http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/articles/060426fege01
Inside Hollywood's Big Wiretap Scandal
A SNEAK PEEK FROM THE JUNE ISSUE.
It looks as if the wiretapping investigation
consuming L.A. may bring down some of the townÂ’s
top names. From the details of Anthony
Pellicano’s electronic “War Room” to the P.I.’s
most damaging cases, to the impact of his divorce
and his delusions of Godfather grandeur, the
authors have a road map to the biggest scandal in Hollywood history
By BRYAN BURROUGH and JOHN CONNOLLY
Back before everything went wrong, before they
discovered the wiretap transcripts and the hand
grenades and the plastic explosives in his
office, before he spent more than two years in
federal prison, before a storm of indictments
sent waves of fear cascading through the Southern
California entertainment and legal communities,
before the investigation into the ham-fisted
intimidation of a reporter helped trigger the
greatest scandal in Hollywood history, Anthony Pellicano was a family man.
Most every night Pellicano, the swaggering
62-year-old "private detective to the stars," the
man who handled sensitive jobs for everyone from
Michael Jackson and Tom Cruise to onetime
Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz, left his
office on the third floor of a Sunset Boulevard
high-rise and hopped into his black, two-seat
Mercedes. He drove home to suburban Oak Park,
where he and his fourth wife, Katherine "Kat"
Pellicano, raised their children—three daughters
and an autistic son named Luca. Kat was expected
to have dinner waiting on the table, complete
with dessert. Afterward, she might give Pellicano
a massage or have sex with him.
For the Pellicanos, a pleasant evening might mean
watching The Sopranos or one of the Godfather
movies. Mafia rituals fascinated Pellicano, who
grew up in Al Capone's hometown of Cicero,
Illinois, and once listed the son of a reputed
Chicago Mob boss as a creditor. In business,
where he crafted a tough-guy persona designed to
appeal to a clientele weaned on Jake Gittes and
Sam Spade, he was a man who playfully brandished
baseball bats, allegedly had a dead fish left on
an opponent's windshield, and told clients they
were joining his "family"—and no one hurt his
family. He named his son after Don Corleone's
favored assassin, Luca Brazzi. On occasion Kat
felt he took the mafioso shtick a tad far. "There
were times when he would make my children kiss
his hand like he was the Godfather," she says.
"He started to think he was Don Corleone."
Her husband could be controlling and
temperamental, according to Kat, but for years
she put up with his moods, in part because he had
no one else. "I was his only confidante," Kat
says. "He had no friends to speak of. On the
weekends we rarely, and I mean rarely, had any
friends over, and they were my friends — he had
none. He just wanted to be with me. It was so bad
that for years he would not let me talk on the telephone over the weekend."
By 1999, after 15 years of marriage, the
Pellicanos were squabbling. That December, Kat
encouraged her husband to buy a condominium on
Doheny Drive, near his office, telling him to
sleep over there when he was working late. A few
months afterward, when she threw Pellicano out of
the house for good, the detective began living in
the condominium full-time. The turmoil in
Pellicano's private life, Kat and others
speculate, made him sloppy, made him do things he
wouldn't ordinarily do. "He was definitely
distracted," says Rich DiSabatino, a Beverly
Hills private investigator who probably qualifies
as Pellicano's closest friend. "He was, in his
mind, a family man, and he was losing his family."
In fact, the famous incident in which that dead
fish was left on the hood of Los Angeles Times
reporter Anita Busch's silver Audi came as
Pellicano was desperately trying to re-unite with
Kat. Two months later, in August 2002, she
allowed her husband to come home for a single
Sunday, to see if he had really changed. In the
old days, Sunday was a time of ritual in their
household. Pellicano had his weekly massage
promptly at six p.m., during which the children
were ordered to remain silent, and afterward he
would watch The Sopranos, a rite so solemnly
observed "it was like he was going to church," Kat remembers.
It took only a few hours for Kat to realize that
her husband hadn't changed. He remained prickly
and cold. Finally, she says, "my oldest daughter
came to me and whispered, 'Say the magic word,
Mom, say the magic word.'" The magic word was
"asshole," which always caused him to leave the
house when Kat called him one. "Eventually, I
said that magic word that day, he left, and I have not regretted it since."
That same August, Vanity Fair's Ned Zeman, who
was investigating one of Pellicano's former
clients, actor Steven Seagal, was driving through
Laurel Canyon when a dark Mercedes displayed a
flashing light in his rearview mirror. When Zeman
rolled down his window, the Mercedes pulled up
beside him. The passenger rolled down his window
and rapped a pistol on the side of his car. Then
he pointed it at Zeman. "Stop," he said, and
pulled the trigger. The gun wasn't loaded. "Bang," he said.
A few weeks later the aging detective's divorce
went through, and he lost his family for good.
Two months after that the F.B.I. raided his
office, and nothing in Hollywood will ever, ever be the same.
No scandal in Hollywood history can compare to
the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping scandal. Not
the Fatty Arbuckle murder trials, of the 1920s,
not the killing of Lana Turner's lover Johnny
Stompanato, in 1958, not director Roman
Polanski's statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl,
in 1977, not even the late-1970s Indecent
Exposure embezzlement scandal involving producer
David Begelman. "People out here, they're talking
about this endlessly," says media magnate Barry
Diller. "If you're talking to people in L.A. right now, it's the only topic."
The details are being uncovered by a federal
investigation into the tactics of dozens of Los
Angeles attorneys, who in turn represented over
the years more than a hundred directors,
producers, and movie stars, from Steven
Spielberg, Nicole Kidman, and Stevie Wonder to
Chris Rock, Kevin Costner, and Demi Moore.
History suggests that only a few are likely to be
indicted, but until the case concludes, a wide
swath of Hollywood's legal and entertainment
establishments is living in abject fear.
Why? Because every disagreement in
Hollywood—every divorce, every baby born out of
wedlock, every contract dispute, every squabble
between studios and talent agencies—involves
attorneys, and for the last 20 years when things
got nasty, L.A. lawyers turned to Anthony
Pellicano, who monitored, investigated,
intimidated, and in some cases wiretapped their
opponents. After months of anticipation, the tip
of this very dirty iceberg finally hove into view
in February, when Pellicano and six of his
flunkies, including two policemen, were indicted
on various charges, including illegally accessing
law-enforcement databases. A week later the
billionaire financier Kirk Kerkorian's longtime
attorney, Terry Christensen, became the first
high-profile L.A. lawyer to be indicted, for
allegedly paying Pellicano $100,000 to tap the
phones of Kerkorian's ex-wife, Lisa Bonder,
during the couple's child-custody case.
In comments made after these indictments, the
U.S. Attorney's Office indicated that more
indictments are coming, and, several people close
to the investigation say, they won't be limited
to attorneys. Clients will be indicted, too.
Which is why the story of Pellicano's fall is
quickly changing from one man's personal and
professional immolation to a broader, far more
sordid exposé of the tactics that some of
Hollywood's storied power brokers have used to stay in power.
"There will always be people who'll do the
bidding of powerful and wealthy people," observes
Gavin DeBecker, the noted security consultant.
"I'm more curious about the people who do the
hiring than about the guns for hire. The book
wasn't called The Luca Brazzi Story, you know. It was called The Godfather."
