Bill Pavelic Blog | William Bill Pavelic

April 10, 2008 - 5:21 pm

By: Greg Risling, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES - A total of 28 charges were dropped at the prosecution’s request Thursday in the Hollywood wiretaps case against private investigator Anthony Pellicano and a co-defendant.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Saunders said the government made the request because some of the alleged victims weren’t available to testify and other counts were redundant.

More than 35 charges remain against Pellicano and former Los Angeles police Sgt. Mark Arneson. They and three other codefendants have pleaded not guilty.

Pellicano is accused of running a criminal enterprise that used wiretaps and other clandestine tactics to dig up dirt to help his clients gain an advantage in legal and other disputes.

The dropped counts mostly involved wire fraud that authorities had alleged involved Arneson searching law enforcement databases for Pellicano.

U.S. District Judge Dale Fischer dropped the counts shortly before prosecutors rested their case.

Pellicano, who is representing himself, is to begin his defense Friday.

Among high-profile Hollywood figures called during the prosecution’s case were Chris Rock, Garry Shandling, Keith Carradine, Paramount studio head Brad Grey and Michael Ovitz, the former superagent and Disney executive.

“Guilty of Incompetence” is a hard hitting book, that will expose the facts instead of fiction, and take you behind the scenes to see how LAPD and LADA helped create the OJ Simpson “race card”, covered up the existence of suspect “Charlie”, mismanaged the investigation and botched the “Trial of the Century”.

The Machiavelli of muck: Anthony Pellicano’s double-dealing made him Hollywood’s top investigator. Then it all fell apart.

Domanick, Joe

THE PALE, AGING PRISONERS IN THE ARMY GREEN WINDBREAKER, navy blue pants, and leg irons exits the U.S. courtroom in Los Angeles doing the chain-gang shuffle with the line of men to whom he’s shackled. Already incarcerated for more than three years, Anthony Pellicano has just learned on this May 2007 day that it will be nine more months before he stands trial on 112 counts of wiretapping, identity theft, racketeering, conspiracy, witness tampering, and destruction of evidence, charges that could land him in prison for a decade or more. Until next February he’ll be forced to sit in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A., jailed without bail as a flight risk.

Once Hollywood’s charismatic, high-flying private eye to the stars, the 63-year-old Pellicano now appears small and stooped, his ample nose made more prominent by a new gauntness. His jowls are loose and hanging, his mouth is sad and downturned–a look, given his receding chin and balding pate, that puts one in mind of Homer Simpson.

Just a handful of reporters have shown up for the hearing, and their articles, if they appear at all, will be consigned to the back pages, the surest sign that the man once thought to be at the center of Hollywood’s own Watergate scandal is fast fading into irrelevance. A story that was supposed to blow the lid off the Industry has instead come to seem about as scandalous as kissing your sister. It’s a remarkable denouement in a prosecution that once promised to suck in some of the Industry’s biggest names.

Pellicano’s troubles began with a November 2002 raid by FBI agents on his detective agency offices in a swank 12-story glass tower on the western end of the Sunset Strip. The raid was triggered by a tip from a jailhouse informant alleging that Pellicano was behind a bizarre incident the previous June, when a rose, a dead fish, and a cardboard sign reading STOP were left on the cracked windshield of an Audi belonging to then-Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch. She had been investigating a connection between the actor Steven Seagal–an old client of Pellicano’s–and an organized-crime figure. Pellicano never faced federal charges in the incident (although a single count growing out of the case has been filed by the L.A. County district attorney). Nevertheless, it was enough to set up all that followed.

As the agents fanned out, Pellicano showed them two loaded handguns in a desk drawer and opened two combination floor safes. Inside were two hand grenades, military-grade plastic C-4 explosives, a detonator, jewelry, gold coins and bullion, and $200,000 in cash. In subsequent searches, agents carted off 36 pieces of electronic equipment, including wiretapping software, computer hard drives and storage files, 150,000 pages of documents, encrypted transcripts of phone conversations, and more than 1,300 tape recordings.

About a year later Pellicano pleaded guilty to possessing illegal explosives and was sentenced to 27 to 32 months in federal prison. On the day before he was scheduled for release in February 2006, he wash it with the multi count federal wiretapping indictment. When the indictment came down, Hollywood was awash in speculation about who would be next. Thus far 11 others have been charged or have pleaded guilty, including Pellicano clients Terry Christensen, the attorney to multibillionaire Kirk Kerkorian; Die Hard director John McTiernan; Sandra Carradine, former wife of actor Keith Carradine; three other clients; two police officers; two phone company employees; and a software programmer.

No small potatoes by any means, but hardly the Hollywood kingpins whose names had been bandied about. Chief among them–and named by prosecutors as a “person of interest”–was Bert Fields, il cupo di tutti capi of entertainment attorneys and a man with whom Pellicano had been closely associated for more than a decade. Fields’s clients include Brad Grey, a manager and producer at the time and now the chairman of Paramount Pictures, who was locked in ugly, high-stakes lawsuits with actor-comedian Garry Shandling and screenwriter “Bo” Zenga. Both of them–in addition to four others linked to Fields’s clients–allegedly were wiretapped by Pellicano.

Then there was Michael Ovitz, the former head of Creative Artists Agency. According to summaries of FBI interviews of Ovitz obtained by The New York Times, in early 2002, Ovitz paid Pellicano to gather dirt on 15 to 20 people, including high-level former CAA agents and partners he was at war with, like current Universal Studios head Ron Meyer, Richard Lovett, Kevin Huvane, and Bryan Lourd. New York Times reporter Bernard Weinraub and Busch, who had been writing critical articles about Ovitz’s financial difficulties, were also targeted.

There’s been no shortage of speculation, but it’s unlikely that Fields, Ovitz, or any of those not already indicted ever will be. Federal prosecutors, signaling they were ready to go ahead with their case at the hearing in May, unsuccessfully opposed postponing the trial until February. The statute of limitations has run out on many of the potential crimes.

Meanwhile, Pellicano remains in jail, vowing to take his punishment “like a man” and refusing to implicate others in the wide-ranging wiretapping scheme he created. According to the indictment, that scheme was devised to gather and use information to secretly gain “a tactical advantage in litigation by learning [his] opponents’ plans, strategies, and perceived strengths and weaknesses and other personal information of a confidential, embarrassing or incriminating nature.” Among the 63 wiretapping victims were Sylvester Stallone, Keith Carradine, Kevin Nealon, and Donna Dubrow, the former wife of McTiernan.

Pellicano never responded to interview requests left with his lawyer. Whatever the outcome of Pellicano’s trial, he’ll go down in pop history as one of Hollywood’s great characters. He’s the Rudy Giuliani of private eyes: audacious, narcissistic, emotionally immature, and egomaniacal, a guy who sold exactly what Giuliani is now hawking–protection. Working for people who wanted their toilets scrubbed without getting their fingers dirty, for two decades Pellicano played his role of Hollywood factotum to perfection, an all-service provider presenting himself to his clients as their consigliere, operative, and intimidator. He conveyed that he was someone possessing a great cache of knowledge, someone who knew guys who knew guys and could solve any problem–just like Mr. wolf in Pulp Fiction. “I need everything from refinement [to threats with] baseball bats,” the singer Courtney Love once told him in a tape leaked to The New York Times. “And I need them all under one roof … when I have a problem of any stripe–A to Z,I can go to you. That’s what I need.” To which Pellicano replied: “Listen, Courtney, if you come to me, that’s the end of that. I’m an old-style Sicilian. I only go one way. My clients are my family, and that’s it.”

“He took care of people’s problems,” his wife, Kat, told a New York Times reporter. “That’s what he did for a living. And he did it very well.”

But what has been frequently overlooked is that he was also an astonishing self-creation. He came to the land of make-believe and fooled the people whose business it is to spin tales and create lies, fooled them into believing the myth of Anthony Pellicano: the world’s greatest private investigator; the smartest-guy-in-the-room Mensa member; the super expert in the esoteric quasi-science of voice and audio identification technology; the tracer of missing persons extraordinaire. Hiding in plain sight was a prime-time bullshitter and first-rate showman.

His black-bag jobs, dirty tricks, anonymous threatening late-night phone calls, and thug-for-hire intimidations were common knowledge among high-end divorce and paternity lawyers and Hollywood reporters. Rather than obscuring what he did, Pellicano made it his brand, thriving on the notion that he was a mobbed-out guy. The mere chance that you could be exposing yourself or your family to such a man worked wonders for him, and people backed away when he pushed.

He dressed in expensive double-breasted wise-guy suits and leather jackets set off by patent leather shoes, man-with-no-eyes shades, and a pinkie ring. He slicked back his thinning hair, doused himself with cologne, and popped Chiclets the way Kojak used to suck on lollipops. He was, said Kat, “the only man I ever met that could make a silk shirt look like polyester.” In the ’80s, he papered the walls of his office in bordello red velvet, later graduating to a hipper decor, highlighted by black leather furniture. His oak-finished office doors were painted in gold lettering announcing that you were entering the Pellicano Investigative Agency Ltd./Forensic Audio Lab/Syllogistic Research Group. He installed what he claimed was the latest in audio analysis equipment. He had his receptionist talk over the piped-in Puccini and offer cappuccinos to prospective clients. Once visitors were led through the hallways lined with framed magazine articles heralding the magnificence of himself, he played the role of professional goombah. “What can I tell ya,” he would say with a shrug. “I’m Sicilian.”

“He was like a hungry kid looking at a candy store when he talked about the mob,” says novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard, who spent time as a young reporter with Pellicano in the late ’70s. “He loved to play up his connections, making a point of referring to ‘Lucky’ Luciano as ‘Paul’–because that’s what real mob guys did. It was kind of sad. He always reminded me of Butch Cassidy looking back to a time that was over, refusing to believe there was just no place for a gunslinger anymore.” More recently, Sunday night–Sopranos night–had become a sacred rite for Pellicano. He prepared for High Mass on HBO with a massage from Kat and enforced absolute silence throughout the house.

He billed himself as a kung fu master and bragged that he carried a Louisville Slugger in the trunk of his car–just in case. What frightened some intrigued others, who seemed to view Pellicano as an actor in his own amazing movie. In the early ’90s, he worked with producer-director Michael Mann, developing a television series for NBC while also writing a screenplay based on his experiences. Neither the show nor the movie ever materialized, but just before Pellicano’s arrest, his client Brad Grey had been in talks with HBO about developing a similar series.

His specialty was unique for a private eye: protecting the image of stars. That’s why Michael Jackson, Roseanne Barr, Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, James Woods, Farrah Fawcett, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chris Rock sought him out. Just how much they valued his protection was demonstrated by a phone call from Rock to Pellicano in 2001, asking for help in neutralizing an accusation that he’d had sex with a woman without her consent. “I’m better off getting caught with … needles in my arms,” he told Pellicano in a tape leaked to The New York Times. “Needles with pictures [saying,]’Here’s Chris Rock shooting heroin: [That would be] a much [lesser] blow to the career.” No charges were filed.

His reputation enabled him to charge a $25,000 retainer, to live in a million-dollar canyon-view home in suburban Ventura County an hour and a half drive from his work, to take Kat to the best hotels and restaurants, to drive a classic two-seater Mercedes, a jet-black Lexus SUV, and a second Mercedes, and to own a West Hollywood condo in a building a short walk from his high-priced office.

