April 6, 2021 • 44 mins
Anthony Pellicano has dirt on some of Hollywood’s biggest names, and even after spending 17 years in prison, he’s still not talking. For decades, he was one of Tinseltown's most sought-after private investigators. His clients ranged from Tom Cruise to Michael Jackson, from Elizabeth Taylor to Courtney Love. But a raid of his Sunset Boulevard office in 2002 turned up explosives and eventually more than 150,000 illegal wiretaps. He walked out of prison on his 75th birthday, March 22, 2019. If he’d turned state’s evidence, he could have reduced his prison time, but that’s not how a personal code works, at least not for Anthony Pellicano.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from my Heart Radio. Longtime Hollywood private eye and
his term problem solver, Anthony Pellicano lives by a unique
code of honor, a code that has caused him a
tremendous amount of suffering and loss. In two thousand nineteen,
(00:25):
Pellicano was released from prison after serving a fifteen year
sentence for wire tapping, conspiracy, racketeering, and wire fraud. He
could have leveraged some of the dirt he had on
his famous clients in exchange for a shorter sentence, but
that simply wasn't an option for the Chicago raised and
(00:46):
proudly Sicilian Anthony Pellicano. In the early days, I was
very successful at locating missing people. So my career started
out really with that and audio surveillance countermeasures, which is,
you know, devulgating and a wire It's happy. I've got
articles about me and TV shows that it did back
in the seventies, you know, early some Yeah, I did
(01:09):
a lot of shows, a lot of talk shows. I
moved to California. First case I had was the Lorian case.
Who contacted you about that? Actually, John de Lorian did.
I just had moved out there, and my office called
me and told me that he wanted to talk to me.
And I told him that I was in California, and
(01:29):
they said, well, he's in California. I said, well, fancy
that anyway. So all my clothes and my you know,
furniture and all that were on the way out there
to be moved in. So I went out and bought
a suit and then went down to a law firm
where there's a bunch of guys sitting around a table
talking about FBI conspiracies, you know, British intelligence conspiracy and
(01:52):
all that bullshit. And so here's this, you know, a
little Sicilian kid from Chicago sitting at a table and
tell they're all full of ship. And I told him
that the Lorian Cohn, the government, the government con DeLorean
and the informant on both of them. So came to
pass that that's exactly what was true. And you know,
(02:12):
we won. When people wanted to contact you, how did
they contact you, Well, there were two methods, you know,
either word or mouth, which you know, after de Lorian
I was a hot ticket, or through attorneys, through agents,
through you know, personal managers, etcetera. Once I got known,
then it just spiraled up. You had an office, Yeah, sure,
(02:36):
I had a a huge office at Sunset. I had
that office for almost thirty years the Luckman Building. Yeah
you remember, huh. I was told that I was the
only guy in the building that paid the rent on
the first of the month every month. Yes. I got
a big kick out of that. When people would contact you,
I wonder sometimes like, at what point did you begin
(02:57):
to feel Because I do believe the research I've done,
You're obviously a very smart guy. You're a very tough guy.
You're a guy with a lot of principles. You you
went through hell because of your principles. I mean, you
really really tortured yourself as in service of your principles.
And I really believe that we'll see to me, the
most important thing in my life was honor. In my word,
it still is till today, because they took everything away,
(03:19):
and that's what I've got left, and that's all that
really I really cherish. When I had a client, you know,
and I wanted to work from, they became like a
member of my family. And nobody works with my family. Right.
If someone is reaching out to someone in that profession,
and what they're asking them to do is if not illegal,
it's dicey, it's illicit in some way. Well let me
(03:42):
let me stop you right there. Because I was a
private investigator, but I was really a problem solver, and
I use investigation as a tool. So when somebody came
to me, they came to me with a problem, you know,
And the first thing I did, like I do always,
I have to define the problem in order to solve it.
And I never told anybody what I was doing. I
(04:02):
never told attorneys what I were doing. I never told
clients what I was doing. I never even told my staff.
You know. I assigned people to different tasks, and nobody
knew whatever the next guy was doing. You sound like
a florist. People say I want some flowers, You deliver
the flowers, don't ask any questions. This is this is
this goes back to my you know, to my early
(04:23):
days where you know, that type of attitude was the
attitude I wanted to keep. What happened in the early
days that shaped that attitude. Well, I mean, I'm Sicilian,
and all of the attitudes that I attained, I guess
are used and cherished came from that life, and I
(04:43):
still have that attitude. This is an attitude that you
developed when where you're very young. As a matter of fact,
I was asked to and have written a novel which
will come out sometime, I guess in May. It's called
The neighborhoo It and it outlines, you know, the way
(05:04):
life was for me. Then this is a novel. It's not,
you know, a biographical thing in any stretch of imagination,
but it laid it out. And so you you developed
by association with people attitudes. And one of those attitudes was,
you know the attitude of keeping to yourself. You know,
(05:24):
sub rosa, everything is within you. You know, there's an
opera called Tourndo and he sings, my mystery lies within Me.
