The Plumbers. NYT's David Carr: Why did Conde Nast hire one of accused Hollywood tapper/private eye Anthony Pellicano's "technicians?"

On Thursday, it was the turn of Wayne Reynolds, a close associate of and a former audio technician for Mr. Pellicano. When he took the stand, he was asked where he now works.

“I have two sources of employment. I work for Condé Nast Publications and I serve in the Marine Corps Reserve,” he said. At Condé Nast, he said, “I manage the information technology security department.”

I later checked and, indeed, Mr. Reynolds has a Condé Nast phone number in New York (he did not return my call) and is listed in the company directory. Now, Mr. Reynolds may be a whiz with technology — he testified with a great deal of specificity about the black boxes used to record intercepted calls — but his testimony raised a troubling question: why would Condé Nast hire him?

Plenty of interesting information came out in court. Mr. Reynolds was first questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the Los Angeles offices of Condé Nast early in 2003. Mr. Pellicano, who is serving as his own lawyer, asserted in his cross-examination that Mr. Reynolds had bragged about bugging his own supervisor — no name was mentioned — at Condé Nast and that Mr. Reynolds had provided him with a prepublication copy of a Vanity Fair article (widely assumed to be about the Hollywood “superagent” Michael S. Ovitz).

Mr. Reynolds emphatically denied both assertions, but just to thicken the plot, a story about the Pellicano case in the June 2006 issue of Vanity Fair written by Bryan Burrough and John Connolly stated that Mr. Reynolds had become a government witness, but it did not say where he worked.

When I phoned Condé Nast about Mr. Reynolds, the company reacted as if I were a dead fish left on its dashboard. A spokeswoman eventually confirmed that Mr. Reynolds had worked at the company in both Los Angeles and New York for “a number of years” and was still an employee, but the company had nothing to say about the accusation that he wiretapped one of its executives.

A spokeswoman for Vanity Fair, Beth Kseniak, said, “If Mr. Ovitz did in fact obtain a copy of an article prepublication, he did not ask for any changes. We never heard from him.” She said she had no comment when asked about Condé Nast’s decision to employ someone who worked for a man who was accused of being in the business of terrorizing journalists. ...

How long until the Pellicano case becomes a movie??

Posted by Laura at April 7, 2008 08:37 AM