20 Questions: Anthony Pellicano

Anthony Pellicano may be America's most tenacious private detective. An expert at locating missing persons, he is also a wizard at criminal-defense work, corporate spying, electronic surveillance and the relatively new science of audio forensics. In 1983, Pellicano gained notoriety by assisting John DeLorean's attorneys in puncturing the cocaine-smuggling charges against the car manufacturer. Now, through an ongoing association with DeLorean lawyer Howard Weitzman, Pellicano is working on another headline-making case: He is gathering information to use in defending Cathy Smith, the former heroin addict and self-described groupie who is expected to go on trial for the murder of comedian John Belushi. Steve Oney talked with Pellicano in the detective's Los Angeles office. He reports, "In L.A., it's impossible to think of private eyes without thinking of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, but there could be no one less Marlowesque than Pellicano, a wiry Mensa member who operates out of a suite high above the Sunset Strip. The heart of the business isn't a file cabinet containing a bottle of Jack Daniel's but an impressive electronics center--computers, spectrum analyzers, microscopes, pieces of equipment so revolutionary that in some cases, Pellicano has had them longer than the FBI."

1.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think Cathy Smith is not guilty of murdering John Belushi and that you'll be able to blow holes in the prosecution's case?

[A] Pellicano: They have a very weak case to start with. The Government has admitted that its case is based on what Smith said to two journalists from the National Enquirer--who paid her to get an interview. If you listen to it, she was extremely inebriated at the time, and she was being fed liquor by those people. Any admission that she made as far as injecting Belushi is a moot question. But did she give him the fatal injection? I took her through my own interrogation, which most people find to be very effective, and I found that she did not. And we're going to be able to prove that she wasn't the last person to see Belushi alive, either. A lot of people in the entertainment field are going to get shook up as a result of this case. Not because of any involvement in his death but because they lied, tried to hide the fact that they used drugs themselves and might have been involved in some activities they wouldn't want the public to know about. If they had told the truth, Cathy Smith probably wouldn't have been brought to trial.

2.

[Q] Playboy: In the DeLorean case, you took on the chief Government witness, James Timothy Hoffman, and, along with the defense, helped discredit him. What did you do and how did you do it?

[A] Pellicano: In the beginning, DeLorean and his lawyers made all kinds of comments about a British secret-service operation, an FBI operation, a Secret Service and CIA conspiracy to get DeLorean because the British government was mad at him. When I got on the case, I immediately said, "That's all bullshit. The reason they're after DeLorean is that somebody told them something that they believed." Because of my work with CIA-type people, I knew that if they had wanted to get rid of DeLorean, you'd never have seen him again. But Hoffman had conned these people. And we just exploited that. He conned not only DeLorean but also the United States Government. They were so zealous and eager to get DeLorean that they overlooked what Hoffman truly was. The Government should learn a valuable lesson from this: When you deal with a person who is informing, he's informing for a reason, and that reason leads him to say things that may not be true.

3.

[Q] Playboy: You once remarked that DeLorean was no saint. If he could have gotten away with funding his company through drug dealing, do you think he would have?

[A] Pellicano: Sure. But I don't think that he would have thought of it as funding it through drugs. He had approached everybody to try to get money to save his company. Along came these people who said that they had all this money and could get him money through a venture-capital bank account. To save his company, he sat and listened. He didn't give a shit where they got their money. He was desperate. When you finance your car and take a loan from a bank, do you ask the bank where it got the money? And listen, there are movie deals and corporations being built on the assets of drugs right now. There are taxes being paid from drugs. So the U.S. Government is partly founded from drugs.

4.

[Q] Playboy: You've made your name by tracking missing persons and claim you put together a streak of nearly 4000 successful cases. Tell us about your most nagging failure--the one that got away.

[A] Pellicano: The most perplexing case involved Elaine Graham, the 29-year-old wife of a Southern California doctor, who disappeared in 1983. With a random disappearance or murder--where somebody pulls somebody else off the street, kills him and leaves him lying somewhere up in the mountains--it's virtually impossible to find the victim. We would never have found Elaine Graham had it not been for a girl who was out hiking with her boyfriend. As she was going down this steep crevasse, she lost her footing and slipped. And when she fell to her knees, she found a skull--Elaine Graham's skull. I made a mistake in logic on the case, because I had never experienced a random kidnaping. My logic was fighting with my imagination. Mrs. Graham had done a lot of things the day she disappeared that suggested she was unhappy. She had tears in her eyes when she left her baby. She left early, though normally she was habitually late. Everything on that day led me to believe that she had just had it. I've had cases similar to that where women run away from their husbands. My suggestion to Dr. Graham was that we look for her as if she were alive, because if she had been, we would have been able to let her know that everything was OK to come back. Unfortunately, she wasn't.

