A private investigator under investigation

Among those who seek the moniker “Hollywood detective,” Anthony Pellicano, who was arrested last week, has set the standard for two decades -- even the rivals who portray him as a greedy, self-promoting bully concede that much.

John Nazarian, a fearsome-looking former San Francisco cop who has done private-eye work for the likes of Dean Martin and Peggy Lee, tells of going to the Lalique store in Beverly Hills a few weeks ago to buy a $3,000 piece of crystal for a client who has given him a good deal of business, the gift being one of those gestures that keeps up the mystique, like wearing a Rolex. So what did the clerk say when he handed her his business card?

“She said, ‘Oh, you must know Mr. Pellicano,’ ” Nazarian recalls. “Mr. Pellicano comes here all the time.” There’s a grudging respect in such stories, even as a competitor like Nazarian points out how Pellicano did not come from the ranks of law enforcement, but started back in Chicago as a “skip tracer” for the Spiegel catalog.

“Image in this town is everything,” Nazarian says. “I don’t know how he does what he does, but he’s very good at it.... Everybody wants to be in that little select club.”

Pellicano established his image long before the latest incident -- the discovery of weapons at his office as part of an investigation into whether he orchestrated a threat against a Times reporter -- landed him in the news.

He’s the P.I. with the arms-folded, stare-you-down look, a trademark logo -- a pelican, of course -- and a motto for clients, “Your problem becomes my problem.” But part of his image, too, has been that he’s one detective who does not need a gun to deal with the enemies of such celebrity clients as Michael Jackson and Sylvester Stallone. He might use a little dirt, sure -- or a lot of dirt. And a bat too -- his signature Louisville slugger. But not a gun. “I always start out by being a gentleman,” he said once. “I only use intimidation and fear when I absolutely have to.” Another time, he described his approach as appealing to someone’s sense of values first, and only then, “if they don’t have any, then I have to counter-blackmail ‘em.” Or as he put it on another occasion, “Anybody who wants to malign one of my clients, I dig into their pasts. So they gotta take the same heat that they dish out.”

That’s been the image -- built on tough talk, dirt and a bat -- that has helped the 58-year-old father of nine win both business and headlines for 20 years now in Los Angeles. And in a city whose own image was crafted in part by a line of fictional private eyes -- from Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes in “Chinatown” -- the Hollywood detective is almost expected to play the loner walking an ethical tightrope, even if the image has only a marginal relationship to reality.

But now the detective who supposedly didn’t need a gun will have to explain why federal authorities stumbled on far more than that last week when they searched two safes in his Sunset Boulevard office. The FBI agents were there to investigate allegations on an FBI informant’s tape recordings that Pellicano may have orchestrated a threat in June against Times reporter Anita M. Busch, perhaps at the behest of actor Steven Seagal -- an allegation both men deny. The FBI agents said they found two loaded guns and 15 to 20 bundles of cash, “the majority of which bore $10,000 wrappers.” But what’s cost Pellicano his freedom, at least until a hearing Wednesday in U.S. District Court, is the discovery of two practice hand grenades, allegedly “altered for the specific purpose of rendering them lethal,” and plastic explosives “consistent with military C-4,” according to an affidavit by special agent Stanley E. Ornellas.

Pellicano is said to have told another agent at the scene that “the items in the safe were from an old case of his and that he had forgotten they were there.” “I don’t like to talk about defenses before I have to use defenses. But I think there’s a reasonable explanation,” Pellicano’s attorney, Donald M. Re, said over the weekend.

The defense attorney promised an explanation this week that would at least suggest a “mitigating circumstance” for why the city’s most famous private detective had the favored weapons of terrorists. “The explosive could easily be used to blow up a car,” Ornellas said, “and was in fact strong enough to bring down an airplane.”

High school dropout

Anthony “The Pelican” Pellicano learned the value of myth-making, and even a touch of scandal, before he came to L.A.

He takes pride in having transformed himself from a high school dropout off the streets of Cicero, Ill., raised by a divorced single mom, into a detective able to command, as an “ultimate problem solver,” $25,000 retainers. He used the name Tony Fortune during his days collecting debts for the Spiegel catalog, then went into business for himself in 1969.

He won appointment to the Illinois Law Enforcement Commission, which distributed federal crime-fighting funds, but resigned in 1976 in the wake of news reports that he had accepted a $30,000 loan from the son of an underworld figure. Pellicano said the son was a childhood friend and his daughter’s godfather, “just like any other guy in the neighborhood.”

He made a splash again in 1977, for finding not a missing person but missing bones -- the remains of movie producer Michael Todd, who was married to Elizabeth Taylor when he died in a 1958 plane crash. When Todd’s remains vanished from an Illinois cemetery and local police couldn’t find them, Pellicano did, saying an informant had told him to search under leaves and dirt near the grave. His detractors whispered, but it was a perfect noir moment -- who could say where the truth lay?

