Celebrity Mound

Phil Spector is hoping to get a few comforts of home in his new prison cell, and a television, iPod and computer access are at the top of his list.

The music producer was transferred this week to the largest state prison in California where he will serve his sentence of 19 years to life for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson.

As a medium-security inmate, Spector can make some requests for items he wants in his cell, and his wife acknowledges her husband is already creating a list.

“He wants a TV and an iPod or something like that for listening to music,” Rachelle Spector said Tuesday. “And he would like to be able to receive e-mail.”

Phil Spector, 69, is at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison at Corcoran, where more than 6,900 other inmates are housed.

Prison officials said Phil Spector may even be allowed a musical instrument, noting that some state inmates have made similar requests and play together in groups. However, Rachelle Spector said her husband doesn’t plan to make much music behind bars.

“He has not requested an instrument, and I doubt if he will,” she said.

Rachelle Spector said she was relieved her husband was out of North Kern State Prison, where he has been undergoing evaluation since his conviction in April. She said he wrote a letter detailing alleged abuse at the prison such as being forced to sleep naked on the floor for two nights and eating out of a bowl with his hands “like a dog.”

The prison does not mistreat inmates and the actions described by the Spectors “would be a violation of policies and laws,” said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections. Thornton said any report of misconduct would be investigated.

Phil Spector was placed in the “sensitive-needs facility” of his new prison and was given a single cell, Thornton said.

Spector’s notoriety probably got him into that housing area, Lt. Stephen Smith said. The typical inmate in the section is a former gang member who has dropped out of a gang and needs protection, Smith said.

Spector is not the first celebrity to be sent to the facility. Robert Downey Jr. served time there in 1999 for a probation violation in a drug conviction. He wound up counseling other inmates before he was released.

Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in the 2003 death of Clarkson at his home in Alhambra.

In his heyday in the early and mid-1960s, Spector produced dozens of hits, including The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron” and The Righteous Brothers’ classic, “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’.” Spector also worked on the Beatles album “Let It Be” and John Lennon’s album, “Imagine.”

Phil Spector was sentenced Friday to 19 years to life in prison for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, who was shot through the mouth in the music producer’s home six years ago. Spector, 69, looked straight forward and showed no emotion as Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler ordered a term of 15 years to life for second-degree murder plus four years for personal use of a gun.

Clarkson’s mother, Donna, made a brief statement before sentencing, speaking of her daughter’s fine qualities, sense of humor, intelligence and dedication to her craft of acting.

“I’m very proud of Lana, proud to be her mother,” Donna Clarkson said. She added, “No one should suffer the loss of a child.”

The judge also ordered Spector to pay $16,811 in funeral expenses, $9,740 to a state victims’ restitution fund and other fees.

Spector, dressed in his customary dark pinstripe suit with a red silk tie, was led away immediately. His attorney asked that he be transferred immediately from county jail to a state prison. It was not immediately known to which prison Spector would be assigned.

Spector gained fame decades ago for what became known as the “Wall of Sound” recording technique that changed rock music.

Clarkson was most famous as the star of Roger Corman’s 1985 cult film classic “Barbarian Queen.” She was 40 when she died.

Spector’s young wife, who is in her late 20s, attended the sentencing.

“This is a sad day for everybody involved,” Rachelle Spector said. “The Clarkson family has lost a daughter and a sister. I’ve lost my husband, my best friend. I feel that a grave injustice has been done and from this day forward I’m going to dedicate myself to proving my husband’s innocence.”

Spector’s son Louis, accompanied by his wife, also came to the sentencing. He had attended much of the trial.

“I’m torn about this,” he said. “I’m losing my father who is going to spend his life in jail. At the same time, justice is served.”

Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson said afterward that the outcome sent a message: “If you commit crimes against our citizens we will follow you and prosecute you. And no matter whether you are famous or wealthy, you will stand trial.”

Asked how he felt about Spector personally, Jackson said, “I find nothing tragic about him. Everything he did was intentional.”

Jackson said the case was “rock solid” legally and will not be subject to a successful appeal.

Defense attorney Doron Weinberg told reporters that the appeal will be extremely strong.

“Mr. Spector did not kill Lana Clarkson,” he said, “and we hope by the time we are through we will be able to prove that.”

Spector had two trials with essentially the same evidence. His first in 2007 was televised gavel to gavel and spectators flocked to the courtroom. But when the jury deadlocked after a five-month trial, his legal “dream team,” which at times numbered half a dozen lawyers, bailed out.