So that attitude kept with me. I I never never
forgot that, and I never forgot that attitude. What did
your dad do? My dad, he was a truck driver,
(05:44):
he was a doc foreman. He was, you know, a
salesman in the in the trucking business. And your mom
she was a housewife or she worked too. She worked too.
She worked for airline Pilots Associations for many years. But
you know, my mom and dad or divorced when I
was young, so I saw very little of my father
growing up. Did Yeah, what were you looking for? I mean,
(06:07):
I know that when my dad died. He died right
around the time that I started working in Los Angeles.
I mean, working on a more serious level, I wind
up seeking men to replace my father. I needed mentoring,
I needed advice. This was a critical time in my
life where the decisions I was making I could go
this way or that way. And my dad died. He
was only fifty, had cancer in three Right when I
(06:29):
went to l A, right when I'm surrounded by people
who are and I don't need to tell you, Hollywood
is the Harvard of bullshit. I mean, there's more people
full of ship out there than you can possibly imagine. Listen.
It took me an entire year to get used to that.
I was used to people saying, you know, giving you
their word and keeping it. I was used to people
(06:50):
telling you the truth. I I it took me a
year to get used to Hollywood, and it was a
tough year because of the attitude that I had when
I came across bullsh shit. You know, I reacted immediately
and I got a lot of people's attention because of that,
and that's why I think I would retain attained the
respect that I got because I was a no bullshit guy.
(07:12):
I was straight, right in your face, straight, and having
to deal with it as you had to deal with
it was cumbersome. The old man told me, he says,
you've gotta be more careful. I says, listen, the sharks
that we have in Chicago, don't compare it to the
sharks that are in Hollywood. You understand what I mean. Well,
(07:32):
I would say to people that if you want to
make money, and you want to make real money, go
to Wall Street. If you want to spend a lot
of time with beautiful women, go into the magazine business
and the modeling business. I said. If you want to
have power over people's lives, go to Washington money, sex, power.
But if you want the cocktail of all three, money,
(07:53):
sex and power, that's Hollywood, without any question, and I
would go out there. And the mistake I made was
I didn't realize that people will befriend you while you're
working together, and the moment what you're doing stops working,
the friendship is over. Well, you know, friendship, you can't
even equate people in Hollywood with friendship. I mean, the
(08:14):
guy that I'm closest to in the world is Ron Meyer.
He's like my brother. I mean, he took care of
me the whole time I was in prison, never stops
came to see me. You know. He was a stand up,
no bullshit man. He's a rare breed. Yeah. Yeah. But
getting back to father figures, I had lots of fathers,
you understand, because that's the way the family runs. You
(08:37):
had bosses, and you had this and that. But you know,
these were guys that I you know, I looked up
to and respected, and I respected that attitude and I
continue that attitude throughout my entire life. So going to
prison keeping my mouth shut was a no brainer for me.
At some point in your life, you pick up a
passion for, if not an obsession for gadgets and technology.
(09:00):
When does that start for you? Well, when I went
into the Army, I found out at that time I
had a high i Q. And they sat me down
and they asked me what did I wanted? What I
wanted to do? Well, I'm a street kit. All I
know is the street, right, And I looked around and
I saw a magazine that set electronics. So I said electronics,
not knowing the thing about it, and go in and
(09:23):
they may make me a cryptographer. Where we stationed well
at schooling in Fort Gordon, Georgia. But then I was
stationed in France and I avoided the Vietnam War because
of it. While in the army, I learned a lot
about electronics, and I learned a lot about cryptography obviously,
and when I came out, I started getting heavily involved in,
(09:43):
you know, audio surveillance. So when when people asked me
about wire tapping, you know, I've been wire tapping since
nineteen sixty, never stopped. And the interesting thing about that
is the person that I learned about a particular recording
to ICE was Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson was the person
(10:04):
who put the Sony eight hundred B recorders in the
White House not mixing. So a Sony eight hundred B
recorder had a remote jack, so if you want to
record telephone conversations, and at that time it was really
real as you can imagine, what I did is I
devised a device that when the phone was on hook,
(10:28):
you had a certain voltage, and when it's off hook,
the voltage drops and it turned the record around and
every time they hung up, it would shut off. So
let's go away, way back. One thing I'll say about
Hollywood movie making, that's one of the benefits of it
is you can at times get access to things you
never imagined. And I wanted to talk to guys who
(10:50):
are part of the joint New York State FBI Organized
Crime Task Force, and we wound up going to a
really non to script block on like thirty second Street,
ninth Avenue. You're the middle of nowhere. Everything's closed, the
deli's closed, the coffee shops closed, everybody's all work now.
It's eight o'clock at night. And I walk in and
I go into the room and everything's been set up
(11:11):
by the studio and I go in and these guys
are there and it's an FBI wire tap nest and
they had the equipment there and up above was a
sign and it would say diminish four and they would
list husband, wife, parishioner, clergy, lawyer, client, doctor, patient. It
(11:31):
would tell them when they had to turn down the
volume and not record that conversation. Yeah, but they didn't
quite do that. Well, No, I don't know that I'll
leave it to you. But my point is this is
back in nineteen mid nineties, you'd hear this weird set
you here, like a big one, which was the guy
picking up his phone and it's a dial tone and
you'd hear boo boo boo boo boo boo boo here,
(11:57):
and then they know, now he's recording the equipment to
be boarding and real real, And then you hear the
guy go, Frank, what are you doing? Hi, Tommy? How
you doing Tommy? I went out to stand down and
talk to Joey about that thing? What do you say
that things will take care of? What about that other thing?
