Anthony Pellicano, aka Tony Fortune, boss of Pellicano Investigative Agency on Sunset Boulevard, said to be a purveyor of hollywood dark arts for a number of big name clients like Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone, Chris Rock etc.
Over 20-some years in Los Angeles, he managed to insinuate himself into the New Hollywood — where ambition, rivalry and hardball tactics were an art form and blood sport.
Two criminal trials revealed Pellicano, engaged in intimidation, bribed police officers, and paid phone company workers to help set his racket and was convicted of 78 felony offenses.
He charged clients nonrefundable retainers of $25,000, plus an added fee, which varied but usually reached hundreds of thousands of dollars — plus expenses.
“The government claimed that I compromised the judicial system — and I did,” he concedes.
“I was often the last resort for many.
I always kept my word and did everything I could — good, bad or indifferent — to get the job done, and I was successful.”
While, he was getting the results, Pellicano lived the life -he favored double-breasted silk suits, patent leather shoes, mirror shades and the cold stare beloved by movie-star heavyweights.
He used different business cards describing his specialty as “private investigation”, “electronic surveillance” or “negotiations”.
The government charges Mr. Pellicano wiretapped on behalf of corrupt lawyers seeking illegal and unfair advantages in litigation — most involving the entertainment industry, but also divorces and criminal cases with a motive of financial gain and to secure “a tactical advantage in litigation.
Pelicano, a former high-profile Los Angeles private investigator seemed to be playing out his self created drama with a cast of the rich, powerful and merely famous.
Intimidation for hire – a tough-talking investigator who told clients they were joining his “family”—and no one hurt his family , while ‘playfully’ brandishing a Louisville Slugger – always at the ready.
For journalists he had a special gift, a paperweight inscribed with the words “Sometimes … you just have to play hardball.”
“If you can’t sit down with a person and reason with them,” he once told GQ magazine, “there is only one thing left and that’s fear.”
Mafia rituals fascinated Pellicano, who grew up in Al Capone’s hometown of Cicero, Illinois.
He named his son after Don Corleone’s favored assassin, Luca Brazzi.
“There were times when he would make my children kiss his hand like he was the Godfather.
He started to think he was Don Corleone.” — Katherine Pellicano, on her husband’s Mafia obsession (Vanity Fair, June 2006)
Most involved in telling versions of Pellicano’s story, allege his mafioso demeanor is fabricated, though as the grandson of Sicilian immigrants, raised by a divorced single mother on the mob-dominated streets of Cicero.
It was where Al Capone set up his headquarters when Chicago police started busting his speakeasies and gambling operations.
By the 1960s, it was billed as “the Walled City of the Syndicate”.
At age 16 after being kicked out of school, he got a GED, and joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he was trained as a cryptographer.
“When I got out,” he told Playboy magazine, “the majority of people doing crypto work were in cosmetics or toy manufacturing…. It wasn’t all that thrilling .”
Instead he took a job chasing defaulted customers for Spiegel catalog and was good at it.
In 1969, at the age of 25, having changed his name to Tony Fortune, he set up his own private investigation agency, focused on collections and removal of secretly placed surveillance equipment.
He used the score from the Godfather film as hold music and on occasion wore a white lab smock embroidered with the symbol of his agency, Fortune Enterprises.
He acquired a mastery of audio technology, and was constantly quoted in Watergate-era articles about detecting wiretaps.
Hired by the attorneys of Richard Nixon’s secretary in 1974 to see if the immortal 18-minute gap in the Nixon tapes could be recovered, he said no, it couldn’t; in addition, he believed the erasure wasn’t intentional.
“I had a great knowledge of electronics, and much of what I dealt with was so far advanced from others in that business,” said Pellicano.
“I was mentored by a genius from military intelligence, Lt. Col. Allan D. Bell, who became closer than my own father…He taught me many things which gave me an edge over others.” but Pellicano was resourceful in this Orwellian subculture even before meeting Bell.
