Hollywood Investigator Gets 30-Month Term in Weapons Case

The private Hollywood investigator and central figure in a federal wiretapping investigation, Anthony Pellicano, was sentenced on Friday to 30 months in prison on an unrelated weapons charge.

In issuing the sentence, Judge Dickran M. Tevrizian Jr. of federal District Court here rejected defense pleas that Mr. Pellicano had no money and fined him $6,000. Mr. Pellicano pleaded guilty in October to illegal possession of hand grenades and plastic explosives. The weapons were found in 2002 in a raid on his office.

Mr. Pellicano, once a high-flying figure who often attended movie premieres and dined in fancy restaurants, arrived in the courtroom downtown in handcuffs and leg chains accompanied by two marshals. He sat impassively, a wan and bespectacled figure in loose-fitting blue pants, an olive windbreaker and blue sandals. He made no comment.

It was plainly a humbling experience for a colorful person whose well-known tough-guy image seemed out of the pages of the novel and film "L.A. Confidential." His clients have included celebrities like Roseanne Barr, Kevin Costner, Michael Jackson, Sylvester Stallone and Elizabeth Taylor.

Mr. Pellicano began serving his sentence in November at the Federal Metropolitan Detention Center here.

The authorities seemed to hope that the prison term would extend much further as a result of a separate grand jury investigation into his reported illegal wiretapping of prominent people in Hollywood. Mr. Pellicano has refused to cooperate in the investigation, and his lawyer, Donald M. Re, said this week that there was "no possibility" that he would do so.

Mr. Pellicano's former clients and employees have been questioned in the wiretapping investigation. One of the most powerful lawyers in Hollywood, Bert Fields, acknowledged late last year that he was a subject of the investigation. Other prominent lawyers who have retained Mr. Pellicano over the years include Martin Singer and Howard Weitzman.

The federal authorities are seeking to determine whether any of the clients were involved in the wiretapping case, the officials said.

The case against Mr. Pellicano began strangely, according to documents filed by the United States attorney's office. The papers said that in June 2002 a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, Anita Busch, found her car vandalized, a shatter mark that appeared to be a bullet hole in her windshield, a note saying "STOP" and a tin-foil tray holding a dead fish and a rose.

A convicted felon, Alex Proctor, was arrested after he telling an F.B.I. informant in a taped conversation that Mr. Pellicano had hired him to silence Ms. Busch's reporting. Ms. Busch was working on an article about the actor Steven Seagal and his relationship to a mob figure. Government documents cited many telephone calls between Mr. Pellicano and Mr. Proctor, who is serving a 10-year federal prison sentence on an unrelated charge of heroin trafficking.

A raid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at Mr. Pellicano's office on Sunset Boulevard in November 2002 found not only the grenades, but also what the authorities said were transcripts of the wiretaps. The authorities declined to discuss the details of the grand jury investigation and when it might hand up indictments.

Officials also seized a file labeled "Stephen Seagal matter," copies of an article that Ms. Busch had helped write about Mr. Seagal, as well as an article about him in the October 2002 issue of Vanity Fair, written by Ned Zeman, later reported being assaulted in his car in November 2002 by what federal documents described as "a gun-wielding individual who told him simply, `Stop!' "

Hillary's Private Eye Arrested in Reporter Intimidation Case

A California private detective who worked to discredit Clinton Sexgate accusers Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers has been arrested in connection with attempts to intimidate a reporter for the Los Angeles Times after the FBI caught him with an arsenal of explosives.

Anthony J. Pellicano was arrested Thursday after a search of his office by a dozen FBI agents turned up an "array of explosives," reported New York's Daily News on Saturday.

"Agents seized plastic explosives, detonating cord, blasting caps and two handguns," the paper said.

Pellicano's stash of explosives "could be used to bring down a plane or blow up a car," an FBI agent said.

In addition, the safe in Pellicano's Sunset Boulevard Office contained 15 to 20 bundles of cash, "the majority of which bore $10,000 wrappers," according to the Los Angeles Times.

In February, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton was alleged to have hired Pellicano in 1992 in an attempt to discredit Gennifer Flowers' claims of a twelve year affair with Mr. Clinton.

Pellicano's office was searched Thursday after ex-con Alexander Proctor told police that the Clinton-connected detective had paid him $10,000 to intimidate Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch into stopping an investigation into a Mafia extortion plot against actor Steven Seagal.

According to Proctor, Seagal hired Pellicano, who in-turn subcontracted the job to him.

Federal prosecutors allege that Proctor broke the windshield of Busch's car and left a dead fish on the front seat. The fish had a single long-stemmed red rose in its mouth, with a sign placed nearby that read simply, "Stop."

