The Pellicano Files
Anthony Pellicano has worked as a private eye for some of Hollywood's
brightest stars. Now he's up in court for bugging phones ... and
Tinseltown is quaking in its boots. Dan Glaister investigates
Wednesday April 19, 2006
The Guardian
Pellicano with Farrah Fawcett in 1998
Private eye to the stars ... Pellicano with Farrah Fawcett after a court case in 1998. Photograph: Reuters
Like many a young Hollywood hopeful, Anthony Pellicano was lured to
Hollywood by the bright lights of the movies. Unlike most young
Hollywood hopefuls, however, he did not want to act. Anthony Pellicano,
aka Anthony Pellican, aka Tony Fortune, wanted to be a gumshoe - a
private eye. Anthony Pellicano looked at the movies and saw Bogie
sparring with Bacall, and Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes shaking-down
conspiracy in Chinatown - and that was who Anthony Pellicano wanted to
be.
Now, like most of his Hollywood idols, Pellicano has taken a
fall. And what a fall it has been. As boss of the Pellicano
Investigative Agency at 9200 Sunset Boulevard, Pellicano had managed to
get to the very top. His is a story with a cast list like no other, a
heady blend of the rich, the powerful and the merely famous. It
includes presidents, Hollywood royalty such as Elizabeth Taylor and
Warren Beatty, and high-wattage stars of the likes of Tom Cruise and
Nicole Kidman. Then there are the directors, studio bosses, and divorce
lawyers to the stars, with walk-on parts from OJ Simpson, Michael
Jackson and Heidi Fleiss. It is the sort of list, in short, that most
players would scramble to get their name on.
Take the comedian Kevin Nealon. He is not a household name, but,
through a myriad of connections, Nealon got on to the list. "I am
elated to have made this group," Nealon wrote recently. "It makes me
feel important." Nealon's was one of many names included in a 68-page
indictment served by Los Angeles prosecutors on Pellicano in February
this year, the day before he ended a 30-month prison term for
possessing explosives. The indictment, a list of accusations, runs to
147 counts but boils down to the allegation that Pellicano illegally
wiretapped - bugged - the phones of the rich, the famous and the rest,
and passed on the information he acquired to interested parties.
Pellicano, says the indictment, was helped in his endeavours by
individuals inside two police departments and a local telephone
company, some of whom are among the seven co-defendants listed on the
indictment. They are charged, with Pellicano as the group's leader,
with bugging, bribery, identity theft and fraud, as part of a criminal
conspiracy. The motive, it argues, was financial gain and to secure "a
tactical advantage in litigation by learning their opponents' plans,
strategies, perceived strengths and weaknesses, settlement positions
and other confidential information".
So far so procedural. But the few recognisable names in the indictment
provided clues that this case might be the one to drag Hollywood's
hidden side - the unpleasant business of divorces, the lengths gone to
in order to keep the famous out of the media - into the spotlight.
Sylvester Stallone was the name at the top of the marquee. Below him
came lesser Hollywood luminaries such as Keith Carradine and Larry
Sanders' alter ego, Garry Shandling. Then came Hollywood lawyers and
Hollywood wives. None of these people are accused of any criminal
activity or even any impropriety. Some of them are presumed victims of
wiretapping; others are said to have innocently hired attorneys who in
turn retained the services of Pellicano, unaware of the methods he is
accused of using to gain the information he then passed on.
The indictment, as with the Heidi Fleiss case before it, has caused a
lot of people in Hollywood to choke on their Pellegrino. Many of the
names listed as victims of the wiretaps provide a link to prominent
attorneys, among them the legendary Los Angeles lawyer Bertram Fields,
the man who can most legitimately claim the title "attorney to the
stars".
Fields started in Hollywood representing Edward G Robinson and
Dragnet's Jack Webb. He has gone on to represent Tom Cruise, Dustin
Hoffman, John Travolta and Michael Jackson. Fields hired private
investigator Pellicano to work with him on numerous occasions. With
Pellicano at his side, Fields, on behalf of Jackson, negotiated the
$23m (£13m) settlement in 1993 with the family of Jordan
Chandler, the boy who accused Jackson of child molestation.
Although Fields has been questioned in connection with the Pellicano
investigation, his attorney - in Hollywood, even the attorneys have
attorneys - insists that he did not suspect that Pellicano was using
illegal means to acquire the information that proved so valuable to
some of Fields's clients.
But he was certainly impressed by the results. In 1993, the time of the
Jackson deal, he told an interviewer: "He [Pellicano] turns up really
spectacular kinds of evidence."
