002 surveillance-intimidation episode: a dead fish, a rose, and a sign reading “stop” were left on her car windshield, which had been smashed by a bullet hole. The intimidation campaign had been part of the underlying federal case.
Pellicano’s 2008 sentencing came after a multi-year federal trial process. The wiretapping, wire-fraud, and racketeering convictions covered an extensive period of illegal-surveillance activity. The court proceeding had drawn substantial press attention; Paul Barresi, who provided the courtroom report quoted in the original FishbowlLA piece, was a longtime LA-region private investigator with substantial Pellicano-case background knowledge.
Dan Cox’s FishbowlLA framing was structurally sympathetic to Busch. The piece captured the courtroom confrontation as a substantive vindicating moment for a journalist who had spent years navigating the consequences of Pellicano’s intimidation campaign.
Now
Anthony Pellicano was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. He served the sentence at a federal facility and was released in 2019. Anita Busch’s lawsuit against multiple entertainment-industry figures connected to the Pellicano surveillance operation — particularly her case against Michael Ovitz — has gone through multiple rounds of litigation across the years since the original sentencing; the broader civil-litigation record has continued to produce documented disclosures about the Pellicano operation’s scope and clients.
Anita Busch has continued in journalism and as a recurring source for documentary work about the Pellicano case. The 2014 BBC documentary Hollywood Confidential: The Anthony Pellicano Story and various subsequent podcast and documentary projects have continued to revisit the case.
Paul Barresi has continued in LA-region private-investigator work across the years. His subsequent reporting and commentary on Pellicano-related matters has been a recurring presence in coverage of the case’s continued legal aftermath.
The broader category of journalist-targeted surveillance — which the Pellicano case had been one of the most-cited American examples of — has been substantially elevated as a press-freedom issue across the years since. The 2018 federal indictment of the Lacey-Larkin-and-Backpage operation (covered in batch 6 in the Ashton Kutcher / Village Voice Media piece) was part of the broader cycle of federal scrutiny of entertainment-and-classified-ads-industry illegal operations; the Pellicano precedent has been one of the recurring reference points in subsequent press-freedom discussions about surveillance-and-journalism conflicts.
The 2008 piece reads now as a documented moment when the LA Hollywood-investigation-and-press-freedom story arc was reaching one of its most substantive conclusions — Busch’s courtroom confrontation with Pellicano captured in real time, just before the federal sentencing that ended the active criminal phase of the case.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.
More from the FishbowlLA archive
- California Watch’s April 2011 ‘On Shaky Ground’ investigation — seismic-safety failure in California public schools
- CPJ’s 2011 Impunity Index — Iraq, Mexico, and the documented unsolved-murders-of-journalists list
- The October 2011 John and Ken boycott — KFI, Clear Channel, and immigrant-rights advocacy