By the time the second trial started in 2008, interest had waned. The judge ordered cameras turned off and only a handful of spectators and reporters stopped in sporadically to watch testimony.

During jury selection, only a few panelists remembered Spector’s heyday as producer of teen anthems including “To Know Him is to Love Him” by The Teddy Bears, The Ronette’s “Be My Baby,” The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron” and The Righteous Brothers’ classic, “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’.” Spector also worked on a Beatles album with John Lennon.

Ironically, Clarkson didn’t know Spector’s music legacy either when she met him only hours before she died at his Alhambra “castle” in February 2003. She was working as a hostess at the House of Blues nightclub on the Sunset Strip, where she had to be told by a manager that Spector was an important man.

His time had passed. Clarkson’s career also was ebbing. Their fateful meeting, recounted in both trials, led to her death and the end of his life as he knew it. For the next six years he spent millions of dollars on lawyers as he sought to prove that Clarkson killed herself.

But what had happened inside his house was never clear. Clarkson’s body was found slumped in a chair in a foyer. A gun had been fired in her mouth. Spector’s chauffeur, the key witness, said he heard a gunshot, then saw Spector emerge holding a gun and heard him say: “I think I killed somebody.”

Weinberg said forensic evidence proved that Clarkson shot herself and cited her desperation at not being able to get acting work. Jackson said the shooting fit the pattern of other confrontations between Spector and women.

Much of the case hinged on the testimony of five women from Spector’s past who said he threatened them with guns when they tried to leave his presence. The parallels with the night Clarkson died were chilling even if the stories were very old – 31 years in one instance.

Weinberg said Spector’s appeal will assert that the judge erred in allowing the women to testify.

PHIL Spector’s adopted son, Louis, 42, is shopping a sordid memoir with a bombshell allegation about one of his dad’s long-ago girlfriends. In his proposal for “The Gingerbread House on La Collina Drive: My Life Caged Behind Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound,” Louis writes: “When I was 13, Dad was seeing someone, a woman the kids all liked . . . and hoped for the chance of one day calling her ‘Mom.’ That all changed, however, one evening . . . [It] involved a bottle of wine, a Playboy magazine and ‘the lady.’ That night I lost my innocence, and my brother, Donte, at the age of 10, lost his virginity — to that lady. That was the last time I ever saw the ‘lady.’ ”

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Long before he was convicted of second-degree murder in a Los Angeles courtroom this afternoon, Phil Spector led the kind of rich-and-famous life that almost no one wanted to emulate.

Including Phil Spector.

“It hasn’t been a very pleasant life,” Spector told writer Mick Brown in a rare 2002 interview. “I’ve been a very tortured soul. I have not been at peace with myself.”

Or with everyone else, either. During his two trials for the shooting of actress Lana Clarkson, a parade of women testified that he enjoyed waving guns at them, often to keep them from leaving his company.

Friends said when he was younger, he would change outfits up to four times a day, with a different matching gun to accessorize each.

He fired a gun into the ceiling during a John Lennon recording session and the Ramones said that when Spector produced one of their albums, he would hold them in the studio at gunpoint.

His ex-wife Ronnie said she often felt like a hostage in their home. She also said Spector set up a glass-topped coffin in the basement and told Ronnie’s mother that if Ronnie ever left him, he would kill her and keep her there like Snow White.

No, Spector’s behavior has for years gone way beyond the lovably zany excess associated with, say, Keith Richards or Jack Nicholson.

His adopted sons, Gary and Donte Spector, said in 2003 that they were sexually abused as children. “We were caged animals to be let out for Dad’s amusement,” Donte told The Mail.

Gary and Donte have both had demons of their own. But tales of unpleasant encounters and poisoned relationships permeate every Spector biography.

Forgiveness, he has acknowledged, is not his strong suit. When his 1966 production of Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High” did not become the towering success he felt it deserved to be, he took his ears and went home, in effect telling the music business and the public it didn’t deserve him.

Before his January 1989 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Spector got so drunk his speech turned into a seemingly endless ramble to nowhere.

“Finally two of his bodyguards physically picked him up, one at each arm, and carried him off the stage,” recalls WPLJ program director Scott Shannon. “As they took him off, his legs were moving as if he were walking, even though they weren’t touching the floor. It was like a cartoon — one of the strangest things you’ve ever seen.”

Spector’s lawyer, Allen Klein, said the problem that night is that Spector is essentially very shy, and the idea of speaking in front of all his peers literally drove him to drink, which he does not handle well.

