HOLLYWOOD ENDING.

Bertram Fields, who has a reputation as the most feared lawyer in Hollywood, does not often do lunch. He prefers to be driven in his Bentley Arnage from his law office, in Century City, to his Cape Cod-style home, in Malibu, where he prepares a salad, takes a twenty-minute nap, and has time to think--what he calls "wa time" ("It's a Japanese expression meaning peacefulness of spirit," he explains)--before returning to the city. But on a sunny day in April he agreed to meet at Spago, in the heart of Beverly Hills. This was particularly unexpected because, in the past several months, Fields has been the subject of much curiosity in Hollywood, where many believe that he is the central target of federal prosecutors in a wiretapping scandal that has obsessed the city. So, as Fields, a trim seventy-seven-year-old, walked swiftly to an outdoor table, people stared.

In nearly half a century, Fields has represented almost every studio head and some of Hollywood's biggest stars, including Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, Warren Beatty, the Beatles, John Travolta, Madonna, Mike Nichols, and Dustin Hoffman. He has also represented Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp., and Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founders of DreamWorks SKG. His unwritten calling card says, not wholly accurately, "Bert Fields has never lost a court case." He has played much the same role in L.A. that the late Edward Bennett Williams did in Washington: clients come to him in the belief that, through skill or intimidation, he will make their legal problems vanish.

At Spago, Fields ordered a glass of Chardonnay and a Greek salad with chicken, which he ate very little of. Wolfgang Puck, the chef-owner, lingered at Fields's table as he made the rounds. Half-glasses perched on the tip of his nose, Fields explained his approach to the law: "If I were a general, I would attack, and keep pressing the attack--to throw the opponent off balance, to change the odds and make a settlement your way much more favorable." When you attack, he says, "it forces the other side to think, Hey, I may lose this case. Let's settle it." But lately Fields has been following the advice of his own attorney, and has barely spoken to the press or gone on the attack.

Fields's connection to what may turn out to be the biggest, and dirtiest, scandal in Hollywood's history is Anthony Pellicano, a rough-edged private detective whose involvement with Fields started some twenty years ago, and who is now in jail. Pellicano's troubles began where many Mafia tales end: with a dead fish. In this case, the fish appeared, in June of 2002, on the windshield of the Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch's silver Audi. The windshield was cracked; a rose was in the fish's mouth, and a cardboard sign saying "Stop" had been placed over the glass. Busch had done a series of investigative stories about the movie industry, focussing on the former superagent Michael Ovitz; she was working on a story alleging that Mob money might have financed a Steven Seagal movie. Over the next few months, Busch told police, her parents felt threatened, her phone was tapped, her computer was hacked into, and someone tried to run her down. F.B.I. investigators later told her they believed that her chief pursuer was Pellicano.

In November, 2002, five months after the fish was found on the windshield, the F.B.I. obtained search warrants for Pellicano's office, and in his safe agents discovered explosives, two hand grenades, loaded pistols, and bundles of cash totalling about two hundred thousand dollars. After an investigation by the United States Attorney in Los Angeles, Pellicano pleaded guilty to illegal weapons possession, and in February, 2004, was sentenced to thirty months in prison. But the most significant discovery in Pellicano's office was said to be hundreds of hours of encrypted, illegally wiretapped conversations, and in February of this year Pellicano was indicted, along with six associates, on charges that included racketeering, wiretapping, bribery, destroying evidence, and perjury.

The federal indictment, which now lists a hundred and twelve counts, names many of the people who were wiretapped or under surveillance by Pellicano. The indictment doesn't identify any of his clients, but it is known that they included Ovitz; Brad Grey, the head of Paramount; and Ron Meyer, the president of Universal Studios, who, with Ovitz, was a founder of the powerful Creative Artists Agency. It is also known that no one used Pellicano more frequently than Fields and his law firm, and that puzzles even friends and former clients, like Jeffrey Katzenberg, who told me, "I cannot reconcile the Bert I know having anything to do with Pellicano."

This spring, the U.S. Attorney seemed to be circling Fields--"the biggest name in town," in the words of Laurie L. Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor and a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles. He is, she said, "sort of the giant in the field," which makes him "much more" of a target.