Dish (43 page)

“That’s him!” Dimond whispered to her producer. “That’s the guy who’s been trying to spin my Heidi Fleiss story.” Dimond wondered why the same person would be involved in the two biggest scandals in Hollywood. “This guy must be one slick operator,” she thought. She didn’t yet know the half of it.

By 1993, the culture of celebrity was so pervasive that movie stars and recording artists were among the richest, most powerful people in the country—and no one was bigger than Michael Jackson. Jackson wasn’t just a pop star; he was a multibillion-dollar conglomerate. He had signed a contract with Sony worth $1 billion, the biggest entertainment deal in history. He had an endorsement deal with Pepsi and was credited with the soft drink’s two-point increase in market share; each point was worth $470 million, so Jackson was a very valuable commodity to Pepsi.
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The power of celebrities, however, extended way beyond their financial clout. They were modern society’s most sacred icons. Celebrities had a cultural significance and an emotional impact on Americans that they didn’t find in religious or political leaders. In the early 1990s, no performer personified the celebrity-as-demigod syndrome more than Michael Jackson. It was an image Jackson worked hard to cultivate. Although his actual philanthropic work was limited mostly to singing songs about the underprivileged and hugging children in hospitals, Jackson was seen as one of the world’s great humanitarians. Presidents wanted to be photographed with him; he was honored by Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley declared a Michael Jackson Day.

The entire scandal industry, however, was built on bashing such icons. By the time the Michael Jackson story broke, the scandal industry was very big business. In addition to the super
market tabloids, there were twelve news magazines on television in 1993—up from three five years earlier—each one trying to come up with revelations more shocking than the other. The scandal business, according to one estimate, was a $28.3-billion-dollar industry.

With so much at stake, both sides became
very
aggressive. As tabloid reporters increasingly resorted to tactics like paying sources and going undercover to get the goods on celebrities, an equally combative industry evolved that specialized in suppressing scandal. When a salacious bit of information threatened to wreck a star’s career, when police reports and criminal charges were involved, traditional public relations—even gatekeepers like Pat Kingsley—were useless. At times like those, celebrities turned to a breed of aggressive private detectives usually billed as “security consultants.”

The best-known of these operators worked in and around Hollywood. Pellicano’s key competitor was probably Gavin de Becker, who for years was on the William Morris payroll and whose clients included Michael J. Fox, Cher, and Bill Cosby. Fox hired de Becker when he married actress Tracy Pollan in 1988. At first, Fox thought de Becker was going overboard on the job. When the actor showed up at the quiet Vermont inn where he was to be married, he was startled to see what he later described as “half a dozen Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alikes in business suits and mirrored shades in Adirondack chairs scanning the woods with binoculars and searchlights.” To execute Operation Fox, de Becker had prepared a thirty-six page manual, referring to Michael Fox as Coyote 1 and Tracy Pollan as Coyote 2. “The
National Enquirer
and its ilk have the whole industry more or less wired,” the young and attractive de Becker warned a startled Fox. “You’ve got two-bit publicists, chauffeurs, and secretaries all over Hollywood selling information to the junk press. Whenever you go to a restaurant frequented by celebrities, you can assume that the guy who parks your car is working with a paparazzo. He’s got a slip of paper in his pocket with the name of a photographer on it.” Fox came to the conclusion that de Becker wasn’t overreacting after the detective sent Fox’s publicist, Nanci Ryder, undercover answering phones at the
National Enquirer’s
makeshift
headquarters at a nearby hotel. Not only did Ryder discover the
Enquirer’s
plans—including an idea to rent a llama suit to cross a meadow—but she also got her hands on a copy of the
Enquirer’s
confidential source list, including some people on Fox’s payroll.

“When you arrive at the scene of a story and a bunch of guys are talking into their cufflinks, you know de Becker is on the job,” said a tabloid reporter.