5.

[Q] Playboy: If you were approached with a renowned missing-person case--say, the case of Jimmy Hoffa--what would you do that no one has yet done?

[A] Pellicano: I wouldn't get involved with Jimmy Hoffa. In order to find remains, you have to have something to find. I believe he's a liquid now.

6.

[Q] Playboy: Not all the disappearances you investigate involve victims abducted against their will. Some people--in fact, most of us at one time or another--would simply like to vanish. If you had just stiffed a loan shark and impregnated a Mafia don's daughter, how would you hide?

[A] Pellicano: The only way to disappear is to continue to travel, never staying in one place more than two or three days; never using your name; never giving people any name; never (continued on page 144) Anthony Pellicano (continued from page 109) talking to anybody or being friendly with anyone. When I look for someone, I don't look for the person I'm hired to find; I look for the one person who knows where that person is and get him to tell me. So a fugitive has to be constantly traveling. Your car is cold: Its license plates are stolen; it has no registration. You can travel forever with that car. Just steal another set of plates in every state you enter, so that you have in-state plates. As long as you don't violate any laws, nobody will stop you.

7.

[Q] Playboy: What are the most common mistakes people make who try to disappear?

[A] Pellicano: They end up doing the same things they did before. They domesticate. They find a friend or another person they can get close to, and they start telling their secrets to him. They never change their date of birth. People change their names, but that date of birth is a very personal thing to them. They sometimes apply for Social Security or use their real Social Security number. And very often, they communicate with family--and that's the biggest mistake.

8.

[Q] Playboy: You grew up in a tough ethnic neighborhood in Cicero, Illinois. You were kicked out of high school and caused a little trouble. It's not a background that suggests either your present occupation or the fees you exact, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. How did you get into this business?

[A] Pellicano: In the military, I was a cryptographer--a person who codes and decodes secret messages. When I got out, there was nothing for me to do, because the majority of people who were doing crypto work were in cosmetics or toy manufacturing, where they were transferring coded information by telephone or telegraph. It wasn't all that thrilling to me. I wandered around, doing a bunch of things, until I was hired as a collector at Spiegel, the mail-order house. And I became very, very good as a skip tracer, locating people who had run out on their debts. Later on, I was looking for a guard who was missing, and I went through the Yellow Pages and there were all these ads under Detective Agencies. I picked out one of them, and I said, "Train me or allow me to do your missing-persons cases, because I'm the best." I had a small ego at that time, too. They gave me a case and said, "If you solve this, we'll hire you." I did, and I decided that this was the business I wanted to be in. The major factor was that I would be finding people to make other people happy. For all those years in the collection business, the people I found were not happy that I had found them. But now I'm able to reunite people with their loved ones and, boy, that's when it's really good.

9.

[Q] Playboy: In your years as a collector, what was the best excuse you ever heard for not paying a bill?

[A] Pellicano: God. You hear every excuse in the world, from "My wife just had a baby" to "My mother died." The one that made me pause was when people were honest and said, "I just don't want to pay you."

10.

[Q] Playboy: We've learned about private detectives from fiction and television. The stereotypic P.I. has a contempt for authority, a healthy libido and a quick trigger finger. With that image in mind, when was the last time that a beautiful, leggy blonde like Evelyn Mulwray of Chinatown appeared at your door late at night with a problem?

[A] Pellicano: I can remember only a couple of occasions when beautiful women walked into my office. And the problem was always the same: They wanted me to find out if their husbands were cheating on them. What bothers me about private-eye shows is that the detectives always have a gun, there's always a shooting, there's always a life-threatening situation. And, Christ, if that were the truth, you wouldn't make it past a week as a private investigator. If somebody wants to kill you, there is no chance that you're going to get away. You can hire all the bodyguards in the world, have all the electronic security systems that are available. I never carry a gun, because a weapon is a physical solution to a mental problem. If a guy has a gun pointing at me, he's going to shoot me. If somebody wants you dead, you're going to die.

11.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that you use imagination in cracking cases. How?