Attorneys, producers, agents, and film executives loved him, too. Ovitz admired Pellicano’s “innovativeness and resourcefulness.” Producer Don Simpson saw him as a fierce protector of his clients, a “lion at the gate” whom you never wanted to be “on the wrong side of.” And attorneys Bert Fields and Howard Weitzman considered Pellicano an invaluable investigator. Weitzman admired his “rock-solid loyalty,” Fields his efficiency. “Time after time,” says Fields, “he comes up with the witness I’m looking for. He gets results.”

How he got them only Pellicano really knew until that life-defining, career-destroying 2002 search of his office. Before then, everybody in Hollywood–including the media–was drinking Pellicano’s Kool-Aid in huge gulps. Only the spin varied: Either he was a Mensa man/techno genius or a bat-wielding Mafia thug. But the truth was much more complex and, therefore, far more interesting.

THE GRANDSON OF SICILIAN IMMIGRANTS, Anthony Joseph Pellicano was born in Chicago in 1944. A grandfather had anglicized the family name; the grandson would later restore it. He was raised by a divorced single mother on the mob-dominated, Italian-immigrant streets of Cicero, a ten-minute ride from Chicago. Cicero was then a place where guys wore wife-beater T-shirts with suspenders and played pinochle on the stoop, where the Irish priests ate their pork chops, peas, and boiled-potato dinners out on Saturday night, and people were happy that their daughter Rose went to novena with the niece of a local gangster. Al Capone set up his headquarters there when Chicago police started busting his speakeasies and gambling operations; by the 1960s, it was billed as “the Walled City of the Syndicate” and was filled with strip clubs, gambling joints, and bars.

His mother, Pellicano once said, was a “working lady who never made more than $150 a week,” and he was forced to “fend for himself at age 14 [working in] a barbershop for a dollar an hour and a lesson cutting hair.” By his own description, he was a “hot-tempered, skinny little kid who lived by [my] wits”; neither of his parents, he said, “gave me any education at all.” Possessing “the attention span of a hyper kinetic six-year-old,” he left high school at 16.

In the early ’60s, he joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps and received his GED while serving as a cryptographer, coding and decoding messages. “When I got out,” he told Playboy magazine, “the majority of people who were doing crypto work were in cosmetics or toy manufacturing…. It wasn’t all that thrilling to me.” Instead he took a job chasing deadbeats for the Spiegel catalog company.

In 1969, he opened his own private-eye firm, focusing on collections and the removal of secretly placed surveillance equipment. He liked to wear huge, amber-tinted aviator glasses and three-piece jeans suits with foot-long collars and huge knotted ties; in repose he was almost handsome, with curly dark hair, large, heavy-lidded, expressive eyes, and full lips–the effect broken only when he smiled and revealed large, uneven buckteeth. On occasion he wore a white lab smock embroidered with an eye surrounded by concentric circles, the symbol of his detective agency, Fortune Enterprises. In 1974, he filed for bankruptcy, a setback he blithely ignored as he hired a press agent and launched an all-out assault on the gullibility of the Chicago press.

Throughout the mid-1970s, he sold the legend of “Tony” Pellicano to anyone who would listen. His message was simple: He was the baddest, sagest practitioner of the “praying mantis style of kung fu.” He had a “100 percent success rate” in tracking down exactly 3,968 missing persons. Most amazingly, they were all “cases other people couldn’t solve.”

There he was on Channel 7 talking about runaway teens, on WBBM radio discussing “the families of missing persons,” flying to New York to appear on To Tell the Truth, and then back to Chicago to do Friday Night with Steve Edwards. Then it was over to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University to speak as “one of the top debugging experts in the United States” and off to lecture at the Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity at Chicago-Kent College. He went to Marquette University Law School to make a presentation on the “psychological stress evaluator,” then to the Maywood Rotary Club, then to the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators.

At the same time, he was playing footsie with seemingly every reporter in Chicago. They gushed over his plush office, with its silver walls, black furniture, and full-length mirrors in the waiting room. They marveled over the mammoth gold zodiac that dominated his office–beneath which hung samurai swords and two nunchaku sticks, which he’d take off the wall to demonstrate how he could kill a reporter, while his pet piranha looked on.

He didn’t carry a gun, he told Oui magazine, “because my hands are lethal weapons.” In fact, he couldn’t legally carry a gun because he’d never been employed by a law enforcement agency. He recounted how he was knifed in a Mexican bar while working on a kidnapping case but “went into my kung fu stance and beat the hell out of him.” He boasted of having $300,000 worth of electronic equipment, an unlikely possibility given that in his bankruptcy he’d listed his assets as $50 in clothes and $28 in cash. Nevertheless, he was good at finding people.

Even his bankruptcy fed the Pellicano myth, for 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). He was also a pallbearer at the eider DeLucia’s 1972 funeral and named DeLucia Jr. the godfather of one of his daughters. He claimed that the younger DeLucia “was just like any guy in the neighborhood.” From then on he both denied and promoted his mob connections as it served his purposes. The governor of Illinois took the loan seriously enough, however, to force Pellicano to resign from a state law enforcement advisory board.

A recent story from the Chicago Sun-Times alleges, with little evidence, that Pellicano was once a member of Chicago gangster Joseph “Joey the Clown” Lombardo’s crew and had done investigative work for Lombardo in 1974, helping clear him as a suspect in a murder case. But as Joe Paolella, a former Secret Service agent from Chicago says, “Pellicano never promoted being connected in Chicago the way he did in L.A.–a place where he could portray himself as some kind of mob guy to an upper-middle-class Hollywood clientèle that didn’t know any better, if you’re a real crook in Chicago, you don’t want anybody to know about it.” In any case, there’s no public record of Pellicano being arrested or convicted of a crime before the 2002 FBI raid, of his having his record sealed, or of any significant association with organized crime in L.A. Nor for that matter has there surfaced any public or police complaint against him for using his famous Louisville Slugger in an assault. Stare-downs, threatening phone calls, and intimidation, yes, but actual physical violence, well, the proof is hard to come by.

What’s clearer, however, is that like Johnny Fontane–the Frank Sinatra character in The Godfather–Anthony Pellicano did gain fame with a grotesque assist. In 1977, after 19 years of resting peacefully in a small Jewish cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, the body of Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband, Hollywood producer Mike Todd, was stolen by grave robbers. They’d moved his tombstone, pried open his bronze coffin, and made off with his remains. Eight local cops searched the graveyard without finding the body. Then the police heard from Pellicano, who told them he’d received “a number of phone calls” revealing Todd’s location. Arriving at the cemetery with a local Channel 2 news anchor and a camera crew, Pellicano found bones and Todd’s old belt buckle in a pile of mud, leaves, and branches about 75 yards from his grave. The robbers, Pellicano later told the police, had hoped to find “a ten-karat diamond ring,” a gift from Taylor they mistakenly thought had been buried with Todd. Accused of orchestrating the incident as a publicity stunt, Pellicano denied it, asking, “Why would I need publicity?”

The incident caught the attention of defense attorney Howard Weitzman, who brought Pellicano to Los Angeles. (He left his wife and five kids in Chicago.) Together they would work on the case that made both their careers: the 1983 drug-entrapment trial of automaker John DeLorean. 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 Weitzman gave Pellicano a large share of the credit for tarnishing the informant. That kind of attention had not been showered on a private eye in Hollywood since the days of Fred Otash.

A rogue ex-LAPD vice detective, Otash was also a pimp, wire-tapper, friend to Mickey Cohen, and informant to the FBI on Cohen and fellow L.A. mobster Johnny Roselli. Otash always wanted to be “Hollywood’s most spectacular private eye,” newspaper columnist Paul Coates wrote in 1959, “and had made it a special point to cultivate the right people. Attorneys, the movie set, the TV crowd.” After which he made it a point to exploit them. There are unconfirmed reports that Otash, who died in L.A. in 1992, mentored Pellicano, who arrived in the early ’80s.

Born in Massachusetts in 1922, Otash worked as a lifeguard at the Miami Biltmore Hotel before enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1942. Discharged in 1945, he joined the LAPD and operated undercover out of the Palladium nightclub, where he met both lowlifes and stars. He allegedly ran a prostitution ring with the bartender. Forced to resign from the department in 1955, he was hired as a private eye by Confidential magazine, the fountainhead for much that’s cheap and tawdry in the media today.

Confidential’s 1950s heyday synchronized perfectly with the final days of the Hollywood star system. For decades the studios had maintained their own security forces to shield their stars from unfavorable publicity and had worked hand in glove with the Los Angeles, Culver City, and Beverly Hills police departments. They would receive a call from the cops about a star they’d arrested but not booked, send a studio rep to get him, cover things up, and take him home and put him to bed.

Using what an FBI report called “a seemingly inexhaustible list of call girls” who brought information to him, Otash cultivated sources for Confidential. Otash and Confidential spied on Rock Hudson talking about his homosexuality, and then played the tape for Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn–who agreed to become an informant in return for the magazine’s not outing Hudson. Operating a sound truck stocked with surveillance and wiretapping equipment, Otash broke into the homes of Marilyn Monroe and Peter Lawford to get information on the Kennedys. At 3 a.m. on the night Monroe died of a drug overdose, Lawford, as Otash later told it, called him to sweep the house of bugs before calling an ambulance.

Eventually Otash had his PI’s license revoked, and the stars and studios banded together with a California senate investigating committee to sue Confidential for criminal libel.

************

The case ended in a mistrial, but the magazine went broke defending itself and folded, bringing the era to a close.

Pellicano brought to Los Angeles several personal traits that would serve him well: an adoration of old-school Mafia values that resonated deeply among people who found it difficult to differentiate between the movie fictions they created and reality, and an easy, soothing intimacy, it was all “buddy” and “pal” and “honey” on the phone to both women and men.

He was also “a very charismatic, eccentric, entertaining personality with an entrepreneurial spirit that allowed him to make phone calls and ask for work,” says Howard Weitzman. “People were impressed by that and by his ability to [subsequently] follow up and deliver information.”

Others were less impressed with the cold calls. Phoning Century City defense attorney Harland W. Braun, Pellicano hinted in an answering machine message that he was connected to the Chicago mob, as a kind of recommendation. Braun’s reaction was, “Why would I ever want to hire a guy like that?” and he never called back. But others did.

As his profile rose, so did the profile of the celebrities he worked for–or against. They included Heidi Fleiss, “Beverly Hills Madam” Elizabeth Adams, Sylvester Stallone, and Kevin Costner. He investigated the OD death of John Belushi and found the daughter Roseanne Barr had given up for adoption (and then leaked the story to the tabs).

Working with Weitzman and Fields in the early ’90s, he helped beat back allegations that Michael Jackson molested a 12-year-old boy by producing evidence of extortion by the boy’s father and damaging information about the family–a job for which he later claimed to have received $2 million. During the case, according to Diane Dimond, then a senior correspondent at Hard Copy, Pellicano tried to intimidate her and discourage her coverage critical of Jackson. She became convinced that Pellicano was tapping her phone.

Meanwhile, Pellicano was building relationships with law enforcement, reaping payments for appearing as an expert audiotape witness, and collecting numerous letters of praise. Commendations rolled in from federal prosecutors across the country, from district attorneys throughout Southern California, from two California attorneys general, from the U.S. Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the Arizona State Senate, and the mayor of Houston.