The Pellicano scandal has been simmering since
2002, since that dead fish was thrown on Anita
Busch's Audi, along with a red rose and a note
bearing the single word "Stop." At the time,
Busch was writing about Steven Seagal and Michael
Ovitz, both Pellicano clients. By the time Ned
Zeman was accosted two months later, an F.B.I.
probe of Pellicano was under way. It climaxed
with the raids on Pellicano's office that
November, in which two hand grenades, a wedge of
C-4 plastic explosive, and thousands of pages of
wiretap transcripts were found, as well as
recordings encrypted on computer discs. An
investigation that had initially focused on the
intimidation of a journalist quickly grew into a
broader probe of electronic eavesdropping.
Pellicano was indicted on weapons charges, copped
a plea, and in 2003 was given a 30-month sentence
in the Taft Correctional Institution, north of
Los Angeles, while federal authorities attempted
to understand his wiretapping activities. He was
poised to emerge from prison in February 2006,
when he was indicted again, this time with two
former cops and two former employees of Pacific
Bell, on 112 charges of wiretapping and of paying
the policemen to illegally access law-enforcement
databases. Pellicano remains in custody while
rumors ricochet that he will begin "ratting out" his clients.
Those attorneys who used Pellicano's services and
who have cases known to be under federal
examination, or who have retained their own
attorneys, include some of the best-known lawyers
in Southern California: Dennis Wasser, the
renowned Beverly Hills divorce attorney whose
clients have included Kerkorian, Spielberg, Rod
Stewart, and Jennifer Lopez; Martin Singer, who
has represented Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy,
Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, and Celine
Dion, and whose office number is said to have
appeared on Pellicano's speed-dial list; the late
Edward Masry, best known for spearheading the
class-action lawsuit that inspired the 2000 movie
Erin Brockovich; Charles N. ShepÂard, head of
litigation at Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman
Machtinger & Kinsella; two attorneys who have
represented Pellicano, Victor Sherman and Donald
Re; and Daniel G. Davis, a Beverly Hills
criminal-defense attorney best known for his work
in the late 1980s on the McMartin pre-school
child-molestation case. (None of the attorneys or
their representatives would comment for this article.)
But the "whales" in this investigation, the men
whose futures are now being debated every night
at the Ivy, Mastro's Steakhouse, and Koi, are
three of the most powerful Hollywood figures of
the last half-century: Michael S. Ovitz, the
onetime head of the CAA talent agency and later
the president of Disney, who dominated American
film deals for two decades; Brad Grey, the
chairman and C.E.O. of the Paramount Motion
Picture Group, previously head of the
talent-management firm Brillstein-Grey, and an
executive producer of The Sopranos; and Bert
Fields, the 78-year-old legal legend who has
played a hand in almost every significant
Hollywood dispute of the last 30 years. None of
these three men has been indicted, and all deny
any wrongdoing, but Fields has admitted to being
a subject of the investigation, and Grey and
Ovitz have been questioned. The cases cited in
Pellicano's February indictment suggest that all
three stand squarely in the U.S. attorney's crosshairs.
Pellicano, several sources say, worked for Grey
off and on for years while Grey was at
Brillstein-Grey. Ovitz was facing the collapse of
his post-Disney start-up, Artists Management
Group, when, in 2001, he reportedly hired
Pellicano to probe several members of what he
famously termed, in a Vanity Fair interview, a
Hollywood "Gay Mafia" of his enemies, several of
whom weren't in fact gay. (Ovitz has denied this,
and said he hired Pellicano for other matters.)
According to the indictments, Pellicano paid his
cops to run background checks on several of these
men. But it is Fields who may have the most to
fear. According to Kat Pellicano and several of
her husband's former employees, Pellicano
considered Fields by far his most important client.
It was Fields who, according to former Pellicano
employees, brought Pellicano into DreamWorks
Animation C.E.O. Jeffrey Katzenberg's litigation
with Disney's Michael Eisner, Tom Cruise's
defense against a gay-porn star's sex
allegations, Imagine Entertainment's suit against
Mike Myers, and Kevin Costner's struggle with a
difficult British fan, to name but a few. "He
would speak to Bert just about every day," says
DiSabatino, "and if he was working one of his
cases, they would talk a few times a day."
Until Pellicano's indictment, in fact, Fields was
probably his biggest fan, serving up adoring
quotes for media profiles of him. "Time after
time, Anthony comes up with the witness I'm
looking for," Fields told a writer in 1992. "He
gets me results, so I stick with him."
Kat Pellicano discloses a measure of how tight
the two men became. "Six or seven years ago," she
says, "Anthony comes home one night and tells me
we are going to become Jewish and that Bert
Fields has arranged conversion classes for both
of us. I said, 'Anthony, with all that Italian
and Catholic bullshit of yours and my being an
almost atheist from Oklahoma, why the hell do you
want us to become Jewish?' He tells me, 'Because
Bert thinks it will be good for my business. Most
of the lawyers out here are Jews, so it would be
a good thing.' I refused to participate, and the idea eventually went away."
When Pellicano was arrested, in November 2002,
Fields spearheaded an effort to raise money for
Pellicano's children. Kat says of her husband,
"He left us with nothing. That's why I became a
real-estate agent." The president of a major
studio, who says he has given testimony before
the grand jury, recalls that Fields told him,
"Anthony has no money, and he's not going to be
able to take care of his kids. A group of us
should pitch in and do something for him."
"Subsequently, Anthony and I spoke," says the
studio president, "[and] he gave me a list of
people to call." The list, which numbered 20 to
30 people, was a Who's Who of Hollywood power
players, including Ovitz and producer Jerry
Bruckheimer. Several of them promised to
contribute, but as word of the wiretapping probe
spread, all but the studio president and a
producer dropped out. When Pellicano heard about
this, the studio president says, he responded,
"If no one else is putting up the money, then I don't want it."
As pressure grows on Pellicano to testify against
his former clients, a lot of people may wish they had been more charitable.
Detective agencies in America run the gamut from
large international outfits such as Wackenhut and
Kroll Inc., who handle security and
investigations for companies worldwide, all the
way down to storefront solo proprietors,
typically former policemen. In size, the
Pellicano Investigative Agency, which usually
employed five or fewer investigators, fell low
down the scale, though the publicity Pellicano
drew in myriad media profiles made him seem more
significant. He commanded a niche business, but
that niche was Hollywood, which made him a
household name in some very powerful Los Angeles
households. Outside L.A., however, the few
private investigators who knew of him considered
Pellicano a cartoonish character.
"Before this, I'd never heard of the guy," the
C.E.O. of a top New York agency told me. "No,
check that. I read about him in Vanity Fair. Guy
seemed like a real nut job." The noted San
Francisco P.I. Jack Palladino says of Pellicano,
"I never took the guy seriously. The way he
bragged openly about wiretaps and baseball bats,
I mean, I just thought it wasn't real. I didn't
understand that his Hollywood clientele lived in
that same film noir world and accepted it as real."
In the national investigative community, in fact,
there is a sense that Pellicano could have
thrived only in L.A. His mock-mafioso act was
tailor-made for Hollywood, which expects a
private detective to act the way detectives do in
the movies, where illegal activities such as
tapping telephones and bribing cops are routine.
Peers who know him, like Palladino, suspect
Pellicano became so wrapped up in his fantasy he
lost touch with reality. The irony, they say, is
that the background checks he allegedly bribed
policemen to run can often now be accessed in publicly available databases.
"You have to understand, a lot of what he did was
unnecessary," says Palladino. "He was asking for
information he could have gotten otherwise.
