A blond Australian actress told yesterday how accused Adelphia fraudster Timothy Rigas allowed her to use the company jet like a personal taxi, flying her to New York for intimate dinners and ferrying her around the Caribbean at shareholders’ expense.
Peta Wilson, the former star of cable television series “La Femme Nikita,” took the witness stand at the Rigas family’s $1 billion corporate fraud trial to detail her jet-setting days aboard Adelphia’s $13 million Gulfstream III and $7 million Cessna Citation planes.
The leggy 33-year-old told the Manhattan jury she used the cable company’s planes for personal reasons at least 10 times between March 1999 and December 2000.
Wilson, who appeared with Sean Connery in the 2003 flick “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” said she first met Timothy Rigas in New Orleans in 1996, soon after she hit the big time with the USA Networks’
“La Femme Nikita.”
She became close pals with Rigas, Adelphia’s then-director of internal reporting, after he asked her to “drop a puck” at a Buffalo Sabres hockey game. The team was then owned by Rigas’ father, Adelphia founder John
Rigas. Wilson said she “wasn’t thrilled” about having to attend the game because she was planning a
four-day vacation in St. Barts in the Caribbean. But she agreed to drop the puck after her thenboss, USA Networks chief Barry Diller, helped arrange to have Adelphia’s jet pick up her and her mom in Toronto, where she was filming, and ferry them to St. Barts and on to Buffalo and then home.
Rigas, 47, who’s standing trial with his 79-year-old father and brother Michael Rigas, 50, organized the
company’s wings to whisk himself and Wilson to Montego Bay in Jamaica in April 2000, where she was doing a shoot for Condé Nast Traveler magazine, the jury heard.
Wilson also told how Rigas responded to her distress call during a vacation in the Bahamas with then
boyfriend Damian Harris and his family. She said she asked Rigas to send a plane when her boyfriend’s father,
Richard Harris, suffered a heart attack.
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TAKEN FOR A RIDE
Peta Wilson, who once starred on the cable series “La Femme Nikita,” was a guest of Timothy Rigas aboard the Adelphia corporate jet ten times:
* March 1999: Toronto, where Wilson was working, to St. Barts for vacation.
* March 1999: St. Barts to Buffalo (via Puerto Rico) for appearance at Buffalo Sabres hockey game.
* March 1999: Buffalo to Toronto
* Nov. 1999: Three flights from Toronto to New Jersey to meet Tim Rigas for dinner.
* Feb. 2000: New Jersey to Toronto after appearing at a store opening in New York.
* April 2000: New Jersey to Montego Bay, Jamaica, with Tim Rigas for advertising
shoot with Conde Nast Traveler.
* Aug./Sept. 2000: Bahamas to New Jersey – Tim Rigas sends plane to airlift her family after her boyfriend’s father suffers a heart attack.
* Dec. 2000: New Jersey to Los Angeles with Tim Rigas.