“Ironically, President Johnson gave me an edge as well -He was the one who installed recorders in the White House — not Nixon.
They were Sony 800B tape recorders capable of recording hours on reel-to-reel tapes.”
“I devised a method of wiretaps using recording devices that automatically turned the recorders on when the handset was lifted and off when he hung up.”
“My methods kept getting more sophisticated, says Pellicano, adding “the system I designed is still state-of-the-art, it even encrypted the recordings it made.”
Pellicano offered himself up as an audio expert to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, submitting to the investigation the exact number of gunshots heard on the JFK tapes.
In 1979, Pellicano was hired as an audio expert by The New York Times to authenticate taped recordings of the exiled Shah of Iran.
Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign ,reportedly by Hillary Clinton hired Pelicano to discredit Gennifer Flowers, who allegedly maintained a 12-year affair with the candidate.
The New York Post reported – Six years later, Clinton into his second term, the White House hired Pelicano to look into Monica Lewinsky’s background.
He claimed a “100 percent success rate” , tracking down exactly 3,968 missing persons – amazingly, all “cases others couldn’t solve.”
Channel 7 showed him talking about runaways, he was on radio discussing “families of missing persons,” then flown to New York to appear on TV and back to Chicago to do Friday Night with Steve Edwards.
Next he spoke at Northwestern University as “one of the top debugging experts in the US” and lectured at Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity at Chicago-Kent College.
Reporters in Chicago taken by his plush office, silver walls, black furniture, marveled at the gold zodiac dominating his office, beneath it hung samurai swords which he took off the wall to demonstrate his deadly skill, while his pet piranha looked on.
Even his bankruptcy fed the Pellicano myth, 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).
From then on he both denied and promoted his mob connections ,whenever it served his purposes.
The governor of Illinois took it seriously enough to force Pellicano’s resignation from a state law enforcement advisory board.
But ultimately it was his Hollywood clients who would do him in.
It was the grave of Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband, legendary producer Mike Todd , emptied by looters that gave Pelicano , his big break.
Pellicano told police, he’d received “a number of phone calls” revealing Todd’s location.
Arriving at the cemetery with a Channel 2 news anchor and a camera crew, Pellicano found bones and Todd’s old belt buckle in a pile of mud and branches about 75 yards from his grave.
The robbers, Pellicano later told police, hoped to find “a ten-karat diamond ring,” a gift from Taylor, they thought was buried with Todd.
Lt. Joseph Byrnes of Forest Park police told journalist John Connolly: “Seven patrolmen and I, walking shoulder to shoulder, searched every inch of that small cemetery, and we found nothing.
The very next day, Pellicano makes a big deal of finding the remains in a spot we had thoroughly checked.” (Los Angeles magazine, 94)
Police found this achievement incredibly suspicious, and accused Pellicano of orchestrating a publicity stunt.
Pellicano denied it, asking, “Why would I need publicity?”
The resulting acclaim put Pellicano on the map in Hollywood and the incident caught the attention of defense attorney Howard Weitzman, who brought him to Los Angeles.
Together, they worked on the 1983 drug-entrapment trial of automaker John DeLorean ,who was fighting cocaine charges.
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 Pellicano received , a large share of credit for tarnishing the informant which allowed the defence to introduce enough doubts on tapes of DeLorean allegedly buying cocaine, to have him acquitted.
The case made both their careers and the acquittal instantly established Pellicano.
He became the celebrated go-to guy, set up several companies from his office on Sunset Boulevard, specializing in surveillance and what he called “forensic audio”.
Pelicano, hired a team of glamorous female techies with names such as Tarita Virtue to run surveillance.
He loved publicity and had the personal flair, clientele, and success to warrant it.
As his business exploded, so did the range of services along with the open secret – wiretapping.
By the mid-1990s he revolutionized the practice, inventing a virtually undetectable technique.
Wiretaps were installed not inside a target location but, in phone company junction boxes, connected over telephone lines either directly to his office or to a laptop in a nearby apartment recording every call.