Either he really didn't understand how much is
now available or he was just too lazy. I mean,
this is not how anyone else in this business does
business. It's the way it is in the movies. And,
unfortunately, he had this L.A. community—they're
like politicians, they don't have much to do with
regular people. They don't know much about the
real world. They don't know much about
boundaÂries or rules. They're rich and spoiled
and out of touch. And this was a guy who
reflected their reality, which was the reality in films."
Wiretapping, though prevalent in films, is almost
unheard of today, several leading private
detectives say. It was more common in the 1950s
and 60s—the famous San Francisco P.I. Hal Lipset
bragged of bugging the olive in a suspect's
martini—but the government scandals of the 1970s
led to tightened privacy laws, which can carry
heavy penalties for electronic eavesdropping.
None of the detectives interviewed for this
article could recall a single instance in recent
years of a P.I.'s being prosecuted for
wiretapping. "Clients always want us to check
their phones for taps, but I don't think I've
ever come across a flat-out wiretap in all my
years in the business," a veteran New York
investigator says. "It's just not done anymore."
But Pellicano was proudly old-school. He played
the part of "Hollywood detective" as if in a
movie—double-breasted suits, patent-leather
shoes, opera on the office speakers—and over the
years any number of producers, including Brad
Grey, Michael Mann, and Jerry Bruckheimer, talked
of putting his life on film. Life inside the
Pellicano office, however, was less Magnum P.I.
than Raging Bull. Pellicano preferred his
assistants young and beautiful; his executive
vice president, Tarita Virtue, 36, who says she
was the only employee allowed into the secret
room where his wiretaps were monitored, once
posed in lingerie for Maxim. Pellicano mused
about arranging a Playboy layout on "The Girls of Pellicano."
Yet between their boss's flirtations and his
bellicose management style, few stayed long. "I
always thought when people left Pellicano they
should be entitled to therapy instead of
severance," says Denise Ward, a P.I. who toiled
six years for Pellicano and dated him as well.
"He constantly screams and yells and threatens
everyone who works for him. I would ask new
employees, 'Are you on Prozac yet?'" Adds another
former Pellicano employee, "At one point every
one of us in the office was on anti-anxiety and/or anti-depression medicine."
But as difficult as he could be, Pellicano got
results. Celebrities preoccupied with their
images found him the perfect antidote for
stalkers, troublesome lovers, and the mothers of
accidental children. As the Louisville Slugger he
liked to fondle attests, Pellicano had no qualms
about using threats and intimidation. The
Hollywood Hills are teeming with ex-wives,
ex-lovers, journalists, and former business
managers who swear Pellicano had them followed,
wiretapped, threatened, roughed up, or worse. The
most common stories one hears are of people
having their homes watched and being followed in
their cars by large men—one or two claim to have
been driven off the road by them. Pellicano was
especially good at identifying an opponent's weak
spot and attempting to exploit it.
To cite just one example, consider how he dealt
with one of Brad Grey's adversaries, a
writer-producer named Bo Zenga. Zenga had sued
Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, claiming they
ignored a verbal producing agreement for 2000's
Scary Movie. Pellicano's indictment indicates
Zenga was one of the many Hollywood figures he
allegedly wiretapped and investigated by paying a
local policeman to run an illegal background
check. With that information, Zenga believes,
Pellicano learned that Zenga and his sister had
co-signed a mortgage on his elderly mother's home
in New Jersey. At the time, Zenga's mother, who
had diabetes, was blind and confined to a wheelchair.
"When Pellicano learned that I had that mortgage,
he made a pretense call to that number, and my
mother answered," Zenga says. "He repeatedly
called my mother and would terrify her. He told
her that unless her son dropped the lawsuit her
daughter would lose her house; she, her daughter,
and grandson would be homeless; and he would see
to it that her son went to prison. When that
didn't work, he tried the goombah bit. He told
her that he was the father of nine children and
like her always worried about them. He did
everything he could to get her to convince me to
drop the lawsuit. He continued until the day she
died from a stroke. This guy is pure evil."
The grandson of Sicilian immigrants, Pellicano
was born in 1944. His grandfather Americanized
the family name, Pellicano, to Pellican, but
Anthony, proud of his roots, restored the name to
Pellicano as an adult. A self-described "young
tough" on the streets of Cicero, he was kicked
out of high school for fighting. He joined the
U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he was trained as a
cryptographer. After his discharge he took a job
with the Spiegel catalogue in Chicago and was
placed in collections, where he tracked down
delinquent customers. He was good at it. In 1969,
at the age of 25, he decided to hang out his shingle as a private investigator.
From the beginning, Pellicano had panache. He
drove a huge Lincoln Continental, sealed his
letters with monogrammed wax, and hung samurai
swords in his office. At various times he gave
his employees and family members necklaces
bearing a small golden horn he said contained a
strand of his hair. Much of his early work
involved missing persons. A 1978 article claimed
that he had found 3,968 of them—which works out
to 440 people a year, more than one a day.
Hyperbole was in his blood, however, which made
him a magnet for Chicago reporters, who year
after year filed into his office—done in a
silver-and-blood-red color scheme—to fill their
notebooks with stories. Coverage brought
customers, including a celebrity or two; at one
point, Yoko Ono hired Pellicano to find her missing daughter, Kyoko.
From his earliest days, Pellicano had an
obsession with electronic gadgetry. He kept
$200,000 worth of it in a back room he called the
"bat cave" and claimed to have found dozens of
listening devices for clients ranging from
housewives to, he said, the government. His first
serious publicity, in fact, came in 1973, when he
claimed to have found a bug in the phone of an
aide to Illinois secretary of state Michael J.
Howlett, sparking a mini-Watergate scandal that
put Pellicano on the front pages.
Pellicano's big break was discovering Mike Todd's
body in a pile of leaves in a Chicago cemetery
that police detectives had repeatedly searched.
The legendary showman and producer had died at
the age of 48 in a plane crash in 1958, a year
after he had married the 24-year-old Elizabeth
Taylor. In 1977 his grave was emptied by looters
searching for a diamond ring. Pellicano was able
to lead reporters directly to the body, an
achievement detectives found suspicious. The
resulting plaudits put Pellicano on the map in
Hollywood and, in 1983, after a difficult divorce
from his second wife, Angie, he made the move to Los Angeles.
His rapid rise there was facilitated by his first
client, Howard Weitzman, who hired Pellicano when
Weitzman was defending auto magnate John DeLorean
on cocaine-trafficking charges in 1984. It was
Weitzman who introduced him to the world of
celebrities, as did Don Simpson—Jerry
Bruckheimer's partner. The wild-eyed SimpÂÂÂson,
whose vast appetite for drugs and prostitutes
remains a legend a decade after his death, found
in Pellicano someone who could make his sins go
away. (Hence, one of Pellicano's nicknames: the
Sin Eater.) He used Pellicano when a former
employee sued him for emotional distress, and in
quieter cases, including an incident in which a
doctor friend overdosed at his Bel Air mansion.
"Simpson would often ramble on that 'I'm going to
get Pellicano to do this' or 'get Pellicano to do
that,'" says one of "Hollywood Madam" Heidi
Fleiss's former girls, Alexandra Datig. "At the
time, few of us took it seriously."