And while he was getting the results, Pellicano lived the life. He
favoured double-breasted silk suits, patent leather shoes, mirror
shades and the cold stare so beloved of movie heavies. Pellicano -
whose nicknames included the Celebrities' Thug, the Ultimate Problem
Solver, and the Big Sleazy - was loud and public. He dined at legendary
Hollywood eateries such as Le Dome. He had different business cards for
different circumstances, describing his speciality variously as
"private investigation", "electronic surveillance" or "negotiations".
For journalists he had a special gift, a paperweight inscribed with the
words "Sometimes ... you just have to play hardball." He reputedly kept
a baseball bat - referred to as his "Louisville slugger" - in the boot
of his car. "If you can't sit down with a person and reason with them,"
he once told GQ magazine, "there is only one thing left and that's
fear." Central casting could not have made a better job of it.
But it hadn't always been like that. Born in 1944, of Sicilian descent,
in a working-class suburb on the west side of Chicago, Anthony Pellican
dropped out of school and joined the army signal corps. After the army,
and now calling himself Tony Pellicano, he got a job with a mail-order
company tracing clients who had defaulted on their bills. In 1969,
having changed his name again, to Tony Fortune, he set up his own
investigative agency. Five years later, he filed for bankruptcy, a
filing that was notable for the revelation that he had borrowed $30,000
from Paul de Lucia, son of a mobster and godfather to Pellicano's
daughter.
Three years later, he got his big break, and his passport to Hollywood.
The bones of Elizabeth Taylor's late husband Mike Todd, who died in
1958, had reportedly been stolen from his grave in Illinois, apparently
by thieves intent on prising the silver wedding ring from his finger. A
search was conducted but nothing found. And then Pellicano appeared at
the cemetery, which had been searched by police the previous day, with
a television crew in tow. Within minutes, Pellicano had located the
missing remains. But many, including the Illinois police, have cast
doubt on the discovery.
Elizabeth Taylor introduced Pellicano to the powerful Hollywood
attorney Howard Weitzman. In 1983, Pellicano moved to Los Angeles and
Weitzman hired him to help in the defence of the car mogul John
DeLorean, who was fighting cocaine charges. Thanks partly to Pellicano,
the defence was able to introduce enough doubts about the tapes of
DeLorean allegedly buying cocaine that the car-maker was acquitted.
Pellicano became celebrated, the go-to guy. He set up several companies
from his office on Sunset Boulevard, specialising in surveillance and
what Pellicano called "forensic audio". He even hired a team of
glamorous female techies with names such as Tarita Virtue to run the
surveillance, the Angels to his Charlie. The good years were just
beginning for Tony Pellicano.
The list of people with problems who have turned to Pellicano, or whose
attorneys have turned to him on their clients' behalf, is mesmerising:
Don Simpson, Kevin Costner, Steven Spielberg, Jerry Springer, Farrah
Fawcett, Mike Myers, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Kirk Kerkorian and Roseanne
Barr. Again, there is no suggestion that any of the celebrities who
hired Pellicano were aware that the person they were hiring was
involved in any criminal activity.
But it was not just movie people. Pellicano also claimed to be the
audio expert who pinpointed the gaps in the Nixon Watergate tapes and
identified the extra shots in the recording of the shooting of JFK.
Pellicano did work directly with one president: during Bill Clinton's
first presidential campaign Pellicano was hired, reportedly by Hillary
Clinton, to discredit Gennifer Flowers, the woman who alleged that she
had maintained a 12-year affair with the candidate. Six years later,
with Clinton into his second term, the White House, according to the
New York Post, hired Pellicano, considered a respected forensic audio
specialist, to look into Monica Lewinsky's background.
Another report places Pellicano, who was hired by OJ Simpson before the
murder of Nicole Simpson, outside her house on the night that she was
killed. Pellicano has denied the allegation.
But it was Pellicano's Hollywood connection that finally got him into
trouble. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times who was investigating
alleged links between the actor Steven Seagal and the Mafia had an
unpleasant surprise one morning in June 2002. Leaving for work, Anita
Busch found that her car had been vandalised. Closer inspection
revealed that this was more than vandalism. The windscreen was cracked
by what appeared to be a bullet hole. A tinfoil tray was taped to the
windscreen just below a note with the word "Stop" written in red.
Underneath the tray, the reporter found a dead fish.
FBI investigations led detectives to an informant who taped a
small-time criminal, who in turn named Pellicano as the private
investigator who had hired him to scare the reporter. The FBI has
recently cleared Seagal of any involvement in the Busch scheme; the
actor has always denied any links to the Mafia. When the FBI raided
Pellicano's office on Sunset Boulevard, they found a cache of
explosives and $200,000 in cash. Pellicano was charged with illegal
possession of explosives and sentenced at trial to 30 months in prison.
A subsequent search then provided the basis for the present charges.
