The Machiavelli of muck: Anthony Pellicano's double-dealing made him Hollywood's top investigator. Then it all fell apart.

Domanick, Joe

THE PALE, AGING PRISONERS IN THE ARMY GREEN WINDBREAKER, navy blue pants, and leg irons exits the U.S. courtroom in Los Angeles doing the chain-gang shuffle with the line of men to whom he's shackled. Already incarcerated for more than three years, Anthony Pellicano has just learned on this May 2007 day that it will be nine more months before he stands trial on 112 counts of wiretapping, identity theft, racketeering, conspiracy, witness tampering, and destruction of evidence, charges that could land him in prison for a decade or more. Until next February he'll be forced to sit in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A., jailed without bail as a flight risk.


Once Hollywood's charismatic, high-flying private eye to the stars, the 63-year-old Pellicano now appears small and stooped, his ample nose made more prominent by a new gauntness. His jowls are loose and hanging, his mouth is sad and downturned--a look, given his receding chin and balding pate, that puts one in mind of Homer Simpson.


Just a handful of reporters have shown up for the hearing, and their articles, if they appear at all, will be consigned to the back pages, the surest sign that the man once thought to be at the center of Hollywood's own Watergate scandal is fast fading into irrelevance. A story that was supposed to blow the lid off the Industry has instead come to seem about as scandalous as kissing your sister. It's a remarkable denouement in a prosecution that once promised to suck in some of the Industry's biggest names.


Pellicano's troubles began with a November 2002 raid by FBI agents on his detective agency offices in a swank 12-story glass tower on the western end of the Sunset Strip. The raid was triggered by a tip from a jailhouse informant alleging that Pellicano was behind a bizarre incident the previous June, when a rose, a dead fish, and a cardboard sign reading STOP were left on the cracked windshield of an Audi belonging to then-Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch. She had been investigating a connection between the actor Steven Seagal--an old client of Pellicano's--and an organized-crime figure. Pellicano never faced federal charges in the incident (although a single count growing out of the case has been filed by the L.A. County district attorney). Nevertheless, it was enough to set up all that followed.


As the agents fanned out, Pellicano showed them two loaded handguns in a desk drawer and opened two combination floor safes. Inside were two hand grenades, military-grade plastic C-4 explosives, a detonator, jewelry, gold coins and bullion, and $200,000 in cash. In subsequent searches, agents carted off 36 pieces of electronic equipment, including wiretapping software, computer hard drives and storage files, 150,000 pages of documents, encrypted transcripts of phone conversations, and more than 1,300 tape recordings.


About a year later Pellicano pleaded guilty to possessing illegal explosives and was sentenced to 27 to 32 months in federal prison. On the day before he was scheduled for release in February 2006, he wash it with the multi count federal wiretapping indictment. When the indictment came down, Hollywood was awash in speculation about who would be next. Thus far 11 others have been charged or have pleaded guilty, including Pellicano clients Terry Christensen, the attorney to multibillionaire Kirk Kerkorian; Die Hard director John McTiernan; Sandra Carradine, former wife of actor Keith Carradine; three other clients; two police officers; two phone company employees; and a software programmer.


No small potatoes by any means, but hardly the Hollywood kingpins whose names had been bandied about. Chief among them--and named by prosecutors as a "person of interest"--was Bert Fields, il cupo di tutti capi of entertainment attorneys and a man with whom Pellicano had been closely associated for more than a decade. Fields's clients include Brad Grey, a manager and producer at the time and now the chairman of Paramount Pictures, who was locked in ugly, high-stakes lawsuits with actor-comedian Garry Shandling and screenwriter "Bo" Zenga. Both of them--in addition to four others linked to Fields's clients--allegedly were wiretapped by Pellicano.
Then there was Michael Ovitz, the former head of Creative Artists Agency. According to summaries of FBI interviews of Ovitz obtained by The New York Times, in early 2002, Ovitz paid Pellicano to gather dirt on 15 to 20 people, including high-level former CAA agents and partners he was at war with, like current Universal Studios head Ron Meyer, Richard Lovett, Kevin Huvane, and Bryan Lourd. New York Times reporter Bernard Weinraub and Busch, who had been writing critical articles about Ovitz's financial difficulties, were also targeted.


There's been no shortage of speculation, but it's unlikely that Fields, Ovitz, or any of those not already indicted ever will be. Federal prosecutors, signaling they were ready to go ahead with their case at the hearing in May, unsuccessfully opposed postponing the trial until February. The statute of limitations has run out on many of the potential crimes.


Meanwhile, Pellicano remains in jail, vowing to take his punishment "like a man" and refusing to implicate others in the wide-ranging wiretapping scheme he created. According to the indictment, that scheme was devised to gather and use information to secretly gain "a tactical advantage in litigation by learning [his] opponents' plans, strategies, and perceived strengths and weaknesses and other personal information of a confidential, embarrassing or incriminating nature." Among the 63 wiretapping victims were Sylvester Stallone, Keith Carradine, Kevin Nealon, and Donna Dubrow, the former wife of McTiernan.


Pellicano never responded to interview requests left with his lawyer. Whatever the outcome of Pellicano's trial, he'll go down in pop history as one of Hollywood's great characters. He's the Rudy Giuliani of private eyes: audacious, narcissistic, emotionally immature, and egomaniacal, a guy who sold exactly what Giuliani is now hawking--protection. Working for people who wanted their toilets scrubbed without getting their fingers dirty, for two decades Pellicano played his role of Hollywood factotum to perfection, an all-service provider presenting himself to his clients as their consigliere, operative, and intimidator. He conveyed that he was someone possessing a great cache of knowledge, someone who knew guys who knew guys and could solve any problem--just like Mr. wolf in Pulp Fiction. "I need everything from refinement [to threats with] baseball bats," the singer Courtney Love once told him in a tape leaked to The New York Times. "And I need them all under one roof ... when I have a problem of any stripe--A to Z,I can go to you. That's what I need." To which Pellicano replied: "Listen, Courtney, if you come to me, that's the end of that. I'm an old-style Sicilian. I only go one way. My clients are my family, and that's it."


"He took care of people's problems," his wife, Kat, told a New York Times reporter. "That's what he did for a living. And he did it very well."


But what has been frequently overlooked is that he was also an astonishing self-creation. He came to the land of make-believe and fooled the people whose business it is to spin tales and create lies, fooled them into believing the myth of Anthony Pellicano: the world's greatest private investigator; the smartest-guy-in-the-room Mensa member; the super expert in the esoteric quasi-science of voice and audio identification technology; the tracer of missing persons extraordinaire. Hiding in plain sight was a prime-time bullshitter and first-rate showman.


His black-bag jobs, dirty tricks, anonymous threatening late-night phone calls, and thug-for-hire intimidations were common knowledge among high-end divorce and paternity lawyers and Hollywood reporters. Rather than obscuring what he did, Pellicano made it his brand, thriving on the notion that he was a mobbed-out guy. The mere chance that you could be exposing yourself or your family to such a man worked wonders for him, and people backed away when he pushed.
He dressed in expensive double-breasted wise-guy suits and leatherjackets set off by patent leather shoes, man-with-no-eyes shades, and a pinkie ring. He slicked back his thinning hair, doused himself with cologne, and popped Chiclets the way Kojak used to suck on lollipops. He was, said Kat, "the only man I ever met that could make a silkshirt look like polyester." In the '80s, he papered the walls of his office in bordello red velvet, later graduating to a hipper decor, highlighted by black leather furniture. His oak-finished office doors were painted in gold lettering announcing that you were entering the Pellicano Investigative Agency Ltd./Forensic Audio Lab/Syllogistic Research Group. He installed what he claimed was the latest in audio analysis equipment. He had his receptionist talk over the piped-in Puccini and offer cappuccinos to prospective clients. Once visitors were led through the hallways lined with framed magazine articles heralding the magnificence of himself, he played the role of professional goombah. "What can I tell ya," he would say with a shrug. "I'm Sicilian."


"He was like a hungry kid looking at a candy store when he talked about the mob," says novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard, who spent time as a young reporter with Pellicano in the late '70s. "He loved to play up his connections, making a point of referring to 'Lucky' Luciano as 'Paul'--because that's what real mob guys did. It was kind of sad. He always reminded me of Butch Cassidy looking back to a time that was over, refusing to believe there was just no place for a gunslinger anymore." More recently, Sunday night--Sopranos night--had become a sacred rite for Pellicano. He prepared for High Mass on HBO with a massage from Kat and enforced absolute silence throughout the house.