Around 1995, he hired a self-taught computer programmer named Kachikian to create software to intercept telephone calls and devised a way to operate many wiretaps at once.
They named it Telesleuth and Pellicano had an attorney to trademark the name.
Later, they developed another program able to analyze and enhance audio recordings, trademarked by Pelicano as Forensic Audio Sleuth.
A spokesman for his attorney’s firm said they believed the software was created to aid on cases Pellicano did for law-enforcement.
When a call came in, Telesleuth automatically recorded it and relayed it to a Macintosh computer in Pellicano’s Sunset Boulevard offices.
His indictment suggests that Telesleuth’s first use was against a Los Angeles real-estate developer, Robert Maguire and around September 1997, Pellicano allegedly used the program to wiretap Mark Hughes, the late founder of Herbalife, who was engaged in a nasty divorce.
According to former employees, the wiretapping operation was the one unique service he could market to clients.
Pellicano’s former executive vice president, Tarita Virtue described the wiretapping setup in a series of interviews with Vanity Fair, the single Mac soon became five, lined up in a small locked office Pellicano called “the War Room.”
Only Pellicano, Virtue, and Kachikian had access to the room and only Pellicano and Virtue had the code.
The operation had one drawback: the Macs could receive wiretap recordings only from their own, 310 area code, to tap phones in other area codes, Pellicano had to rent an apartment in each where he could stash a Mac and a detachable hard drive.
Pellicano would switch out the hard drive every few days, bring it to his office, and download the recordings.
The recordings were typically clear, but sheer volume of them became a problem —thousands of telephone conversations.
To hone in on the most promising ones, Kachikian’s software could graph a recording’s volume; a conversation in which his subject had raised his voice, was often a sign that something emotional was being discussed.
Virtue did most of the initial scanning and forwarded useful information to Pellicano’s computer with data displayed in red lettering, signifying it was urgent.
Virtue asserts, the detective refrained from telling attorneys where the wiretapped information came from and begin a briefings saying, “My sources tell me … ” or “It’s been brought to my attention … “
But he wasn’t always so careful; “He would also illegally tape his own clients and their attorneys and then play tape recordings of those conversations to impress [them].”
In the face of his own indiscretions, Pellicano re-doubled his security systems to safeguard the War Room with security cameras throughout the office, and doors could be opened only with pass codes.
Modern investigators work mostly for attorneys and spend their time identifying and interviewing people who might give testimony to help an attorney’s case.
Yet Pellicano lacked the common touch, patience and temperament—to soothe and coddle potential witnesses.
When he needed “street work,” Denise Ward handled it.
“Anthony hadn’t been out in the field for years,” and “He literally didn’t know his way around town.”
Pellicano cut corners by wiretapping, first-person information obtained was faster and inherently more reliable than third parties.
It also gave Pellicano ready access to a trove of personal information, including credit-card numbers and a variety of secret passwords.
“We had anything we wanted,” the only problem, unfortunately, was that Pellicano’s eavesdropping operation was 100 percent illegal.
Pellicano also used a second shortcut: the bribes he allegedly paid policemen to search law-enforcement databases.
One Los Angeles cop named Mark Arneson became a fixture in Pellicano’s cases, according to the indictment.
Arneson was “an arrogant guy, who sent information illegally obtained with his name and police id right on top.
In his camera-lined bunker, high above Sunset Boulevard, listening with his black headphones to wiretaps and allegedly paying bribes to policemen and Pac Bell workers, signs of carelessness crept into Pellicano’s operation.
On one occasion, he is said to have allowed a pair of outsiders into the War Room to listen to wiretaps.
It was this incident, it turns out—and not the fish on Anita Busch’s Audi, as previous reports suggest—which first brought Pellicano’s secret world to the F.B.I.’s attention as part of the Nicherie brother’s saga with the Shafrir family.