The FBI found transcripts, tapes and computer records of bugged
conversations. Investigators say that if all the conversations were on
paper, there would be 2m pages of transcripts. Pellicano, who made no
secret of his admiration for the Godfather films, had perhaps seen
another Francis Ford Coppola film, The Conversation, about an obsessive
surveillance expert who spends hours listening to other people's
conversations.
The resulting investigation of Pellicano on charges that he illegally
recorded the conversations of people involved in litigation in order to
give an illegal advantage to one side in a case has set Hollywood
a-flutter. One prominent Hollywood divorce lawyer, Terry Christensen,
is charged in the indictment. Other lawyers whose clients, or their
adversaries in court, feature on recordings made by Pellicano are
furiously denying that they knew he was engaged in illegal activity and
insist they took the information he provided them on good faith.
One such is Dennis Wasser, a Hollywood attorney who has brokered the
divorce settlements of Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg and Jennifer Lopez.
Wasser's work on behalf of Cruise in his divorce from Nicole Kidman has
prompted the current investigation's reported interest in talking to
the two actors - interest that is said to be heightened by the
discovery of conversations between the two recorded by Pellicano.
"I have known and worked with Anthony Pellicano for nearly 20 years,"
wrote Bert Fields in a letter to court supporting a failed request by
Pellicano for bail. "I have never once known Mr Pellicano to commit an
act of violence. He has been thoroughly professional in all my contacts
with him."
Meanwhile, many of those featured on the recordings, as well as people
who have had brushes with Pellicano in the past, are filing lawsuits
against him, including the former LA Times reporter Anita Busch.
An indication of the potential reach of the investigation came this
month when charges were levelled against the Hollywood director John
McTiernan. Prosecutors allege that McTiernan lied to them about his
knowledge of Pellicano's illegal methods in an interview with FBI
agents on February 13. While McTiernan may not be a household name, he
is a significant-sized fish in the Hollywood fishbowl: he directed two
of the Die Hard movies, as well as the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle,
Last Action Hero, and the more highbrow remake of the Thomas Crown
Affair.
McTiernan, who had hired Pellicano on several occasions, retained the
detective's services in 2000 when he was directing the remake of
Rollerball. Seemingly, the director was involved in a dispute with a
producer on the film, Charles Roven. While McTiernan subsequently told
FBI agents investigating Pellicano that he had no knowledge of the
private eye's methods, detectives knew differently: they had discovered
a tape recording of McTiernan and Pellicano discussing the results of
Pellicano's bugging of Roven's phone calls. On Monday this week,
McTiernan pleaded guilty to the charges. He now faces a maximum jail
term of five years when he returns for sentencing.
But the question now dominating Hollywood, and particularly its
all-powerful and handsomely remunerated legal elite, is whether
Pellicano will turn. The recordings are rumoured to include not only
the targets, but also Pellicano's own conversations with the lawyers
hiring him. Should any of these indicate that Pellicano's clients were
aware of the illegal methods the private eye might use to gather
information, the case would acquire a sensational twist. Should
Pellicano decide to save himself and cooperate with investigators, the
implications for Hollywood could be cataclysmic.
"I don't rat on a client," Pellicano told an interviewer after his
arrest on the explosives charges. And two years ago, Fields told Vanity
Fair, "I would bet my life and my child's life that Anthony would never
betray someone he was working for."
Others are not so sure.
"He'll roll over," says Ernie Rizzo, a Chicago private eye and
contemporary of Pellicano's. "He's in his 60s. He can't afford 10 years
in jail."
Pellicano has cut a less than glamorous figure in the run-up to his
trial, which could start later this month. He appears shackled in
court, dressed not in silk suits but prison fatigues; he is gaunt,
stooped and aged. And he is broke.
He is certainly down - but he is not quite out. He has a new
girlfriend, his fifth marriage having ended with his divorce from
42-year-old Ann DeLucio, whom he married in Las Vegas a week before
going to prison. And some of the old defiance and braggadocio are still
there. During a recent hearing in court in Los Angeles, he bullishly
told the judge that he intended to represent himself at trial.
An acquaintance from his Chicago days, journalist Jacqueline Mitchard,
suggests that he may not be as dejected as he appears. "There would be
nothing that would make him happier than knowing that at last he had
achieved this power to speak or not and hold people's destiny," she
says. "Tony always wanted to be more of a mobster than he was. But he
was living in a world that didn't exist any more. Even in Chicago, when
he was growing up, that life felt like it was on the way out. So he
went to Hollywood to be the next best thing."
Pellicano has reportedly signed a lucrative contract to write his life
story. (A TV series based on his exploits almost went into production
in the 1990s.) Others are said to be writing books about him. "There
are lots of ways in American culture to achieve fame," observes
Mitchard. "This is one of them and Tony made it".
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