He billed himself as a kung fu master and bragged that he carried a Louisville Slugger in the trunk of his car--just in case. What frightened some intrigued others, who seemed to view Pellicano as an actor in his own amazing movie. In the early '90s, he worked with producer-director Michael Mann, developing a television series for NBC while also writing a screenplay based on his experiences. Neither the show nor the movie ever materialized, but just before Pellicano's arrest, his client Brad Grey had been in talks with HBO about developing a similar series.


His specialty was unique for a private eye: protecting the image of stars. That's why Michael Jackson, Roseanne Barr, Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, James Woods, Farrah Fawcett, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chris Rock sought him out. Just how much they valued his protection was demonstrated by a phone call from Rock to Pellicano in 2001, asking for help in neutralizing an accusation that he'd had sex with a woman without her consent. "I'm better off getting caught with ... needles in my arms," he told Pellicano in a tape leaked to The New York Times. "Needles with pictures [saying,]'Here's Chris Rock shooting heroin: [That would be] a much [lesser] blow to the career." No charges were filed.


His reputation enabled him to charge a $25,000 retainer, to live in a million-dollar canyon-view home in suburban Ventura County an hour and a half drive from his work, to take Kat to the best hotels and restaurants, to drive a classic two-seater Mercedes, a jet-black Lexus SUV, and a second Mercedes, and to own a West Hollywood condo in a building a short walk from his high-priced office.


Attorneys, producers, agents, and film executives loved him, too. Ovitz admired Pellicano's "innovativeness and resourcefulness." Producer Don Simpson saw him as a fierce protector of his clients, a "lion at the gate" whom you never wanted to be "on the wrong side of." And attorneys Bert Fields and Howard Weitzman considered Pellicano an invaluable investigator. Weitzman admired his "rock-solid loyalty," Fields his efficiency. "Time after time," says Fields, "he comes up with the witness I'm looking for. He gets results."


How he got them only Pellicano really knew until that life-defining, career-destroying 2002 search of his office. Before then, everybody in Hollywood--including the media--was drinking Pellicano's Kool-Aid in huge gulps. Only the spin varied: Either he was a Mensa man/techno genius or a bat-wielding Mafia thug. But the truth was much more complex and, therefore, far more interesting.
THE GRANDSON OF SICILIAN IMMIGRANTS, Anthony Joseph Pellicano was born in Chicago in 1944. A grandfather had anglicized the family name; the grandson would later restore it. He was raised by a divorced single mother on the mob-dominated, Italian-immigrant streets of Cicero, a ten-minute ride from Chicago. Cicero was then a place where guys wore wife-beater T-shirts with suspenders and played pinochle on the stoop, where the Irish priests ate their pork chops, peas, and boiled-potato dinners out on Saturday night, and people were happy that their daughter Rose went to novena with the niece of a local gangster. Al Capone set up his headquarters there when Chicago police started busting his speakeasies and gambling operations; by the 1960s, it was billed as "the Walled City of the Syndicate" and was filled with strip clubs, gambling joints, and bars.


His mother, Pellicano once said, was a "working lady who never made more than $150 a week," and he was forced to "fend for himself at age 14 [working in] a barbershop for a dollar an hour and a lesson cutting hair." By his own description, he was a "hot-tempered, skinny little kid who lived by [my] wits"; neither of his parents, he said, "gave me any education at all." Possessing "the attention span of a hyperkinetic six-year-old," he left high school at 16.


In the early '60s, he joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps and received his GED while serving as a cryptographer, coding and decoding messages. "When I got out," he told Playboy magazine, "the majority of people who were doing crypto work were in cosmetics or toy manufacturing.... It wasn't all that thrilling to me." Instead he took a job chasing deadbeats for the Spiegel catalog company.
In 1969, he opened his own private-eye firm, focusing on collections and the removal of secretly placed surveillance equipment. He liked to wear huge, amber-tinted aviator glasses and three-piece jeans suits with foot-long collars and huge knotted ties; in repose he was almost handsome, with curly dark hair, large, heavy-lidded, expressive eyes, and full lips--the effect broken only when he smiled and revealed large, uneven buckteeth. On occasion he wore a white lab smock embroidered with an eye surrounded by concentric circles, the symbol of his detective agency, Fortune Enterprises. In 1974, he filed for bankruptcy, a setback he blithely ignored as he hired a press agent and launched an all-out assault on the gullibility of the Chicago press.


Throughout the mid-1970s, he sold the legend of "Tony" Pellicano to anyone who would listen. His message was simple: He was the baddest, sagest practitioner of the "praying mantis style of kung fu." He had a "100 percent success rate" in tracking down exactly 3,968 missing persons. Most amazingly, they were all "cases other people couldn't solve."


There he was on Channel 7 talking about runaway teens, on WBBM radio discussing "the families of missing persons," flying to New York to appear on To Tell the Truth, and then back to Chicago to do Friday Night with Steve Edwards. Then it was over to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University to speak as "one of the top debugging experts in the United States" and off to lecture at the Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity at Chicago-Kent College. He went to Marquette University Law School to make a presentation on the "psychological stress evaluator," then to the Maywood Rotary Club, then to the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators.


At the same time, he was playing footsie with seemingly every reporter in Chicago. They gushed over his plush office, with its silver walls, black furniture, and full-length mirrors in the waiting room. They marveled over the mammoth gold zodiac that dominated his office--beneath which hung samurai swords and two nunchaku sticks, which he'd take off the wall to demonstrate how he could kill a reporter, while his pet piranha looked on.


He didn't carry a gun, he told Oui magazine, "because my hands are lethal weapons." In fact, he couldn't legally carry a gun because he'd never been employed by a law enforcement agency. He recounted how he was knifed in a Mexican bar while working on a kidnapping case but "went into my kung fu stance and beat the hell out of him." He boasted of having $300,000 worth of electronic equipment, an unlikely possibility given that in his bankruptcy he'd listed his assets as $50 in clothes and $28 in cash. Nevertheless, he was good at finding people.


Even his bankruptcy fed the Pellicano myth, for it revealed that he'd received a $30,000 loan from a friend, Paul DeLucia Jr., the son of mobster Felice DeLucia (aka Paul "the Waiter" Ricca). He was also a pallbearer at the eider DeLucia's 1972 funeral and named DeLucia Jr. the godfather of one of his daughters. He claimed that the younger DeLucia "was just like any guy in the neighborhood." From then on he both denied and promoted his mob connections as it served his purposes. The governor of Illinois took the loan seriously enough, however, to force Pellicano to resign from a state law enforcement advisory board.


A recent story from the Chicago Sun-Times alleges, with little evidence, that Pellicano was once a member of Chicago gangster Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo's crew and had done investigative work for Lombardo in 1974, helping clear him as a suspect in a murder case. But as Joe Paolella, a former Secret Service agent from Chicago says, "Pellicano never promoted being connected in Chicago the way he did in L.A.--a place where he could portray himself as some kind of mob guy to an upper-middle-class Hollywood clientele that didn't know any better, if you're a real crook in Chicago, you don't want anybody to know about it." In any case, there's no public record of Pellicano being arrested or convicted of a crime before the 2002 FBI raid, of his having his record sealed, or of any significant association with organized crime in L.A. Nor for that matter has there surfaced any public or police complaint against him for using his famous Louisville Slugger in an assault. Stare-downs, threatening phone calls, and intimidation, yes, but actual physical violence, well, the proof is hard to come by.


What's clearer, however, is that like Johnny Fontane--the Frank Sinatra character in The Godfather--Anthony Pellicano did gain fame with a grotesque assist. In 1977, after 19 years of resting peacefully in a small Jewish cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, the body of Elizabeth Taylor's third husband, Hollywood producer Mike Todd, was stolen by grave robbers. They'd moved his tombstone, pried open his bronze coffin, and made off with his remains. Eight local cops searched the graveyard without finding the body. Then the police heard from Pellicano, who told them he'd received "a number of phone calls" revealing Todd's . Arriving at the cemetery with a local Channel 2 news anchor and a camera crew, Pellicano found bones and Todd's old belt buckle in a pile of mud, leaves, and branches about 75 yards from his grave. The robbers, Pellicano later told the police, had hoped to find "a ten-karat diamond ring," a gift from Taylor they mistakenly thought had been buried with Todd. Accused of orchestrating the incident as a publicity stunt, Pellicano denied it, asking, "Why would I need publicity?"