By the early 1990s a number of lawyers were
turning to Pellicano to make their celebrity
clients' problems disappear. When a British
tabloid linked Kevin Costner to a young fan,
Pellicano helped get the story killed before it
reached the U.S. media. When James Woods was
being bothered by Sean Young, Pellicano helped
out. When Farrah Fawcett had trouble with a
boyfriend, she hired Pellicano. When Roseanne
wanted to find a long-lost daughter, Pellicano.
When Stevie Wonder needed information about a
girlfriend, Pellicano. When O. J. Simpson—before
his murder trial—reportedly had a troublesome
secretary, Pellicano. "Anthony is one of those
people, shall we say, who is a lion at the gate,"
Don Simpson once said. "He is not a man to be on the wrong side of."
Pellicano could be startlingly candid about his
methods. On a celebrity's behalf, he found that
an effective way to make an inconvenient lover go
away was "counter-blackmail." A girl sues an
actor for palimony? Pellicano would dig into her
past and find something—a prostitution arrest,
drugs. Men weren't so easy. "If you can't sit
down with a person and reason with them,"
Pellicano told GQ in 1992, "there is only one
thing left, and that's fear. Of course,
law-enforcement authorities don't want to hear
stuff like that, know what I mean? But it happens every day."
He was Hollywood's best-kept secret. Until 1993.
That was the year Pellicano emerged from the
shadows onto the national stage, taking
high-profile roles on behalf of movie executive
Michael Nathanson, who hired him to show he
"never did business Â… on any level" with Heidi
Fleiss, and Michael Jackson, for whom he
spearheaded the defense against a 13-year-old
boy's allegations of child molestation, by
digging up embarrassing information about the
boy's family. For following and monitoring scores
of witnesses and reporters, Pellicano received
not only a Mercedes but a $2 million fee, his
best payday ever. The Jackson case, during which
Pellicano appeared at a press conference with
Howard Weitzman to vilify the accuser's family,
spawned profiles in The Washington Post and
People. The 1992 GQ piece, by Peter Wilkinson,
also fired the Pellicano legend. In it, Pellicano
admitted accessing certain databases "without
permission." Asked how he handled a client's
cocaine-addled son, Pellicano answered, "I just used a bat."
That $2 million fee, however, brought Pellicano
into conflict with one of the few outfits more
tenacious than he: the Internal Revenue Service.
According to several people close to him,
Pellicano reported only $1 million of the fee as
income. The other $1 million, Denise Ward says,
was reported as a loan: "I remember one morning
when he opened his mail with the letter from the
I.R.S., he jumped on his desk and started
screaming, 'Abandon ship! Abandon ship! We're out
of business!' Women were crying and screaming in
the office. Fortunately, Rich DiSabatino was in
the office and pulled him aside and calmed him
down. I understand it took him a few years to pay off the I.R.S."
No one knows when Pellicano first tried to
wiretap a telephone, but by the mid-1990s he
seems to have been attempting to perfect his
technique. Around 1995 he hired a self-taught
computer programmer named Kevin Kachikian—who was
also indicted in February—to create software that
would intercept telephone calls. They named it
Telesleuth. In November 1995, Pellicano had an
attorney from Bert Fields's firm apply to
trademark the name. Later, Kachikian developed
another program, called Forensic Audio Sleuth,
which was able to analyze and enhance audio
recordings. Again using an attorney from Fields's
firm, Pellicano applied for a trademark. Fields
has said he didn't work on such matters, and a
spokesman for his firm has said they believed the
software was created to aid on cases Pellicano
worked on for law-enforcement outfits.
By early 1997, Pellicano was apparently ready to
use Telesleuth in earnest. To arrange the
wiretaps, according to the indictment, he bribed
two Pacific Bell workers—one was indicted in
February. A former Pellicano employee explains
that additional telephone wiring was clipped
inside the box at the phone company. (It was
never necessary to break into a location.) When a
call came in, Telesleuth automatically recorded
it and relayed it to a Macintosh computer in
Pellicano's Sunset Boulevard offices. His
indictment suggests that Telesleuth's first use
was against a Los Angeles real-estate developer,
Robert Maguire. Beginning around September 1997,
Pellicano allegedly used the program to wiretap
Mark Hughes, the late founder of Herbalife, who
was then engaged in a nasty divorce.
According to former employees, the wiretapping
operation became the secret heart of Pellicano's
business—the one unique service he could market
to clients. According to Pellicano's former
executive vice president, Tarita Virtue, who
described the wiretapping setup in a series of
interviews with Vanity Fair, the single Macintosh
soon became five, lined up in a small locked
office Pellicano called "the War Room." Only
Pellicano, Virtue, and Kachikian had access to
the room, whose only other furniture was a row of
filing cabinets. Pellicano and Virtue alone had
codes to use the Macs. The operation had one
drawback: the Macs could receive wiretap
recordings only from their own, 310 area code. To
tap phones in the 323, 213, 626, and 818 area
codes, Virtue says, Pellicano had to rent an
apartment in each where he could stash a
Macintosh and a detachable hard drive. When one
of these computers was used, Pellicano would
switch out the hard drive every few days, bring
it to his office, and download the recordings.
The recordings were typically crystal clear. The
problem became the sheer volume of them—thousands
and thousands of telephone conversations,
everything from a target's confidential
discussions with his attorney to chats with his
orthodontist, according to Virtue. To home in on
the most promising ones, Kachikian's software
could graph a recording's volume; Pellicano could
then go directly to a conversation in which his
subject had raised his voice, often a sign that
something emotional was being discussed. Virtue
did most of the initial scanning. When a wiretap
yielded something especially useful, she says,
she forwarded it to Pellicano's computer with the
data displayed in red lettering, signifying that it was urgent.
On most cases, Virtue asserts, the detective
refrained from telling attorneys where the
wiretapped information came from. He would begin
a briefing by saying, "My sources tell me Â… " or
"It's been brought to my attention Â… " But he
apparently wasn't always so careful; the
indictment of Terry Christensen cites numerous
conversations in which Pellicano told Christensen
exactly what he was doing. Besides, Pellicano
liked to brag, and in time, any number of his
peers and clients say, he told them he was
tapping telephones. "Everyone knew that Pellicano
was constantly tapping people," says Jack
Palladino. "He would also illegally tape his own
clients and their attorneys and then play tape
recordings of those conversations to impress [them]."
There are many in Hollywood who say Pellicano
bragged to them of his wiretapping prowess. A
woman named Corinne Clifford, a figure in a
child-support case Pellicano worked on for Dennis
Wasser, describes an evening in 2003 when the
detective tried to seduce her at his condominium.
After an unsuccessful bid to get her to watch a
video of certain celebrities having sex, she
says, Pellicano claimed he had bugged Nicole
Kidman and Kirk Kerkorian's wife—both involved in
cases he had also worked on. "I'm the No. 1
private eye in the world," Pellicano boasted,
according to Clifford. "I made Dennis Wasser's career."
In the face of his own indiscretions, Pellicano
re-doubled his security systems to safeguard the
War Room. There were security cameras throughout
the office. Internal doors could be opened only
with pass codes. "Even his own wife was not
allowed into the office," one employee remembers.
"I once let her and Luca into the office.
Pellicano had headphones on and the kid slapped
his father in the head. Pellicano went crazy,
screaming, 'Who the fuck let these people in here?'"