According to a lawsuit, the saga is complex, including allegations: Daniel and Abner Nicherie were Israeli con men, who targeted fellow Israeli, Ami Shafrir, owner of several Beverly Hills office buildings.
Posing as legitimate businessmen, they succeeded not only in swindling Shafrir out of around $40 million—but also in persuading his wife, Sarit, to work alongside them, convincing her Ami was a criminal.
When Ami sued, the Nicheries responded with a barrage of legal artillery, eventually hiring 40 separate Los Angeles attorneys to countersue.
After a referral from one of these lawyers, Victor Sherman, they allegedly paid Pellicano $50,000 to wiretap Ami.
Pellicano told the Nicheries he could use customized electronics to cause interference on Ami’s cell phone, which would force him to use the wiretapped landline more often.
The Nicheries understood Ami was being bugged, although Pellicano initially refused to let them listen in.
But the Nicheries were eventually given access to the recordings because Ami sometimes spoke in Hebrew, and Pellicano couldn’t understand him.
He made the two brothers swear that what they heard would remain confidential.
On several occasions they arrived at Pellicano’s office after hours, allowing themselves to be frisked and turning over their cellular phones.
Unbeknownst to Pellicano, however, Daniel Nicherie had secreted a tiny cell phone in his sock, which he used to allow Ami’s wife, Sarit, to listen in on the wiretap recordings.
Sarit Shafrir, heard dozens of Ami’s conversations this way; sometimes the Nicheries would call from Pellicano’s office and play back a tape, other times they would leave a recording of the wiretap on her answering machine.
In time, the Nicheries and Pellicano began speaking of ways to put Ami in jail by framing him; one involved planting cocaine in the trunk of his car and having a Beverly Hills policeman on Pellicano’s payroll pull him over.
It was then, Sarit’s began having second thoughts about the Nicheries.
Sensing this, the brothers threatened her, telling her she and her two children could be “barbecued” when their home went up in flames.
Daniel Nicherie emphasized that there was nothing Sarit could do against them; Daniel told her that Pellicano had his offices wired with plastic explosives.
If she told the authorities about the wiretapping operation, a single cell-phone call, Daniel claimed, would allow Pellicano to blow up all the evidence.
After months of worrying, Sarit decided to turn on Pellicano and the Nicheries and contact the F.B.I.
But she was so afraid of Pellicano’s capabilities she flew to Israel in order to telephone the bureau’s L.A. office from a foreign country.
When she returned, in August 2001, she met an agent in the Beverly Hills Public Library.
There, hidden deep in the stacks, she told the agent everything she knew about Pellicano’s wiretapping system.
To her amazement, the agent appeared skeptical, “that it would take a ‘tremendous infrastructure’ to do something like that.”
The agent seemed unconvinced even when Sarit described a wiretapped conversation she had heard between Ami and another F.B.I. agent, investigating Ami’s complaints about the Nicheries.
Sarit suggested that the F.B.I. send in someone undercover. “Do what I did,” she insisted. “Go to Victor Sherman—he’ll get you to Pellicano and you can see the whole setup!”
The agent scribbled down everything she said.
Sarit waited for an F.B.I. raid on Pellicano’s offices in the coming months, nothing happened.
No one is suggesting that the F.B.I. “covered up” for Pellicano, but did say Pellicano had been handling audio-analysis tasks—cleaning up, amplifying, and identifying legal wiretaps—on F.B.I. cases since the mid-1990s.
In 1997 he served as an expert witness for the federal prosecution of a murderer in Miami.
As late as 2001 the F.B.I. retained Pellicano to analyze federal wiretaps during the Arizona narcotics-trafficking trial of New York Mafia hit man Sammy “the Bull” Gravano.
At his home Pellicano kept a collection of plaques and glowing letters from F.B.I. officials.
The longer his wiretapping activities went undiscovered—or at least unpunished—the more brazen Pellicano became.