Pellicano couldn’t stand de Becker. He referred to his biggest competitor as a “fucking wimp.” Pellicano was of the tough-talking Philip Marlowe gumshoe school of private detectives. Also known as “The Private Investigator to the Stars,” “The Publicist of Last Resort,” or “The Celebrities’ Thug,” Pellicano was born in 1944 in the working-class Chicago suburb of Cicero. “I’m a kid from the streets,” he admitted. “I could have been a criminal just as easily.” A high school drop-out raised by a single mother, he earned a GED in the army signal corps and went to work at the Spiegel catalogue company “skip tracing” customers who didn’t pay their bills. From there, Pellicano joined a private detective agency he found in the back of the Yellow Pages. In 1969, he set up his own shop, solving several highly publicized missing persons cases, working for the government, and becoming a minor celebrity around Chicago. He loved publicity, drove a huge Lincoln Continental, hung samurai swords in his office, and sealed his letters with monogrammed wax. In 1974, however, Pellicano declared bankruptcy and in the filing revealed that he had borrowed $30,000 from Paul “The Waiter” de Lucia, the son of a reputed mobster. “Paul de Lucia is my daughter’s godfather,” Pellicano protested. “He’s just like any other guy in the neighborhood.” Nevertheless, the scandal forced Pellicano to resign his prestigious position on the Illinois Law Enforcement Commission. His business and his reputation were in shambles, and he needed a highprofile case to restore his reputation. It came in the form of Elizabeth Taylor.

In 1977, the body of the actress’s third husband, Mike Todd, was stolen from its grave in a Chicago area cemetery. After police searched and found nothing, Pellicano showed up at the cemetery with the camera crew from a local news station, went to a spot seventy-five yards south of the excavated grave, reached under
some scattered branches and leaves, and produced a plastic bag containing Todd’s remains. Pellicano insisted that “underworld sources” had told him the body’s whereabouts, but rivals snickered that the private detective had staged the entire escapade for publicity. If so, it worked. The recovery of Todd’s body made headlines, and a grateful Elizabeth Taylor introduced Pellicano to her Hollywood friends. Los Angeles criminal attorney Howard Weitzman hired Pellicano to work with him, and the pair successfully defended auto executive John DeLorean in a cocaine-trafficking case—even though the FBI caught DeLorean on videotape selling cocaine to an undercover agent.
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In 1983, Pellicano left Chicago and opened an office on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. There, sources say, he was coached by the notorious Fred Otash, the private investigator for
Confidential.
In Hollywood, Pellicano quickly became what he calls “the ultimate problem solver.”

Pellicano didn’t tackle the problem, he went after the accuser. He has, foes say, boasted of his underworld contacts and threatened people with violence. He insists he didn’t, however, carry a gun. “That’s a physical solution to a mental problem,” says Pellicano, a proud member of Mensa, the organization whose members all have genius-level I.Q.s. Pellicano used “Sherlock Holmes-type stuff,” he explained, by digging up the dirt on the people who were maligning his clients. And there always was dirt. When a woman sold a story to a British tabloid that she had an eleven-year affair with Kevin Costner, the actor called Pellicano, who fed damaging facts about her to the tabloids. “She was trying to extort Kevin Costner,” said Pellicano. “We exposed her for what she was.” In cases of blackmail, Pellicano said, he starts by “appealing to their sense of values,” he said. “If they don’t have any, then I have to counter black ‘em.”

Before O. J. Simpson was accused of murdering his wife Nicole and Ron Goldman, the ex-football star hired Pellicano to silence a secretary who accused him of abusive behavior. The accusations went away after Pellicano found potentially embarrassing information on the secretary. When James Woods was
going through a messy breakup with Sean Young—a split so acrimonious it was said to have involved mutilated dolls, threatening letters, and bizarre tales of Woods’s penis stuck to his thigh with Krazy Glue—Woods hired Pellicano. The private detective also worked on the William Kennedy Smith rape trial. He is said to be the one who dug up information about accuser Patricia Bowman’s personal life that appeared in the
New York Times
and the supermarket tabloid
The Globe.

One of Pellicano’s mandates was to track down
Spy
magazine’s aggressive but pseudonymous Hollywood reporter Celia Brady. “It’s a secret society,” Pellicano said. “If somebody wants to investigate a member of the group, they have to be willing to take the heat themselves.”

Don Simpson had used Pellicano’s services before. When a former receptionist sued Simpson for $5 million, claiming the producer of
Top Gun
and
Days of Thunder
made her schedule hookers for him and that he used cocaine and watched pornographic videos in front of her, Pellicano produced evidence that the accuser herself had used drugs, rented porn movies, and had stolen letters from Simpson’s wastebasket. “He goes in like a junkyard dog to find dirt,” said the receptionist’s lawyer. One witness who testified against the receptionist got a $4,500 “loan” from Pellicano, which, the detective said, didn’t have to be paid back. “Anthony is one of those people who is, shall we say, a lion at the gate,” Simpson gleefully said after the case was dismissed. “He is not a man to be on the wrong side of.”