Among the raves, hard questions rarely came up. Just how good an audio-video expert was he? How many of the letters came from law enforcement clients who were happy because they got the analysis they wanted? What is clear is that he had no formal linguistic, mathematical, or scientific education in a complex field.

Pellicano solidified his reputation as an audio-video expert during the DeLorean trial. Weitzman recalls his doing “a very good job” in his tape analysis. But according to Roger Shuy, a professor emeritus of linguistics at Georgetown University who also worked on the DeLorean defense team, Pellicano’s work was sloppy. “I reviewed the transcripts of the tapes that Pellicano made against the actual tapes,” says Shuy. “And I found dozens and dozens of places where Pellicano was in error–where the transcripts didn’t show what was on the tape. I had to go through and correct them all. It was weird, because most of the mistakes weakened the defense case and helped the prosecution.”

Shuy is hardly alone in his criticism. “I was representing one of Hollywood’s biggest agents who was in criminal trouble,” says Century City defense attorney William Graysen, “and he asked me to hire Pellicano as an expert witness. I called him, and he said, ‘I’ll cross any river and climb any mountain to do what I have to do to win the case.’ I took that to mean falsifying evidence. I went back to my client and said, ‘This guy is bad news.’ And we didn’t use him.”

During a late 1990s case in Tampa, Florida, investigated by the L.A. Times, the U.S. Attorney’s office was prosecuting a couple for the disappearance of their child based on remarks allegedly made on a secretly recorded audiotape. When the FBI failed to detect the remarks on the tape, prosecutors hired Pellicano, who declared that the alleged incriminating utterances existed and that he could clearly hear them. To which the judge replied, when they were played in court, “The government hears what no reasonably prudent listener can. It interprets what can be heard as no prudent listener would.” Federal authorities dropped the case, and the defendants were awarded $2.9 million for wrongful prosecution.

In 1990, then-freelance journalist Rod Lurie acquired a list of paid sources used by the National Enquirer and contracted to do a story about it for Los Angeles magazine. Pellicano was allegedly paid $500,000 by the Enquirer to have the story killed. The huge amount of money was an indication of how desperate the tabloid was. The Enquirer couldn’t continue to exist if its sources were burned. Moreover, the company was in the process of going public on Wall Street, and this was a terrible time to have the kind of embarrassing revelations they themselves made their living generating.

Pellicano’s way of dealing with recalcitrant reporters involved perseverance–he’d start with “I’m a tough guy, don’t luck with me,” and when that didn’t work, he’d try “I’m getting a lot of money. If you don’t think I’m going to get paid, you’re out of your mind.” He’d follow that with “You’re an intelligent guy. I really like you. I’ve checked you out” and finally graduate to bribery: “You shouldn’t write this story. I can get you six figures elsewhere.”

By the late ’80s, Pellicano had become involved in a far more complex dance with the tabloids. In 1997, Jim Mitteager, a reporter for the National Enquirer and the Globe, died of cancer. Shortly before his death, he gave hundreds of tapes he had secretly recorded to Paul Barresi, an informant and sometime investigator for Pellicano. The tapes capture little people fighting over crumbs tossed around as celebrities try to protect their images. Transcripts of the tapes provided by Barresi, a former porn star and producer currently working as an unlicensed investigator, show Pellicano trading gossip and planting stories with Mitteager and Globe reporter Cliff Dunn while paying to have other stories killed.

During a 1994 conversation, Mitteager, Dunn, and Pellicano agree to get together the following Tuesday, and Pellicano, who was working for Michael Jackson, promises to find out for them what’s happening with the L.A. grand jarls looking into child molestation accusations against the star. The reporters then inform Pellicano that actress Whoopi Goldberg, a friend and client of his, went to Saint John’s Hospital for a mammogram and that Dunn was tipped off by a hospital source that she had breast cancer (a rumor unconfirmed by Los Angeles). “I want that source,” Pellicano tells Dunn. “For how much?” replies Dunn.”What the fuck kind of question is that?” Pellicano shoots back. “You can’t say, ‘How much?’ to me. You have to give me a price and say, ‘This is what I want!’” Dunn answers, “I want five grand. Then you blow him out of the water [i.e., expose him as a source], and he’s used on every celebrity story [at the hospital].”

They next turn to Elizabeth Taylor.

Pellicano: Now let me ask you a question on Liz Taylor. You say that they are going after her?

Mitteager: Well, of course. She’s in the hospital. Liz Taylor sells goddamn books.

Pellicano: Because I don’t care what you do with her. As a matter of fact, if I can help you with her, I will…. What do you want to know on her?

Mitteager: Any story that would make the front page.

Pellicano: I know that she is fucking drinking again. That’s a fact.

Dunn: That’s something. If we can confirm that.

Pellicano: I just told you!

Dunn: I can’t say to [the Globe] lawyers that my source is Anthony Pellicano.

Mitteager: We need to work together to get some sort of network of people.

Pellicano: We’ll go further on that. But you guys are guaranteed the three grand on Tuesday.

Barresi says he worked with Pellicano on cases involving Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Jackson, Barry Bonds, and Tom Cruise. Pellicano, he says, “worked mostly with entertainment attorneys–they were his favorite clients–to keep salacious information about their clients away from the public. It was a great way for them to make big money.”

“If you find dirt on a celebrity, then you go to the attorney, or directly to the client, and say, ‘Hey, there’s a story brewing with the tabs, we need to quash it: Most celebrities are not gonna hesitate, because a celebrity is the most naive, infantile person in the world. They get preferential treatment, but if boulders fall on their head in real life, they don’t know what to do, other than dig deep into their pockets,” says Barresi. “Pellicano was the master of getting them to do that–the celebrity never knew how simple it was to put a fire out, or that sometimes there was never really a fire in the first place. There would be a story brewing, but the reporter couldn’t nail it down. So Pellicano would light the fire. He was the arsonist—and then he’d come back and put the fire out.”

Often, says private investigator Bill Pavelic, who worked for the defense on the O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake, and Phil Spector cases, “Pellicano would have the source in his hip pocket and be able to pay him right off the bat to kill the story or rumor. But he wouldn’t tell his clients that. He’d simply say, ‘I can make the problem go away.’” That fed right into the Pellicano mystique. If you’re a magician, you don’t tell the audience how you do your tricks.

Thus it’s entirely plausible that attorneys like Bert Fields were never informed about Pellicano’s illegal activities, his connections with the police, or his association with the tabloids–because he didn’t want them to know. During one phone conversation, for example, Mitteager asks if Fields knows Pellicano is getting information from tabloid reporters. “I’m not telling anybody anything,” Pellicano replies. “When Cliff [Dunn] comes to my office, I go to meet him in the fucking parking lot…. I don’t tell them [his attorney and other clients] these things. I have a cash slush fund that I use. And that’s what you guys have been getting [paid from].”

The last case Barresi says he worked on for Pellicano involved Tom Cruise. A male hustler, as Barresi tells it, asked for help in landing a book deal about a sexual relationship he’d allegedly had with Cruise, and Barresi mentioned it to Pellicano. The guy’s story, Pellicano told Mitteager in a taped phone conversation, “was so far off the wall, it was pathetic.” Well then why, asks Mitteager, “has Bert Fields jumped all over it?” (On November 20, 2002, Fields sent a letter to the accuser threatening legal action.) “Because,” replies Pellicano, Cruise “is a new client, and he has to do that shit.” The bottom line, says Barresi, was that it quickly became apparent that the accuser had made the story up. “I brought him into Pellicano’s office to be interrogated,” says Barresi, “and after it was over, it was clear his story was falling apart. But Pellicano said, ‘You know, this guy sounds credible to me.’ I know now that he wanted to create a credible case, because he couldn’t go to Bert Fields and say, ‘I got this guy who’s a kook.’” Instead, according to Barresi, “he made the guy more legit. Because that was where the money was.”

It’s a rare good moment for Anthony Pellicano–his March wedding day, a last hurrah before his trial next February. When he spots his three daughters in federal court, all holding bridesmaid’s bouquets of red roses, he raises his wrists, points to the shackles that wind around his waist, and jokes about his “new jewelry.” Standing by is Kat Jane Pellicano, a blond, animated woman of 50, draped in a white sleeveless dress. In her hands is a white shirt she’s brought for Pellicano to wear during their remarriage ceremony.

The scene is pure Pellicano, as he had invited AP reporter Linda Deutsch, the doyenne of the L.A. courthouse press corps, along with Chuck Phillips of the Los Angeles Times, People magazine’s veteran celebrity profile writer, Frank Swertlow, and the New York Times entertainment industry reporting team of David M. Halbfinger and Allison HopeWeiner (who are themselves under investigation for printing leaked grand jury tapes of conversations between Pellicano and various clients and stars).

Sitting together after the ceremony, Kat and Pellicano kiss and hold hands as they watch the vows of two other couples. Kat, a native Oklahoman and mother of four of Pellicano’s nine children, had first met her husband in 1984 while working in the Luckman Plaza tower where his offices were. She’d found him macho, which for Kat translated into attractive. By 2002, however, Pellicano’s life was falling apart. Weary of the 60-mile round-trip from his office to their Ventura County home, Pellicano took to staying overnight at their West Hollywood condo. Stressed, consumed with anger, and unable to find release, he became explosive in the office. In the mid-’90s, the Internet was making information more accessible, but private investigators had lost legal access to voter registration addresses and DMV information as resources for tracking people down. Despite his success, Pellicano was still a small businessman, still hustling for customers after 30 years on the job. He was approaching 60. “When I was representing Robert Blake during his murder case, Pellicano would call me,” says Harland Braun, “and say, ‘Robert’s friends are asking me to help out on the case: But I knew he just wanted to get his name back in the paper and get some publicity, and I told him no thanks.”

At home he was tense and moody, craving solitude, demanding that the kids not have friends over on weekends. Kat filed for a divorce that became final in September 2002. Pellicano–a man who needed the structure of a family and the support of a wife even as he ignored them–was cast adrift. Two months later, the FBI raided his office.

Alex Proctor, the small-time hood whose conversation with a government informant triggered the search of Pellicano’s office, told the informant he saw a change. “Anthony is losing it. He’s getting to an age, quite frankly, that there’s deterioration. I see it,” he said.

Pellicano’s remarriage received almost no coverage, and only Deutsch noted how happy Kat Pellicano seemed. “It’s not often,” Kat said, “that you get to marry the love of your life twice.” All had been forgiven–her driving him out of their house and divorcing him, his flying to Las Vegas on his last weekend before going to prison to marry Teresa Ann DeLucio, a 42-year-old former dancer and bartender, in a Bellagio hotel chapel. They subsequently divorced.

Before their remarriage, Kat had been unable to visit Pellicano because of detention rules limiting visits to immediate family and legal counsel. Now that would change. Cynics saw the reunion as a way to prevent Hat from having to testify against her husband. Hat had helped make the cynics’ point after Pellicano’s Vegas marriage by boasting that she’d been pressured by FBI agents but had told them nothing, even though she’d discussed her husband’s cases with him and had helped “solve half of them.” But with Pellicano in jail she was broke. As she put it to The New York Times, “What is the benefit to me of talking to them? It’s more benefit to me for Anthony to be out of jail than in jail.”

