Prosecutors nearing the end of their child sex case against Michael Jackson attempted Monday to flesh out an alleged conspiracy hatched by the pop icon against his young accuser's family.
Telephone records were presented showing dozens of calls between Jackson associates following a documentary broadcast in February 2003 in which the singer held hands with his alleged victim and admitted to sharing his bed with children.
And a bank manager testified how a close Jackson aide, Marc Schaffel, cashed two cheques totalling 1.5 million dollars from an account in which he and Jackson were the sole signatories.
The evidence appeared aimed at shoring up the prosecution's assertion that Jackson and his aides were so panicked by the documentary that they plotted to hold his accuser's family captive until they agreed to record a video rebuttal.
The phone records detailed a total of 38 calls between two of Jackson's aides on one day alone, February 12 -- the same day his accuser's mother claims she escaped from the singer's Neverland Ranch.
Bank branch manager Beverly Wagner told jurors that Schaffel cashed a cheque for one million dollars, and another one week later for 500,000 dollars, from the account he controlled with Jackson.
Legal analysts said the prosecution was seeking to tie Jackson closer to his unindicted co-conspirators.
"But the fact there was a lot of activity does not in and of itself prove there was any conspiracy," said Jim Moret, a lawyer following the trial. "There are a lot of loose ends out there they need to tie together."
Under defence cross-examination, the police sergeant who presented the telephone records acknowledged there was no evidence that Jackson was party to any of the phone calls.
Jackson, 46, stands charged with molesting his then 13-year-old accuser in 2003, plying him with alcohol and conspiring to hold his family captive.
With prosecutors indicating that they intend to rest their case on Tuesday, court observers questioned why they would choose this moment to spend hours taking weary jurors through complex flow charts of telephone conversations.
"You want to end on a strong note. For the prosecution to end on phone records sounds very weak," Moret said.
Some members of the jury appeared to find the day tough going, and at one point one of the alternate jurors noticeably dozed off.
The prosecution's quest for a strong finish had already been hampered at the end of last week by the testimony of Jackson's ex-wife, Debbie Rowe.
Although Rowe had been touted as a star prosecution witness, the decision to call her backfired badly, as she sung Jackson's praises and firmly rejected suggestions that a video interview she gave extolling his parenting skills had been scripted.
The prosecution took another minor hit on Friday when Judge Rodney Melville barred testimony from a journalist who said he may have heard one of Jackson's aides talking about the accuser's family "escaping" from Neverland Ranch.
The judge deemed the witness's recollections too vague to be entered as evidence.
Once the prosecution rests, the celebrity floodgates could open on the already high-profile trial, thanks to a defence witness pool whose members are more used to gracing red carpets than courtrooms.
Smokey Robinson, Eddie Murphy, Elizabeth Taylor and Stevie Wonder are just some of the names on the list provided by the defence team before the trial began.
There have even been hints that Jackson himself may testify, although many legal analysts say the singer's unpredictability would make that an extremely high-risk tactic.