Evidence of collusion? Six weeks of phone calls among the five publishers.
FORTUNE — We got a peek at the witness list in U.S.A. v. Apple, the e-book antitrust trial scheduled to begin its second of three weeks Monday in a Manhattan federal courthouse.
On deck for today, according to our notes:
- Thomas Turvey: The Google (GOOG) director of strategic partnerships whose written testimony was demolished Thursday by Apple’s (AAPL) chief counsel. (See Is the e-book judge starting to see things Apple’s way?) Before joining Google, Turvey worked for Macmillan, the last of the five publisher defendants to settle with the Department of Justice.
- Keith Moerer: The former editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, Moerer was the Apple executive described in court — to big laughs — by Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy as “one of Eddy Cue’s minions.” It was Moerer who negotiated the price caps in the Apple contracts signed by the five publisher defendants. Before joining Apple he spent five years at Amazon (AMZN) as its editorial director for books and music.
- Brian Murray: The CEO of HarperCollins refused to go along with Apple’s terms until Steve Jobs went over his head to James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and the deputy COO of News Corp. (NWS). The redacted Jobs-Cue-Murray-Murdoch e-mail exchange entered into evidence is one of the cases’ most quoted documents. See Attachment B.
- Markus Dohle: The CEO of Random House is arguably the most powerful executive on publisher’s row and the only holdout when the deals with Apple were signed in early 2010. See Who dropped the dime on the e-book five? His COO, Madeline McIntosh, used to work in Amazon’s Kindle division and was feeding details about the negotiations to an old friend there. After refusing to throw in with Apple, Random House enjoyed higher e-book profit margins and preferential treatment on the Kindle home page.
- David Young: The volume of phone calls between the CEO of Hachette and S&S’s Reidy in the six-week period when they were negotiating with Apple was offered by the DOJ as evidence of collusion among the publishers. Given the pace at which the trial has been moving, it’s unlikely that we’ll hear from Young today.
NOTE: The order that witnesses appear is subject to change.
UPDATE: Sure enough, the witness list has changed. The government slipped HarperCollins’ Murray in ahead of Apple’s Moerer, and during the mid-morning break, John Sargent was waiting outside the courtroom with his attorney waiting to go next.
Sargent, you may recall, is the CEO of Macmillan who was escorted out of Amazon’s offices when he demanded that Amazon either move to Apple’s new agency model or wait 7 months to get Macmillan’s new releases. He discovered when he landed in New York the next day that the “buy” buttons had been removed from Amazon’s website for all his top-selling books, both digital and physical. See Day 3 of the Apple e-book trial: Enter Amazon.
Also, it looks like the government won’t be calling Random House’s Dohle, although Apple may later choose to do so.