Pellicano had initially turned down the assistance of a public defender, declaring that he intended to defend himself. Cooler heads prevailed, and two respected defense attorneys volunteered to represent Pellicano pro bono. They will make the argument that the search warrant was based on the false premise that Pellicano had been involved in the threats and vandalizing of Anita Busch’s car, and that what they were really after was evidence about an entirely different case, in which Pellicano illegally wiretapped an FBI agent speaking to an Israeli businessman Pellicano was surveilling.

As a result, the defense will ask the judge to declare the original search warrant invalid, thereby negating the entire case. The chances of that happening are slim. A better shot at an acquittal will probably rest on the government’s having to prove most of its case circumstantially. Thus far prosecutors have produced only one wiretap, that of the wife and brother of Los Angeles billionaire Alec E. Gores discussing their extramarital affair. According to the government, Pellicano was hired by Gores to investigate the two lovers. Gores has already admitted that Pellicano played the tapes of their conversations for him.

A guilty verdict will probably cost Pellicano ten years in prison. Barring an acquittal, his only hope is to roll over and implicate some of the Hollywood moguls and attorneys who employed him. But as Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, a former U.S. attorney, points out, “Any prosecutor would be out of his mind to try and make a case against Bert Fields based on the testimony of Pellicano–who would have zero credibility. Every word he said would have to have corroboration. They’d be fighting the best lawyers money can buy and have to convince a jury that a man of Fields’s stature would stoop to such cheap tricks.”

Consequently, assistant U.S. attorney Daniel Saunders, the lead prosecutor, appears unwilling to take a chance on any high-profile losses and has decided to focus on Pellicano, the lowest-hanging fruit. “He’s got Pellicano and Terry Christensen,” says Levenson. “When you take down a major partner in a major law firm in a city like Los Angeles, you’re making a statement and issuing a warning that lawyer abuse of the system won’t be tolerated.”

Limiting the prosecutions also means that the most compelling aspects of the case won’t be resolved: How much did Fields, Ovitz, Grey, Kerkorian, and all the rest know? How did Pellicano stay off law enforcement’s radar for so long? Was it because he was an informant, like Fred Otash? How many dirty tricks did Pellicano and his clients perpetrate? What would have been revealed if Hollywood had had its Watergate hearings?

At least Pellicano will have achieved what he’s always craved: pop immortality. Back in the early ’90s, Sylvester Stallone described Pellicano’s life as “the kind of script that can only get better as his experiences grow.” What has turned out to be so good for the script, has, however, been a disaster for the man.

Crossed Wires

12 degrees of Anthony Pellicano

BARRY BONDS

An ex-porn star claims Pellicano worked an a case involving the slugger

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

TERRY CHRISTENSEN

Attorney to the powerful has been indicted for illegal wiretapping

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

TOM CRUISE

Frequently relied on Bert Fields to make rumors go bye-bye

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

BERT FIELDS

Entertainment attorney named as a “person of interest” by the feds

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

GENNIFER FLOWERS

Her recordings of Bill Clinton received the investigator’s analysis

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

MICHAEL JACKSON

The PI helped beat back molestation charges filed against the singer

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

JOHN MCTIERNAN

The director has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about eavesdropping

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

MICHAEL OVITZ

The agent hired the snoop to spy on 15 to 20 associates and journalists

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

STEVEN SEAGAL

His alleged ties to organized crime may have triggered Pellicano’s troubles

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

GARRY SHANDLING

The comic actor has possibly been spied on by the investigator

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

DON SIMPSON

The late producer’s appetites kept Pellicano busy and helped make him rich

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

HOWARD WEITZMAN

The attorney brought the Chicago investigator to Hollywood in 1983

ABC NEWS
January 30, 1997

SHOW: ABC GOOD MORNING AMERICA (7:00 am ET)

GUESTS: BILL PAVELIC

BYLINE: ,ELIZABETH VARGAS
SECTION: News
LENGTH: 1901 words

HIGHLIGHT: RESPONSE TO LANGE AND VANNATTER

ELIZABETH VARGAS, Host: As we said earlier, former LAPD detectives Phil Van-natter and Tom Lange were guests on our show yesterday. Today — and they were emphatically defending the integrity of their investigation, we must say. Today, we are going to speak with Bill Pavelic. He was the chief investigator of the OJ Simpson criminal trial, civil trial, and the custody case involving his two young children, Sydney and Justin. Bill Pavelic joins us this morning. Welcome, thank you for being here.

BILL PAVELIC, Former Simpson Lead Investigator: Thank you.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: Former detectives Lange and Vannatter took on the air — were on the air — concede they made mistakes, but they emphatically deny framing OJ Simpson. Why are you so sure that, in fact, they did?

BILL PAVELIC: In fact, their book even substantiates that premise even more. They basically falsified the affidavit, the search warrant affidavit. The information that they provided to the judge in order to get the search warrant was basically fabricated. They lied to the judge by informing her that OJ Simpson left on an unscheduled flight, thus leaving them with the impression — leaving her with the impression that he was fleeing California. They did not tell her that they scaled the wall. They told her that they recovered the glove while securing the evidence. And as you know from the trial, that’s absolutely incorrect. I could go on, but I don’t think we have the time.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: But even if we grant, even if we were to accept everything you just said on face value, which clearly detectives Lange and Vannatter deny and do not, you were an LA police officer for 19 years yourself. What you are suggesting is a conspiracy of such an enormous scope. They would have had to have planted Mr Simpson’s blood at Bundy. They would have planted Mr Goldman’s blood in Mr Simpson’s Bronco, planted Nicole’s blood and Simpson’s blood at the Rockingham estate. It goes on and on, and it seems fantastic to many people.

BILL PAVELIC: Yes, it does. But if you look at the facts, even Judge Ito sup-ported our premise, and that is that Vannatter, for all intents and purposes, was dishonest. If Vannatter was dishonest, his partner obviously is just as culpable as Vannatter. What we found in this book, in fact, is, that Vannatter was shopping for a favorable prosecutor, in this case, Marcia Clark. Vannatter contacted Marcia Clark before he obtained the search warrant or the affidavit, completed the affidavit for the search warrant, before he went to Judge Lefkovitz (ph). So now we learn from his book that the prosecutor had a much bigger role in this conspiracy than we initially thought.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: Well, let’s get to the specifics of what they said yesterday …

BILL PAVELIC: Sure.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: … on our air, for example. For — the first thing they said was that Mr Simpson was not acting like an innocent man. As one of the proofs, pieces of proof of that, they played the following tape. It’s an audio-tape from the Bronco chase. Let’s listen to it very quickly.

Det TOM LANGE: (on phone) And nobody’s going to get hurt.

OJ SIMPSON: (on phone) I’m the only one that deserves …

Det TOM LANGE: No, you don’t deserve that.

OJ SIMPSON: I’m going to get hurt.

Det TOM LANGE: You do not deserve to get hurt.

OJ SIMPSON: Ahhh …

Det TOM LANGE: You do not deserve to get hurt. Don’t do this.:

OJ SIMPSON: All I did was love Nicole. That’s all I did was love her.

Det TOM LANGE: I understand.

OJ SIMPSON: I love everybody. I tried to show everybody my whole life that I love every body.

Det TOM LANGE: We know that, and everybody loves you.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: Mr Simpson says on this tape, “I’m the only one who deserves to get hurt. I loved Nicole too much.” To detectives Lange and Vannatter, they say that sounds like a grieving guilty man.

BILL PAVELIC: Well, he is a grieving not-guilty man. What he is referring to is obviously not the crime itself, but the fact that he eluded authorities, and went to the grave, and was suicidal. The interpretation that the — Lange and Vannatter are putting out is that somehow this has to do with the crime itself, and that is totally incorrect.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: Any question why Mr Simpson didn’t say, “I’m innocent of these crimes”? Why he didn’t say — talk more about Nicole’s death?

BILL PAVELIC: In fact, he did say that. Not only did he maintain his innocence, but he also said, in various discussions that same day, that he was being framed by the police. I would like to submit to you, why didn’t Vannatter and Lange put the contents of all — the entire tape in a follow-up report or a supplemental report? You’re not going to find that. And the reason you’re not going to find it is because there’s a problem with this tape. First of all, what probable cause did they have to tape record this conversation? Second of all, they’re totally contradicting their initial premise, which was that he was fleeing again, trying to leave the public with the impression that he was somehow — with the goatee and the mustache, that he was going to run away.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: But it does bring up an interesting issue. Why, in fact, if he was just going to his wife’s grave, or why, in fact, he was only going to commit suicide or contemplating that horrible thought, would he have a disguise and $8,000 cash with him?

BILL PAVELIC: Well, first of all, he had a disguise. Why would he take his passport with no disguise? I mean, it’s ludicrous to assume that he was trying to disguise himself in order to flee, but yet he took the passport that doesn’t have the disguise. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: All right. They also introduced, detectives Lange and Vannat-ter, they say there was new evidence that was never introduced at the criminal or civil trial, and they talked about it yesterday on our show. I’ve got another clip I’d like you to listen to.

Det TOM LANGE: We had a witness at the airport that initially, interestingly enough, came to the defense and said, “Listen, I was at the airport a little after 11:00. I saw OJ Simpson there with his arm buried in a trash container, and then it went to a small flight bag on top. He zipped it closed, and he walked inside.” The day after — the day of the murders, this fellow reported this to the defense, and they never shared it with us. It was nine months later when this man followed up on this revelation with us.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: Did you investigate this man who says he saw OJ Simpson dis-posing contents of the — of a bag?

BILL PAVELIC: First of all, first of all, let me just say something about Detective Lange here. We don’t have an obligation to turn over discovery material to him. Discovery material would be turned over to the prosecution. If the prosecution did not let him see it, that’s their business. We did turn over that information. As far as his interpretation, what happened is, their interpretation is completely different from ours.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: And the other evidence about supposedly OJ Simpson got a gift of knives just days before the murders?

BILL PAVELIC: Again, you have to ask yourself, why didn’t they introduce this man? Why didn’t they call him to testify? His contention is that it was the prosecution that didn’t want to do it. This is a question that should be posed to the prosecution. As far as we’re concerned, the gentleman that he is referring to was contacting tabloids, was trying to sell his story, has changed the version of his story, and he is — he was not reliable.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: To many people in this civil trial in particular, the most damning evidence against OJ Simpson is this series of photographs showing him wearing Bruno Magli shoes, the kind of shoes that left a footprint at the murder scene. Do you still believe that first photograph printed in “The Enquirer” was indeed doctored, was a fake?

BILL PAVELIC: Unlike the plaintiffs’ witnesses, I will not comment on an issue that the jury in the civil case is adjudicating. I think it would be improper. I’m still subject to the rules and regulations and the gag order that was issued by Judge Fujisaki.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: All right. Then without commenting in specific on this evidence, do you think that overall, this civil trial has been a fair trial for Mr Simpson?

BILL PAVELIC: I would prefer to answer that question after the adjudication. And I think you may find it rather surprising.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: There have been many have been — who have felt that Mr Simp-son has been subjected to double jeopardy. Those who support him feel that he’s already been through this once, that in the civil trial, he is — has been — all this has been brought out against him again, we’re getting this new evidence. Do you feel the same way? Do you feel sympathetic that way?

BILL PAVELIC: Let me just make a comment that I don’t see the rage in America with regards to Mark Fuhrman making a living, who is a convicted perjurer. I don’t see groups demonstrating against him. He is given an opportunity to make a living. So if we’re talking about a double standards here, I think there are double standards with regards to the way they look at OJ versus Mark Fuhrman. And in this case, only one person was convicted, and that was Mark Fuhrman.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: You still have a good relationship with OJ Simpson. You still speak with him regularly.

