Hollywood Scandals Converging

A district attorney's investigator and others linked to a French con man may be victims of Pellicano's snooping.

By Andrew Blankstein and Kim Christensen
Times Staff Writers

June 7, 2006

While George Mueller was investigating French con man Christopher Rocancourt in a bogus-passport scheme in the 1990s, Rocancourt called him to boast of a "contact" with access to confidential law-enforcement information.

The Los Angeles County district attorney's investigator didn't know it at the time, but Rocancourt — notorious for his fake identities and big lies — apparently was telling the truth.

In an unlikely convergence of two high-profile Hollywood scandals, federal prosecutors allege that Mueller and at least five others connected to the passport case were victims of illegal background checks directed by rogue private eye Anthony Pellicano, then working for Rocancourt as an audio forensics expert.

"It didn't shock me that much," Mueller said of the connection between the two cases. "But it did shock me that I was one of the victims…. Knowing that a suspect in a case that I'm tracking has my personal information is pretty alarming."

Rocancourt, 38, began life as a poor orphan in France and went on to travel the world, using a large number of aliases and an aura of celebrity to steal more than $1 million from the wealthy and well-connected from Beverly Hills to the Hamptons in New York.

At various times, he also claimed to be a Rockefeller heir, the son of actress Sophia Loren and a nephew of movie producer Dino De Laurentiis and fashion designer Oscar de la Renta.

In the mid-1990s, authorities in Los Angeles began investigating Rocancourt in connection with thefts of hundreds of thousands of dollars; a shooting; and the bribing of federal workers to provide him with a phony U.S. passport that was delivered to his Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel suite in a brown paper bag.

Mueller said that he also looked into allegations involving drugs and prostitution, and that some victims of Rocancourt's scams were too embarrassed or wary of publicity to come forward. Mueller estimated that the extent of the Frenchman's swindles was closer to $2 million than to the official figure of $1.2 million.

Lillian Pinho, a Sunland businesswoman, met Rocancourt in 1997 at a Beverly Hills police ball and became part of an eclectic, mostly well-heeled group that socialized at his hotel suite and at Westside nightspots, often joined by his wife, Pia Reyes, a 1988 Playboy Playmate of the Month.

Like others who backed Rocancourt's schemes, Pinho had a falling out with the Frenchman after allegedly losing a $125,000 investment in a clothing boutique that never opened. Her doubts about Rocancourt deepened when he started making threats while Mueller was investigating him.

In one telephone conversation with Pinho, Rocancourt allegedly said he planned to kill his bodyguard, Ali "Benny" Amghar, who found weapons, explosives and racks of Versace suits — with the tags still on them — in an apartment that Rocancourt kept in Beverly Hills.

Fearing that he might be implicated in what he suspected was criminal activity, Amghar told authorities that Rocancourt had paid $2,000 for a fake passport, boasted of sneaking diamonds into the U.S. from Zaire and bragged about having a stash of hand grenades.

Pinho later testified that she also felt threatened by Rocancourt, who told her, "You better not snitch on me, or you will take a very long nap." She also suspected that he was responsible for leaving a decapitated mouse in her mailbox, which she understood to be a message to keep quiet.

At Mueller's urging, Pinho recorded her conversations with Rocancourt, including some that implicated him in the passport scheme, in which he was charged with conspiracy.

Enter Pellicano, the private investigator and self-styled audio forensics expert hired by Rocancourt's lawyer, Victor Sherman, to analyze the tapes and determine their authenticity.

Sherman, who later defended Pellicano against federal explosives charges that landed the private eye in prison for 30 months, said his client had only a bit part in the Rocancourt saga.

"He didn't really have much of a role," Sherman said in a telephone interview.

Nevertheless, the names of six people from the Rocancourt case showed up earlier this year among scores of victims listed in a 112-count federal indictment accusing Pellicano and others of wiretapping and illegally accessing law-enforcement databases, typically to gain an advantage in criminal and civil litigation.

According to court records in the passport case, the tapes were made available to Pellicano in May 1999 — the same month he allegedly directed Sgt. Mark Arneson, his contact inside the Los Angeles Police Department, to run illegal background checks on six people with ties to the case, including prosecution witnesses, co-defendants and Mueller.

Pellicano never told him of any illegal activity, and it had no bearing on the passport case anyway, Sherman said.

"It's possible that he may have run their names," he said, "but that didn't play a role in the case."

While two of Rocancourt's co-defendants in the passport case pleaded guilty, Rocancourt jumped bail and headed to New York, where he allegedly swindled some well-heeled residents of the Hamptons, who knew him as Christopher Rockefeller.

In March 2004, after being arrested and imprisoned for a year in Canada, Rocancourt pleaded guilty to passport fraud conspiracy in Los Angeles County Superior Court and was sentenced to five years in prison, the term to be served concurrently with two others for convictions in New York.

When he was released from a federal prison in Pennsylvania last October, authorities took him directly to the Philadelphia airport and put him on a British Airways flight to London, with a connecting flight to Paris. It was a one-way, first-class ticket.

"That's Christopher," said Sherman, noting that his former client is now collaborating on a movie about his life. He insists that Rocancourt is on the straight-and-narrow these days.

"Christopher would never do anything wrong again — ever," Sherman said, not even pretending to keep a straight face: "I have a big smile."

But maybe it was Mueller who had the last laugh on Rocancourt.

"With him, it was 'Catch me if you can,' " Mueller said. "And we did."