Pellicano's reliance on wiretapping is viewed by
several of his peers as an admission of his
greatest weakness. Modern investigators work
mostly for attorneys and spend much of their time
identifying, cajoling, and interviewing people
who might give testimony to help an attorney's
case. Yet Pellicano lacked the common touch—some
say the patience and temperament—to soothe and
coddle potential witnesses. When he needed
"street work," Denise Ward handled it. "Anthony
hadn't been out in the field for years," says
Rich DiSabatino. "He literally didn't know his
way around town." Rather than work the field,
Pellicano cut corners by wiretapping.
First-person information could be obtained faster
and was inherently more reliable than that gotten
from third parties. Wiretapping also gave
Pellicano ready access to a trove of personal
information, including credit-card numbers and a
variety of secret passwords. "We had anything we
wanted," says a former employee. "We could do anything we wanted to you."
The only problem, unfortunately, was that
Pellicano's eavesdropping operation was 100
percent illegal. "In our business, wiretapping is
a shortcut," says DiSabatino. "To suicide."
Pellicano also used a second shortcut: the bribes
he allegedly paid policemen to search
law-enforcement databases. One, a Los Angeles cop
named Mark Arneson—also indicted in
February—became a fixture in Pellicano's cases,
according to the indictment. Arneson was "an
arrogant guy, and I told Anthony just that," says
DiSabatino. "Pellicano would call him, and the
guy had the balls to send him information that he
had illegally obtained with his name and police
identification right on top. I once saw a report
from Arneson to Pellicano, and it said, 'Sgt.
Mark Arneson, Official Inquiry.'" (Arneson did
not respond to repeated phone calls.)
There in his camera-lined bunker, high above
Sunset Boulevard, listening with his black
headphones to wiretaps and allegedly paying
bribes to policemen and Pac Bell workers,
Pellicano should have been home free. If he had
been smarter, he probably could have gone on
wiretapping half of Hollywood for years to come.
Maybe it was hubris. Maybe it was losing his
family. But after Kat asked for a divorce, in
early 2000, signs of carelessness crept into
Pellicano's operation. On one notable occasion,
he is said to have allowed a pair of outsiders
into the War Room to listen to wiretaps. It was
this incident, it turns out—and not the fish on
Anita Busch's Audi, as previous reports
suggest—that first brought Pellicano's secret world to the F.B.I.'s attention.
The saga of the Nicherie brothers and the Shafrir
family is one of those "only in L.A." tales that
make your head hurt. According to a lawsuit and
people involved in the case, the story is a
complex one, including the following allegations:
Daniel and Abner Nicherie were Israeli con men,
who, in the late 1990s, targeted a fellow
Israeli, Ami Shafrir, who owned several Beverly
Hills office buildings. Posing as legitimate
businessmen, they succeeded not only in swindling
Shafrir out of around $40 million—but also in
persuading his wife, Sarit, to work alongside
them, convincing her that Ami was a criminal,
according to a lawsuit filed by Ami.
When Ami sued, the Nicheries responded with a
barrage of legal artillery, eventually hiring 40
separate Los Angeles attorneys to countersue.
After a referral from one of these lawyers,
Victor Sherman, they allegedly paid Pellicano
$50,000 to wiretap Ami. Pellicano told the
Nicheries he could use customized electronics to
cause interference on Ami's cell phone, which
would force him to use the wiretapped landline
more often. The Nicheries understood Ami was
being bugged, although Pellicano initially refused to let them listen in.
But the Nicheries were eventually given access to
the recordings because Ami sometimes spoke in
Hebrew, and Pellicano couldn't understand a word.
He made the two brothers swear that what they
heard would remain confidential. On several
occasions they arrived at Pellicano's office
after hours, allowing themselves to be frisked
and turning over their cellular phones.
Unbeknownst to Pellicano, however, Daniel
Nicherie had secreted a tiny cell phone in his
sock, which he used to allow Ami's wife, Sarit,
to listen in on the wiretap recordings.
Sarit Shafrir, a stylish woman in her 50s, heard
dozens of Ami's conversations this way; sometimes
the Nicheries would call from Pellicano's office
and play back a tape, other times they would
leave a recording of the wiretap on her answering
machine. In time, the Nicheries and Pellicano
began speaking of ways to put Ami in jail by
framing him; one involved planting cocaine in the
trunk of his car and having a Beverly Hills
policeman on Pellicano's payroll pull him over.
It was then, people familiar with Sarit's story
say, that she began having second thoughts about
the Nicheries. Sensing this, the brothers
threatened her, telling her she and her two
children could be "barbecued" when their home
went up in flames. Daniel Nicherie emphasized
that there was nothing Sarit could do against
them; Daniel told her that Pellicano had his
offices wired with plastic explosives. If she
told the authorities about the wiretapping
operation, a single cell-phone call, Daniel
claimed, would allow Pellicano to blow up all the
evidence. (Attorneys for the Nicheries did not respond to calls for comment.)
After months of worrying, Sarit decided to turn
on Pellicano and the Nicheries and contact the
F.B.I. But she was so afraid of Pellicano's
capabilities she flew to Israel in order to
telephone the bureau's L.A. office from a foreign
country. When she returned, in August 2001, she
met an agent in a public place: the Beverly Hills
Public Library. There, hidden deep in the stacks,
she told the agent everything she knew about
Pellicano's wiretapping system. To her amazement,
the agent appeared skeptical. "He said it was
impossible," says a person familiar with the
story, "that it would take a 'tremendous
infrastructure' to do something like that."
The agent seemed unconvinced even when Sarit
described a wiretapped conversation she had heard
between Ami and another F.B.I. agent, who was
investigating Ami's complaints about the
Nicheries. Sarit suggested that the F.B.I. send
in someone undercover. "Do what I did," she
insisted. "Go to Victor Sherman—he'll get you to
Pellicano and you can see the whole setup!" The
agent scribbled down everything she said. But as
Sarit waited for an F.B.I. raid on Pellicano's
offices in the coming months, nothing happened. Nothing at all.
No one is suggesting that the F.B.I. "covered up"
for Pellicano, but the bureau's skepticism was
probably influenced by the perception that
Pellicano was in some ways "one of their own."
Pellicano had been handling audio-analysis
tasks—cleaning up, amplifying, and identifying
legal wiretaps—on F.B.I. cases since the
mid-1990s. In 1997 he served as an expert witness
for the federal prosecution of a murderer in
Miami. As late as 2001 the F.B.I. retained
Pellicano to analyze federal wiretaps during the
Arizona narcotics-trafficking trial of New York
Mafia hit man Sammy "the Bull" Gravano. At his
home Pellicano kept a collection of plaques and
glowing letters from F.B.I. officials.
"We worked for the F.B.I. on a number of cases,"
says a onetime Pellicano employee. "I [once] told
Pellicano, 'We're doing bad shit in here. Aren't
you worried that [F.B.I. agents] may have slipped
a bug in?' He said, 'I'm not worried about it!'"
"Everyone knew what he was doing," says a person
involved in the Shafrir case. "But not the feds. The feds didn't have a clue."
The longer his wiretapping activities went
undiscovered—or at least unpunished—the more
brazen Pellicano became. Kat and his closest
intimates, Rich DiSabatino and Denise Ward,
believe his marital troubles distracted him. "He
was devastated when I asked him for the divorce,"
Kat asserts. "He really became unglued. He lost
it." As he attempted to re-unite with Kat,
Pellicano's world shrank. He ate most nights,
often with Ward or DiSabatino, at one of four
restaurants, including Le Dome and Mastro's. "He
never traveled more than a half a mile from his office," Ward asserts.
