..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Episode IV: Charles Bronson, My Ass!

Bogotá had Pablo Escobar, cocaine baron. New York: John Gotti, wiseguy. Chicago: Al Capone, an even tougher wiseguy. Oakland: Sonny Barger, Hell's Angel. Compton: Suge Knight, gangsta rap mogul.

How in the hell did our current Hollywood Public Enemy Number One end up to be Anthony Pellicano, a 62-year-old wiretapper for short, rich guys dumping their first wives?

Have things gotten so boring in this town from the corporate poohbahs ramming their groupthink and doublespeak down our throats that we have to wait with baited breath for the prosecution of some loudmouth private investigator with severe narcissistic personality disorder? One whose claim to fame in the real violence game is talking dirty to Hard Copy's Diane Dimond and having knowledge of journalist-turned-auteur Rod Lurie getting knocked off his bicycle?

This is a town that once had real tough folks on the streets and on the screen: Bugsy Siegel, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Jack Dragna, Shelly Winters, and many others. These dudes and babes could pack their mud. Say what you will about Suge Knight, but the guy behind the glad-handing Reggie Wright, Knight's chief of security, was always a just-released mainline con from the Black Guerilla Family who would kill you rather than look at you.

We had reason to be afraid of those animals!

But Pellicano?

Despite all his posturing with bimbos and outright lying to reporters about his prowess with a Louisville Slugger, Pellicano has always been a punk from Chicago who, as attorney Stephen Yagman is fond of saying, "escaped his punkdom and moved to L.A., where nobody knew he was a punk."

The only one who ever thought Pellicano was tough besides the press was Don Simpson, and the late producer spent his life having to look up to Tom Cruise.

All that hasn't mattered recently, because the beast is hungry, and federal prosecutors know how to feed the beast.

This week, I'm referring to the big news that came out on Monday afternoon when the Los Angeles U.S. attorney's office claimed in a document that they had corroborated an informant's information that Pellicano was ordering a gangland hit. This fatwa was supposedly called from his jail cell and was against Alexander Proctor, who is Pellicano's co-defendant in a state case involving the alleged threats in 2002 against former Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch.

News of the shot that Pellicano was supposedly calling from the slam made the front page of the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times jumped in with its now-standard secret weapon, summaries of F.B.I. interviews that had been slipped to NYT reporters. (Full disclosure: I write for the NYT on a free-lance basis)

This time the F.B.I. interview was with the informant, Sandra Carradine, the 58-year-old ex-girlfriend of Pellicano. In the NYT, Carradine is quoted via the F.B.I. summaries as stating that Pellicano not only wanted to ice Proctor, but also wanted to do the nasty on F.B.I. agents and the lead federal prosecutor, Daniel Saunders.

There's one problem with all this noise. Why would Pellicano want to kill Proctor over the state case? Pellicano and Proctor haven't even been arraigned on those charges, and the D.A.'s office seems to be in no hurry to present any evidence per the charges. If Pellicano was going to risk life in prison for conspiracy to commit murder, wouldn't he be wanting to off witnesses on the wiretapping and racketeering case, which carries a potential sentence five times as long as the maximum three-year stretch he would have to pull for conspiring to put a fish on Busch's windshield?

On the reliability level, the only thing that separates Ms. Carradine and the McMartin pre-schoolers who told Manhattan Beach police in 1984 that they had been put on planes and flown to visit child molesters is that Carradine is a convicted perjurer - one who is trying to reduce her sentence by informing on Pellicano.

The Pellicano prosecutors have a response for all this: They say they have corroboration of Carradine's claims.

But they're not telling us what that corroboration is. As Steven Gruel, Pellicano's attorney, said on Tuesday night, if the federal government has evidence outside of Carradine's claims - claims that were first revealed in February -- "Why aren't they putting it in a criminal complaint?"

That's easy. Nobody cares about the evidence when you got Public Enemy Number One (that's PENO to you, bub) in the hole. They care about the news. Doesn't matter whether the news is true or false, as long as it has juice and helps us sleep at night knowing that PENO is safely locked up.

Caveat Emptor: There is something about the banner headline of Pellicano ordering gangland hits through his 58-year-old girlfriend, one who was once married to that well-known Hollywood goombah Keith Carradine, that has all the smell of Fonzie jumping the shark.

(Yeah, you heard me, I'm playing the Fonzie card.)

Once the press elevates Pellicano to the Pablo Escobar level and Pellicano doesn't deliver, things can go to hell in a hand basket in a lot less time than when Happy Days bit the dust.

What's been left out of the latest government news about Pellicano ordering a hit, news that was buried on page 17 of a reply to a discovery motion, is that the government has pushed this button before.

In 2003, Pellicano was out on bail awaiting trial on possession of illegal explosives. The feds claimed he was intimidating witnesses, and wanted his bail revoked. The judge in the case didn't buy any of the allegations.

After Pellicano pled guilty and received a 30-month sentence, he was suddenly rushed into solitary confinement. Why? Because there was a rumor that Pellicano and a confederate on the outside were planning to bust Pellicano out of the Taft Correctional Facility by landing a helicopter on the Taft prison yard.

Just like Bronson in Breakout, right?

Never happened.

Pellicano is a creep, and he sure looks guilty of wiretapping, and he's probably going to either cop a plea or get convicted. (Of those who choose to go to trial in the Central District of California, 95 per cent are convicted of some sort of crime, according to government statistics.)

But no matter what happens to Pellicano, he'll always be a lame Public Enemy Number One - a PENO who, according to a report attributed to his ex-wife, Kat Pellicano, has a three-inch penis. .

Sleep easy, dear reader.

- by Ross Johnson
May 10, 2006

Ross Johnson is a veteran Hollywood journlaist and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire magazine, New York magazine, Los Angeles magazine, Premiere magazine, and USA Today. He has recently created a website called LA Indie which houses analysis of documents relating to the Pellicano case. You can reach him by e-mail here.

 

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