BILL PAVELIC: Yes, I do.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: How is he holding up through this trial?

BILL PAVELIC: I’m sure it’s very difficult for him, but I think the fact that he has his children, he’s content with that, and he knows this is an uphill battle. This is only round two in a 15-round fight. I’m sure that there will be some additional rulings.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: Round two, that means it sounds like if he loses, he’ll appeal.

BILL PAVELIC: I expect the appeal to go. I don’t expect him to lose in this case.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: You expect him to win in the civil trial.

BILL PAVELIC: I think we’re going to have to wait for the jury, and we may be just as surprised here as we were in all the others.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: In the criminal trial, OJ Simpson repeatedly professed his innocence, repeatedly pledged to find the real killers of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. You were the man put in charge of that. What have you found about who might have killed these two people?

BILL PAVELIC: It’s interesting that you ask that question. I don’t recall anybody asking Mr Jewell, “If you didn’t plant the bomb in the — in Atlanta, who did?” In this particular case, Mr Simpson did authorize me to conduct an investigation. I will not comment on the investigation. I want to maintain the integrity of the investigation. And unlike the prosecution in the criminal case, I’m not about to rush to judgment.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: Bill Pavelic, thank you for coming in, interesting speaking with you this morning.

BILL PAVELIC: Thank you, have a good day.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: Thanks, same to you.

(Commercial Break)

(Local News)

(Commercial Break)

LOAD-DATE: February 27, 1997

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

Transcript # 97013004-J01

TYPE: INTERVIEW

Content and programming copyright (c) 1997 American Broad-casting Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior permission. For further information please contact ABC’s Office of the General Counsel. Transcribed by Federal Document Clearing House, Inc. under license from American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

The New York Times
October 27, 1996, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 7; Page 4; Column 4; Book Review Desk
LENGTH: 304 words

To the Editor:

In a letter to the Book Review last week about my book “The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson,” Prof. Alan M. Dershowitz propounded a novel theory. According to Mr. Dershowitz, responsibility for the “race card” defense in the Simpson trial rested not with Mr. Dershowitz and O. J. Simpson’s other lawyers — who daily portrayed their client as the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy of racist police officers — but rather with me. This, of course, is ab-surd.

For an article in the July 25, 1994, issue of The New Yorker — just after the preliminary hearing in the Simpson case — I interviewed Mr. Dershowitz, who told me he thought Detective Mark Fuhrman was a “liar.” Following up, I found records in Los Angeles Superior Court of Mr. Fuhrman’s attempt to obtain a dis-ability pension on the ground, in part, of his hostility to the African-American community. I then discussed these records with Mr. Dershowitz’s colleague Robert L. Shapiro, who told me that Mr. Fuhrman was a “racist cop” who may have planted evidence against Mr. Simpson. (Contrary to what Mr. Dershowitz says in his letter, Robert Shapiro already knew about the disability file when I spoke to him. He had learned of it from his private investigator Bill Pavelic, who knew Mr. Fuhrman because they had both worked as security guards for Johnny Carson.)

Neither Mr. Dershowitz nor Mr. Shapiro, both highly experienced lawyers in dealing with the press, needed any prompting from me to disclose their plans. Oddly, Mr. Dershowitz now seeks to pretend that his own and his colleagues’ aggressive public relations strategy never took place, even though it helped their client win an acquittal in the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Gold-man. Why isn’t the professor proud?

Jeffrey Toobin
New York

LOAD-DATE: October 27, 1996

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

TYPE: Letter

CNBC News Transcripts

May 29, 1996, Wednesday 11:15 AM

SHOW: RIVERA LIVE (9:00 PM ET) 

hal lipset, private investigator, discusses offer-ing his services for free in finding who killed nicole simpson and ronald goldman

ANCHORS: JOHN GIBSON

LENGTH: 481 words

JOHN GIBSON, host:

We are back.  And we have the San Francisco detective on the phone who is go-ing to help O.J.  Simpson track down this intriguing lead that Simpson mentioned while he was in Eng–in England, that he believes was in San Francisco.  He threw it off sort of off-handedly, but on the phone with us is Hal Lipset, a legendary figure in the private eye business.

Hal Lipset, do you have any idea what O.J.  Simpson was talking about–what lead could there possibly be in the San Francisco area?

Mr.  HAL LIPSET (Private Investigator): The only thing I can see out there is all the dimensions of Faye Resnick and the drug culture in San Francisco.

GIBSON: Do you have a…

Mr.  LIPSET: I assume it’s got some connection with that.

GIBSON: Yeah, but you don’t know of any connection.  You don’t know of any connection with Faye in San Francisco or any particular people or any Colombian necktie assassinations up there?

Mr.  LIPSET: No.  Obviously–he says he has major investigative leads.

GIBSON: Well, Hal, why are you doing this?

Mr.  LIPSET: Well, San Francisco is my base.  It’s been a–a–a wonderful place to me.  And, you know, as far as I’m concerned, if somebody was involved in this heinous crime is in here in San Francisco, I think you–the leads should be checked out.  I don’t feel that I’m doing it for Simpson.  I feel I’m doing it to–to bring this major case to some end.
GIBSON: Well…

Mr.  LIPSET: I don’t think you can just go–if–if you just throw it out the–the leads were in New Orleans or Chicago or Philadelphia, you wouldn’t have had my offer.

GIBSON: That’s right.  Now–now my understanding is that you’ve made an offer to Simpson to follow up on his leads, and if he doesn’t–if you don’t get a re-sponse, you’re going to withdraw the offer in–What?–three weeks?

Mr.  LIPSET: Three weeks.

GIBSON: So have you heard anything yet?

Mr.  LIPSET: Not a word.  The only contact we had was the–William Pavelic asked that we fax him our offer, and I did that.

GIBSON: And you–and you sent an offer to Bill Pavelic, and you have not heard…

Mr.  LIPSET: On Friday–last Friday.

GIBSON: …any–anything further.  Well, Hal Lipset, I hope that we can keep in touch with you, because if you dig something up, we’re going to want to hear about it, and we appreciate you coming on the phone tonight.

Mr.  LIPSET: I’ve had about six other calls from people who say they’re the leads, but all I’m doing is logging them in.

GIBSON: All right.  Log them in.  Thanks a lot, Hal.  We appreciate it.

Jay Monahan, what do you think of the chances that supersleuth Hal Lipset can find anything in San Francisco?

Mr.  JAY MONAHAN (Criminal Defense Attorney): Well, he’s only taking messages on his answering machine.  I don’t see what kind of good he’s really doing.  I do have to say that I met with Pat McKenna–this is about a month ago–and Pat says that he is still investigating the case. I don’t know if he’s being paid, but when you look Pat in the eye, you–you take him as a very sincere person.

GIBSON: All right.  We have been talking about the Simpson case in Chicago, calling it Chicago Bull question mark and now we’re going to change gears and go over to Whitewater Woes.

LOAD-DATE: May 29, 1996

LANGUAGE: English

TYPE: Interview

CNBC News Transcripts
May 29, 1996, Wednesday 11:15 AM

SHOW: RIVERA LIVE (9:00 PM ET)

Hal Lipset, Private Investigator, Discusses Offering His Services For Free in Finding Who Killed Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman

ANCHORS: JOHN GIBSON
LENGTH: 481 words

JOHN GIBSON, host:
We are back. And we have the San Francisco detective on the phone who is going to help O.J. Simpson track down this intriguing lead that Simpson mentioned while he was in England, that he believes was in San Francisco. He threw it off sort of off-handedly, but on the phone with us is Hal Lipset, a legendary figure in the private eye business.

Hal Lipset, do you have any idea what O.J. Simpson was talking about–what lead could there possibly be in the San Francisco area?

Mr. HAL LIPSET (Private Investigator): The only thing I can see out there is all the dimensions of Faye Resnick and the drug culture in San Francisco.

GIBSON: Do you have a…

Mr. LIPSET: I assume it’s got some connection with that.

GIBSON: Yeah, but you don’t know of any connection. You don’t know of any connection with Faye in San Francisco or any particular people or any Colombian necktie assassinations up there?

Mr. LIPSET: No. Obviously–he says he has major investigative leads.

GIBSON: Well, Hal, why are you doing this?

Mr. LIPSET: Well, San Francisco is my base. It’s been a–a–a wonderful place to me. And, you know, as far as I’m concerned, if somebody was involved in this heinous crime is in here in San Francisco, I think you–the leads should be checked out. I don’t feel that I’m doing it for Simpson. I feel I’m doing it to–to bring this major case to some end.
GIBSON: Well…

Mr. LIPSET: I don’t think you can just go–if–if you just throw it out the–the leads were in New Orleans or Chicago or Philadelphia, you wouldn’t have had my offer.

GIBSON: That’s right. Now–now my understanding is that you’ve made an offer to Simpson to follow up on his leads, and if he doesn’t–if you don’t get a response, you’re going to withdraw the offer in–What?–three weeks?

Mr. LIPSET: Three weeks.

GIBSON: So have you heard anything yet?

Mr. LIPSET: Not a word. The only contact we had was the–William Bill Pavelic asked that we fax him our offer, and I did that.

GIBSON: And you–and you sent an offer to Bill Pavelic, and you have not heard…

Mr. LIPSET: On Friday–last Friday.

GIBSON: …any–anything further. Well, Hal Lipset, I hope that we can keep in touch with you, because if you dig something up, we’re going to want to hear about it, and we appreciate you coming on the phone tonight.

Mr. LIPSET: I’ve had about six other calls from people who say they’re the leads, but all I’m doing is logging them in.
GIBSON: All right. Log them in. Thanks a lot, Hal. We appreciate it.

Jay Monahan, what do you think of the chances that supersleuth Hal Lipset can find anything in San Francisco?

Mr. JAY MONAHAN (Criminal Defense Attorney): Well, he’s only taking messages on his answering machine. I don’t see what kind of good he’s really doing. I do have to say that I met with Pat McKenna–this is about a month ago–and Pat says that he is still investigating the case. I don’t know if he’s being paid, but when you look Pat in the eye, you–you take him as a very sincere person.

GIBSON: All right. We have been talking about the Simpson case in Chicago, calling it Chicago Bull question mark and now we’re going to change gears and go over to Whitewater Woes.

LOAD-DATE: May 29, 1996

LANGUAGE: English

TYPE: Interview

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS

May 27, 1996, Monday, HOME FINAL EDITION

Investigators offer Simpson free help to find kil-ler, exonerate San Francisco

BYLINE: San Francisco Examiner

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 12A

LENGTH: 204 words

DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO

SAN FRANCISCO - OK, O.J. here’s your chance.
So, you think whoever killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman is on the loose and may have ties to San Francisco.
Legendary San Francisco private eye Hal Lipset and five fellow gumshoes have an offer that may fit snug as a glove.  They’ll prove you right or wrong - for free.
“I want to clear San Francisco’s name,” Mr. Lipset said, so the world will not think a brutal killer or killers lurk in the city.
Mr. Simpson’s private investigator, Bill Pavelic, welcomed the offer Friday and said he will discuss it with Mr. Simpson, who was acquitted Oct. 3 of the crimes.
Mr. Simpson told Oxford University students May 14 that he has strong leads tying the suspect or suspects to his hometown.
Mr. Lipset called The Examiner to say that he and fellow sleuths want to crack the case a la Sam Spade, their literary hero.
“If you say somebody is following you, I’m going to find if they are,” said Mr. Lipset.  “If I find you’re not being followed, I’m going to refer you to a psychiatrist.”
“If there are leads in San Francisco that somebody is not looking into, then I think they should be,” Mr. Lipset said.
Distributed by Scripps-McClatchy Western Service.