The incident caught the attention of defense attorney Howard Weitzman, who brought Pellicano to Los Angeles. (He left his wife and five kids in Chicago.) Together they would work on the case that made both their careers: the 1983 drug-entrapment trial of automaker John DeLorean. Desperately trying to raise money to save his company from bankruptcy, DeLorean ran into a government sting fueled by a paid informant and ambitious federal prosecutors. DeLorean was acquitted, and Weitzman gave Pellicano a large share of the credit for tarnishing the informant. That kind of attention had not been showered on a private eye in Hollywood since the days of Fred Otash.


A rogue ex-LAPD vice detective, Otash was also a pimp, wire-tapper, friend to Mickey Cohen, and informant to the FBI on Cohen and fellow L.A. mobster Johnny Roselli. Otash always wanted to be "Hollywood's most spectacular private eye," newspaper columnist Paul Coates wrote in 1959, "and had made it a special point to cultivate the right people. Attorneys, the movie set, the TV crowd." After which he made it a point to exploit them. There are unconfirmed reports that Otash, who died in L.A. in 1992, mentored Pellicano, who arrived in the early '80s.


Born in Massachusetts in 1922, Otash worked as a lifeguard at the Miami Biltmore Hotel before enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1942. Discharged in 1945, he joined the LAPD and operated undercover out of the Palladium nightclub, where he met both lowlifes and stars. He allegedly ran a prostitution ring with the bartender. Forced to resign from the department in 1955, he was hired as a private eye by Confidential magazine, the fountainhead for much that's cheap and tawdry in the media today.


Confidential's 1950s heyday synchronized perfectly with the final days of the Hollywood star system. For decades the studios had maintained their own security forces to shield their stars from unfavorable publicity and had worked hand in glove with the Los Angeles, Culver City, and Beverly Hills police departments. They would receive a call from the cops about a star they'd arrested but not booked, send a studio rep to get him, cover things up, and take him home and put him to bed.
Using what an FBI report called "a seemingly inexhaustible list of call girls" who brought information to him, Otash cultivated sources for Confidential. Otash and Confidential spied on Rock Hudson talking about his homosexuality, and then played the tape for Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn--who agreed to become an informant in return for the magazine's not outing Hudson. Operating a sound truck stocked with surveillance and wiretapping equipment, Otash broke into the homes of Marilyn Monroe and Peter Lawford to get information on the Kennedys. At 3 a.m. on the night Monroe died of a drug overdose, Lawford, as Otash later told it, called him to sweep the house of bugs before calling an ambulance.


Eventually Otash had his PI's license revoked, and the stars and studios banded together with a California senate investigating committee to sue Confidential for criminal libel.
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The case ended in a mistrial, but the magazine went broke defending itself and folded, bringing the era to a close.


Pellicano brought to Los Angeles several personal traits that would serve him well: an adoration of old-school Mafia values that resonated deeply among people who found it difficult to differentiate between the movie fictions they created and reality, and an easy, soothing intimacy, it was all "buddy" and "pal" and "honey" on the phone to both women and men.


He was also "a very charismatic, eccentric, entertaining personality with an entrepreneurial spirit that allowed him to make phone calls and ask for work," says Howard Weitzman. "People were impressed by that and by his ability to [subsequently] follow up and deliver information."
Others were less impressed with the cold calls. Phoning Century City defense attorney Harland W. Braun, Pellicano hinted in an answering machine message that he was connected to the Chicago mob, as a kind of recommendation. Braun's reaction was, "Why would I ever want to hire a guy like that?" and he never called back. But others did.


As his profile rose, so did the profile of the celebrities he worked for--or against. They included Heidi Fleiss, "Beverly Hills Madam" Elizabeth Adams, Sylvester Stallone, and Kevin Costner. He investigated the OD death of John Belushi and found the daughter Roseanne Barr had given up for adoption (and then leaked the story to the tabs).


Working with Weitzman and Fields in the early '90s, he helped beat back allegations that Michael Jackson molested a 12-year-old boy by producing evidence of extortion by the boy's father and damaging information about the family--a job for which he later claimed to have received $2 million. During the case, according to Diane Dimond, then a senior correspondent at Hard Copy, Pellicano tried to intimidate her and discourage her coverage critical of Jackson. She became convinced that Pellicano was tapping her phone.


Meanwhile, Pellicano was building relationships with law enforcement, reaping payments for appearing as an expert audiotape witness, and collecting numerous letters of praise. Commendations rolled in from federal prosecutors across the country, from district attorneys throughout Southern California, from two California attorneys general, from the U.S. Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps, the Arizona State Senate, and the mayor of Houston.


Among the raves, hard questions rarely came up. Just how good an audio-video expert was he? How many of the letters came from law enforcement clients who were happy because they got the analysis they wanted? What is clear is that he had no formal linguistic, mathematical, or scientific education in a complex field.


Pellicano solidified his reputation as an audio-video expert during the DeLorean trial. Weitzman recalls his doing "a very good job" in his tape analysis. But according to Roger Shuy, a professor emeritus of linguistics at Georgetown University who also worked on the DeLorean defense team, Pellicano's work was sloppy. "I reviewed the transcripts of the tapes that Pellicano made against the actual tapes," says Shuy. "And I found dozens and dozens of places where Pellicano was in error--where the transcripts didn't show what was on the tape. I had to go through and correct them all. It was weird, because most of the mistakes weakened the defense case and helped the prosecution."


Shuy is hardly alone in his criticism. "I was representing one of Hollywood's biggest agents who was in criminal trouble," says Century City defense attorney William Graysen, "and he asked me to hire Pellicano as an expert witness. I called him, and he said, 'I'll cross any river and climb any mountain to do what I have to do to win the case.' I took that to mean falsifying evidence. I went back to my client and said, 'This guy is bad news.' And we didn't use him."


During a late 1990s case in Tampa, Florida, investigated by the L.A. Times, the U.S. Attorney's office was prosecuting a couple for the disappearance of their child based on remarks allegedly made on a secretly recorded audiotape. When the FBI failed to detect the remarks on the tape, prosecutors hired Pellicano, who declared that the alleged incriminating utterances existed and that he could clearly hear them. To which the judge replied, when they were played in court, "The government hears what no reasonably prudent listener can. It interprets what can be heard as no prudent listener would." Federal authorities dropped the case, and the defendants were awarded $2.9 million for wrongful prosecution.


In 1990, then-freelance journalist Rod Lurie acquired a list of paid sources used by the National Enquirer and contracted to do a story about it for Los Angeles magazine. Pellicano was allegedly paid $500,000 by the Enquirer to have the story killed. The huge amount of money was an indication of how desperate the tabloid was. The Enquirer couldn't continue to exist if its sources were burned. Moreover, the company was in the process of going public on Wall Street, and this was a terrible time to have the kind of embarrassing revelations they themselves made their living generating.


Pellicano's way of dealing with recalcitrant reporters involved perseverance--he'd start with "I'm a tough guy, don't luck with me," and when that didn't work, he'd try "I'm getting a lot of money. If you don't think I'm going to get paid, you're out of your mind." He'd follow that with "You're an intelligent guy. I really like you. I've checked you out" and finally graduate to bribery: "You shouldn't write this story. I can get you six figures elsewhere."


By the late '80s, Pellicano had become involved in a far more complex dance with the tabloids. In 1997, Jim Mitteager, a reporter for the National Enquirer and the Globe, died of cancer. Shortly before his death, he gave hundreds of tapes he had secretly recorded to Paul Barresi, an informant and sometime investigator for Pellicano. The tapes capture little people fighting over crumbs tossed around as celebrities try to protect their images. Transcripts of the tapes provided by Barresi, a former porn star and producer currently working as an unlicensed investigator, show Pellicano trading gossip and planting stories with Mitteager and Globe reporter Cliff Dunn while paying to have other stories killed.


During a 1994 conversation, Mitteager, Dunn, and Pellicano agree to get together the following Tuesday, and Pellicano, who was working for Michael Jackson, promises to find out for them what's happening with the L.A. grand jarls looking into child molestation accusations against the star. The reporters then inform Pellicano that actress Whoopi Goldberg, a friend and client of his, went to Saint John's Hospital for a mammogram and that Dunn was tipped off by a hospital source that she had breast cancer (a rumor unconfirmed by Los Angeles). "I want that source," Pellicano tells Dunn. "For how much?" replies Dunn."What the fuck kind of question is that?" Pellicano shoots back. "You can't say, 'How much?' to me. You have to give me a price and say, 'This is what I want!'" Dunn answers, "I want five grand. Then you blow him out of the water [i.e., expose him as a source], and he's used on every celebrity story [at the hospital]."
They next turn to Elizabeth Taylor.