What thing? The thing would ray? You know? And everything
was that thing, that thing that nobody said nothing, And
(12:20):
I thought, oh my god, I couldn't believe that this
is the FEDS wire tapping these guys, these mob guys houses. Well,
there was a law pass where they had to minimize
they would have to record for a certain length of
time and then shut it off and you know, if
they weren't talking about something, you know, interesting, But they
never did that. But I'm the guy who coined the
(12:40):
term of forensic audio, and I devised you know, programs
through analyze tape recordings. I did the the eight team
in a gap, I did the sarvantep. Was it easier
then when you started or did it become gradually easier
or harder to do this kind of work technologically in
the old days of the old phone opening. If you're
talking about your bugging and while you're tapping and all
(13:03):
that stuff, explain to my audience what the difference is. Okay,
A wire tap is recording both sides of a telephone conversation,
and a bug is usually involved in a rumor and enclosure.
In other words, you know you because smart guys didn't
really use the phone to communicate certain things. They would talk,
you know, in their home in a certain room. You
(13:26):
know when when people asked me to come and debug
their homes, and I had elaborate amount of equipment to
do it, and I found lots of wire tap and
bugging devices. But I would tell them, if you really
want to keep a secret, you go out to the
golf course and you're whispering each other's ear and you
say nothing, Okay, you want to really keep you know,
(13:49):
what is a Benjamin Frankly that says the only two
people that can keep a secret, you know, and a
three person situation is if two of them are dead.
But one time I went to uh Barrett Jackson, the
vintage car auctioneer. We were shooting a film in Phoenix
and we went to the legendary Barrett Jackson and they
showed us pictures of I don't think we saw the
(14:10):
actual car that Howard Hughes had commissioned, where he did
an array of batteries in the back of this buick
or whatever he had. He wanted to be able to
drive into the desert in Las Vegas and have meetings,
and he wanted to have the air conditioning on but
the car turned off, and he wanted to be able
to speak with no potential for being bugged or eavesdropped.
(14:32):
But if somebody really wanted to you would have figured
it out. But by then Hughes would have hired you
already and you'd be in his pocket, you'd be on
his staff. I've been involved in many of those adventures now.
But let me ask you, so, why are tapping or bugging?
Was it easier then when there was a simple bell
system in the old phone company. What's harder than or no? Well,
(14:53):
let me put it to you this way. When you
turn on a recorder, let's say you have on the tape.
You can listen for an hour, okay, you're going to
record an hour. That means you have to listen through
that hour, okay. So it's harder back then, because in
order to gather the information that you needed, you had
to listen to everything. So I devised a device and
(15:15):
you know, computer program where I could selectively record. In
other words, when you dial your mother, I didn't listen.
When you dial Domino's Pizza, I didn't listen because I
programmed all those telephone numbers in there, so if you
dial those numbers, it wouldn't record. So it's a matter
of efficiency, common sense, and logic to determine what you
(15:37):
want to do. I was ten times better than what
the FBI had, you know, and it was all encrypted,
by the way, so if somebody were to get the recordings,
they couldn't listen to him anyhow, only I could listen
to him. I would imagine that with the work you
were doing, you had people come into your life, and
there's a legitimate need for private investigation. There are things
(16:00):
that people are stealing from people, There are things, people
are cheating on them, marriages, you take a vow you this.
There's information that people are entitled to and they have
to take certain steps to get that information, and all
of that is legitimate and understandable. At the same time,
the relationship we might have had ends when the work
is over. Did people kind of distance themselves with you
when the dirty work, as far as they were concerned,
(16:21):
was done. Were there's some people that treat you that way?
Or were there other people who actually were gentlemanly in
an ongoing way. I made a lot of friends. But
let me just say one thing to you, which is
an adage that I used all the time. People love
you when they need you. That's say it all for
you that say it all that does say it. I'll
(16:42):
share Hollywood fixer Anthony Pelicano. I've talked to some pretty
tough characters, from Jimmy Cohn to Eline Stretch and Joe
Delessandro who went from juvenile delinquent to sex symbol and
talked about the first time he met the man who
made him famous, Andy Warhol. I never thought about it,
(17:06):
about the modeling thing. I had a couple of friends
in New York that introduced me to other people, and
and then one day one of these friends said, Hey,
I know this person that's uh making these campbell soup?
