In Court Files, Hollywood’s Mr. FixIt at Work

LOS ANGELES, May 20 - Just hours after a raft of articles suggesting the impending collapse of his business hit the papers on April 11, 2002, Michael S. Ovitz did what Hollywood moguls had done for a generation: He called Anthony Pellicano.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image George Wilhelm/Los Angeles Times, via Associated Press

Anthony Pellicano

Multimedia Graphic On Either Side of a Private Eye's Gaze Related Excerpts and Audio: The Pellicano Case (May 20, 2007)

The onetime superagent and Disney president Michael S. Ovitz

"I need to see you," Mr. Ovitz said, asking for a private meeting at an out-of-the-way spot. "This is the single most complex situation imaginable."

They all went to Mr. Pellicano when their situations seemed too complex, or the stakes too high, to leave anything to chance: executives and actors, studio bosses and their jilted spouses, the hottest and the has-been. In nearly 20 years in Los Angeles, he had made himself into the rightful owner of that breathless title, "Detective to the Stars," the one man who would, and seemingly could, do anything to clean up any mess.

So when federal agents raided Mr. Pellicano's office in November 2002, his case became a local obsession: who would be fingered next, people wondered anxiously, as investigators gathered evidence and listened to Mr. Pellicano's wiretap tapes.

Perhaps the case has not lived up to its advance billing as the biggest Hollywood scandal in decades. More than a dozen people have been arrested, including a movie director, the head of a Century City law firm and a cast of minor characters.

Mr. Pellicano himself sits in jail, awaiting trial on charges that his vaunted detective prowess actually boiled down to an almost addict-like reliance on illegal wiretaps. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of wiretapping and conspiracy. Only one actual wiretap has been produced by prosecutors, and defense lawyers dispute its authenticity.

Still, the evidence so far - 150,000 pages of documents and hundreds of recordings Mr. Pellicano made of his own phone calls, many of which include discussions of wiretapping - is a rich sourcebook of show-business manners, mores and argot, a vicarious tour through the dysfunctional heart of Hollywood.

The case file, much of which was obtained by The New York Times, illustrates the economics of information in the place that values it most - a community devoted to the manufacture, control and perpetuation of image. And it explains why Mr. Pellicano, who trafficked in all manner of potentially damaging data, was so eagerly hired and his unmasking so direly feared.

The marketplace was filled with potential buyers, from the top of the town to the bottom of the D-list, in the movies, television, music, even the art and sports worlds. Stars might have had the most to lose if secrets were exposed. But entertainment executives - for whom job security is notoriously fleeting, and reputations as evanescent as last weekend's box office - had ample reason to think others were plotting against them, or at least rooting for them to fail.

Back in the golden days of Hollywood, the studios had in-house detectives to erase the indiscretions of their bosses and stars. In the era of outsourcing, Mr. Pellicano set himself up as a fixer for hire, on a ,000 nonrefundable retainer, creating a character to suit whatever his clients imagined him to be: old-time shamus or shady ex-spy, geeky technophile or mobbed-up muscle. His constant allusions to being "connected," to his roots in Al Capone's old stomping ground of Cicero, Ill., nurtured what, for some customers, was a captivating aura of violence.

From his suite on Sunset Boulevard, he maneuvered his way into the confidences of the powerful and fabulous, peddling information as ammunition or as protection from the unintended consequences of their lives.

A Penchant for Celebrities

He started out in Chicago in the 1960s tracking deadbeat customers for the Spiegel catalog, then hung out a shingle as a private investigator. From the beginning, he made celebrity clients his calling card. When the remains of Elizabeth Taylor's husband, the producer Mike Todd, disappeared from a Chicago cemetery in 1978, Mr. Pellicano led the police, and news cameras, right to them.

He also acquired a mastery of audio technology, and was constantly quoted in Watergate-era articles about detecting wiretaps and electronic bugs. When a tape said to be of the exiled shah of Iran surfaced, The Times hired Mr. Pellicano, "one of the country's top voice analysis" experts, to authenticate it.

For a private eye selling himself to celebrities, however, Chicago was not as target-rich as Los Angeles. Mr. Pellicano moved west to help John Z. DeLorean, the carmaker and playboy, fight cocaine charges, and the acquittal instantly established him in town.

As his business exploded, so did the range of services he offered. It was an open secret that the menu included wiretapping.

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