Michael Jackson’s fixer returns: why Anthony Pellicano has Hollywood running scared…

View original article on telegraph.co.uk

Anthony Pellicano, the ruthless former private investigator to the stars – looks set to fan the flames anew tomorrow, when he will finally walk free following a 15-year prison

It was he who handled Jackson’s negotiations with Evan Chandler, who accused the King of Pop of sexually abusing his 13-year-old son Jordan “Jordy” Chandler in 1993 – accusations Pellicano later labelled “an extortion attempt”. Indeed, Pellicano knows everything about everyone. He pops up in unexpected places in US history, offering his opinion to select committees – on the Watergate tapes, on JFK’S assassination. When he was arrested in 2002, FBI agents found more than 150,000 pages of transcriptions taken from covert recordings. Many powerful men have reason to be afraid of what they contain.

“For 30 years, I’ve been a sin eater for the rich and famous,” Pellicano said in 2003 on being jailed for crimes ranging from possession of plastic explosives and hand grenades, to wiretapping, racketeering, protection, intimidation, witness tampering and evidence destruction. “I just ate one sin too many.”
[…] In the early Nineties, Bert Fields – known as “Hollywood’s scariest lawyer”, who has represented Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman – hired Pellicano, who Reed describes as a “terrifying character”. A specialist in electronic surveillance – especially phone tapping, it would transpire – Pellicano would cultivate police sources while letting his reputation for violent intimidation do some of his work for him. In a 1992 GQ interview, he boasted: “I’m an expert with a knife. I can shred your face.” …
[…] Before his conviction, the private eye had sought to “disappear” problems from clients including Steven Spielberg, Kevin Costner and Arnold Schwarzenegger – the latter of whom he alleges to have “personal stuff ” on that, had he made known, would have stopped him from becoming governor of California.
[…] In one leaked audiotape from a conversation with Courtney Love, discussing the services she wanted from a private eye, he told her: “I’m an old-style Sicilian… My clients are my family and that’s it.”
[…] The former attorney for Birmingham, Alabama, said in court that Pellicano had enhanced undercover recordings of Ku Klux Klansman Thomas Blanton Jr – in which he implicated himself in the 1963 bombing of a Baptist church that killed four schoolgirls.

Meanwhile, rumours have continued to swirl. He went on record to deny having been the unnamed private eye who, it was alleged, had been shadowing OJ Simpson’s wife Nicole Brown Simpson when she and Ronald Goldman were murdered. The lead investigator in the murder trial later alleged that Pellicano had bugged Brown Simpson’s home with the same equipment that he had employed at Neverland.
[…] In February 2018, Pellicano told The Hollywood Reporter that he had “fired” Jackson because he was disgusted by truths “even darker” than those alleged in the Chandler case. “I was offered $500,000 to tell the whole story by a tabloid and I declined,” he said. It echoed a 2008 Newsweek interview: “I quit because I found out some truths… He did something far worse to young boys than molest them.”

“A lot of people are quaking that I’m going to disclose lots of things when I get out,” Pellicano said last year, adding, in typical chilling fashion: “They’ll just have to keep quaking, won’t they?”