LOAD-DATE: May 28, 1996

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

Los Angeles Times
March 25, 1996, Monday, Home Edition

FALSE CONFESSIONS AND TIPS STILL FLOW IN SIMPSON CASE;
CRIME: SUCH CALLS HAVE BEEN COMMON SINCE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING. ABOUT 500 CONFESSED TO BLACK DAHLIA KILLING.

BYLINE: MILES CORWIN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
SECTION: Part A; Page 1; Metro Desk
LENGTH: 2098 words

Bill Pavelic, the former lead investigator for O.J. Simpson’s defense team, is sitting in his living room, reminiscing about the trial, when he is interrupted by a telephone call.

A man, who claims he is a Canadian psychiatrist, tells Pavelic that Simpson did not kill his ex-wife and Ronald Goldman, but he knows who did.

Pavelic sighs heavily, puts his hand over the phone and says in a weary voice, “We’ve gotten thousands of these calls. And now that the civil trial is coming up, we’re getting them again. Every. Single. Day!”

Pavelic, a private investigator and former Los Angeles Police Department detective, has received calls from prisons, jails and mental institutions. From psychics, astrologers and Tarot card readers. From ex-cons and ex-priests. From clinical psychologists, forensic psychologists, research psychologists and dog psychologists. He has talked to people who claimed they saw the killer, people who said they heard the killer, people who supposedly were married to the killer.

The most startling calls, the ones that offered the most promise and ultimately were the biggest disappointments, Pavelic said, were from the dozen people who claimed that they were the killer, that they had stabbed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

False confessions and dubious leads have been the byproducts of high-profile cases since the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, when about 250 people confessed to the crime. Homicide detectives are so accustomed to them that they routinely withhold critical details of murders–what they calls “keys”–from the press. That way they can quickly weed out the real killers from the spurious.

Some people who make false confessions tell such outlandish tales that they are dismissed outright. Others can be convincing, and detectives will attempt to verify their stories, wasting valuable time on red herrings during the early critical stages of an investigation.

Variety of Motives

Forensic psychiatrists say many people falsely confess because they simply can’t distinguish between delusion and reality. Some have a morbid desire for notoriety. A few confess out of a general sense of guilt or from a desire to be punished for past transgressions. And some simply crave attention.

“This is not the kind of attention most people want, so obviously you’re dealing with a group of very disturbed people,” said Richard Ofshe, a psychologist at UC Berkeley who has written extensively about false confessions. “Whenever you get cases that receive a lot of publicity, you can count on one thing. You see the walking wounded confessing or rambling on about crimes they know nothing about.”

In most cases, the false confessors go straight to the police. But in the Simpson case, many contacted the defense, to the relief of LAPD detectives. Since the police were convinced that they already had the killer in custody, the callers assumed that the defense would be more receptive to alternative theories. The defense ended up assuming the traditional investigative role by creating a toll-free tip line and offering a $ 500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer.

A few months after the murders, someone claiming to be Nicole Simpson’s gardener called the tip line and said he had killed Nicole and Goldman because she had refused to pay for yard work.

“This was typical of the kinds of calls we were getting. This guy was ranting about how she called them all kinds of derogatory names, how he swore at her and how it escalated from there,” Pavelic said. “He claimed he lost his temper, went berserk and cut her up. When I asked him to describe her living room, he couldn’t. So that ended that.”

LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division also was deluged with leads and tips–from all over the world–during the Simpson trial.

“We even got a call from Greenland, from a guy who wanted to know if we had checked a certain place for the murder weapon,” said Det. Ron Ito, one of the investigators assigned to follow up on the hundreds of leads. “We got calls from people confessing for other people, saying this person or that person did it. We got the psychics who’d describe the parks and the lakes where the murder weapon was stashed. We got the dog psychologists who could interpret barks and tell you what happened.”

On high-profile cases, detectives waste countless hours tracking such dubious information. In the Simpson case, for example, Ito and his partner spent 10 months, full time, following up on every Simpson-related phone tip.

Black Dahlia Mystery

While the Simpson case kept Robbery-Homicide detectives hopping, the 1947 Black Dahlia murder set the record for crank leads, worthless phone calls and false confessions. In the years after the slaying, more than 500 people confessed, some of whom were not even born when the body of a 22-year-old actress named Elizabeth Short was found neatly cut in half in a vacant lot.

During the first few months after the murder, police interviewed a steady stream of men–and a few women–who claimed to be the killer. A former member of the Women’s Army Corps told detectives, “Elizabeth Short stole my man so I killed her and cut her up.”

One man marched into Los Angeles police headquarters and confessed. Four times. Detectives began calling him, “Confessin’ Tom.”

One confessor was asked by skeptical detectives to pick out Short from a series of photographs. He could not and then tried to stagger off. Detectives threw him into the drunk tank.

During the first few years after the murder, an array of housewives, soldiers, winos, farmers and clergymen confessed to the crime. Police ruled out all of them, and the case remains unsolved. Even today, usually after the TV movie “Who Is the Black Dahlia?” is aired, detectives receive another spate of calls.

“Every time that movie is shown we’ll all say, ‘Oh hell, here come the kooks,’ ” said Don Ham, a retired Robbery-Homicide detective who joined the department a year after the Dahlia murder. “Decades later, we’d still get a half-dozen confessions a year. In the old days you didn’t need a badge to gain entry to homicide. People would just walk in off the street and say, ‘Get me a detective. I want to tell them about someone I killed.’ ”

The most sensational false confession case in recent history involved a Texas prisoner named Henry Lee Lucas. During the early 1980s, Lucas confessed to killing more than 600 people, including Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. The Texas Rangers were delighted with Lucas because, as a result of his confessions, they were clearing troublesome, unsolved cases by the dozens.

The more Lucas talked, the better treatment he received. For almost two years he had a private cell with an unlimited supply of cigarettes and his favorite meal–cheeseburgers and strawberry milkshakes. He traveled across the country to point out the sites of his murders. He was interviewed by countless reporters. Criminologists sought audiences with him.

As his fame spread, his accounts became increasingly outrageous. He talked of cannibalism and necrophilia. He told one detective that he cut a murder victim into little pieces and made hamburger out of her.

His claims began to unravel when a suspicious prosecutor discovered that Lucas had received traffic tickets on the dates of some of his confessed murders. The prosecutor knew Lucas was lying because he had received tickets in different states than the murder sites.

When Lucas’ wild ride was over, he admitted that he had killed only one per-son–his mother. The alcoholic drifter with an IQ of 83 had hornswoggled law enforcement authorities across Texas.

In the end, one of the few declarations by Lucas that rang true was his confession about why he made false confessions. He enjoyed the attention. He liked the perquisites in jail. And he felt important for the first time in his life.

Although Lucas had recanted virtually everything, many prosecutors in Texas still are convinced that some of his confessions were true. He finally was convicted of 11 murders and remains on death row in Huntsville.

At one time, Lucas claimed he was the Green River killer, suspected of murdering as many as 49 women during the mid-1980s in Washington state. Two detectives flew to Texas and interviewed him, but they quickly discovered that all he knew about the killings was what he had seen in the media. Several “keys” about the killings, which had not been publicized, gave Lucas away, said King County Police Det. Jim Doyon, one of the lead investigators on the case, which remains unsolved.

Two prisoners from San Quentin also confessed to the Green River murders in a letter they sent to King County police. They promised to show detectives where the bodies were buried if authorities guaranteed them they would not receive the death penalty.

“We sent two detectives to talk to them,” Doyon said. “They knew so little about the geography of the Seattle area that we were convinced that they’d never even been here. We found out from some other inmates that all these two wanted was to get in a wooded area with a few detectives. Then they would make a run for it. The whole thing was just an escape plan.”

It is not just murder cases that attract false confessors. After the 1993 Laguna Beach fire, which destroyed or severely damaged 441 homes, a transient confessed to setting the blaze. He had been arrested for lighting three small fires in Fullerton. While in custody, he told police he set the fire to conjure up a demon king named Gotam. He was charged with arson and held without bail.

Unfortunately, the suspect’s mother pointed out to authorities that her son could not have set the fire because he was in a Mexican jail at the time. This was confirmed by Mexican prison records, and the charge was dropped. She explained that her son was delusional, was convinced mobsters were trying to kill him and believed he would be safe in jail.

Night Stalker Frenzy

During the 14 Night Stalker killings in Southern California during the mid-1980s, the LAPD received more than 3,000 tips, said Paul Tippin, a retired Robbery-Homicide detective who was assigned to the case.

“I remember one guy wandered into Parker Center and told the desk officers that he could help them out on the Night Stalker case,” Tippin says. “They sent him over to us, and he announced ‘I’m responsible for a few of ‘em.’ The guy was a real dirt bag. After we talked to him, we quickly figured out that he was a phony. He just wanted to spend a few days in jail so he’d get a warm bed and a few free meals.”

A false confession in one of California’s most sensational murder investigations–the Zodiac slayings in San Francisco during the late 1960s–gave discouraged detectives an evanescent glimmer of hope. Police attributed six random slayings to the Zodiac, who wrote bizarre, taunting messages to newspapers.

Dave Toschi, a retired San Francisco Police Department inspector and one of the lead investigators in the case, thought he finally had tracked down the killer on a November night in 1969. A man called a television news show during a program about the Zodiac killer and told the host, “I think you’re looking for me.”

“The host thought they had the guy, and we put a trace on the call,” Toschi recalled. “The guy talked on and on, giving all kinds of details. Meanwhile, we traced the call to a hospital in Oakland, and we talked to one of the supervisors there. He told us, ‘You’ve been talking to a man we just gave phone privileges to. He’s a mental patient.’ ”

Rambling Monologue

Private investigator Pavelic, who chased the leads on the Simpson case, has talked to his share of mental patients–and those who should be mental patients.

The man who interrupted Pavelic on the recent afternoon claiming to be the Canadian psychiatrist sounded as if he was in great need of psychiatric help himself. In a rambling, disjointed monologue, he informed Pavelic that he could clear up “the murder mystery of the century.”

“I know who did it,” he told Pavelic.

“And who is that?” Pavelic asked, in a bored monotone.

“A guy who works at a Brentwood restaurant,” the man said.

“And how do you know that?”

“I saw him on television the other day. I could tell he was the killer by the way he crossed his legs.”

Pavelic deftly concluded the conversation and rolled his eyes.

“If I had let him ramble on, by the end of the conversation he probably would have copped to the murder himself and promised to cross his legs for me as proof.”