Can you know makes the candle sup? And I was
thinking we wore going to eat some soup, which I
(17:27):
was all for. Here more of my conversation with Joe
Delessandro that Here's the thing dot Org After the break,
Anthony Pellicano explains why he represented himself in court when
he was so well connected to some of Hollywood's most
powerful lawyers. I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to
(17:59):
Here's the Hang. In two thousand two, following up on
a tip, federal agents raided Anthony Pellicano's office on Sunset
Boulevard and found explosives in his safe. For such a
careful guy, it seemed like an uncharacteristic misstep. Well, there
wasn't any laughing judgment. The Sea four and the grenades
(18:20):
that I found were not mine. I tried to get
rid of them. I'm not gonna mention who they belonged to,
but I put them in and my evidence safe. They
were in an evidence safe in my laboratory and my
forensic laboratory. Now I didn't know that thirty FBI agents
were to come that day and with a search warrant
and find them. So it just was a matter of
(18:42):
time and circumstance and bad luck. When they went and
searched the vault or whatever it was, the safe and
got the Sea four in the grenades, well, they had
an array. I had an array of safe in my office,
and you know, I was commanded to open them up,
otherwise they were going to take a mountain and drill
the locks. So I just opened them all up. What
do they find in there other than the see four
in the grenades? Lots of things they contributed to the
(19:05):
case that took you down. No, not really. There's only
one thing in the in the and there that was
a recording that was it, and that that was because
the client wanted me to memorialize particular recording, which I
never did, by the way, and I had it on
a CD and he wanted to keep that for whatever purposes,
and I had it locked in my safe. But no,
(19:26):
I mean the actual search warrants entitled the government to
do just about anything, which they're always entitled to do
just about anything. You know, when you're fighting the federal government.
You're not going to win. You are just not going
to there the litigant with the deepest pockets. It's not there.
It's not It's not only that. But they have immense power,
(19:49):
and people don't realize this. They don't know. People don't
realize the immense power that the United States government has.
They can do just about anything they want and get
away with just about anything. They what I mean, there
was a lot of things that they did that they
didn't have the power to do, and they did it anyhow.
I remember a famous actress and she was divorcing her
(20:09):
famous husband, and she joked and said that when her
friends would call, let's say, her famous husband's name was Bob.
And she said to me that she used to joke
that when her friends would call, she would say She'd
say say hi to Bob, and they go, what because
he knew that she knew she was divorcing Bob. And
she said, well, he's listening in right now. They're they're
(20:29):
tapping my phone, So say hi to Bob. And they
don't laugh and joke, and she she was like right
out there that this whole thing was going on. Well,
a lot of people imagine it too. You know, they
assume the ratio from actual wire tapping to the truth
is probably. You know, when you get these phone calls
from people who say, you know, I think my phones
(20:51):
are being tapped, I tell them the same thing. I
could come out there with an array of equipment. I
can find it and the next morn and they can
reinstall it. So you know, anybody is susceptible to anything
under the right circumstances. Is everything wireless? Now, can someone
sit in a car out in front of your house
and listen to everything you say on the phone? Oh,
(21:12):
we can be able to do that back in the sixties, really, yes, sir?
Oh my god. Well, if you use your imagination, you know,
anything is possible. And and today, with technology as it
is today, oh my god, you can do just about
anything you want, anything you want. So you go on
trial and you get sentenced to go to prison the
(21:34):
first round, and then we're gonna talk about how you
get to the end of that line, and then they
dump this whole other thing on you for this ungodly
amount of time. When you're in prison the first time,
what were you convicted of? Well, that was for the
CEA for in the grenades, right, and so and that
was sentence was how long? Well? That was for three years?
And you wound observing how long? Well? I finished that
(21:55):
sentence and walked out the door, and there were two
marshals who brought me back downtown and then I was
indicted for the racketeerian and everything else. And so when
that happened, do you think that these were people who
did this just to funk with you because you wouldn't
cooperate with them? Were they out to get you without
any question? Because they came to me with all kinds
(22:15):
of deals, and I, you know, I wouldn't talk about
my clients or lawyers or judges or senators or presidential
candidates or any of the other people that I represented,
nor would I talk about Chicago. So they wanted me
to cooperate, and I wouldn't. I'll give you a one story.
(22:36):
I'm sitting in prison and they come in and grab
me and they locked me in a caged room and
they tell me that I have visitors, And I thought,
my families here? Why am I here? And they says no,
it took him, you know, an hour and a half
to get here. I says, well, if it's who I
think it is, then tell them that now they know
how long it's going to take them to get back.
(22:58):
And I wouldn't talk, so and they were fisted about
that obviously. So no, they tried all kinds of machinations
to get me to talk, but I never would. They
sent you to how long well I I did. Essentially
sounded ten years altogether. So I did a film once
again in terms of this motion picture access thing. I
(23:20):
went to what was then Rahway State Penitentiary. The guy
that was the director of communications escorted me through minimum
security with some officers. We had bodyguards, and my goal
was to interview people in minimum security. They had a
maximum security block in the distance. When you say minimum
you're talking about a camp, yeah, I mean, I'm sure
you can quote them. It was one of the most
(23:41):
mesmerizing and eye opening experiences of my lifetime and the
stories I heard and the things I learned. It was
one of the guys that was one of the head
of the guards and he said to me, everybody says
they're innocent. They all say they're innocent, He goes, but
you can tell the ones that really are innocent. I said,
how he said, the ones most of them complain that
they're innocent, because but after about a couple of months,
(24:03):
they settled them because they know they belong here, because
they know they did it, he said. The ones who
are truly innocent, he says, they never adjust, never, they
never accepted one day. They're bitter and miserable. Well, I don't,
I don't know that I would agree with that, because
everybody was bitter and miserable. You know, I was guilty,
you know, I I served my time. I was guilty.