Pellicano: Now let me ask you a question on Liz Taylor. You say that they are going after her?
Mitteager: Well, of course. She's in the hospital. Liz Taylor sells goddamn books.


Pellicano: Because I don't care what you do with her. As a matter of fact, if I can help you with her, I will.... What do you want to know on her?
Mitteager: Any story that would make the front page.
Pellicano: I know that she is fucking drinking again. That's a fact.
Dunn: That's something. If we can confirm that.
Pellicano: I just told you!
Dunn: I can't say to [the Globe] lawyers that my source is Anthony Pellicano.
Mitteager: We need to work together to get some sort of network of people.
Pellicano: We'll go further on that. But you guys are guaranteed the three grand on Tuesday.
Barresi says he worked with Pellicano on cases involving Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Jackson, Barry Bonds, and Tom Cruise. Pellicano, he says, "worked mostly with entertainment attorneys--they were his favorite clients--to keep salacious information about their clients away from the public. It was a great way for them to make big money."


"If you find dirt on a celebrity, then you go to the attorney, or directly to the client, and say, 'Hey, there's a story brewing with the tabs, we need to quash it: Most celebrities are not gonna hesitate, because a celebrity is the most naive, infantile person in the world. They get preferential treatment, but if boulders fall on their head in real life, they don't know what to do, other than dig deep into their pockets," says Barresi. "Pellicano was the master of getting them to do that--the celebrity never knew how simple it was to put a fire out, or that sometimes there was never really a fire in the first place. There would be a story brewing, but the reporter couldn't nail it down. So Pellicano would light the fire. He was the arsonist-and then he'd come back and put the fire out."
Often, says private investigator Bill Pavelic, who worked for the defense on the O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake, and Phil Spector cases, "Pellicano would have the source in his hip pocket and be able to pay him right off the bat to kill the story or rumor. But he wouldn't tell his clients that. He'd simply say, 'I can make the problem go away.'" That fed right into the Pellicano mystique. If you're a magician, you don't tell the audience how you do your tricks.


Thus it's entirely plausible that attorneys like Bert Fields were never informed about Pellicano's illegal activities, his connections with the police, or his association with the tabloids--because he didn't want them to know. During one phone conversation, for example, Mitteager asks if Fields knows Pellicano is getting information from tabloid reporters. "I'm not telling anybody anything," Pellicano replies. "When Cliff [Dunn] comes to my office, I go to meet him in the fucking parking lot.... I don't tell them [his attorney and other clients] these things. I have a cash slush fund that I use. And that's what you guys have been getting [paid from]."

The last case Barresi says he worked on for Pellicano involved Tom Cruise. A male hustler, as Barresi tells it, asked for help in landing a book deal about a sexual relationship he'd allegedly had with Cruise, and Barresi mentioned it to Pellicano. The guy's story, Pellicano told Mitteager in a taped phone conversation, "was so far off the wall, it was pathetic." Well then why, asks Mitteager, "has Bert Fields jumped all over it?" (On November 20, 2002, Fields sent a letter to the accuser threatening legal action.) "Because," replies Pellicano, Cruise "is a new client, and he has to do that shit." The bottom line, says Barresi, was that it quickly became apparent that the accuser had made the story up. "I brought him into Pellicano's office to be interrogated," says Barresi, "and after it was over, it was clear his story was falling apart. But Pellicano said, 'You know, this guy sounds credible to me.' I know now that he wanted to create a credible case, because he couldn't go to Bert Fields and say, 'I got this guy who's a kook.'" Instead, according to Barresi, "he made the guy more legit. Because that was where the money was."


It's a rare good moment for Anthony Pellicano--his March wedding day, a last hurrah before his trial next February. When he spots his three daughters in federal court, all holding bridesmaid's bouquets of red roses, he raises his wrists, points to the shackles that wind around his waist, and jokes about his "new jewelry." Standing by is Kat Jane Pellicano, a blond, animated woman of 50, draped in a white sleeveless dress. In her hands is a white shirt she's brought for Pellicano to wear during their remarriage ceremony.


The scene is pure Pellicano, as he had invited AP reporter Linda Deutsch, the doyenne of the L.A. courthouse press corps, along with Chuck Phillips of the Los Angeles Times, People magazine's veteran celebrity profile writer, Frank Swertlow, and the New York Times entertainment industry reporting team of David M. Halbfinger and Allison HopeWeiner (who are themselves under investigation for printing leaked grand jury tapes of conversations between Pellicano and various clients and stars).


Sitting together after the ceremony, Kat and Pellicano kiss and hold hands as they watch the vows of two other couples. Kat, a native Oklahoman and mother of four of Pellicano's nine children, had first met her husband in 1984 while working in the Luckman Plaza tower where his offices were. She'd found him macho, which for Kat translated into attractive. By 2002, however, Pellicano's life was falling apart. Weary of the 60-mile round-trip from his office to their Ventura County home, Pellicano took to staying overnight at their West Hollywood condo. Stressed, consumed with anger, and unable to find release, he became explosive in the office. In the mid-'90s, the Internet was making information more accessible, but private investigators had lost legal access to voter registration addresses and DMV information as resources for tracking people down. Despite his success, Pellicano was still a small businessman, still hustling for customers after 30 years on the job. He was approaching 60. "When I was representing Robert Blake during his murder case, Pellicano would call me," says Harland Braun, "and say, 'Robert's friends are asking me to help out on the case: But I knew he just wanted to get his name back in the paper and get some publicity, and I told him no thanks."


At home he was tense and moody, craving solitude, demanding that the kids not have friends over on weekends. Kat filed for a divorce that became final in September 2002. Pellicano--a man who needed the structure of a family and the support of a wife even as he ignored them--was cast adrift. Two months later, the FBI raided his office.


Alex Proctor, the small-time hood whose conversation with a government informant triggered the search of Pellicano's office, told the informant he saw a change. "Anthony is losing it. He's getting to an age, quite frankly, that there's deterioration. I see it," he said.


Pellicano's remarriage received almost no coverage, and only Deutsch noted how happy Kat Pellicano seemed. "It's not often," Kat said, "that you get to marry the love of your life twice." All had been forgiven--her driving him out of their house and divorcing him, his flying to Las Vegas on his last weekend before going to prison to marry Teresa Ann DeLucio, a 42-year-old former dancer and bartender, in a Bellagio hotel chapel. They subsequently divorced.


Before their remarriage, Kat had been unable to visit Pellicano because of detention rules limiting visits to immediate family and legal counsel. Now that would change. Cynics saw the reunion as a way to prevent Hat from having to testify against her husband. Hat had helped make the cynics' point after Pellicano's Vegas marriage by boasting that she'd been pressured by FBI agents but had told them nothing, even though she'd discussed her husband's cases with him and had helped "solve half of them." But with Pellicano in jail she was broke. As she put it to The New York Times, "What is the benefit to me of talking to them? It's more benefit to me for Anthony to be out of jail than in jail."


Pellicano had initially turned down the assistance of a public defender, declaring that he intended to defend himself. Cooler heads prevailed, and two respected defense attorneys volunteered to represent Pellicano pro bono. They will make the argument that the search warrant was based on the false premise that Pellicano had been involved in the threats and vandalizing of Anita Busch's car, and that what they were really after was evidence about an entirely different case, in which Pellicano illegally wiretapped an FBI agent speaking to an Israeli businessman Pellicano was surveilling.


As a result, the defense will ask the judge to declare the original search warrant invalid, thereby negating the entire case. The chances of that happening are slim. A better shot at an acquittal will probably rest on the government's having to prove most of its case circumstantially. Thus far prosecutors have produced only one wiretap, that of the wife and brother of Los Angeles billionaire Alec E. Gores discussing their extramarital affair. According to the government, Pellicano was hired by Gores to investigate the two lovers. Gores has already admitted that Pellicano played the tapes of their conversations for him.


A guilty verdict will probably cost Pellicano ten years in prison. Barring an acquittal, his only hope is to roll over and implicate some of the Hollywood moguls and attorneys who employed him. But as Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, a former U.S. attorney, points out, "Any prosecutor would be out of his mind to try and make a case against Bert Fields based on the testimony of Pellicano--who would have zero credibility. Every word he said would have to have corroboration. They'd be fighting the best lawyers money can buy and have to convince a jury that a man of Fields's stature would stoop to such cheap tricks."


Consequently, assistant U.S. attorney Daniel Saunders, the lead prosecutor, appears unwilling to take a chance on any high-profile losses and has decided to focus on Pellicano, the lowest-hanging fruit. "He's got Pellicano and Terry Christensen," says Levenson. "When you take down a major partner in a major law firm in a city like Los Angeles, you're making a statement and issuing a warning that lawyer abuse of the system won't be tolerated."