So when a doctor named Stephen Ammerman, who was said to be treating Don Simpson for drug addiction, died of a drug overdose at Simpson’s Bel Aire estate, the producer immediately called Pellicano. Later, Ammerman’s family filed a wrongful death suit, alleging that the doctor hadn’t willingly taken the drugs that killed him and that Pellicano and others destroyed evidence before police arrived on the scene. The charges against Pellicano were dismissed after Simpson himself died the following year of a drug overdose.

Not everyone was always impressed with Pellicano’s tactics. After Heidi Fleiss was arrested, Pellicano publicly denied that Columbia executive Michael Nathanson was one of her clients. The
problem was, until the denial, Nathanson hadn’t been publicly linked to Fleiss. The denial prompted
Variety
to give Pellicano the PR Boner Award.

Then there was the Roseanne case. The comedienne paid Pellicano $25,000 to locate a daughter she’d given up for adoption seventeen years earlier. The story appeared in the
National Enquirer,
and Roseanne claimed that Pellicano—whom she called “a low-life scumbag”—split the fee with reporters from the tabloid who then tracked down her daughter and ran the story. Pellicano denied giving the story to the
National Enquirer;
he blamed the leak on Roseanne’s husband Tom Arnold, who did, in fact, sell stories about Roseanne to the
Enquirer
to support his drug habit.
*

The truth is that Pellicano did work for the
National Enquirer
from time to time. When
Los Angeles
magazine was preparing an expose of the tabloid, reporter Rod Lurie said the detective threatened him and tried to get the piece killed. “There was consistent cultlike phone intimidation from Pellicano,” said Lurie. “He would call my friends and family and editors I worked for at other magazines, saying I was through in this town.” According to Lurie, Pellicano paid the reporter’s research assistant to steal his notes.
Enquirer
sources, meanwhile, insist that Lurie’s biggest source on the story was actually working for tabloid foe Gavin de Becker.

“I can’t do everything by the book,” Pellicano once admitted. “I bend the law to death in gaining information.” Pellicano would sometimes remind people that he carries an aluminum baseball bat in the trunk of his black Nexus. “Guys who fuck with me get to meet my buddy over there,”; he once told a reporter, gesturing toward the bat. Pellicano also tells people that he is an expert with a knife—”I can shred your face” he has said—and that he has a blackbelt in karate. “If I use martial arts, I might really maim somebody,” he said. “I have, and I don’t want to. I only use intimidation and fear when I absolutely have to.”

Anthony Pellicano had worked for Michael Jackson for four years. His services didn’t come cheap. The investigator’s usual fee
was $500 an hour; Jackson paid Pellicano a retainer of $100,000 a month. The singer, according to Pellicano, was the victim of twenty-five to thirty extortion attempts every year. He also had family problems. When Jackson’s sister La Toya wrote a tell-all book that included allegations that Michael had been molested as a child, Pellicano launched a campaign to discredit La Toya and her husband, Jack Gordon. He succeeded. Before the book came out, newspaper articles appeared saying that Gordon was a convicted panderer who had owned massage parlors and had changed his name twice. Despite Pellicano’s efforts, the book was a bestseller. The detective, however, insists that Jackson was pleased with his work. “We finished that job,” Pellicano said. “Michael is happy.”

During the child molestation allegations, Pellicano completely took over the function of public relations. Jackson’s usual publicist, Lee Solters, referred all calls—more then seven hundred in the first week—to Pellicano. “I had to lay out the chessboard and say, what does the public think?” Pellicano said of the situation. “How will this affect Michael and all of the other deals that are in the works for him? And the sponsors involved?”

Even before the child abuse scandal broke, Jackson and his handlers were masters at manipulating the press. Actual interviews were minimal and were limited to journalists who were bona fide friends or allies. Although articles frequently appeared about Jackson’s bizarre behavior, most of them were amusing tales of Jackson’s wacky eccentricities or stories of his love for stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Ross. Almost all the stories were planted by the singer or at his direct orders. When Jackson and Madonna had a “date” at the Los Angeles restaurant Ivy, paparazzi were waiting by the time they arrived. They had been tipped off by both Jackson’s people and Madonna’s. A similar scene occurred when he had a “date” with Brooke Shields—whose other highly publicized romances included George Michael, John Travolta, and Dodi Fayed.
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Some believed that Jackson’s friendship
with Elizabeth Taylor was also largely for public consumption. They fed off each other’s fame: she gave him old Hollywood credibility, he gave her cutting-edge hipness. “They rarely saw each other privately,” according to writer Chris Anderson, who said the friendship was both a public relations ploy and a financial arrangement because Jackson was a big investor in Taylor’s various merchandising efforts.