Ovitz said that he couldn’t speak for others, but that Pellicano “didn’t produce anything for us to even ask about. The lawyers hired him. We got nothing, zippo.” Ellis added, “We asked for a refund.” Ellis and Ovitz declined to say what they wanted to learn from Pellicano, or whether Ovitz had hired Pellicano to pursue Anita Busch. As for the stories about Pellicano’s ties to Illinois mobsters, Ovitz said that he never saw them. “To me—this is going to sound really stupid—but the couple of times I met him he seemed really out of shape. He was just a regular-looking middle-aged man. He didn’t look like those imposing guys on ‘The Sopranos’ or in ‘The Godfather.’ ”

Press accounts have suggested that Ovitz is being investigated in the wiretap scandal. Ovitz says that the stories about him “are basically not accurate.” The one “article that surprised me was the Ron Meyer article,” he said, a reference to a New York Times story saying that Meyer had visited Pellicano in prison and “urged Mr. Pellicano to ‘drop a dime on’ Mr. Ovitz.” Nothing, he believes, could have justified his former partner in urging Pellicano to claim that he had done something criminal. Ovitz insisted that he had no idea what his legal situation was; Ellis said that Ovitz was “a potential witness,” but suggested that he was neither a subject, like Fields, nor a target.

Ovitz and his lawyers are aware that he still has enemies in Hollywood. “I think that what I’ve learned at this stage of my life is that if I could do it again I’d absolutely do it differently,” Ovitz says. “But being in the agency business and starting a business at age twenty-six and building everything from scratch, I was as tough as I felt I needed to be, and probably tougher than I should have been.” Hatred of Ovitz seems undiminished by time. One major Hollywood figure says, “If Ovitz gets indicted, there will be parties. It will be the end of a Shakespearean tale.”

In May, at a club in midtown Manhattan, Bert Fields hosted a book party for Kathy Freston, whose husband, Tom, is the C.E.O. of Viacom. At the party—Barbara Guggenheim and Rupert and Wendi Murdoch were among the co-hosts—one guest murmured about Fields, “I’m amazed he came.” But if Fields is suffering from having been a subject of federal interest since 2003, he’s not letting on—at least, not publicly. Gustavo Cisneros, a friend of Fields who is the chairman of a privately owned media conglomerate, recalls phoning him this spring to inquire how he was. “Gustavo, don’t be concerned,” Fields responded. It was the last they spoke of the case. Susan Estrich (Guggenheim and Fields are the guardians for her two children) says it’s “a disgrace the way his name has been dragged through the mud.” Estrich, a Democratic activist and occasional television pundit, has gone so far as to wonder whether pressure from conservative Republicans is animating the drive to get Fields and also Hollywood.

Fields is more circumspect. When asked if it frustrates him to be silenced, he says, without hesitation, “Oh, yeah. If it were a case that I was trying, I’d be all over the press, all over everything. That’s my style. But I have very good counsel in this case, and I’m going to follow him.” As for the specifics of the case, Fields won’t go beyond his public comment, which is that he had “no knowledge” of wiretapping and would never condone it.

There is a five-year statute of limitations for wiretapping crimes, and for some of the cases in which Fields may be implicated the limit was due to expire in March. At the request of the U.S. Attorney, he has three times consented to extend the deadline. For a prosecutor, it means more time to gather evidence; for a potential target who wants to avoid the ruinous spectre of an indictment, it shows a willingness to coöperate. In early May, Fields believed that the case would either collapse or lead to formal charges by the end of that month. In mid-July, though, he said that he still wasn’t sure of his status; his lawyer, John Keker, who had been talking regularly with prosecutors, had not heard from the government since May 3rd.

“The first time the F.B.I. came to my office was three years ago,” Fields told me. “I talked to the agents voluntarily. I had nothing to hide. For the succeeding three years, I’ve been a subject of their inquiry. It’s very hard on my wife. When the United States government says to you, ‘We think we may have evidence to put your husband in jail for a long, long time,’ to a woman who loves her husband that’s a frightening, horrible concept. How would she not be tortured by that?”

We were in Fields’s house in Malibu, sitting in the dining alcove, which also serves as the entrance foyer, and one could see Fields’s reflection in a mirror that covers one wall. “I don’t pretend it’s easy,” he said, “but when you saw this lovely woman you’ve been married to for twenty-seven years”—his voice broke—“slowly die of cancer, nothing after that is hard. This is easy compared to that.” His eyes filled with tears.

When I asked Fields if he had learned anything from this ordeal, his reply seemed somewhat labored. “I have to go back in time to answer that question,” he said. “When I was in the service, I prosecuted high-profile military cases. I had the attitude of a prosecutor: I wanted to get these people and convict them because I was convinced that they had betrayed their trust as officers or airmen. I felt imbued with a spirit of defending the country. So I understand what the mentality must be of a young prosecutor, having been one myself. But having now seen what it’s like to be on the other end of that huge force that is the United States government when one is not guilty, it brings a kind of sense of completion to my understanding of the criminal process. By that I mean I saw what it was like to want to convict as a prosecutor, and I see what it is like to myself and my family and my partners to be accused of something I didn’t do, and to have to fight the power of the United States government.”

Fields insists that he has no idea where the contents of Pellicano’s safe will lead, but his firm hired the private detective in six of the cases referred to in the indictment—more than any other firm. Fields’s firm also encouraged a prominent art collector and hedge-fund manager, Adam D. Sender, to hire Pellicano, and the New York Times reported on June 26th that Sender listened to illegal wiretaps and is now coöperating with the U.S. Attorney. Fields knows that there will be civil lawsuits against law firms, including his, and that these lawsuits might reopen several cases. There will be a trial, now scheduled for late October, for Pellicano and his co-defendants.

If Fields is charged with a crime, his record suggests that he will fight. To this day, he thinks that Howard Weitzman and Johnnie Cochran made a grave error by reaching an out-of-court settlement in the Michael Jackson case. “I felt he would damage his career irrevocably by paying a huge amount in a settlement,” Fields says. “When you try a criminal case,” he adds, “you have working for you ‘a reasonable doubt,’ which is an enormous weapon.”

Even if Fields is not indicted, people who have followed the case and his career will undoubtedly continue to ask what he knew about Pellicano’s services and what he should have known, and how, as one prominent Hollywood lawyer said to me, “smart people could be so stupid.” One Fields client, insisting on anonymity, suggested that Fields’s competitiveness is at the root of his legal problems. Referring to the missing Elaine May film, he said, “I can imagine that a guy who steals the negative of a Paramount film and who is a lawyer and an officer of the court can do anything.”

Finally, I asked Fields if he was angry at Pellicano. “Sure, I’m pissed off at him,” he said, and then his tone shifted: “I know the pressures he had. He would call me and say, ‘Can’t you get me any work?’ His expenses were enormous. It’s inexcusable. But I can’t be too hard on Anthony Pellicano. This is a guy who did good work for us.” ♦