Limiting the prosecutions also means that the most compelling aspects of the case won't be resolved: How much did Fields, Ovitz, Grey, Kerkorian, and all the rest know? How did Pellicano stay off law enforcement's radar for so long? Was it because he was an informant, like Fred Otash? How many dirty tricks did Pellicano and his clients perpetrate? What would have been revealed if Hollywood had had its Watergate hearings?


At least Pellicano will have achieved what he's always craved: pop immortality. Back in the early '90s, Sylvester Stallone described Pellicano's life as "the kind of script that can only get better as his experiences grow." What has turned out to be so good for the script, has, however, been a disaster for the man.
Crossed Wires
12 degrees of Anthony Pellicano
BARRY BONDS
An ex-porn star claims Pellicano worked an a case involving the slugger
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
TERRY CHRISTENSEN
Attorney to the powerful has been indicted for illegal wiretapping
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
TOM CRUISE
Frequently relied on Bert Fields to make rumors go bye-bye
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
BERT FIELDS
Entertainment attorney named as a "person of interest" by the feds
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
GENNIFER FLOWERS
Her recordings of Bill Clinton received the investigator's analysis
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
MICHAEL JACKSON
The PI helped beat back molestation charges filed against the singer
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
JOHN MCTIERNAN
The director has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about eavesdropping
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
MICHAEL OVITZ
The agent hired the snoop to spy on 15 to 20 associates and journalists
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
STEVEN SEAGAL
His alleged ties to organized crime may have triggered Pellicano's troubles
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
GARRY SHANDLING
The comic actor has possibly been spied on by the investigator
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
DON SIMPSON
The late producer's appetites kept Pellicano busy and helped make him rich
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
HOWARD WEITZMAN
The attorney brought the Chicago investigator to Hollywood in 1983

Bill Pavelic Book “Guilty of Incompetence”

“Guilty of Incompetence” is a hard hitting book, that will expose the facts instead of fiction, and take you behind the scenes to see how LAPD and LADA helped create the OJ Simpson “race card”, covered up the existence of suspect “Charlie”, mismanaged the investigation and botched the “Trial of the Century”.

Spector's Ex-Lawyer Says Forensics Expert Manipu-lated Evidence

City News Service
May 3, 2007 Thursday

One of Phil Spector's former attorneys testified today she saw famed foren-sics expert Dr. Henry Lee manipulate evidence at Spector's Alhambra mansion af-ter an actress was fatally shot there.
Spector, 67, is accused of killing 40-year-old Lana Clarkson in the foyer of his mansion on Feb. 3, 2003. Spector's defense team maintains that Clarkson shot herself.Testifying outside the presence of the jury, Sara Caplan -- a Beverly Hills-based criminal defense lawyer -- said that the day after the shooting, she saw Lee pick up a flat white object the size of her fingernail and put it in a vial in the foyer of Spector's "Pyrenees Castle."
Prosecutors have long accused Spector's lawyers of evidence tampering, in particular a piece of a broken fingernail belonging to Clarkson. If such evi-dence exists, it may prove there was a struggle between Clarkson and Spector just before her death, prosecutors contend.Caplan testified that she pointed out a few areas of interest in the foyer to Lee, who is expected to testify in the murder trial. Lee then picked up a flat white object and said it "might be interesting," Caplan told the court.
Lee then put the object in a vial, she said.
The revelation may support the testimony of Gregory Diamond, a former em-ployee of Spector's ex-lawyer Robert Shapiro, who claimed that Spector's defense team manipulated evidence in the case.
Diamond, a paralegal who once worked for Shapiro, said he was in the foyer the night of Feb. 4, 2003, after homicide detectives left the scene. He testi-fied he saw Caplan pick up a what appeared to be a tooth fragment and hand it to Dr. Michael Baden, another forensics expert. Baden has denied knowing Diamond.On the stand today, Caplan denied picking up anything at Spector's mansion."I would never touch an object at an alleged crime scene, ever," she said.
Bill Pavelic, a private investigator working for Shapiro, confirmed Diamond was at Spector's mansion that night.
Diamond contacted prosecutors two weeks ago, and he was interviewed by Los Angeles police officers. In court yesterday, he testified that Shapiro asked him to observe the defense team's investigation of where Clarkson died.That investigation occurred immediately after police finished their initial crime scene investigation at Spector's home, Diamond testified. He said he watched the investigation for about three hours.
Under questioning from defense attorney Christopher Plourd, Diamond admitted he was a writer who pitched a law-type show to CBS in 2004. Diamond also admit-ted to contacting a Los Angeles Times reporter about the Spector case before he ever called prosecutors. He also admitted to contacting the New York Times, Court TV reporter Beth Karas and the legal Web site, thesmokinggun.com.
If Fidler rules that defense attorneys deliberately withheld evidence from prosecutors, he may impose sanctions.Spector faces 15 years to life in prison if found guilty.

William Bill Pavelic’s Letter to Ms. Brenda Hope – BSIS Enforcement Analyst

To: Ms. Brenda Hope (BSIS Enforcement Analyst)Re: Anonymous Complaint - Conducting Business as a Licensed PI
Dear Ms. Hope,
I am in receipt of your letter, dated April 25, 2006, to with Case Number IA2006 2251, pertaining to a complaint(s) that I may be conducting business as a licensed private investigator. As you know from my file, this is not the first such anonymous complaint initiated via California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services. The pattern is clear and unambiguous. The complaints seem to surface whenever I am personally consulted on controversial cases involving prominent celebrities ala Michael Jackson, OJ Simpson, Gordon Jones, Andrew Luster, Steven Segal and Anthony Pellicano, to name a few.
The issues in the most current complaint mirror what transpired 12 years ago, when I exposed LAPD Det. Mark Fuhrman in the OJ Simpson case. That’s when I received my first complaint via BSIS and nothing has changed since then. Suffice it to say that I am not representing myself as a private investigator, nor am I engaging in work that "private dicks" normally do.
It is beneath me to do surveillances, engage in obstruction of justice, intimidate witnesses, milk and frame clients, sell information to tabloids, search trash cans, act as a snitch for the police, bug telephones, falsify transcripts, run police data bases, process phony subpoenas and or serve as a taxi for defense attorneys and their witnesses.
I am a retired police investigator / detective supervisor and in my capacity as an Investigative Consultant and case manager, I hire and fire Private Investigators. Furthermore, I specialize in police corruption cases and I make it my business to expose people like LAPD Det. Mark Fuhrman, Mark Arneson and Private Investigator Anthony Pellicano. With Anthony Pellicano's corrupt LAPD and LADA connections, going back to approximately 1984, it is not surprising that your office is once again, being used to silence and or discredit me.
Respectfully,
Bill Pavelic

A guide to key players in the Peterson case

Scripps Howard News Service
October 27, 2003, Monday

SOURCE: Modesto Bee

SECTION: DOMESTIC NEWS

LENGTH: 320 words

DATELINE: MODESTO, Calif.

For the defense:

Dr. Henry Lee

Forensic authority who has testified in more than 1,000 legal proceedings, including for the defense in the O.J. Simpson double-murder case. Also consulted in JonBenet Ramsey murder and President Kennedy's assassination.

Dr. Cyril Wecht

Nationally recognized forensic expert and coroner of Allegheny County, Pa., which includes Pittsburgh. Examined remains of Modesto's Chandra Levy.

Bill Pavelic

Private investigator and former veteran Los Angeles police detective. Previously worked on Simpson's defense team.

Gary Ermoian

Local private investigator retained when Modesto police began focusing on Scott Peterson. Authorities secretly monitored part of one of his calls to Peterson.

For the prosecution:

Steve Jacobson

Investigator with the Stanislaus County district attorney's office and former police officer. Supervised wiretaps on Peterson's phones.

Jon Buehler

Modesto police detective. Amber Frey, Peterson's girlfriend, reported to Buehler after telephone conversations with Peterson, which continued at least a month after Frey went public with their romance.

Craig Grogan

Modesto police detective and lead investigator in the Peterson case. Previously named in a federal lawsuit filed by the family of 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda, who was killed by another officer during a 2000 raid.

Al Brocchini

Modesto police detective. Helped escort Peterson from San Diego to Modesto after his arrest in April. Defense lawyers say Brocchini mishandled a hair found in Peterson's boat.

James Brazelton

Stanislaus County district attorney since 1996 and a local prosecutor since 1985. Previously worked as a policeman and in private practice.

John Goold

Chief deputy district attorney since 1999 and former Bay Area policeman. Often serves as a spokesman for the Peterson prosecutors.