"It bothered him about his kids—he lost his older
kids [Pellicano's five children from earlier
marriages], and he didn't want to lose the four
younger ones," says DiSabatino. "Once his divorce
came into play, there were definitely times when
he realized that, 'Hey, I'm not as young as I
used to be. I can't go and hit on women.' He
constantly said that, that he looked in the
mirror and saw a 25-year-old and everyone else saw a 55-year-old."
Pellicano's midlife crisis was gathering steam in
June 2002 (nine months after Sarit Shafrir's
accusations) when that fateful fish landed on
Anita Busch's Audi—a job, it's been shown,
carried out by a Pellicano flunky named Alexander
Proctor. Busch had just moved to the Los Angeles
Times, after co-authoring six articles about
Michael Ovitz's failing Artists Management Group
for The New York Times. She believed from the
outset the warning was Pellicano's handiwork.
The F.B.I. quickly identified and detained
Proctor, who claimed responsibility and said
Pellicano had hired him. The bureau's initial
interest in Pellicano was the Busch incident;
only as agents began interviewing former
employees and Pellicano targets did the first
hints of illegal wiretapping start to interest
them. Pellicano quickly caught wind of the F.B.I.
investigation and did what he could to stop it.
In time, though, Pellicano saw the handwriting on
the wall. After being questioned by the F.B.I.,
he called in Rich DiSabatino and handed him
$25,000 worth of electronics, including
oscilloscopes. "I'm cleaning house before [the
F.B.I.] comes back," he said, according to
DiSabatino. He was arrested after the F.B.I.
raids that uncovered the weapons in November. At
a bail hearing, most of his employees showed up,
as did two longtime clients, Dennis Wasser and
Martin Singer. Bert Fields even wrote a letter to
the judge indicating Pellicano wasn't a flight
risk. By then, however, several people, including
Tarita Virtue, Denise Ward, a technical expert
named Wayne Reynolds, and at least two other
office assistants, were cooperating with the
F.B.I. Virtue went into hiding, but Pellicano
phoned her parents. "I know your daughter's
testifying," he told them, according to someone
familiar with the conversation. "That's a damn shame."
During two separate searches, F.B.I. agents had
invaded Pellicano's War Room and carted out 11
computers, including the five Macs, 23 external
hard drives, a Palm V digital assistant, 52
diskettes, 34 Zip drives, 92 CD-ROMs, and two
DVDs. An F.B.I. agent named Elizabeth Rios
assembled a team to begin inspecting and copying
everything that was seized. It was an arduous
task. Copying a single hard drive took at least
10 hours. Some took as long as two days. Many of
the diskettes were encrypted, which made them
even harder to decipher. It took months for the
F.B.I. agents to digest it all, but when they
did, it was obvious to everyone involved that they had found the mother lode.
The indictments against Pellicano, which list
more than 112 instances in which the private
detective allegedly engaged in wiretapping or
illegally accessing law-enforcement databases,
provide a road map of the cases the U.S. attorney
is investigating. Those who were wiretapped, the
indictments allege, run the gamut from minnows
such as Monika Zsibrita, a model who
unsuccessfully claimed that the comedian Chris
Rock had fathered her child, to fish as large as Sylvester Stallone.
One of the most significant cases now under
scrutiny involves Michael Ovitz's complaints
against his "enemies," in which Pellicano began
to investigate them in 2001; the indictments
allege that Pellicano paid policemen to run
background checks on six people, including talent
agents Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane of CAA
(motor-vehicle records searched, August 2001);
New York Times reporter Bernard Weinraub (F.B.I.
database, May 2002); Arthur Bernier, a former
employee who had sued Ovitz for wrongful
termination (F.B.I. database, May 2002); and
James Casey, who had sued for a referral fee he
felt he was owed by the firm. Ovitz, through his
attorney, has denied any knowledge of these searches.
The one Ovitz "enemy" Pellicano is known to have
wiretapped was Anita Busch, whose phone remained
compromised up until the month of the F.B.I.
raids. However, there is no evidence that Ovitz
knew of the wiretap, nor that his interest in
Busch had spurred it. Prosecutors, however, are
known to be examining whether Ovitz was behind
the intimidation of Busch. Initially, speculation
had centered on Steven Seagal, but the F.B.I. has
all but cleared the actor of involvement. At
least two witnesses have been questioned by the
grand jury about Ovitz's links to the incident.
(The U.S. attorney, Dan Saunders, declined to
confirm whether Ovitz was a subject of the
investigation, saying, "We do not comment about
ongoing investigations.") Marshall Grossman,
Ovitz's lawyer, denies that Ovitz is being
investigated and says he had no connection with
the crime, claiming, "At the time he allegedly
hired a third party to threaten Ms. Busch, Mr.
Pellicano was not in the employ of Michael Ovitz."
No previous accounts of Ovitz's relationship with
Pellicano suggest that the two worked together
before 2001. But, according to a former Pellicano
employee, Pellicano had done personal work for
Ovitz since at least 1996. "When Ovitz was
leaving Disney," this employee says, "he became
Anthony's biggest interest, meaning most
important client. They were good friends and
would speak to each other on a daily basis. Ovitz
would often come to the office, and Anthony
helped him set up his office in Santa Monica. It
went on for months, with Anthony going out to
Ovitz's office almost daily. Anthony helped
install the security and phone systems at Ovitz's office."
One facet of Pellicano's work for Ovitz in 2001
involved the billionaire investor Ron Burkle, who
was threatening to sue Ovitz over a failed
Internet venture. Pellicano, who was near the
height of his personal troubles at the time,
turned to Rich DiSabatino for help. "Anthony
called me and asked me to work on a case with
him; it had come from Bert Fields," says
DiSabatino. "He asked if I would help him work on
three people from CAA and Ron Burkle. He told me
that my end could be as much as $100,000. He
indicated that he was going to tap people's
phones. I passed. I didn't need that grief in my life."
In fact, DiSabatino was alarmed. He was friends
with Kevin Huvane, at CAA, and with one of
Burkle's security men. He says he called both men
and warned them that their phones might be
tapped. Burkle, in turn, reached out to Pellicano
via a mutual friend, the producer Steve Bing, who
had reportedly hired Pellicano during a
much-publicized paternity dispute with the
actress Elizabeth Hurley. Bing arranged a
meeting, and Pellicano agreed to refrain from
wiretapping Burkle. In time the two men struck up
a kind of friendship. At one point, Pellicano and
his children spent a weekend at Burkle's weekend
retreat in La Jolla. Their friendship suggests a
possible solution to one of the case's minor
mysteries—an explanation for some of the $200,000
the F.B.I. found in Pellicano's safe.
According to Burkle, Pellicano approached him
with a proposal just days before he went to
prison. He offered his services, promising to do
"anything," if Burkle would give him money. When
Burkle declined, Pellicano said his decision not
to wiretap Burkle had cost him a $200,000 fee
from Ovitz and Fields. He demanded that Burkle
make up for the lost money. Burkle says he
refused. But Bing did pay Pellicano between
$100,000 and $200,000 around the same time,
according to Burkle. "I didn't pay Pellicano
anything," Burkle says. "I know Steven gave him
$100,000 or something like that. I don't know if
it was for me or for what Pellicano did for
Steven in the Liz Hurley paternity case." Bing
declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story.