[A] Pellicano: I learn all I can about a person, and I try to be that person, to think as he thinks. And that's how I find people. I become them. I'm probably better than any actor in Hollywood. But my acting isn't to impress an audience. It's to get someone to tell me what I want to know.

12.

[Q] Playboy: What are some of the new devices in the world of corporate espionage that may make us even more uneasy about our eroding privacy?

[A] Pellicano: There is a bugging device, the transmitter part of which is computerized. It has ten frequencies on which it transmits randomly. Imagine ten flagpoles, each with a different flag on it. Then imagine a video screen that shows the image of each flagpole, one at a time. So you scan very slowly: one, two, three, four, five, in time. Now you mix it up and scan from one to six to four to three, back to six, to one, only doing it in nanoseconds. If I were trying to detect a transmission generated in this way--just one little spike--a spectrum analyzer just couldn't pick it up. That's how this new transmitter works, only with sound. It's undetectable. Well, not undetectable if you know what to look for, but to the common person, it's virtually impossible. That's a little scary. In the near future in technology, everything is going to be light-transmitted--including your telephone calls. Well, God, there will be ways of tapping with light that will be virtually undetectable.

13.

[Q] Playboy: What's the best bugging job you've ever seen?

[A] Pellicano: The jobs I like are where there's a lot of imagination, where the guy doing the bugging will throw in ten diversion devices--three that you can find easily and seven that take a lot of time. In one case, I had gone through my normal routine and cleaned this place up and I found four devices. But I sat there and said, "I know there's something else." I was in the company president's office, trying to figure out what to do. We had taken the walls apart. Then I remembered hearing piped-in music in the halls and in other offices. But in the president's office, I didn't hear it. And I looked up, and there was a speaker. I walked out of the room, found the president and whispered in his ear, "I hate this music. Why do you have this stuff playing?" He said, "I love this. I had this installed." So I knew something was up. I said, "Well, why don't you have it in your office?" He said, "I do." We walked into his office, and there was no music coming out of his system. I traced the wires back from his speaker. His wire went through to a tape recorder. A speaker is nothing but a microphone in reverse, and the guy who bugged his office had used his speaker to listen to his conversations. He was clever.

14.

[Q] Playboy: Most of the corporate surveillance work you do involves protecting companies' secrets from business spooks. Have you worked the other side of the street? If the money were right, would you attempt, for instance, to discover Coca-Cola's formula?

[A] Pellicano: I've been asked to do that about ten times. And to be honest with you, it's not that hard to do. There are two or three people in the Coca-Cola Company who know the exact formula for the syrup. But what Coca-Cola did for years, that it recently stopped, was to introduce phony waste products into the plant's outflow and order ingredients that it wasn't using, just to throw people off. But there's been nobody willing to pay the couple of million dollars it would take to get the formula. And there's no way you could do it legally. Anyway, I've never done any business sabotage. It's called poisoning. I do antipoisoning. It's more gratifying to me to catch people spying than it is to spy.

15.

[Q] Playboy: What measures do you take in your personal life to protect your valuables and to elude prying eyes?

[A] Pellicano: If you have a lot of valuables, don't keep them at home. Put them in a safety-deposit box in the biggest bank you can find. If you keep them at home and somebody knows they're there, you won't have them long. As far as bugging goes, because of the nature of the cases that I encounter--organized-crime cases, defense work--I assume that I'm being monitored 24 hours a day. I just live with it--in the same way I live with this nose I have. I don't do anything to try to find out if I'm bugged or wire-tapped. I live by a Sicilian saying: "Silence is a friend that will never betray you."

16.

[Q] Playboy: This is the era of no-fault divorces, yet you handle a tremendous amount of lucrative detective work investigating adulteries. Why?

[A] Pellicano: It's the nature of the human being. In California, all the adultery in the world isn't going to change the nature of a settlement. But people want to know. They know from their feelings or through an admission, but they want the proof. They also want to know who the other person is. Ego has a lot to do with it. If it's a woman, she wants to know, Is the other woman young? Is she pretty? Women especially want to know for those reasons, because they may still love their husbands, and if they know who the other woman is, they can act differently, dress differently or behave differently to entice their mate back into their arms again. For every person who wants to get a divorce as a result of an adulterous affair, there are five who want to be back with their spouses.

17.

[Q] Playboy: If a person wants to cheat, what should he do to avoid getting caught?