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Phil Spector, the rock music impresario behind such hits such as “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling” and “Be My Baby,” was convicted of shooting and killing a struggling actress at his mansion after a night of drinking.

Mr. Spector, 69, faces at least 18 years in prison. The jury, in a five-month trial, reached its unanimous decision after deliberating whether one of the recording industry’s best-known producers shot the woman in a fit of anger or, as his lawyers argued, merely witnessed the woman’s suicide.

In addition to second-degree homicide, the jury also found Mr. Spector guilty of illegally discharging a firearm.

This was the second murder trial in the case. A previous trial was ended September 2007, when a jury deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of conviction in September 2007. Mr. Spector has remained out on bail for most of the last six years, but was immediately taken into custody after the verdict on Monday.

Mr. Spector came into court looking frail and sullen. He wore a long blue overcoat, a bright red tie, and a shoulder-length mullet hair-style. Gone were his psychedelic glasses and the swagger that carried him through more than five decades at the top of the Los Angeles pop music scene.

He whispered only a few words to his lawyers, whose number shrank to two from more than four by the time the jury was polled. As a court clerk read the verdict, Mr. Spector leaned forward intently. He face betrayed little emotion throughout the proceeding.

The family of the actress, Lana Clarkson, who was 40 at the time of her death, reacted with relief and embraces. They declined to speak to the throng of reporters gathered at the Los Angeles Superior Court in downtown Los Angeles.

Mr. Spector, who was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, is famous for his “Wall of Sound” lush orchestrations heard on an array of hits in the 1960s and 1970s with groups like the Ronettes. He has worked with the Beatles, Tina Turner, the Rolling Stones and others but had receded from the public stage in recent years and was known as much for eccentric behavior — he has been often photographed wearing a large fright wig — as his talent.

The verdict came more than six years after Ms. Clarkson was found shot to death in the foyer of Mr. Spector’s mansion in suburban Alhambra on Feb. 3, 2003.

The decision was a victory for Los Angeles prosecutors who have endured high-profile defeats in celebrity murder trials, including the acquittals of O.J. Simpson and the actor Robert Blake.

Mr. Spector, who had been free on $1 million bail, was accused of shooting to death Ms. Clarkson, an aspiring actress best-known for a starring role in the 1985 cult hit “Barbarian Queen” and a bit part in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” in 1982.

She was working as a hostess at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip when Mr. Spector visited the nightclub, struck up a conversation and eventually took her out drinking.

They ended up at his Alhambra mansion, known as “the Castle,” but when she spurned his advances and tried to leave he put a gun in her mouth and fired, prosecutors said.

They argued that this fit a long pattern of Mr. Spector’s drinking and threatening women with guns over several years, and they presented testimony from several of them.

Mr. Spector, they said, essentially confessed when he emerged from the home, gun in hand, and told his limousine driver, “I think I killed somebody.” Mr. Spector retreated into the house and in the prosecution’s view, took steps to cover up the crime.

The defense disputed the case on several fronts, including the account of the limousine driver, Adriano DeSouza.

They noted that he was a Brazilian immigrant not fully proficient in English and said he may have misquoted Mr. Spector, who they suggested may actually have been telling him to “call somebody.” A gurgling fountain nearby and the driver’s fatigue and hunger from working all night may have added to confusion, they told jurors.

The defense suggested that Ms. Clarkson was handling the gun when it discharged. They said she was despondent over her lackluster career and finances and decided to take her own life.

They supported their case with scientific evidence they believed questioned the prosecution’s sequence of events.

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A Los Angeles hotel is suing Phil Spector, his wife and agent for failing to pay more than $100,000 in accommodations for lawyers and expert witnesses in his murder trial.

In court papers filed Wednesday, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites allege the defendants agreed in a written contract to reserve rooms for the duration of the trial. The lawsuit claims that by the time Spector’s trial ended with a hung jury in September, the defendants owed the hotel more than $104,000.

The lawsuit alleges fraud, breach of written contract and other charges.

Spector faces a second trial in the murder of actress Lana Clarkson at his home in 2003. The producer is known for his “Wall of Sound” recording technique.

(This version CORRECTS that Spector’s trial ended with a hung jury, sted acquittal.)