(24:23):
They convicted me, and I was guilty. So but I
you don't You know, if you're a man, you don't
sit and cry about it. You do your time. What
you do in time. You're sitting now. You might go
through a lot of problems and pain while you're in prison,
but that's what you're essuchially doing. You've given up time
of your life. That's what you lose. You lose that time.
(24:45):
That time is never recoverable. But you know, I can
tell you that based on my experience, I only met
one innocent person the entire time I was in prison.
How did you know he was innocent? Because the guy
that actually committed the I'm confessed that they let him
out otherwise I wouldn't know. And by the way, you know,
when I was antisocial in prison, I didn't enjoin gangs.
(25:10):
I was my own guy. Were you asked to Oh God, yeah, sure,
but you know I I sith the claim I'm Sicilian
and I deal with Sicilians, So you know, go away.
And when you were in prison, did you have friends
and family on the inside, Well, there's there's a lot
of people that I knew that were in. But you know,
if somebody wants to hurt you, they're going to hurt you.
(25:32):
And I went through a lot of occasions where I
could have been hurt seriously, But you know, it's just
the way it is, and you have to live with that,
and you learn to live with that, and you learn
to get into what I would call a mindset where
this is where you are and this is where you're
going to stay for a period of time. Did they
offer you opportunities to talk and you could have gotten out,
(25:54):
Oh yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't have done a day
if I would have talked. But more I'm asking is
beyond the sentencing, is in an ongoing offer? Well they
tried a couple of times, yes, but that did work.
None of that work with me. You know, I was essentially,
you know, a closed mouth, you know, which you couldn't
pry open. And they learned that and I continue that
(26:18):
and I'm still that guy today. I'm the same man
that went in. I haven't changed my attitudes, my honor,
my word, and all of that is still the same.
So you know, you've got to be stand up or
you're not. You're gonna be honorable or you're not. That's
not a thing that you could learn. You're born with me.
I mean, there's lots of things in prison that would
(26:40):
make you, you know, give you pause. But that's just
the way it is. And by the way, I came
across more, you know, circumstances while I was free that
were more dangerous than when I was in prison. So
you know, I call it time and circumstance. Why did
you present yourself in court? You knew some pretty powerful lawyers,
(27:03):
and you had worked for some pretty powerful lawyers. What
happened to them? Yeah, but nobody knew more about me
than me. And I wasn't going to talk and I
wasn't going to interrogate my own clients. I told everybody
to tell the truth, and that's what I wanted everybody
to do. There's no sense of people going to prison
with me, I said, everybody, including my employees. You know,
(27:26):
they gave a bunch of people immunity anyhow. But I
told everybody to tell the truth. Why do you have
to suffer because I'm going to suffer. I'm not I'm
not that kind of guy and I and I wouldn't
testify against somebody else to save myself. But did you
also think that a lawyer would try to get you
to cut a deal? Like did you say to use
off y waste time? Because any lawyer is going to
say cut the deal, Well, they're gonna be frank with you.
(27:48):
I don't know anybody smart enough they handle that case.
And what I did as I went through the machinations,
I did subcross examinations and I saved clients by asking
them questions that would exonerate them, you know, So I
did that. I still was the loyal guy that I
(28:08):
always had been, even though I was in trial and
I knew it wasn't gonna win. There was no way
of winning. Did I know that the judge was going
to slam me? No? I thought that I was going
to do about five years. I never thought that I
would get the kind of time I did. But I
realized when the prosecutors told me that they were going
to very aggressively sentence me, you know, and I just
(28:31):
looked at him and do that. I said, do the
funk what you want to do. They're not going to
hurt me. I'm going to do whatever time the judge
gives me, and that's going to be it. But getting
back to being represented, what could a lawyer do that
could help me? Nothing? What could I do for myself?
I could be myself and help me. So no, I
mean there was a lot of a ton of lawyers
(28:53):
that wanted to represent me for the publicity alone. You
got out of prison, win. Oh. I got to prison
my seventy feet birthday in March two thousand nine. So
it was pre pandemic. Yeah, although in two thousand in
seventeen that we had an outbreak of the flu that
was awful. As a matter of fact, I don't know
(29:15):
how to say this without something glib, but it was
worse than what it is here. I had a fever
for two days, a hundred two fever for two days,
and had that flu for six weeks, so it was
pretty awful. And everybody on the tier who gets the flu,
I mean, someone on the tier gets the flu. Everybody
in the tear gets the flu. There's no escaping anything.
(29:37):
When you're you're in a cage and there's no way
escaping it. You've got the very poor circulation, ventilation, et cetera.