[A] Pellicano: He shouldn't lie, because lies are what get the other person suspicious. And usually, people lie about the silliest of things, like where they've been. For instance, if you were at a bar with a woman, say you were at that bar. If your wife asks who with, say with a bunch of friends. There are other stupid mistakes guys make. If they go out with a woman, they'll shower and put massive doses of cologne on themselves. And they'll come home and get into bed with their wives and wake them up by the smell of the cologne, which is out of character. Or they'll come home after "a night with the boys," and their teeth are sparkling white from brushing. There's even a little tooth paste in the corner of their mouth. Why would a man brush his teeth that late at night, and where would he get the toothbrush?

18.

[Q] Playboy: You don't carry a gun, and though you're a black belt in karate, you try your best to avoid getting into fights. In the final analysis, is the life of a private eye a dull one?

[A] Pellicano: I have the attention span of a hyperkinetic six-year-old. Put me on a surveillance assignment and I'll go crazy. I have to use the warped part of my imagination to think of things to make it interesting. When I find best friends cheating, I have the most fun, because it disgusts me. A woman hired me, and I found that her husband was cheating with his best friend's wife. I caught them at a motel one night. I got the room across the hall, and I was trying to decide what to do to have some fun. So I called up the husband and told him to meet me. He got to the hotel, and I frisked him. I had told him that his wife was cheating with another man, but I didn't tell him with whom. So he says, "How do you know?" I say, "The other guy's wife hired me." He says, "Where are they?" I point across the hall. This guy was big, burly. He looks at me and asks, "What do I do?" He was mad. I say, "Knock on the door." So while he's knocking, I call the police, tell them that I'm the hotel manager, and that I've discovered a guy using phony credit cards. I say, "Come right away, and you can get him." Meanwhile, this guy is pounding on that door. Then he hears a sheepish voice from the other side: "Who is it?" He says, "The manager; open up." So the door opens, and this guy sees his best friend in Jockey shorts, his eyes about the size of watermelons, and his wife, who's got a sheet wrapped around her. He starts chasing his wife; then he starts chasing this fat little guy in Jockey shorts down the hall, through the dining room, right into the arms of the police. I didn't think that was good enough, though. So while he's at the station, I let the air out of his tires. When the police bring him back, he knows he's a beaten man. He's got his key in his hand, and he walks to the car and notices that it's six inches shorter than it used to be. He steps back, looks at the tires and he sits down in the middle of the road and starts to cry. It might sound a little cruel, but that's what I do to keep from going crazy.

19.

[Q] Playboy: You're an expert in tape forensics. How can the study of tape recordings help solve crimes?

[A] Pellicano: There was a group of men who were charged with rape and murder. This was the so-called Art Museum Murder in Philadelphia. As a result of the confession of one of the alleged rapists/murderers, eight men were convicted. One of these eight men relentlessly denied during eight years of imprisonment that he had had anything to do with it. Lo and behold, a tape recording came forward, and I was asked to analyze it. In this tape recording, I heard two confessions, the first radically different from the second. To make a long story short, the tape was recorded at a city hall that had a clock with bells that would ring at the hour and at the half hour. Before the closing of the tape, which meant the stop/record signature, there was a bell for two o'clock. Fifteen minutes later on the tape was a bell for three o'clock, which meant that there were 45 minutes of missing time. I was able to prove that. And these people went to jail as a result. The guy who hired me is now out.

20.

[Q] Playboy: After years of dealing with distraught parents and lovers who have lost a child or a spouse, you must have grown somewhat inured to tragedy. Is there one case that managed to break your heart?

[A] Pellicano: When I'm in a case, I'm purely emotionless and logical, sometimes too logical. But I've had some cases that have brought tears. My most vivid example is the case of a girl named Robin Reade, who disappeared in Hawaii. There had been many detective agencies hired to find her, and a lot of law-enforcement people. But what was so heart-rending was what the parents went through to find their daughter. They were relentless in their search. They even went to psychics and were unable to find her. Thank God I was able to. Robin got in with a bad crowd, and she O.D.'d on cocaine almost the same way John Belushi did. The guy in whose house she died panicked, wrapped her up in a rug, carried her to the side of a mountain and buried her in a shallow grave. I inspired him to tell me where he buried the body. How I did it is for your imagination. I've never been more touched in my life than when that mother wanted me to take her to the side of the mountain and show her where her daughter was buried. Boy, that took a lot out of me. It was days before I got over that one.

"If somebody wants to kill you, there is no chance that you're going to get away ... you're going to die."