What competitors did not dispute, then or now, was that Pellicano had some real skills beyond the ability to garner publicity. The most notable was his ability to analyze recordings, and to enhance the quality of surveillance tapes used by private detectives and the government alike. That’s what brought him to Los Angeles in 1983; he was hired by attorney Howard Weitzman to assist in the defense of carmaker John Z. DeLorean, who was caught in a government sting and charged in a bizarre scheme to raise millions of dollars selling cocaine. Pellicano helped dissect the prosecution tapes and Weitzman won an acquittal for DeLorean. Weitzman went on to use the detective in “a great number of cases afterward” and to this day remains one of Pellicano’s fans, saying over the weekend that he did “a great job as an investigator.” These days, even the government sometimes uses Pellicano’s technical skills. Pellicano also began offering the “damage control” services that made him a P.I. of choice for a coterie of lawyers with the sort of celebrity clients who have to fend off stalkers, extortionists, the tabloids, paternity claims -- or combinations of the above.

“There was a time when a male celebrity I was representing was getting really threatening letters,” recalls one of those lawyers, Bertram Fields. “No police agency could find [the culprit]. The letters were being mailed from a small town in New York. The FBI had worked on it, even some foreign intelligence agency. Within 24, maybe 48 hours, Anthony called me and said, ‘I’m across the street from the guy who’s sending the letters. What do you want me to do?’ ” A decade after the DeLorean case, Pellicano became a full-fledged celebrity in his own right, when he surfaced as a defender and spin-master for singer Michael Jackson, who faced career-threatening molestation allegations from the family of a young boy. In more recent years, Pellicano represented actor Mike Myers, when he was sued by Universal Pictures for allegedly breaching his contract to write and star in a movie called “Dieter.”

For all the attorneys who use Pellicano, and swear by him, there are others who question how he works, like the Beverly Hills lawyer convinced that Pellicano’s men are the ones now watching one of his clients, a nanny to a wealthy family, though he admits: “I can’t prove it.”

One on-the-record critic is criminal defense attorney Leslie Abramson, who has become famous for her work for the Menendez brothers and others. She says Pellicano charged a client of hers $80,000 but did little for that fee. “He’s a joke,” she says, “except he’s not funny.”

Nazarian, the Encino-based investigator, likes to joke that “there are only two types of people who use private investigators: crazy people and rich people. In our business, if you get a crazy rich person, that’s a good day.”

One private investigator who says he has worked a couple of cases with Pellicano said “there’s a little bit of envy in the community” over the big fees and publicity Pellicano draws. He said Pellicano is “a loose cannon ... a big show,” an investigator who has “done very well in the perception business.”

Company he keeps

Now the public perception of L.A.’s best known private investigator is at a crossroads, caught up in some of the very things that have brought him cases over the years: a blood feud, informants and lots of taping.

The feud is between Seagal, the martial arts instructor turned action star, and his former producing partner, Julius R. Nasso. The pair split two years ago and Nasso filed a $60-million lawsuit against the actor this spring for refusing to appear in four movies. Then the seemingly routine Hollywood squabble became anything but -- due to a Mafia investigation in Staten Island, where Nasso lives.

According to court records, FBI bugs at mob hangouts there picked up conversations between Nasso and the local capo, Sonny Ciccone. Nasso was seeking help in dealing with an “entertainment figure,” and Ciccone spoke of demanding $150,000 for each movie Seagal made.

The filing of extortion charges last May against Nasso, Ciccone and others set off a slew of new accusations between the Nasso and Seagal camps, and publicity neither needed. In June, Busch, one of two L.A. Times reporters investigating the relationship between Seagal and Nasso, discovered a bullet hole in her car, along with a dead fish and rose, and a note warning, “Stop.”

A federal search warrant application later outlined how a man then began calling Busch, claiming to know who did it, and how federal agents and Los Angeles police then confronted the informant. He agreed to wear a wire at meetings with the man he said carried out the vandalism, ex-convict Alexander Proctor.

In a July 3 conversation, Proctor confided that he had set out to terrorize the reporter for one “Anthony,” who was “a big investigator in Los Angeles,” according to the FBI document. On Aug. 13, “Proctor acknowledged that the Anthony who hired him was the private investigator Anthony Pellicano.”

Though Proctor was arrested Oct. 16, federal authorities said there still was no independent evidence to prove who had ordered the attack, just his “uncorroborated statements.” So FBI agents showed up Thursday at Pellicano’s offices, looking for that evidence -- only to find something else.

Pellicano now will have to answer the weapons charges even if he is never linked to the June threat against Busch.

His standing seems secure, however. As Pellicano was arraigned Friday on the weapons charges, an official sitting in the holding area for prisoners gave Pellicano a newspaper with the story of his arrest, according to Re, the detective’s lawyer.

“The other inmates,” the official told Re, “will consider him a celebrity now.”

* Times staff writer Dana Calvo contributed to this story.