In June 2002 (nine months after Sarit Shafrir’s accusations) a fateful fish landed on Anita Busch’s Audi and it all came to a screeching halt,
Federal agents looking for evidence of Pelicano’s involvement in a plot to threaten the L.A. Times’s reporter who was pursuing a story about alleged mob ties to movie star Steven Seagal.
She discovered the windshield of her car smashed, and a dead fish left by Alexander Proctor who claimed responsibility and told the FBI he was hired by Pelicano.
Ultimately, the investigation ballooned into allegations of bribery of law-enforcement officers, identity theft, and high-tech eavesdropping.
The case began to take on a life of its own, Hollywood heavyweights were dragged into the mess.
The bureau’s initial interest in Pellicano was the Busch incident; only as agents began interviewing former employees and Pellicano targets did the first hints of illegal wiretapping start to interest them.
Pellicano quickly caught wind of the F.B.I. investigation and saw the handwriting on the wall.
After being questioned by the F.B.I., he called in Rich DiSabatino and handed him $25,000 worth of electronics, including oscilloscopes.
By then, however, several people, including Tarita Virtue, Denise Ward, a technical expert , and at least two other office assistants, were cooperating with the F.B.I.
Virtue went into hiding, but Pellicano phoned her parents. “I know your daughter’s testifying,” he told them, “That’s a damn shame.”
When agents raided Pellicano’s office, they discovered plastic explosives,a pair of hand grenades, and a trove of thousands of transcripts and encrypted tapes of phone conversations he’d illegally tapped.
An F.B.I. agent assembled a team to begin inspecting and copying everything that was seized.
It was an arduous task.
Copying a single hard drive took at least 10 hours.
Some took as long as two days.
Many of the diskettes were encrypted, which made them even harder to decipher, but when they did, they had found the mother lode.
The indictments against Pellicano, which list more than 112 instances in which the private detective allegedly engaged in wiretapping or illegally accessing law-enforcement databases, provide a road map of the cases the U.S. attorney is investigating.
“Everyone expected this to be the case that rocked Hollywood, and it didn’t happen, and it didn’t bring in the great names they hypothesized would happen,” his attorney says.
The betting here is that he won’t break his personal vow of omertà—the Sicilian vow of silence. After all, he has already served more than 30 months in prison without turning on a single client.
“I could have helped myself if I had named names,” Pellicano told the New York Post from prison in 2003. “But that’s not me. Me, I protect my people. [The feds] wanted to get me, and because I’d never give up my client, they got me. I have to accept responsibility.”
“He wouldn’t buckle, and that is why he is in Big Spring, Texas, today.”, due to be released in 2019.
Pellicano, who has eight children from four marriages, says,
“Everything I have is gone, including my family.”
He would like to see his grandchildren one day, but given up hope he will ever see his mother again.
She is too frail to make the flight to Texas.
“Those are the hard things to deal with,” Pellicano says.
He claims he doesn’t harbor any ill will about his situation.
“I had a really long run.
I am not bitter.
I don’t have any hard feelings against the government.
Every U.S. citizen is subjected to the laws of this country.
This guy in Norway [faces] a maximum sentence of 21 years,” referring to the recent massacre there.
“I got 15 years for giving away DMV information.”
With so many roommates in his prison dorm, Pellicano says he isn’t able to write the autobiography he’s received numerous offers to pen.
“Imagine trying to write a story with 100 guys around you,” he says.
“There is nowhere to go for quiet.”
Still, given the alternative of being a stool pigeon, Pellicano says he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It was either I talked or go to jail and accept it like a man,” he says. “I could have gone to the Clintons and senators and asked them for a favor.
I am not going to ask them for a favor.
A tattoo on his shoulder reads “Honor.”
He got it done the night before he went to prison.
“You take everything from me, and I still have honor and integrity.
I look in the mirror and see a person I like.”
The image may be cracked, but its subject hasn’t. Yet.
History suggests that only a few are likely to be indicted, but until the case concludes, a wide swath of Hollywood’s legal and entertainment establishments live in abject fear.