(Distributed by Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, http://www.shns.com.)
LOAD-DATE: October 29, 200

About Bill Pavelic on “AMERICAN TRAGEDY” BY LARRY SHILLER

“...Bill Pavelic was especially proud of his street sense. He had been one of the few (LAPD) Caucasian cops; he liked to tell friends, who understood how things really worked in the black community. He got so deep into it that he saw things, he was certain, through nonwhite eyes. He discovered that African-Americans and dark-skinned immigrants of all backgrounds had a lot to fear from the LAPD. When the department couldn't prove something, some cops had no problem framing people who couldn't fight back. Pavelic complained loudly, and soon enough he was seen as disloyal. Before long, he was out...”

"...I know (LAPD) Robbery-Homicide Division. I've actually seen them frame innocent people. You can't take anything for granted..."

“...Pavelic studied the LAPD's crime-scene logs. He called friends at LAPD to see what else he could learn. He put in twenty-hour days, and finally what happened in the early hours of June 13 started to come together...”

“...Pavelic got a call from an officer on another matter. As they spoke, he realized that the cop was connected to the Simpson investigation. He said the department thought there was more than one killer. The wounds suggested each victim was murdered with a different weapon. Goldman's injuries indicated he had fought fiercely before he died...”

“...Pavelic felt that there was no private investigator in town better at living inside the collective mind of the LAPD than himself. He was an expert on the department's rules and procedures. He'd been on the force for eighteen years, won hundreds of medals, commendations, favorable incident reports...”

“...It was Pavelic who gave them their first real hope, however elusive: He saw corruption in the police casework...”

“...Under any circumstances, Pavelic would have looked for it. His career with the LAPD had ended in angry protest. In 1984, Pavelic had testified against fellow officers who killed a fleeing suspect. One cop was fired, another suspended for six months. Pavelic assumed he was stigmatized forever. But by 1990, he'd made it to supervising detective in the Southwest Division. Then he got in trouble again.

His men were investigating a date rape at USC when their bosses began showing a heavy-handed interest. Pavelic, his partner, and their immediate supervisor eventually concluded that then-chief Daryl Gates and a deputy chief were listening to the suspect's father, a prominent lawyer with influence inside the department.

Pavelic and his men protested publicly. And Bill raised similar charges again before a "people's tribunal" when activist groups held hearings on the LAPD after the Rodney King beating. Pavelic told the crowd that lying and covering up were the norm in the department. That earned him a desk job. In 1992, he and the brass reached an accommodation. He took a disability pension for asthma and chest pains. He told one doctor he'd rather spend time in a gulag than go back to work...”

“...When Shapiro called, Zvonko "Bill" Pavelic was in his basement office at home in Glendale, cut off from everything. Pavelic finished his investigations that way. He isolated himself with his computer and his tapes from mid-morning till midnight or later. He allowed himself only one break, for dinner with Maria and the kids. He was proud of his tight, loyal family. That was one reason he worked at home in the big house that Maria kept so well...”

“...Robert Shapiro called just before eleven P.M. They'd worked together three years. Pavelic liked the lawyer's style-intellectual, highly organized, well prepared. Shapiro's particular genius, he thought, was laying a foundation so solid that the case was a winner no matter who presented it. They had won every case they'd worked on...”

“...Would Pavelic like to join the defense team in the Simpson case? Shapiro asked. "Are you available?" Naturally Pavelic said yes. He apologized because he couldn't make Shapiro’s first meeting the next day. But he shifted into gear mentally while he was still talking. He'd need Maria to clip newspapers. He knew he had to identify the documents already being generated in the case. The prosecution's discovery file would undoubtedly be voluminous..."

“...Bill Pavelic met Robert Shapiro at his office in Century City. Elegantly appointed with original art, Baccarat and Lalique crystal. Polished and expensive, like its occupant. Then they moved to a conference room. Their forty-five-minute meeting ranged over the entire case. Nothing would be easy, Shapiro said. An arrest might be coming soon. He needed the investigator to do what he did best, run parallel with the police detectives and figure out how they saw things; then, as soon as possible, move their own investigation ahead of them. As always, the first days were the most important...”

“...His one experience with O.J. Simpson was part of his police history. When Simpson was one of the runners carrying the Olympic torch before the 1984 games in Los Angeles. Pavelic was assigned to protect VIPs. He and Simpson had talked briefly in the special seating section. Around that time, the International Olympic Committee's Life President, Lord Killenin, nearly died choking on his food. Pavelic had saved his life and he thought Simpson might remember the incident...”

“... He put his background to work as a private investigator and learned to make his computer think like a cop. That was why he was so concerned with early discovery material. If you took the documents, the crime reports, the logs, the affidavits and connected them to each piece of evidence, then considered how each cop might view it, then you could make a pretty good guess where the department was going with the case. You could see who'd like one thing, who favored another. Sometimes you could see their destination and arrive there ahead of them...”
“...As an ex-cop, he drew on his knowledge of what the police do at a crime scene. They don't always go by the book. They cut corners-some officers more than others-but their reports make them sound like Boy Scouts. Pavelic knew how to read between the lines of police verbiage and find the hidden stories in the photographs the D.A. had turned over...”

“..Pavelic knew that Robbery-Homicide, the elite corps of detectives from LAPD, would be assigned the case when it became known that Simpson's ex-wife was involved...”

“...As a private investigator, Pavelic was particularly good at following law enforcement paper trails. He was immediately suspicious of the lack of specifics in the Bundy and Rockingham reports. Pavelic's red alert signals flashed as he studied Phil Vannatter's affidavit for the Rockingham search warrant.

No indication who found the bloody glove. Nothing about going into Kato Kaelin's room. Very little information about the murders at Bundy. Nothing about climbing the wall. Vannatter's affidavit said they learned, after talking to Arnelle and Kato, that Simpson had left on an "unexpected" trip to Chicago. More important, the information about Arnelle and Kato was a handwritten addition to the typed affidavit. Had the judge or someone else asked a question during the hearing that prompted Vannatter's addendum? Bill knew they'd called Cathy Randa and learned from her that Simpson's trip was a planned business trip. The detective had misrepresented the facts about the departure in order to obtain the search warrant. O.J.'s departure was not "unexpected." Vannatter knew that. Pavelic knew then that Vannatter had been forced into a further material omission, the omission of the fact that they had scaled the wall at Rockingham before obtaining the search warrant. He also noticed that the affidavit said that Simpson took the flight "in the early morning hours of June 13, 1994." That expanded the window available for the killings. The cops further "observed" the glove on the back walkway "during the securing of the residence." Whether intentional or not, the language suggested that the LAPD investigators had assumed at once they had a crime scene.

Vannatter wrote that "scientific investigation" confirmed that human blood was found on the Bronco. Pavelic knew that at the time he wrote the affidavit, only a routine presumptive test had been done.

Detective Vannatter had more than twenty years on the force, but his affidavit was amateurish. Why had he omitted so many damaging details? Pavelic suspected that the LAPD was rearranging things and embellishing information. Vannatter and Lange, for example, had failed to log themselves out of Bundy when they went to Rockingham. The police logs showed them signing out at ten A.M. as if they'd never left Nicole's condo.

He also noticed that the criminalists didn't list how many samples of each bloodstain were taken. A deliberate omission? No doubt in Pavelic's mind.

A few days before the preliminary hearing, Shapiro received a twenty nine-page memo outlining every mistake Pavelic saw...”
“...The week before, only two days after the Bronco chase, Pavelic had put together a memo for Shapiro asking for sixty-eight pieces of LAPD paperwork, ranging from communication tapes and follow-up investigative reports to the watch commander's daily reports. He also requested the table of contents for the murder books, which contained virtually everything the detectives had...”

“...Earlier in the week, when Mark Fuhrman said he had found the glove, Pavelic was stunned. This was the guy who found the glove? That night Pavelic went to his computer. By now he had a program in place that tracked every individual involved in the case: what evidence each person looked at, what reports each one filed...”

He couldn't find a single LAPD report identifying Fuhrman as the cop who found the glove. Not even the search warrant affidavit. As far as you could see in the paperwork, Fuhrman hadn't noticed the blood on and in the Bronco. He hadn't gone over the wall, hadn't interrogated Kato Kaelin. In fact, he hadn't been at Rockingham that morning.
The Bundy crime-scene log listed Fuhrman arriving at 2:10 A.M., leaving at ten A.M. Period. At Rockingham, he was logged in at 5:l5 the following afternoon and left at 7:10 P.M.