The Pellicano indictments refer to two cases
Pellicano worked on Brad Grey's behalf: legal
battles involving Bo Zenga and the comedian Garry
Shandling. But former associates of both men say
Grey's dealings with Pellicano were far more
extensive. A former Brillstein-Grey executive
says Grey used Pellicano for work on behalf of
any number of his clients, including Brad Pitt,
Adam Sandler, and the late Chris Farley. "There
wasn't a day that I didn't hear the words
'Anthony Pellicano' come out of Brad's mouth,"
this executive says. "He would be using him for
this client or that client. This one had a
problem that only Tony could solve. It was
disgusting. Here is this big management firm and
they're using a street thug to clean up problems
for some of the biggest stars in Hollywood."
An amended lawsuit filed by Zenga in
March—against Grey, Pellicano, Bert Fields, and
Fields's firm, Greenberg Glusker—gives a sense of
how Pellicano's wiretaps might have helped Grey
in business. The wiretapping had come into play
in the earlier lawsuit Zenga filed against Grey
over Zenga's claim that he was entitled to
profits from Scary Movie. One day after Zenga's
attorneys put Grey through a grueling three-day
deposition, in February 2001, the new suit
alleges, Pellicano began doing illegal background
checks on Zenga and one of his attorneys.
According to the suit, on February 14, Pellicano
began circulating summaries of Zenga's private
conversations with his own lawyer—information he
presumably received from a wiretap on Zenga's telephone.
The taps gave Grey a critical advantage in the
litigation, the new suit alleges. When Zenga
criticized his partner Stacy Codikow in one
conversation, the suit alleges, Grey's attorneys
were able to use the information to drive a wedge
between Codikow and Zenga—a split that eventually
caused Codikow to reverse critical testimony
that, Zenga's attorneys say, ultimately caused
Zenga to lose the lawsuit against Grey.
"Pellicano appeared to be everywhere all at
once," says Zenga's attorney, Gregory Dovel. "We
were litigating this case, and he's brought
in—suddenly he's in touch with all our witnesses.
It was like living in an upside-down world. Stacy
Codikow had been a friend of Bo Zenga's for
years. She testified one way, and then after
Pellicano's involvement she was saying the exact
opposite. Much of what she was saying was so
unsupported that she eventually backtracked from
it." Codikow didn't return phone calls seeking comment for this article.
Shandling and Grey, his longtime manager, fell
out in 1998 when Shandling sued him for $100
million, alleging that Grey cheated him out of
earnings from his hit comedy, The Larry Sanders
Show. Grey countersued. He hired Bert Fields to
handle the litigation, and Fields brought in
Pellicano. Between January and March 1999, the
indictment alleges, Pellicano had a policeman run
unauthorized background checks on Shandling, a
onetime girlfriend of his, his personal
assistant, his business manager, and a friend,
the actor Kevin Nealon. Several sources say
Shandling and others were wiretapped as well.
At the time, Shandling had hired Gavin DeBecker
to aid in his defense, and DeBecker warned the
actor about Fields and Pellicano. "It is pro
forma for you to advise clients to conduct sweeps
of their telephones in matters in which Bert
Fields is involved as the opposing counsel,"
DeBecker said in a deposition. When asked to
explain, DeBecker answered, "I advise clients of
mine to look out for their overall privacy during
suits with Bert Fields because he engages and is
widely known to use [Pellicano], who uses
extra-legal tactics. When you have him on the
other side of a case you need to be concerned
about your privacy. The nature of whether your
garbage is being stolen. Whether or not listening
devices are placed. For that reason, I
recommended that [Shandling] be certain that the
privacy of his home and office were assured."
Unlike some Fields clients, who never dealt
directly with Pellicano, Grey became personally
involved. At the height of their business
relationship, a former Pellicano employee says,
"Grey and Pellicano would be on the telephone to
each other at least once a day, every day." (A
spokesman for Grey maintains that Grey was
"casually acquainted with Pellicano. Mr. Grey
never hired Pellicano or recommended to his
clients Â… that they hire him. Mr. Grey had no
knowledge of any illegal activity by Mr.
Pellicano.") According to another former
employee, Pellicano once gave Grey an
eight-inch-long, silver-plated switchblade knife
for Christmas, prompting Grey to tell a fellow
executive, "That's Tony for you. You know how
crazy he can be." Grey admired Pellicano so much,
the former Brillstein-Grey executive says, that,
when James Gandolfini briefly walked off the set
of The Sopranos in a salary dispute, Grey
considered replacing the hit HBO drama with a
show based on Pellicano's life. A screenwriter
named Ann Biderman was hired to write a script.
The project died, however, when Gandolfini
returned and Pellicano and Biderman fell out over writing credits and fees.
The Grey-Shandling litigation was settled in July
1999, when Grey agreed to pay Shandling more than
$10 million. Three years later, when the F.B.I.
raided Pellicano's offices, agents found a trove
of information about Shandling and his
associates. Shandling and others have now
testified before the Pellicano grand jury.
Another name that surfaces in the investigation
is Kirk Kerkorian, the 89-year-old billionaire
who once owned MGM, is the largest shareholder in
General Motors, and has launched unsuccessful
takeover attempts against Chrysler and other
major American companies. An avid tennis player,
he had been dating a former tennis pro named Lisa
Bonder for 11 years when, in 1997, she became
pregnant. The subsequent marriage lasted 28 days.
In 1999, Bonder asked a California judge for a
record $320,000 a month in child support,
including $6,000 a month for house flowers and
$150,000 a month for private-jet travel. Her
request was undermined, however, when a test
indicated that Kirk was not her daughter's
biological father. A judge eventually ordered
Kerkorian to pay Bonder only $50,316 a month.
The proceedings were still raging, however, when
in early 2002 Kerkorian's attorney Terry
Christensen allegedly began paying Pellicano to
wiretap Bonder. Christensen was indicted in
February, and the indictment alleges he knew what
Pellicano was doing. It contains numerous
verbatim quotations from Christensen, a sure sign
that, as Pellicano is said to have done with
other attorneys, he had recorded conversations
with Christensen. In these talks, the indictment
alleges, the two candidly discussed the
wiretapping operation, with Pellicano admonishing
Christensen at one point to "be very careful
about this, because there is only one way for me to know this."
In another talk, on April 28, 2002, Pellicano
told Christensen about a recorded conversation
between Bonder and her lawyers. "I'm hearing her
talk to Kirk, too," Pellicano says. "That's not
for attribution, I mean distribution, but I'm
hearing both of them, I'm hearing all of it, the whole nine yards."
After his indictment, Christensen issued a
statement that didn't deny his involvement but
suggested that he had resorted to extreme
measures because Kerkorian had been receiving
death threats. "Terry Christensen never heard
wiretapped conversations," his attorney said. "He
never got a transcript of a wiretapped
conversation. All he had to go on was what
Pellicano was telling him over the phone."
hen there's Tom Cruise. Cruise was represented by
Wasser (who was known to have hired Pellicano in
the past) during Cruise's 2001 divorce
proceedings with Nicole Kidman. Kidman used
lawyer Sorrell Trope and Rich DiSabatino.
DiSabatino had Kidman's telephones regularly
swept for bugs, and went as far as installing an
encryption device to foil wiretapping attempts.
Kidman, who remained wary, took to joking during
calls with friends, "So, Tom, are you listening?
Am I saying what you want me to say?"
According to people in the Kidman camp, Pellicano
remained relatively quiet during the proceedings.