The episode bears an eerie resemblance to the account of Clinton sex-accuser Sally Perdue, who told the London Telegraph in 1994 that after she was threatened with physical violence, her car windshield was broken and a spent shotgun shell was left on the seat. Perdue abruptly relocated to China a few months after talking to the Telegraph, shortly after Paula Jones sued Mr. Clinton for sexual harassment.

Though Pellicano's name never surfaced in connection with Perdue's allegations, he reportedly played a key role in attempts to discredit both Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers.

Four days after the Lewinsky story broke in Jan. 1998, ex-Lewinsky boyfriend Andy Bleiler came forward with the claim that she had stalked him. The Washington state school teacher also contended that Lewinsky wanted to become a White House intern so she could perform oral sex on then-President Clinton.

"I'm going to Washington to get my presidential knee pads," Bleiler's lawyer, Terry Giles, quoted Lewinsky as saying.

"Anthony Pellicano, the L.A.-based private investigator and O.J. defense team veteran [was] responsible for digging up Andy Bleiler," the New York Post's Andrea Peyser reported days later. Sexgate provocatuer Lucianne Goldberg told Peyser that Pellicano's services were bought and paid for by the Clinton White House.

When Peyser confronted the Los Angeles private detective with Goldberg's claim, he didn't deny it. "You're a smart girl. No comment," Pellicano told the Post reporter.

Digging up Bleiler's "presidential kneepads" story wasn't the first time Pellicano had gone to bat for the Clintons.

According to Ron Kessler's 1995 best-seller, "Inside the White House," Clinton's first presidential campaign relied on Pellicano's expertise in the field of audio analysis to discredit Gennifer Flowers' smoking gun tapes.

"The Clinton camp made much of the fact that Anthony J. Pellicano, an expert on audio recording analysis, had told the press that a twelve-minute portion of the tape of conversations between Flowers and Clinton had been 'selectively edited' at two points," Kessler reported.

To counter Pellicano's claims, Flowers submitted her recordings to Truth Verification Labs, which found them to be 100 percent authentic.

In 1999 Flowers filed a defamation suit against Clinton campaign officials James Carville and George Stephanopoulos - along with then-first lady Hillary Clinton - based on their attempts to use Pellicano's analysis to discredit her.

During a February court appearance, the head of Flowers' legal team, Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman, told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, "Anthony Pellicano was a private investigator hired by Mrs. Clinton herself. And he's the one who did the analysis of the tapes."

Of the more than two dozen media reports on Pellicano's Thursday arrest so far, none have mentioned his ties to the Clinton attack machine.

(from Newsmax 11/23/03)

Some of the Democratic National Committee's Secret Police Force:

Investigative Group International (IGI)

- Founded by former Senate Watergate committee investigator Terry Lenzner, IGI maintains elegantly low-key offices just four blocks from the White House—and critics say the detective agency has become Bill Clinton's private CIA. IGI does auditing, intelligence, and security work for major clients including 3M, Lockheed, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), and the Democratic National Committee and President Bill Clinton's legal defense fund—which got Lenzner called before Sen. Fred Thompson's (R-Tenn.) televised hearings on campaign finances last year. Lenzner explained that with donations flowing in so rapidly, the Democrats had asked him to check some of their contributors for shady connections—though for some reason they asked him not to interview chief bagman Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie. Lenzner was also made to explain why he had proposed to investigate Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) and his wife on behalf of an Indian tribe (Nickles opposed the return of tribal lands in Oklahoma).

More recently, IGI has been accused of investigating Ken Starr's lieutenants for Clinton's lawyers, and Lenzner again has been called to explain his snooping—this time before Starr's grand jury. Whether or not the allegation is true, IGI has long been a friend of Bill; Newsday recently uncovered that Lenzner began working for the Clinton campaign as early as 1991. Several ex-IGI agents work in the Clinton administration, and in 1994 the State Department awarded IGI's then-president Raymond Kelly a lucrative no-bid contract to train Haiti's new police force. Kelly now heads U.S. Customs.

Palladino & Sutherland

- Jack Palladino, his wife Sandra Sutherland, and their crew of West Coast operatives work out of a Victorian mansion in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and have worked for clients ranging from Hell's Angels to Black Panthers to international bankers. While investigating American Express in Europe in 1989, Sutherland posed as a journalist to try to develop leads. Palladino recently made himself scarce just in time to avoid a subpoena from Paula Jones' lawyers, who wanted to ask him about his 1992 investigations for the Clinton campaign of Gennifer Flowers and numerous other women who were alleged to have had affairs with Bill.

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