If the logs were to be believed, Fuhrman had never left Bundy to go to Rockingham with Vannatter, Lange, and Phillips. He hadn't returned to point at the Bundy glove while a police photographer snapped a picture. He didn't take a Polaroid of the Bundy glove to Rockingham so Vannatter could make a comparison. The man who wasn't there.

Pavelic started to put the facts together. Robert Deutsch, a lawyer Pavelic knew, called him that night. "Bill, do you realize who this Fuhrman is?" "I guess I don't." Fuhrman had been part of the Britton case, which Deutsch and Pavelic had worked together. A black man armed with a knife had robbed and brutally beaten people at automatic teller machines on L.A.'s West Side in 1988. Fuhrman was part of a CRASH Unit stakeout team that spotted Joseph Britton threatening someone with a knife at an ATM. Britton ran. He claimed he tossed the knife over a hedge before the cops chased him down. The CRASH team said Britton waved the knife at them.

They shot him six times. Most of the bullets came from Mark Fuhrman's gun. Britton claimed that Fuhrman walked back to the hedge to get the knife and dropped it beside him. "Are you still alive, nigger?" he sneered at the wounded man. Britton went to prison and sued the LAPD for using excessive force. Fuhrman was that cop. Once reminded of the connection, Pavelic remembered that the Britton incident was just one item in a hefty dossier.

Years earlier, Pavelic had checked out everyone on the CRASH team and found pure gold under Fuhrman's name. The detective had filed for a disability pension in September 1981. He wanted out because of stress. The records said that a department psychiatrist had given him a temporary medical leave a month before he filed. The detective complained that he was getting angrier and angrier at "low-class" people, notably Latino and black gang members-angry enough to kill someone. In one of the interview summaries, a doctor reported that Fuhrman used the word "nigger."

Pavelic knew that in April 1982 the Workers Compensation Appeals Board had judged Fuhrman temporarily disabled and given him time off. But a year later the Board of Pension Commissioners looked at a thick stack of contradictory psychiatric reports and concluded Fuhrman should go back to work.

"I'm going to need the pension reports and Fuhrman's psychological profiles," Bill told his friend. Deutsch was happy to send them to Shapiro.

Some therapists wrote that Fuhrman shouldn't carry a gun. Others felt he was exaggerating the street trouble he saw in hopes of bailing out of a job he didn't like with a golden parachute. The LAPD had an unusually large number of officers applying for stress pensions in those days. It was getting expensive. The force wasn't about to let anyone out easily. Fuhrman appealed the Pension Board judgment to Superior Court. That put his psychiatric evaluations on the public record.

Bill also began hearing from LAPD friends who had watched the preliminary hearings. "Please be advised that several LAPD police officers and detectives have contacted me and are eager to help O.J.," he wrote in a memo to Shapiro. "If there is one common denominator in these phone calls, it is that Mark Fuhrman is a pathological liar."

Of course, nothing is ever simple in an investigator's life. Pavelic began to suspect that the LAPD was sending him disinformation. Anything to make the defense waste time and money.

A letter signed "Blue" from a writer claiming to be a black LAPD lieutenant advised O.J. to hire Johnnie Cochran, and concluded: “All stops are being pulled in your case. Strings are being pulled across the country. The L.A.P.D. and the D.A. do not want to lose your case, so beware. I know for a fact that lies are being blended into your case."

Robert Shapiro on Bill Pavelic

Robert Shapiro, one of the nation’s best-known attorneys is most notable for being part of the defense team which successfully defended O.J. Simpson. He is also a co-founder of LegalZoom and a partner of Christensen, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Glaser, Weil & Shapiro, LLP, a full-service law firm with approximately 120 attorneys.

In his book entitled, The Search For Justice: A Defense Attorney's Brief on the O.J. Simpson Case, Shapiro had many things to say about Bill Pavelic. Below are actual excerpts from The Search For Justice concerning Bill Pavelic….

“....I then called my friend Bill Pavelic, a retired nineteen-year veteran of the L.A.P.D., with eleven of those years spent as a detective supervisor. Bill is perhaps the most anal-retentive, thorough investigator I have ever seen, and he is passionate about police integrity and behavior. During his time on the force, he received more than two hundred commendations, including ones from the U.S. Justice Department and Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti. Pavelic misses nothing. Not only can he find the needle in the haystack, he can tell you who dropped it there and when. If there is a mistake made in police procedure, protocol, or timing, no matter how insignificant it may appear to the layman, he will find it. Most important, Pavelic himself has absolute integrity, as well as an indefatigable work ethic. When he agreed to come on the case, I felt that one of the strongest links in the chain had been forged.....”

“....This changed significantly when Bill Pavelic contacted Gary Randa, Cathy Randa's adult son, and in essence hired him as our video archivist. Gary's mission was to tape, each and every day, anything on television regarding O.J.'s case. That included news segments in the morning, both local and national, all the talk shows throughout the day, the evening news wrap-ups, and everything on Court TV and CNN. Every few days, the defense team and the investigators would go through the tapes, paying close attention to the "court of public opinion'' that was transpiring outside our office door...”

Read more about Bill Pavelic at his official site, BillPavelic.com

“....In the meantime, Bill Pavelic was trying to find out who Ron Goldman was and where he fit into the mystery. Was he a boyfriend? Was he a bystander?...”

“....So initially it appeared that we might have a reasonable basis for exploring a narcotics angle. Bill Pavelic was looking into the record of 911 calls in the area on the night of the murders; there had been reports of prowlers, and we couldn't dismiss the likelihood that if they were borne out, they could have some connection to the crime. At the very least, we had an obligation to investigate further, if only to rule out the possibility. Ultimately, our investigation was to discover much information about Nicole that was of an intimate and possibly inflammatory nature. It was relevant to the case and we chose not to use it as part of the defense. I choose not to use it now....”

Read more about Bill Pavelic at his official site, BillPavelic.com

“....And when we announced an 800 number, along with a $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer(s), fiber-optic hell broke loose: within the first two weeks, Pacific Bell's voice-mail system had recorded and logged 250,000 calls - one a minute - which we then had to log and store on cassette tapes as part of the investigation. Callers who couldn't get through on the 800 number reverted to calling the office number. Every hour or so Bonnie had to "dump" the voice mail and then record the messages in her computer, deciding which ones were genuine and which ones were cranks, and pass them along to Bill Pavelic. We couldn't possibly deal with every call, but it was difficult to dismiss the possibility that among the callers who received radio signals in their fillings or saw the killer's name in their tea leaves might be the one solid lead we needed....”

“....In addition to DNA, the issue I was most focused on was the search-and-seizure procedures of the investigating police officers. Armed with the L.A.P.D. procedures manual and his own extensive experience, Bill Pavelic began a log that cross referenced official procedure with what the police investigators had actually done at the crime scene. Very quickly, he came up with a damning list: they had failed to notify the coroner in the prescribed time; they had failed to complete individual chronology reports; they prepared erroneous property reports; they misrepresented the facts in the search warrant affidavit on the first day of the investigation; they carried forensic evidence from Bundy to Rockingham, rather than taking it to a lab; they didn't secure evidence (Nicole's home, O.J.'s car) in a timely manner; they used the crime scene at Bundy as a staging area for their investigation, using the phone inside the house to make their calls, and the furniture inside to sit on while they talked, rather than cordoning it off completely; and finally, of the chronology reports that were completed, not one was contemporaneous.

No one, it seemed, made notes while they looked at their watches. No one had even looked at their watches. Pavelic was irate. As a senior police detective, he had actually been responsible for auditing the department's "murder books," the step-by-step records investigating officers complete for each case. He well knew what an acceptable level of procedural error should be; in this case, they were way over their limit. "I've never seen a police investigation so screwed up in the infancy stage," he told me. "If there's an anatomy of how not to do an investigation, this might be it..."

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“....The sudden prominence of Mark Fuhrman in the preliminary hearing rang all of Bill Pavelic's alarm bells. Prior to that, we'd barely been aware of Fuhrman's involvement in the case, let alone that he was a key - if not the key - police detective in the investigation, at least in the all-important first hours. In the early reports provided to us by the prosecution, Mark Fuhrman's name never appeared at all: He wasn't in the arrest reports filed on O.J. and A.C.; the property reports didn't mention him; the coroner's report didn't mention him; the June 15 follow-up report didn't mention him; the murder reports didn't mention him; the June 13 and June 28 search warrants and affidavits didn't mention him. Furthermore, nowhere was it stated, in any L.A.P.D. report, that Fuhrman was the one who discovered the glove at each scene....”