So you're gonna get it. So you just get it,
and you just bear through it. And in prison, they
don't give you any medication. You know, they tell you
drink lots of water. I don't know if you ever
heard that growing up, when you have the flu, drink
(29:59):
lots of water. That's what they tell you. That. They
don't even give you a title. And now, now I
would imagine that there are people who erroneously compare the
pandemic to being locked down. That's kind of silly. They'll
sit there and say, hey, you get out of prison,
and now we're in a pandemic and everybody's locked down again.
But I'm sure like they don't know what lockdown is
until you go to prison, No fucking way, exactly. I
(30:23):
was in a hole for two of the years that
I was in prison. Why, But that's that's the reason
you know that. You know, that's serious time when you're
locked in a room with a little porthole and nobody
comes to the door except to feed you. So yeah,
I would imagine. Another thing is that when you're in prison.
This is what occurred to me. This may sound tried.
(30:43):
I mean, there's a lot of horrible things about prison.
I have always had. I've always maintained this fascination. Someone
said to me, if you had your life to do
over again, what are some of the other careers. There's
a little bit of a bouquet here of careers. I
might have psychiatrists. I find that very stating, and one
of them is to be in penology, to be the
warden of a prison. Oh you don't want to do that. Well.
(31:06):
What I wanted to explore was this idea that when
I did the Rahway thing again, because which was so informative.
You know, one guy says to me, I'm with a
white guy that looks like Gene Hackman. I said, what
did you do? He said he was? He said I
was a stick up man. He said, what was the game?
He said, One rule was always have your gun with you.
Never be with the biggest crime was to not have
your gun. I said, why, He goes, because if I
(31:28):
go to the gas station and the little old ladies
there by the counter and she has nine hundred bucks
in the register and none of my gun, that costs
me nine hundred bucks. He said, always have your gun
with you. Another guy said to me, when you get up,
this was my favorite one. He I go, what's the
first thing you do when you get out of prison?
He says, you get a girlfriend. And it was a pause, like, oh,
of course I get that. He goes, no, no, not
for that. He said, you need to have someone to
(31:49):
funnel all your paperwork through. I can't get a lease,
I can't get a bank account, I can't get a
phone turned on. You gotta get a girlfriend who you
can get everything turned on for you, so you can
kind of funnel all your administrative stuff through. But my
point is is that I was kind of shattered by
the idea that one guy said to me. He goes,
you go into prison. He said, you're in prison for
(32:09):
a month, two months, three months. You're sorry, if it's
a non violent craft, you didn't murder somebody. He goes,
you're in prison, four months, five months, six months. You're
really sorry, said, You're in prison for nine months. He said,
you're so fucking sorry. He goes, you keep me there
one day more than a year. He goes, I ain't
sorry anymore. Fuck you that you made me stay in
here all this time for something mine or like drugs
(32:32):
or what have you. My attitude was just the opposite.
I knew I was going to be in prison for
a long time, and I just settled in. What I
wanted to do is keep my mind active. My mind
was my most valuable possession. How did you do that? Oh?
I did all kinds of things. I read like two
thousand bucks while I was at prison. I wrote, I
did lots of high level geometry that took like five
(32:55):
hours a day. One problem took me nine days to
figure out. And when the lights go out, I developed
a technique and I call them, you know, memory movies.
It took me seven years to do this, by the way,
where I could selectively play back things in my life
(33:15):
that made me happy and ignore the things that didn't
make me happy. You play all kinds of games, mind games,
you know, to keep yourself sane and keep yourself active
and keep your brain working. Because otherwise you stagnate. And
if you're a guy that only wants to work out
all day, that's all you're gonna do. And at the
(33:38):
end of your prison term, that's all you got in
your pocket is that you worked out. You might have
developed some muscles, you might have developed a more healthy diet,
you understand, but that's all you got. And I refuse
to walk out of prison. You know, dumber than I
was when I came in, So I continue to educate myself.
(34:01):
Former private investigator Anthony Pellicano. If you're enjoying this conversation,
tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the
thing on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts or
wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Anthony
Pellicano talks about finding ways to care for others while
(34:21):
in prison. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's
the thing. Anthony Pellicano refused to talk when he was
in prison, not just to the Feds, but to other
(34:42):
inmates as well well. I was in rooms by myself,
I was at cells, I was for a lot of time,
I was in a cage, okay, but there are times
that you're in a you're in a dormitory situation, whether
you're with the roommate, you know, two guys, four guys,
room full of people. I would imagine that for me,
the temptation to pass time would be just to talk
(35:03):
to people and shoot the ship. And did you find
you were incapable of telling them about your life because
of confidentiality, Well, listen if you're if you're gonna ask
me that I talk about what I did, No for
a mirrorment of reasons, because usually when people are asking
you questions while you're in prison, so that they can
use that information to try to get a better deal
(35:24):
for themselves to get out of jail. So you learn,
you learned, you just tell nobody a fucking thing. Yeah.
But I had such respect when I was in prison
because of my attitudes and because of who I was,
that I had many many sons. I had many, many
guys that I would mentor many many you know people
(35:45):
that I would advise about cases. I got like six
guys out of prison, and that was pretty much because
I was bored. I mean, I give you this one occasion,
the white shot caller came to me and says, you know,
I'd like you to help me. I said, I'm not interested.