THE defense in Phil Spector’s murder trial has been trying to paint Lana Clarkson as depressed and even suicidal – but one of the blond actress’s last let ters to a friend suggests otherwise. In her new book, “Secrets Can Be Murder, What America’s Most Sensational Crimes Tell Us About Our selves,” former Channel 2 News anchor Jane Velez-Mitchell bares portions of a never-befo re-seen letter Clarkson wrote to a pal one month before she was shot dead at the famed music producer’s mansion in Febru ary 2003. “Happy New Year! This is just a quick note to update you on my situation. I just received a great job offer from the House of Blues . . . [as] Senior Door Hostess,” her cheery note begins. “This is a full-time night posi tion and will enable me to continue to pursue my acting and writing opportunities during the day. All the best wishes for a fantastic New Year! It’s certainly going to be better than the last . . . Sincerely, Lana.” Spector is charged with firing a bul let into Clarkson’s head, killing her instantly.

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If Phil Spector decides to take the witness stand, he should think long and hard about telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

That’s the cryptic message from Los Angeles Judge Larry Paul Fidler, who’s presiding over the “Wall of Sound” producer’s murder trial. Fidler says that while he doesn’t hold grudges against defendants who testify in their own defense, there’s nothing he despises more than under-oath liars.

“If you get up there and you pretty clearly lie, I doubt any judge is going to much like that client,” the jurist told a Loyola Marymount Law School symposium the other day during a break in the trial. Without mentioning Spector, he added: “How is this going to affect sentencing? That may be too far down the line, but does anyone like someone who comes in and lies in front of 12 strangers plus the judge? Probably not.”

Spector, who’s charged with blowing away B-movie actress Lana Clarkson, faces 15 years to life if convicted.

The LMU event, hosted by Fidler, drew an eye-popping array of celebrity lawyers, including Tom Mesereau (who repped Michael Jackson), Mark Geragos (for Scott Peterson) and Harland Braun (for Robert Blake) – and they all gleefully took shots at past enemies, The Post’s David K. Li reports.

Of TV legal pundits, Mesereau said: “There are some very professional legal analysts out there – but there are also some absolute monstrosities like Nancy Dis-Grace.”

Geragos also whacked Grace, calling her a “yapping, bleached blonde former prosecutor on Court TV.” He went on to remark on the undue influence of Fox’s Greta Van Susteren on high-profile cases: “Our favorite expression coming in the morning before the judge was, WWGS – ‘What would Greta say?’ No matter what the ruling was the night before, whatever Greta would say that night, we’d have to revisit that ruling if she didn’t agree.”

Braun joked that he was misquoted when he seemed to have said that anyone who met Blake’s slain wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley, would have wanted her dead: “What I said: ‘If I was married to her, I would have killed her myself’ ” – drawing big yuks from the crowd.

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Not a single music superstar came forward to support “Wall of Sound” producer Phil Spector as his trial for the murder of blond B-movie actress Lara Clarkson kicked off yesterday – and it’s not surprising, considering how he bitterly trashes many of them in an upcoming biography.

Mick Brown, author of “Tearing Down the Wall of Sound,” out in June from Knopf , interviewed Spector – who produced The Beatles, the Ramones, Ike and Tina Turner and the Righteous Brothers – just weeks before Clarkson was shot in the face at his sprawling mansion outside L.A. And Spector didn’t mince words about the biggest acts in pop and rock history.

* Michael Jackson is “the most depressing, heinous thing,” Spector said. “Starting out life as a black man and ending up as a white woman. What’s that all about? But the King [of Pop]? He’s no King . . ”

* On Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys leader and songwriting legend who battled mental illness for years, Spector declared, “I don’t feel sorry for Brian Wilson. I never thought he was that talented to begin with . . . I’d be more impressed if somebody with a brain idolized me.”

* Oasis, the British band fronted by Liam and Noel Gallagher, are “jerks.”

* On Tina Turner: “I made her famous, and she resents that . . . But give it up, for God’s sake . . . Why say, ‘[Bleep] you.’ Just leave me alone.”

* Bruce Springsteen, who borrowed the “Wall of Sound” technique for his breakthrough hit “Born to Run” in the 1970s, “should have paid me royalties . . . Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery until it becomes plagiarism.” Spector also said the Boss’ career is stale: “He’s protected himself with three new songs and 25 old ones.”

* On Motown founder Berry Gordy: “I don’t see Berry doing very much. Wrote some good songs, ‘Money’ and all of that. But beyond that I feel there were more talented people in the organization.”

* And on “American Bandstand” legend Dick Clark: “That’s where payola started. Everybody around Dick Clark went to jail, except for Dick Clark.”

When Brown asked Spector who his closest friends were, he presciently replied, “My attorneys.”

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