"The one thing I was aware of was we started
seeing articles in The National Enquirer on
Nicole," says one Kidman adviser. "We assumed at
the time that was Pellicano. The Enquirer was always his tabloid of choice."
Several reports indicate that during their raid
on Pellicano's offices F.B.I. agents found a
recording of Kidman talking with Cruise.
DiSabatino has said this recording must have come
from Cruise's telephone, but Kidman is said to
disagree. "For some reason Nicole really wants to
believe her phone was tapped," says a person who
worked on the case. Kidman has been questioned by
the F.B.I. A senior F.B.I. agent has also interviewed Cruise, sources say.
Also mentioned in the indictments is Taylor
Thomson, heiress to a Canadian publishing fortune
valued by Forbes in 2003 at $14 billion, who
hired Bert Fields to negotiate the custody of her
child with Michael Kolesa in 2001. Her daughter's
nanny, a twentysomething woman named Pamela
Miller, was drawn into the contentious
proceedings when she aired unfavorable opinions
of Thomson's child-raising habits to Kolesa.
That's when Fields brought in Pellicano.
"These people ruined Miller's life," her
attorney, Neville Johnson, says of Pellicano and
Fields. "Whenever she would get a new nanny job,
she would be let go. Within weeks of her being
hired by a member of the [Michael] Douglas
family, she was let go. The same thing happened
when she went to work for [producer] Jon Peters.
Pellicano would stalk her, going so far as to sit
directly behind her in a movie theater. She was
wiretapped and members of her family had their
private information illegally accessed, including
her uncle, a minister in Bakersfield. They went
so far as to take photos of her when she was with
the children she had been hired to watch.
Needless to say, not many wealthy [parents] want
to keep a nanny who is [being photographed with] their children."
Pamela Miller testified before the Pellicano grand jury.
One of the best-known actors believed to have
been wiretapped is Sylvester Stallone. This
allegedly happened after Stallone sued Kenneth
Starr, his former business manager, in February
2002, alleging that Starr's advice to hold 3.9
million shares of faltering Planet Hollywood
stock cost Stallone as much as $10 million. Starr
hired Bert Fields, who brought in Pellicano. The
indictments allege that Pellicano began
wiretapping one of Stallone's telephones within
weeks of the lawsuit's filing. (Both Stallone's
publicist and his attorney declined comment on the case.)
The allegation is unusual because Stallone was
known to have employed Pellicano on at least one
case going back to the late 1980s. At some point
the two had a falling-out, though what prompted
it remains unclear. According to investigator
Paul Barresi, a onetime porn performer who
handled several freelance assignments for
Pellicano, Pellicano had a vendetta against
Stallone. "Pellicano hired me on two occasions to
find dirt on Stallone," Barresi says. "The first
time was in 1995 or '96 and then again in late 2001."
"When you're a friend of his, you're family,"
Stallone said of Pellicano in 1993. "When you're not, you've got problems."
In another twist to the already bizarre world of
Anthony Pellicano, John McTiernan, director of
the hit films Die Hard and The Hunt for Red
October, pleaded guilty, in a
criminal-information case filed by the U.S.
attorney, to lying to F.B.I. agents about having
had Pellicano wiretap producer Charles Roven
(Three Kings, Batman Begins). Los Angeles
attorney Kevin McDermott explained that, in all
probability, McTiernan is cooperating with the
investigation. "When you file an information as
opposed to an indictment, it's a sure sign that
the perp has agreed to cooperate," says
McDermott, "because, legally, it's easier to work out a deal with the court."
During his contentious 1997 divorce from Donna
Dubrow, McTiernan was represented by Dennis
Wasser, and later by Robert J. Nachshin, who has
also been identified as having hired Pellicano in
the past. Dubrow has stated that she believes
McTiernan hired Pellicano during their divorce. A
former employee of Pellicano's told Vanity Fair,
"In 1997–98, McTiernan would often come into the office."
Much of Hollywood is now holding its breath
awaiting a new round of federal indictments,
which could come any day. The investigation shows
no sign of slowing. Late last fall, after
assigning only three agents to the case for the
previous two years, the F.B.I. formed a Pellicano
task force. Twenty agents are now working the
case full-time. Several sources say the lead
agent, a dour but dogged veteran named Stan
Ornellas, has actually been seen smiling of late.
Many of Pellicano's former employees are now
cooperating with the authorities. So is his
latest girlfriend, Sandra Carradine, 58, the
actor Keith Carradine's ex-wife; she was indicted
in January, pleaded guilty to two counts of
perjury, and is now helping the F.B.I. Mark
Arneson, the Los Angeles policeman, is said to be
trying to cut a deal of his own. Two years ago,
Arneson met with prosecutors for a "queen for a
day" (which means whatever he told them could not
later be used against him). When he failed to
give direct evidence about any of the lawyers
under scrutiny, the prosecutors passed on a plea deal with him.
More than a dozen attorneys, meanwhile, are
preparing civil lawsuits against Pellicano and a
number of the lawyers he worked with, as well as
their firms. Anita Busch has already sued
Pellicano, as has Bo Zenga, as has Keith
Carradine, who alleges Pellicano harassed him
during his 1993 divorce, as has a woman named
Erin Finn, who was wiretapped by her ex-boyfriend
Hollywood Records president Robert Pfeifer.
Pfeifer pleaded guilty in April and faces up to
10 years in prison. "Lawsuits filed by
Pellicano's victims will be sprouting up like
tulips in springtime," predicts Kevin McDermott.
"Not only will they be suing Pellicano but they
will sue the L.A.P.D., the telephone company, the
lawyers who hired Pellicano, and in all
probability the clients. This is going to get very ugly."
Much of the ugliness is likely to be directed at
Bert Fields's firm, Greenberg Glusker. Already
Hollywood is abuzz that an avalanche of coming
lawsuits could force the firm into bankruptcy.
The problem is the sheer number of conversations
Pellicano may have illegally wiretapped. Bo
Zenga's lawsuit, which includes Greenberg Glusker
as a defendant, cites nearly 1,600 telephone
calls Pellicano allegedly recorded at the behest
of Fields and five other Greenberg Glusker
partners. Under California law, each incident
carries a minimum fine of $5,000, meaning
Greenberg Glusker could face potential fines of
at least $8 million—just in the Zenga litigation.
And that's before any criminal penalties. A
series of talks have taken place in recent weeks
among the firm, Fields, and the U.S. Attorney's
Office. The firm's attorney in the case, Brian
Sun, declines to comment on these talks, but
several sources say they're aimed at negotiating
some kind of settlement for Fields himself.
(Pellicano, Ovitz, Fields, Grey, McTiernan, and
the attorneys mentioned in this story declined to comment.)
The wild card in all this is Pellicano, who
remains behind bars at the West Valley Detention
Center, in San Bernardino County. Will he
incriminate Fields or other clients? The betting
here is that he won't break his personal vow of
omertà —the Sicilian vow of silence. After all, he
has already served more than 30 months in prison
without turning on a single client.
"I could have helped myself if I had named
names," Pellicano told the New York Post from
prison in 2003. "But that's not me. Me, I protect
my people. [The feds] wanted to get me, and
because I'd never give up my client, they got me.
I have to accept responsibility."
Bryan Burrough is a Vanity Fair special
correspondent. He is currently working on a book
about Texas oil families. Investigative reporter
John Connolly's book on the Pellicano case, The
Sin Eater, will be published by Simon & Schuster next year.
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Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:16 CST