He says, well, could you can I tell you about it?
I said no, I'm not interested. So he kept coming
(36:06):
back to me and coming back to me, and one
day he said the following words to me that changed
my mind. He says, my mother and father have been
calling my lawyer and and he won't return their phone calls.
So I says, well, they gotta have try harder, and
I walked away. He says, don't We've tried, We've done this.
I says, well, at the end of the day, what
(36:29):
is your lawyer doing for you? And then he paused,
and I said, wait a minute. When's the last time
you saw your lawyer. He says, a year and a
half ago. I said, excuse me, I told him. I said,
you said, your mother and father are calling your lawyer
and he's not taking their calls or you're speaking to
her receptions. Yes, you bring me their telephone bills for
(36:51):
three months, and you go downstairs and you asked for
a list of all your phone calls because you say
you were calling to well. Three months later, he got
all of this accumulated. So I wrote a letter to
the judge for him, saying that he hasn't seen his lawyer.
His lawyer has been inattentive, he won't answer his mother's
phone calls. I write this nice letter to the judge.
(37:13):
Two days later, gets called before the judge, and a
judge realms out his attorney and realms out the prosecutor.
He said, young man, how long have you been you
know here in the MDC. He says, five years, Your
hon her, he says, time served. Walked that kid out
the door that day. Okay, but yeah, but that's you
(37:34):
see that that all that took was logic and common sense. Well,
and also that you cared. He was lucky to meet you.
You cared in the way that you hoped your lawyer
would care. You just said the magic four letter word care.
Because people say they're gonna do this prison reform, they're
gonna do all of these things. I said, it has
to start with the four letter word. Somebody has to care.
(37:58):
Somebody has to go to somebody who goes to somebody
who goes to somebody, and that whole line of people
that you go through, they all have to care. If
they if somebody along that line doesn't care, you're dead.
You know, you can go all the way to a congressman.
And if your congressman doesn't care, you're dead, that's amazing,
(38:19):
that's amazing. I read somewhere that you were approached about
getting involved somehow in the Michael Jackson case. Represented Michael Jackson,
you representative, and what happened. What I do is when
somebody is accused of something, and I didn't handle that
many criminal cases, so you understand I do just the
opposite of what you would think. I try to prove
their guilty. I go out and do everything in my
(38:41):
power to prove that they're guilty. If I can't, then
the chances that they'll tell me the truth. But it
came a point in time with Michael Jackson that I
learned some things and I quit. I fired him. No,
I learned the truth. I fired him, and I was
end of that. And by the way, I gotta offered
(39:02):
tons of money to tell that story, and I have
never well, I you're the only person I know who
by closing his mouth and simply doing nothing and saying
nothing has cost yourself tens of millions of dollars. But anyway,
a plus years of your life. Um, you got at
a prison in two thousand nineteen, and of course we're
(39:23):
in the COVID. Now are you back to work? Are
you back to work in your old career, my old career.
I can't be a private investigator. You're not allowed to.
You've been barred from doing that. But I still can
do negotiations in troubleshooting, which is what I do, consulting.
I have a website that says Pellicano Negotiations and that's
what I do. And I think you might have read
(39:44):
about my most recent adventure with that. So yeah, But
to be honest with you, I have no desire in
the world to be a private investigator again ever, no
desire whatsoever. And like I told you before, I use
investigation as a tool to solve a problem. So let's
(40:07):
say I need somebody to gather information for me, I
could just hire them. But to the extent that you
do sound, I mean you do. You clearly sound so strong, steely, competent, smart, mature, sober,
you all these things. Was there a little part of
you that got a little high on the career you had?
Did you get high on it a little bit? No,
(40:28):
not at all, not at all. No, No, it was
a job. No, you were about to talk to say
things that I wish that I've never done. No, but
I didn't like everybody I worked for. I can tell
you that there are a lot of celebrities that I
had disdained, But you know, the lawyers who hired me
or the agents that hired me. I had to do
(40:49):
the job. And by the way, that's the name of
the game. You know. You come to me with a problem.
I solved the problem. You pay me, and that's how
I support my family. That's how I took care of
and that was my livelihood. So that's why you know.
But you know, there's nothing that I regret. There are
things that I would have done differently. I wouldn't have
(41:12):
given the degree of loyalty to certain people who didn't
deserve it. But I'm that guy. I can't be anything
different to the day I die. I'm going to be
that loyal guy. If I'm loyal to you, I'm going
to remain loyal to you unless you do one thing,
and that's the killer lie. Once you lie to me
(41:35):
one time, you're dead. What's your bucket list? Now you're
at a prison after this ungodly length of time, what
do you want to do with the time in your life. Now.
I want peace. That's all I want is peace. I
want to, you know, survive as long as I can survive.