"....Why are they shielding him?" Bill wondered. He had a nodding acquaintance with Fuhrman; they'd both once moonlighted for Johnny Carson. In addition, we had reports that Fuhrman was involved in a lawsuit, in something called an officer-involved shooting" case. Months before jury selection had begun and soon after Mark Fuhrman had testified in the televised preliminary hearing, Bill Pavelic reported that he was in communication with an attorney named Robert Deutsch, whose client Joseph J. Britton was suing the City of Los Angeles for excessive use of force. In the fall of 1993, Britton was apprehended while fleeing from a robbery which he'd committed. Mark Fuhrman had been one of the police officers involved, and he had reportedly fired ten rounds at Britton, both as he was falling and after he was down on the ground. Britton took five bullets, and his injuries were quite serious. Fuhrman's personnel records were included in the records Deutsch had compiled in the suit, which was eventually settled by the city for $100,000. As a consultant to Deutsch, Bill had done what he calls a “biopsy'' of the case, reconstructing the time line in conjunction with the police logs and Britton's testimony. He came to a strong conclusion that the knife Britton had dropped while running from the police had later been planted near his body in order to justify the shooting....”

“....After Fuhrman's televised session at the preliminary, we started receiving phone calls on both the 800-number line and the office lines, from attorneys who'd had dealings with Fuhrman, from anonymous police personnel, and from anonymous people who had known him. Everybody had a Mark Fuhrman story. Bonnie passed these messages on to Bill; Bill checked out the ones that he could. In the meantime, Gerry Uelmen and I immediately prepared a motion to obtain Fuhrman's police department personnel records, certain of which were already part of the lawsuit against him....”

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“....In addition to the information we'd gathered on Mark Fuhrman's racial attitudes, we had also been contacted by a woman named Kathleen Bell. After talking to Bill Pavelic, Bell, a white woman, ultimately filed an affidavit with the court that reported a casual conversation she'd had with Fuhrman in the mid-eighties. He'd told her that in his capacity as a policeman, he frequently pulled over cars driven by black men, for no particular legal reason, and he especially did so when he saw black men with white women. Mark Fuhrman had met Nicole in the mid-1980s when he was the responding officer on a call Nicole had made initially to the Westec security service. In that incident, she reported that O.J. had shattered a car windshield with a baseball bat. What, then, must have gone through his head when Fuhrman arrived at Bundy and realized who the murdered woman was?....”

“....Bill Pavelic, our investigator, kept reminding me that the district attorney's office hadn't turned over to us the police logs and tapes for June 13. Some months before, he'd heard from a source inside the L.A.P.D. that Fuhrman and his partner, Detective Phillips, were using a department-issued cellular phone in the early morning hours of June 13. This source contended that Fuhrman and Phillips called from outside O.J.'s house to the West L.A. police station, where Sydney and Justin had been taken, and asked the watch commander to find out from the children where O.J. was. Pavelic's source reported that the kids had said something to the effect of "out of town for business." Therefore, contrary to what they'd testified in the preliminary, the police knew quite early that O.J. was not at Rockingham. This meant the police had no reason to scale the wall in order to notify him or protect him from danger. Pavelic was adamant that we obtain the watch commander's log and the cellular phone records to document this call, because his informant was suggesting that it was made before the robbery/homicide detectives, Lange and Vannatter, were in the picture-which gave Fuhrman time to manipulate evidence....”

"....Hodgman knows how important this stuff is," Pavelic fumed, "and he and Clark are deliberately withholding it." I told him there was a more likely explanation. "It's the L.A.P.D. that doesn't want us to have it," I said, "not the D.A. That's why they're stalling. I'll bring it up before Ito again, he's already told them at least once to turn it over. Don't worry, Bill, our chance will come...."

“....Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I visited O.J. twice, once on Thanksgiving Day itself, which, since he was away from his family, was a very hard day for him. On the following Monday, Bill Pavelic and I spent four hours at the jail, going over and over the now-familiar details with O.J. I suspected that if he took the stand he would be a typical witness-that is, not as good as he thought he would be. I often tell clients that they must learn to be witnesses. They must take their time, listen to questions, and answer them simply. Testimony is definitely not social discourse. Over the course of the trial, Bill spent endless hours with O.J., keeping him informed and getting his input. During their conversations he subtly encouraged O.J. to control his constant storytelling impulses. In the time they spent together, the two men formed a bond of trust and true friendship. But that didn't mean O.J. didn't get as impatient with Bill as he did with the rest of us.....”

“....One day, in complete exasperation, O.J. said, "Bill, I hope - this doesn't perjure me, and I haven't really told anyone until now, but I just remembered . . . somewhere, sometime that day, I spent some quality time in the head!...."

“....Then Bill Pavelic called me to report a phone call he'd received from John McNally on Christmas Day. "Hey, Bill," McNally had asked him, "what're you going to do once Shapiro's bumped from the case?....”

“....Pavelic was alarmed. "Bob, you know the files that left your office? They didn't go to Florida," he said. "Everything went to Cochran's office." Linell had been monitoring the goings-on with a growing concern. "Bob, something weird is going on here. What are they doing to you?...."

“....In his carefully detailed report to Skip Taft a few weeks later, Bill Pavelic wrote that his investigation had revealed a systematic and elaborate campaign of disclosures to the press, principally to columnists for Eastern papers, CNN, and supermarket tabloids. The object . . . to denigrate Shapiro's skills and his ability to keep client confidences, and to enhance Bailey's own modest role in the case so far...."

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“....Soon after the Bailey fallout, I was at home, on a conference call with Johnnie and Bill Pavelic. Bill was outlining the point by-point chronology of everything Bailey had done, in the weeks before I was in Hawaii, and in the days since, including the leaks to the press about conversations only the lawyers could've been privy to. I was adamant that Bailey be removed from this case, from anything having to do with O.J. and the upcoming trial....”

“....On March 9, Detective Mark Fuhrman took the stand as another star witness for the prosecution, and a suddenly charming Marcia Clark treated him like he was a poster boy for apple pie and American values. He had never been alone during the entire first morning of the investigation, he told her earnestly, except when he was taking notes. Bill Pavelic believed that he hadn't taken contemporaneous notes but rather had carefully–and neatly–crafted his report much later, to support his version of those events. ...”

“....Shortly after the Fourth of July weekend, our investigator Bill Pavelic informed me that a friend of mine, a lawyer from San Francisco, had called him several times about Mark Fuhrman. This lawyer was someone Bill had worked with before, on my recommendation. The lawyer was aware, as anyone paying even mild attention to the case would have been, that Mark Fuhrman was of key concern to the defense team. "A lawyer in Los Angeles is offering to sell audiotapes of Mark Fuhrman that will blow your case wide open," our contact told Bill. He had heard this from two tabloid reporters, who were as curious to hear the tapes as one might expect but who were also concerned about being victims of some kind of scam...”

“....The Los Angeles lawyer's name was Matthew Schwartz, and he represented someone named Laura Hart McKinney. She was a screenwriter and had recently interviewed Fuhrman as part of a film project she was trying to develop about Los Angeles cops. Schwartz stated that the tapes contained many, many examples of clear perjury on the race issue, and the use of the “N” word in particular. Furthermore, they were a police "textbook" on framing blacks and planting evidence. There were fifteen hours of tape, approximately three hundred transcript pages. The bidding price of these tapes was slated to start at $250,000....”

“....A licensed attorney making these representations would expose himself to major criminal liability if he was trying to perpetrate a scam. I tried to maintain my own skepticism while hoping all the while that Schwartz and his tapes were for real. I instructed Bill to pursue whatever avenues he could to find out if the tapes existed, and if they actually contained what the lawyer and Schwartz said they did. Bill Pavelic needed to act as fast as he could. If what the lawyer was telling us was true, I figured we had about one day to stay ahead of a tabloid bidding war. I didn't intend to meet or match anybody's price; I wanted the tapes subpoenaed....”

“....Pavelic was told how to contact Matt Schwartz and Laura McKinney. In turn, Bill instructed the lawyer to call Carl Douglas and investigator Pat McKenna. Douglas would prepare the subpoena; McKenna was supposed to serve it. However, Gary Randa, Cathy Randa's son, got the subpoena assignment instead. When he went to Matt Schwartz's office, he was told that Schwartz was "on vacation." The person who told him this, we later discovered, was Matt Schwartz, who evidently wanted to keep the bidding war open....”

“....The television tabloid show Hard Copy knew about the tapes; so, suddenly, did a lot of reporters. It was time to go directly to the source-McKinney-and to do that we had to go to North Carolina, where she now lived....”

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