LOAD-DATE: March 28, 1996

LANGUAGE: English

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Simpson defense investigator Bill Pavelic testifies during criminal trial. PHOTOGRAPHER: Associated Press

TYPE: Top Story

Time Magazine

November 27, 1995

INSIDE LOS ANGELES

SECTION: CHRONICLES

LENGTH: 133 words
O.J.: THE SEARCH CONTINUES

If you think O.J. Simpson’s life these days is nothing but putting and partying, you’re wrong. The acquitted celebrity-murder suspect is making good on his vow to find “the
killers who slaughtered Nicole and Mr. Goldman.” Bill Pavelic, a
former L.A.P.D. detective turned private eye who has been
assisting the Simpson defense team since O.J.’s arrest in June
1994, is in charge of the ongoing investigation. (It was Bill Pavelic
who unearthed Mark Fuhrman’s stress-disability problems and
produced the amnesiac housekeeper Rosa Lopez.) “I’m basically
coordinating the efforts,” says Bill Pavelic. And the strategy?
“Nothing is in, nothing is out,” he assured TIME. “I won’t get
into specifics, but I know exactly the direction I want to go in.”
LOAD-DATE: November 28, 1995

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

The Denver Post
May 7, 1995 Sunday 1ST EDITION

BYLINE: Maureen Harrington, Denver Post Staff Writer
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A-01
LENGTH: 1502 words

What seemed like fiction, or at least wild-eyed conspiracy theory nine months ago, now appears to be the heart of the defense strategy in the O.J. Simpson trial.

Denver author Stephen Singular’s theory of a tainted police investigation, which he suggested to the defense last August, is gaining credence in the courtroom - at least on O.J.’s side.

As Singular watched on television, testimony last week centered on whether the preservative EDTA was in blood samples taken from socks found in Simpson’s bedroom and the back gate at Nicole Simpson’s condo.

Nine months ago, after consulting with hematologist Dr. Dan Ambruso at Bonfils Blood Center, Singular told the defense team that they should test for EDTA.

If they found the preservative, he said, it would suggest the blood was taken from a police evidence container and sprinkled around the scene. If there was no preservative, the blood would have been there since the murders.

The presence of EDTA would support the Dream Team’s contention that Simpson is a victim of a police conspiracy framing him for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman on the night of June 12.

A defense source told the Los Angeles Times that the FBI tests show traces of the blood preservative in samples taken from the scene of the crime. On Friday, however, the prosecution said that there are no traces of EDTA. The FBI findings themselves have not yet been made public.

Los Angeles police chemist Gregory Matheson admitted in court that part of the blood from the vial taken from Simpson’s arm is missing. The defense says that proves police salted the crime scene with the football star’s blood. The prosecution says the missing 1.5 milliliters is normal loss from testing.

At home, following the trial on television Wednesday, Singular felt vindicated when he heard DNA expert Barry Scheck tell Judge Ito that the defense “has a bombshell coming on EDTA.”

“I knew that the tests described to me by Dr. Ambruso had been acted on,” said Singular. “Because I had stopped communicating with them, I wasn’t sure they had done the tests.”

Singular’s involvement in the O.J. case has all the makings of an absurdist drama or a Raymond Chandler novel.

Early in August the Kansas native got a call that changed the direction of his life. It was from a source in the Los Angeles legal system.

The case against Simpson was a sham.

Singular couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“I was like the rest of the country. I thought O.J. was an abusive man who had murdered his wife in a rage,” said Singular. “But this information was coming from a source I had worked with 10 years ago, when I was researching the Berg book.”

(In 1984, Singular wrote “Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg,” a Denver radio personality murdered by neo-Nazi white supremacists, which was later made into the Oliver Stone movie “Talk Radio.”)

“I made some phone calls, based on my respect for the source,” said Singular. “I thought I might be being duped, but it was worth looking into.”

On Aug. 3, Singular called the 800 number at the office of defense attorney Robert Shapiro and heard the greeting, “If you have any information that could lead to the exoneration of O.J. Simpson, press one now. If you are an expert in this field press two”

Singular left a message but realized with 100 calls coming in hourly he wasn’t going to be heard. The next day, he faxed Johnnie Cochran’s office detailing some of the information he had been given by his source:

“I was told that Nicole had known Detective Mark Fuhrman since 1985. I was told that when Fuhrman arrived at the crime scene at two a.m. on June 13, he came to an immediate and irrevocable conclusion - O.J. killed his wife.”

Singular informed the defense team that there was a stick and a bag in the evidence vaults of the LAPD. Neither side had seen them or their significance.

The source told this story:

“Fuhrman broke a piece off a fence in the alley somewhere behind Nicole’s condo, used it to pick up one of the bloody gloves near Goldman’s feet and put that glove in a blue plastic evidence bag.

“Then when homicide detectives Phillip Vannatter and Tom Lange came to the condo about an hour later, Fuhrman talked them into driving over to Simpson’s home. He then planted the glove on Simpson’s property.”

Singular included in the fax his source’s accusation that someone gained access to blood drawn from Simpson’s arm after he returned to Chicago June 13. The source said someone then removed it from the vial and planted it at the scene.

“The most important piece of information I was given,” said Singular, “was that there is a scientific test that could be run on blood droplets. If they had been drawn from the vial there would be a preservative present.”

Singular would find out from Ambruso that the anti-coagulant was EDTA.
Less than 24 hours after the fax, Singular got a call from Carl Douglas, second-in-command at Cochran’s office. The attorney was agitated.

There was no way that anyone in Denver could know this stuff.

There was no way, said Douglas, that any of this was true.

They’d had 200,000 leads of which they had taken 100 seriously and Douglas had only met with maybe ten or fifteen people.

Still, Douglas was intrigued. But Singular wouldn’t spill it on the phone. Four days later, Singular, accompanied by two lawyers, walked into defense attorney Shapiro’s Century City offices.

Stan Handman, one of the two attorneys with Singular, says he heard the conversation be-tween Singular, Douglas and lead investigator Bill Pavelic.

As the defense found that Singular’s tips checked out - including the presence of the stick and bag - they continued to press him for more information. Singular, who worked with the defense team through October, says he in turn pushed his source for additional leads.

The one thing he wouldn’t divulge was his source, in whom Singular had placed total faith.

It was the source, in fact, who told him to go to the defense rather than the prosecution. The source said the prosecution wouldn’t listen to him and might have forced him to reveal the name.

Meanwhile, the defense was working on the tip about blood preservatives. In September Barry Scheck, the DNA expert on the team, spoke with Ambruso, who explained how to do the testing.

The prosecution balked at sharing the blood samples. Eventually the defense prevailed, opening up a new line of attack against prosecutors.

Not given to hyperbole in speech or movement, Singular, 44, is a rangy man with big hands and a craggy face.

He’s a man to be trusted, said Jerry Leider who has Singular’s book “Sweet Evil” under option for a television movie.
“He is not a conspiracy kook.”

Still, the author acknowledges the absurdity of the situation.

“Here I am, a journalist from a provincial city, and I’m telling the million-dollar talents of the Dream Team what they don’t know. Sometimes I’d be talking to one of the attorneys giving him information while I diapered my one-year-old son, 1,200 miles from the scene of the crime.”

Singular is careful when he explains why he was given the information.

“It was suggested to me that this is not a conspiracy - it’s a mind-set - an idea that it may be all right to manipulate evidence to get a conviction.

“It was suggested to me that I was tipped to this because of the writing I had done 10 years ago about racism and white supremacy. It was suggested to me that the kinds of people whom I’d been writing about in the Berg case are now wearing a much more respectable face.”

Singular has no idea if O.J. Simpson is guilty or not. But, he will say, “There was a presumption of guilt” by the investigators, by the media, by the public.

“I don’t think enough investigation has been done yet. Obviously if they had to ask Ambruso how to do it, they hadn’t thought to test the blood for preservative.”

In late October, Singular asked the defense team to cooperate with him on a book.

“Not just about this case,” he said, “but the larger implications of what has happened to our justice system. You’re supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.”

Douglas refused, so Singular shopped a 22-page book proposal in New York and Los Angeles. That document was subpoenaed from a publisher and given to Ito and the prosecution in November. The defense, angry that much of their strategy was now in the hands of the enemy, cut off communications with Singular.

Weeks later, after the book proposal was mentioned during the trial April 27, Singular was besieged by newspapers, radio and television. Meanwhile, the man who triggered the defense strategy in this phase of the trial is waiting, like the rest of the country, to see what plays out.

“All of my involvement to date,” said Singular yesterday, “has been self-motivated and financed. All I’ve been doing is pursuing a story and seeing where it leads.”

The Associated Press, New York Times and Los Angeles Times contributed to this story.

LOAD-DATE: May 08, 1995

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: The Denver Post/Glen Martin Singular has a theory.

Los Angeles Times

March 3, 1995, Friday, Home Edition
BYLINE: By JIM NEWTON and ANDREA FORD, TIMES STAFF WRITERS

SECTION: Part A; Page 1; Metro Desk

LENGTH: 2085 words

Rosa Lopez, the Salvadoran housekeeper whose testimony has occupied the mur-der trial of O.J. Simpson for nearly a week, admitted under cross-examination Thursday that she has given contradictory statements and that her recollections of some times, dates, conversations and other events are cloudy.

Lopez — who mostly remained calm on the stand but who fidgeted at times, twitching one leg and glancing around the courtroom under a persistent cross-examination by Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden — also acknowledged that she is not sure at exactly what time she saw Simpson’s car outside his house, only that she saw it sometime shortly after 10 p.m. on June 12.

In fact, Lopez’s recollections of times and dates were often fuzzy: About 50 times Thursday, she answered Darden’s questions with the words “no me recuerdo, senor,” Spanish for “I don’t remember, sir.”

Prosecutors pounced with particular vigor on one of the conversations that Lopez had difficulty remembering. Near the end of the court day, Darden cited a former employer of Lopez and asked whether the housekeeper told her in August that “O.J. Simpson is a great guy, and I’ll testify to anything, any time.”

“I don’t remember,” she answered.

“You’re not denying having made that statement then?” Darden continued, his voice rising slightly and his tone suggesting his disbelief.

“It’s that I don’t remember if I said that or not,” she answered.

“So you could have said that?” he asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” she said.

That testimony and other challenges to Lopez’s credibility create a quandary for defense lawyers: The jury has not been present to hear her account this week, but Simpson lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. told jurors in his opening statement that she would take the stand. If she does — or if the defense seeks to introduce the videotape of this week’s testimony — jurors will hear the questions about her truthfulness and memory. But if she does not, it may raise doubts in the minds of the jury as to why such a potentially significant witness was not called — an omission that prosecutors would surely mention in their closing argument.

*
Lopez is important because she is the only person to have come forward with testimony that bolsters the defendant’s alibi. Prosecutors believe that Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were killed about 10:15 p.m. and that Simpson drove his Ford Bronco to and from the scene of the crime. Lawyers for Simpson, who has pleaded not guilty, have countered that their client was at home chipping golf balls or possibly napping at that time.

That makes Lopez’s observations on the night of murders important, particu-larly her statement that she saw Simpson’s car parked outside his house at 10:15 p.m. or 10:20 p.m. If true, that would back the defense contention that Simpson was home at that crucial time. On Thursday, however, she was less precise.

“All I said was that it was after 10,” she said.
“So you don’t know how long after 10?” Darden asked.

“No, sir,” she responded.

Darden began his long-awaited cross-examination with an aggressive attack on her credibility, but his approach alternated throughout the day, veering from pointed lines of questioning to gentle prodding. As the day progressed, he and Lopez sparred, usually without rancor but occasionally in more spirited ex-changes.

At one point, for instance, Darden asked her not to disclose an address listed on a piece of paper that he handed her. She read it silently, but then Darden mentioned the address in a question to her, prompting Lopez to scold him.

“See, you mention all over the world,” she said, speaking in English. “You’re so bad.”

