Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  “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.* 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 P
ellicano 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.* 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.

  “Jackson would leak stories to us all the time,” says the National Enquirer’s Mike Walker. “Then he’d do this whole ‘the tabloids lie’ routine.” Jackson regularly planted items that he was feuding with rival singer Prince; one of his favorite tabloid stories reported that Prince was using ESP to drive Jackson’s beloved chimp Bubbles crazy. “This is the final straw,” the story quoted Jackson as saying. “What kind of sicko would mess with a monkey?” Jackson personally orchestrated the publication of stories that he wanted to buy the Elephant Man’s bones and that he slept in an hyperbaric oxygen chamber because he wanted to live to be 150. Jackson wanted the hyperbaric chamber story to run on the cover of the National Enquirer—the one condition was that the writer use the word “bizarre” at least three times. “He really liked the word bizarre,” according to Charles Montgomery, the reporter who did the piece. When Jackson was told that the Polaroid that showed him sleeping in the chamber wasn’t good enough quality to run as a cover, he posed for a second photograph. “I did more articles on Jackson than I did on anyone else,” said Montgomery. “Before I ran anything, I would always check with people close to Michael to see how accurate it was. I almost always had full cooperation from his camp.”*

  Jackson was shocked that the mainstream press, including Time, Newsweek, the AP, and UPI, picked up the oxygen chamber story. “It’s like I can tell the press anything about me and they’ll buy it,” Jackson said. “We can actually control the press. I think this is an important breakthrough for us.”

  By the time Jackson did his highly rated interview with Oprah Winfrey in February 1993, his handlers told him he had gone too far with the “bizarre” front; he had to distance himself from the “Wacko Jacko” stories.

  “I have been in this house looking for that oxygen chamber,” Oprah said to Jackson. “I cannot find the oxygen chamber anywhere in the house.”

  “That story is so crazy,” Jackson dolefully said. “I mean, it’s one of those tabloid things. It was completely made up. It’s a complete lie.”

  For the first few days after the Pellicano press conference, the Michael Jackson story was reported largely as the private detective had spun it: an extortion attempt gone awry. “Michael Jackson Tells Fans He Did No Wrong: Complaint Linked to Extortion,” read one typical headline. “Don’t Believe the Dirt!” advised another. “This Is a Guy Who Doesn’t Even Swear!”

  While Hard Copy correspondent Dimond was working the phones on the story, she got a call from someone who started reading from a police report on the Jackson investigation. It was filled with phrases like “masturbation” and “oral copulation.” “I’ve got to meet with you now,” Dimond said. That evening, at a small Italian restaurant in Santa Monica, the informant showed Dimond a confidential report from the Los Angeles Department of Children’s Services. “I saw an extremely graphic, detailed narrative from this child,” said Dimond, “right down to the sexual acts.” Dimond knew a big story when she saw one. “[The informant] was upset by the way the whole story was being reported as a botched extortion,” said Dimond. “He said, ‘You’ve got to promise me this story won’t get buried.’ ” He needn’t have worried. “It was either going to be a superstar being falsely accused or it was going to be a superstar perhaps guilty of one of the most heinous crimes we know,” said Dimond. “Either way, I couldn’t lose.” The report was stolen property so Dimond’s producer forbade her to take it or pay money for it; she spent three hours transcribing the twenty-five-page report in longhand.

  “Tonight, on HARD COPY1.” a teaser blared the next day. “Diane Dimond reveals the exclusive details behind the Michael Jackson child abuse allegations!”

  The story became the biggest sexual scandal in decades. Competition for scoops was furious—and was often fueled by money. Within hours of Dimond’s broadcast, a news agency called Splash was selling copies of the Child Services report for $750 each. ABC, CBS, and NBC all got copies. The National Enquirer assigned a team of twenty reporters who canvassed Los Angeles, knocking on 500 doors in the neighborhood where the accuser lived. Even Nightline and 60 Minutes sent letters to participants, begging them to appear. “First let me say that I am sure this week has been overwhelming to you,” Ted Koppel wrote to the accuser’s father. “You have had a first-hand crash course in dealing with the media. I’m sure it has not been easy…. Anthony Pellicano and the Jackson people have been trying to tip the balance of the media coverage in their favor by making allegations that you were the perpetrator of an extortion attempt…. Therefore, I am offering you and/or your attorney the opportunity to be my sole guest on ‘Nightline’ tomorrow evening.” The father turned down the offer, but Koppel devoted an entire segment of Nightline to the scandal on the evening of the State of the Union address.

  Jackson’s long-running antagonism toward the press actually worked in his favor during the child abuse scandal. His advisers cast the story as a media vendetta against the singer. One of Pellicano’s strategies was to hire dozens of Michael Jackson look-alikes to show up in various locations around the world. “Michael Jackson spotted in London!” a news report would declare. His handlers would then prove that Jackson wasn’t near London, adding, “This is yet another example of the media’s sloppy, irresponsible coverage of Michael Jackson. How can you believe anything they say?”

  Pellicano also produced young boys who insisted that their intimate friendships with the singer were entirely chaste, although some thought that strategy backfired when one of the kids volunteered information that he shared a bed with Jackson. “It’s a very big bed,” Pellica
no explained.

  The detective had more success persuading people not to talk to the media and discrediting those who did. Reporters who tracked down potential sources were constantly told, “Mr. Pellicano has told us not to say anything.” Four former security guards who filed suit against Jackson, alleging that they were fired because they “knew too much,” sold their story to Hard Copy for $100,000. They accused Pellicano of threatening them. When two ex-employees, Mark and Faye Quindoy, sold their story, Pellicano immediately called their credibility into question, pointing out that they were involved in a back-pay dispute. He also called them “cockroaches” and “failed extortionists.”