A chastened Darden slapped himself on the hand.

Later, when Darden asked her to provide the court with her true name, Lopez balked.

“Why do you want my correct name?” she asked.

“This is a court of law,” Darden said, speaking slowly and looking directly at her. “And I’m a lawyer, and I’m asking the questions.”

Newspapers in El Salvador have reported that Lopez has used a number of dif-ferent names, but she explained in court Thursday that the names were drawn from different sides of her family. That is not uncommon in Latin American countries, however, and many immigrants also find that their names are jumbled by officials when they enter the United States.

Although it covered an array of topics, Darden’s questioning was focused largely on ferreting out statements by Lopez that might cast doubt on her truth-fulness and on possible incentives to lie. He elicited Lopez’s acknowledgment that she liked Simpson, and that she disliked his ex-wife because Nicole Simpson once allegedly slapped her housekeeper.

Cochran and F. Lee Bailey, another of Simpson’s lawyers, told reporters out-side court that they did not consider any of the contradictions in Lopez’s tes-timony to be significant. Many of the discrepancies, they said, were attribut-able to language difficulties.

“I think she is believable and credible on all the important issues on this,” Cochran said.

Prosecutors vehemently disagreed and spent all day attempting to dismantle Lopez’s testimony. Initially, Darden questioned Lopez about testimony she gave last week in which she appeared to deny having filled out unemployment insurance forms.

“I was given the applications, but I haven’t filled them out,” Lopez said during her initial appearance on the stand Friday, adding that she understood she was not eligible for insurance because she was planning to leave the coun-try. “Because I want to leave, that is why I have not taken them in, sir.”

On Thursday, however, Darden confronted her with a completed unemployment in-surance form and asked her about the apparent discrepancy.

“When you told us last Friday that you hadn’t filled out your unemployment forms, that wasn’t true, was it?” Darden asked over objections by Cochran. “That was a lie, correct?”

Lopez said it was not, blaming the misunderstanding on the fact that she had more than one set of forms and that she had completed some forms but not others. As Darden pressed on, Lopez appeared to become confused and eventually admitted that she had in fact filed for unemployment.

*
The attack on her unemployment records was followed by a reprise of a cross-examination that Darden effectively used last week to raise questions about whether Lopez really intended to flee to El Salvador. In that session, Darden confronted Lopez with evidence that she had not booked a flight for El Salvador, as she had testified.

Eager to have her repeat that testimony in this session — which is being re-corded in case the Simpson attorneys decide they want to present Lopez’s testi-mony but cannot coax her into the country to take the stand in person — Darden returned to the subject of the phantom plane reservations Thursday. As she did last week, Lopez acknowledged that her initial testimony about making those res-ervations was false.

After those early points, Darden’s questioning drifted to a variety of top-ics, probing, for example, the conversations that Lopez had with Simpson’s law-yers and investigators. At one point, Lopez agreed with Darden that one of Simp-son’s investigators, Bill Pavelic, had suggested slightly different times for some of her observations on the night of the killings,but she denied that he had planted those ideas with her.

A transcript of Pavelic’s July 29 interview with Lopez — a copy of which was obtained by The Times — does suggest that Lopez followed the private investiga-tor through a number of leading questions, including some on the topic of what time Lopez saw Simpson’s car. At one point, Lopez told Pavelic that she took her employer’s dog for a walk at about 10:15 p.m., and Pavelic responded by suggest-ing that it could have been 10:30 p.m. Lopez agreed with his suggestion.

Darden asked Lopez repeatedly about being coached, and suggested that Simp-son’s lawyers were attempting to direct her testimony in court Thursday. On one occasion, Cochran gestured as Lopez was speaking, but he angrily denounced a television report suggesting that he was attempting to signal to the witness.

In fact, Cochran said he was trying to get the attention of the court re-porter. The reporter supported that claim when Cochran asked her about it in court.

As Darden questioned Lopez over several hours, Cochran objected repeatedly, sometimes stating the reason for his objection in open court. That too angered Darden, who accused his counterpart of using his objections to send signals to Lopez about how she should answer.

Throughout the day, Darden’s cross-examination drifted to tangential issues that may undermine her credibility. Under questioning from Cochran, for in-stance, she had insisted that she had only been visited once by police; accord-ing to her, Detective Mark Fuhrman came to her employer’s door on the morning after the murders and questioned her briefly.

Lopez testified that Fuhrman told her that another officer would return to question her further, but she said no officer had ever followed up. On Thursday, however, Darden showed her a photograph of Detective Otis Marlow, a recently re-tired LAPD veteran who the prosecutor said had interviewed Lopez on June 28, the day that police served a search warrant at Simpson’s home.

Darden said that Marlow had asked the housekeeper about her observations on the night of the murders but that she had said she neither saw nor heard any-thing of significance. Lopez denied ever speaking to the detective, but prosecu-tors are preparing to call him to counter her testimony. Marlow was waiting at the courthouse Thursday in case he was needed.

According to law enforcement sources, Marlow met Lopez by chance on June 28 when the detective came to the home of her employers to question the couple. During that session, Marlow asked Lopez a few general questions about the night of the killings, and sources said she volunteered a few details. Marlow did not ask her about Simpson’s white Bronco, nor did she mention it, the sources said.

Marlow did not file a written report on the conversation, the sources said.

In fact, they added, the veteran robbery-homicide detective forgot their meeting until he saw Lopez’s photograph during televised news reports on Coch-ran’s opening statement. Although he could no longer recall her name, the sources said, he contacted the investigating officers and told them what he re-membered concerning the meeting with Lopez.

Marlow has since retired from the LAPD, and currently works as an investiga-tor for Los Angeles County’s alternate public defender.

Marlow was just one of several potential witnesses that Darden signaled are waiting in the wings to rebut Lopez’s testimony. Among others, Darden mentioned a friend of hers who may say that Lopez told her the two of them could get money if they testified to seeing Simpson’s car parked outside his house on the night of the killings.

When first asked whether she had told a friend that they could be paid $5,000 each for their testimony, Lopez said she could not remember. Pressed further, however, she acknowledged that it would be difficult to forget such a conversa-tion, and then said she was sure she had never said any such thing.

Darden also questioned Lopez’s insistence that she had never spoken to any reporters from various tabloid publications, including the National Enquirer. Time and again, Lopez denied ever speaking with the paper or ever trying to sell her story.

But David Perel, general editor of the Enquirer, disputed some of Lopez’s ac-count, saying that she did speak with reporters from the paper — first on June 13 and later in more far-ranging interviews — but adding that she never asked for money, nor was she offered any.

Lopez gave a different account to a reporter from Channel 7 who approached her that day, however. In a television clip played in court Thursday, Lopez tells the reporter that she heard either voices or noises — the exact word is difficult to discern because of her accented English — on the Simpson estate on the night of the murders.

Darden showed the clip to Lopez moments after she had testified that she had never talked to reporters about hearing voices. She said she had been trying to tell the reporter about noises, not voices.

Lopez is scheduled to return to the stand this morning, when cross-examination will continue.

Times staff writers Henry Weinstein, Tim Rutten and Tracy Wilkinson contrib-uted to this story.

LOAD-DATE: March 4, 1995

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: Photo, (A30) Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. explains to Judge Lance A. Ito that he had signaled to court reporter, not a witness.  Pool Photo; Photo, (Southland Edition, A30) Rosa Lopez reviews her telephone bills with prosecutor Christopher Darden during O.J. Simpson trial.  Pool Photo

CBS News Transcripts
March 03, 1995, Friday

SHOW: CBS EVENING NEWS (6:30 PM ET)

ANCHORS: DAN RATHER
LENGTH: 397 words

DAN RATHER, anchor:
This was the week the murder trial of O.J. Simpson turned into the credibility trial of Rosa Lopez, the woman Simpson is counting on to provide him with an alibi. Writer Dominick Dunne of Vanity Fair magazine tells us Simpson was not at all pleased with the performance of his defense team this week. Dunne has a full-time seat in the courtroom. He joins us now as he does every Friday, our expert witness in the O.J. Simpson case.

Dominick, let’s talk about Rosa Lopez’s testimony. What do you make of it?

Mr. DOMINICK DUNNE (Vanity Fair): Well, I think Rosa Lopez has been an utterly fascinating character to watch. I mean, she has held this jury–this courtroom in the palm of her hand for over a week now. She’s been calling the shots. Judge Ito has–has–has been very deferential to her. What we have seen is a woman who took the stand and told lie after lie, or what appeared to be lie after lie. And it has caused a total breakdown, I understand, in the defense.

The other night, after it came out about the tape that Bill Pavelic said he had, after Carl Douglas said there was no tape–it is my understanding from someone on the defense team that O.J. Simpson went ballistic and he wanted to call the entire defense team together to read the riot act. He was furious that they had looked so bad by first saying that they didn’t have a tape and then later saying that they did have a tape.

RATHER: I want to talk about this investigator, Bill Pavelic. What do we know about him, the defense investigator who found the alibi provided, allegedly, supposedly, reportedly, by Ms. Lopez?
Mr. DUNNE: Well, he is a–a former member of the LAPD. And it’s my under-standing he has many, many gripes against the police department.
RATHER: What can we expect next week?
Mr. DUNNE: Well, next week, we still have to finish off with Detective Lange, and then we go into, finally, America’s most famous house guest, “Kato” Kaelin. And I think that could be very, very interesting. There’s all these stories about–in which Kato has told friends, elsewhere, that–a–a different version of the facts than what he told at the preliminary hearing.

RATHER: Interesting stuff.

Mr. DUNNE: OK.

RATHER: Thanks.

Coming up next on the CBS EVENING NEWS, the troupe of Russian ice dancers, now starring in Oklahoma?

LOAD-DATE: March 03, 1995, Friday

LANGUAGE: English

TYPE: Analysis

Los Angeles Times

March 2, 1995, Thursday, Home Edition

ito removes 4th juror from simpson panel

BYLINE: By ANDREA FORD and JIM NEWTON, TIMES STAFF WRITERS

SECTION: Part A; Page 1; Metro Desk

LENGTH: 1758 words

Ending weeks of investigation and anticipation, Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito excused another juror from the murder trial of O.J. Simpson on Wednesday, this time dismissing a man about whom prosecutors had expressed deep reserva-tions.

The juror, a 46-year-old Long Beach man named Michael Knox who wore a San Francisco 49ers cap during a recent jury field trip, became the fourth member of the panel to be excused since the trial began, leaving eight remaining alter-nates.

Knox, who is black, was replaced by a 38-year-old white woman from the San Gabriel Valley who described herself as a “touchy-feely” kind of person and who has complained about the confinement of serving as a sequestered juror.

On the questionnaire completed by all prospective jurors, the San Gabriel Valley woman said she was stunned when she learned that Simpson was a suspect in the June 12 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
“It seemed impossible” that Simpson could have committed the crimes, the woman said, insisting nevertheless that she had no opinion about his guilt or innocence.

Knox was ousted on a day without testimony in the Simpson trial, but the wrangling inside and outside court continued. Robert Tourtelot, a lawyer for Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman, denounced defense attorneys for suggest-ing that his client once possessed Nazi paraphernalia, and lawyers for the two sides returned to court in the afternoon to wrangle over evidence-sharing, a long-running issue in the case.

Robert L. Shapiro, the lawyer who built the highly touted defense team, took full responsibility for the defense’s failu