I want to have the relationship with my children. I
(41:55):
want to have the relationship with the few friends that
I have. And that's it. How were your children when
you were in prison? What were they like when you
were in prison? Uh, they were devastated. It was terrible
for them, you know, and you know, if you want
to use the term regret, I'm sorry that they went
through what they went through. But you know, they came
(42:15):
to people. More people came to me and told me talk,
you know, and all you gotta do is talk. And
I'm not that guy. And I you know, my children
realized that, they realized that their father is an honorable
guy and he's just not going to do it. They
didn't like it, Nobody liked it. But that's what I am.
And I'm going to remain that. What's the first thing
(42:35):
you did when you got out of prison? What's the
thing you said? Just I gotta go do this? What
you do? You have a nice meal in a beautiful restaurant.
Ronnie Yer loves to tell the story, I'm out of prison,
they take me to lunch, and then he takes me
to Italian restaurant after eating gruel for all these years, Right,
I'm complaining about the food. He loves to tell this
fucking story. I said, this is ship. He looks at me.
(42:58):
You've been eating beans and race for all these years,
and you're complaining. I said, well, this is I'm gonna
tell you, and I cook this is ship. Well, I'm
gonna stay in touch with you. I'm coming out there
in a few weeks. I'm gonna look you up out there.
And what I wanted to advance is one promise from you.
You find the restaurant that you know you're not going
to complain about, because I want you to have a
(43:18):
decent meal. If you complain about that fucking meal, I
we'll start crying. Okay, partner, Okay, deal. Anthony Pellicano's novel
The Neighborhood is coming out later this spring. I'm Alec
Baldwin and this is here's the thing. We're produced by
Kathleen Russo, Carrie donohue, and Zach McNeice. Our engineer is
(43:41):
Frank Imperial. Thanks for listening. Nat
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from my Heart Radio. Longtime Hollywood private eye and
his term problem solver, Anthony Pellicano lives by a unique
code of honor, a code that has caused him a
tremendous amount of suffering and loss. In two thousand nineteen,
(00:25):
Pellicano was released from prison after serving a fifteen year
sentence for wire tapping, conspiracy, racketeering, and wire fraud. He
could have leveraged some of the dirt he had on
his famous clients in exchange for a shorter sentence, but
that simply wasn't an option for the Chicago raised and
(00:46):
proudly Sicilian Anthony Pellicano. In the early days, I was
very successful at locating missing people. So my career started
out really with that and audio surveillance countermeasures, which is,
you know, devulgating and a wire It's happy. I've got
articles about me and TV shows that it did back
in the seventies, you know, early some Yeah, I did
(01:09):
a lot of shows, a lot of talk shows. I
moved to California. First case I had was the Lorian case.
Who contacted you about that? Actually, John de Lorian did.
I just had moved out there, and my office called
me and told me that he wanted to talk to me.
And I told him that I was in California, and
(01:29):
they said, well, he's in California. I said, well, fancy
that anyway. So all my clothes and my you know,
furniture and all that were on the way out there
to be moved in. So I went out and bought
a suit and then went down to a law firm
where there's a bunch of guys sitting around a table
talking about FBI conspiracies, you know, British intelligence conspiracy and
(01:52):
all that bullshit. And so here's this, you know, a
little Sicilian kid from Chicago sitting at a table and
tell they're all full of ship. And I told him
that the Lorian Cohn, the government, the government con DeLorean
and the informant on both of them. So came to
pass that that's exactly what was true. And you know,
(02:12):
we won. When people wanted to contact you, how did
they contact you, Well, there were two methods, you know,
either word or mouth, which you know, after de Lorian
I was a hot ticket, or through attorneys, through agents,
through you know, personal managers, etcetera. Once I got known,
then it just spiraled up. You had an office, Yeah, sure,
(02:36):
I had a a huge office at Sunset. I had
that office for almost thirty years the Luckman Building. Yeah
you remember, huh. I was told that I was the
only guy in the building that paid the rent on
the first of the month every month. Yes. I got
a big kick out of that. When people would contact you,
I wonder sometimes like, at what point did you begin
(02:57):
to feel Because I do believe the research I've done,
You're obviously a very smart guy. You're a very tough guy.
You're a guy with a lot of principles. You you
went through hell because of your principles. I mean, you
really really tortured yourself as in service of your principles.
And I really believe that we'll see to me, the
most important thing in my life was honor. In my word,
it still is till today, because they took everything away,
(03:19):
and that's what I've got left, and that's all that
really I really cherish. When I had a client, you know,
and I wanted to work from, they became like a
member of my family. And nobody works with my family. Right.
If someone is reaching out to someone in that profession,
and what they're asking them to do is if not illegal,
it's dicey, it's illicit in some way. Well let me
(03:42):
let me stop you right there. Because I was a
private investigator, but I was really a problem solver, and
I use investigation as a tool. So when somebody came
to me, they came to me with a problem, you know,
And the first thing I did, like I do always,
I have to define the problem in order to solve it.
And I never told anybody what I was doing. I
(04:02):
never told attorneys what I were doing. I never told
clients what I was doing. I never even told my staff.
You know. I assigned people to different tasks, and nobody
knew whatever the next guy was doing. You sound like
a florist. People say I want some flowers, You deliver
the flowers, don't ask any questions. This is this is
this goes back to my you know, to my early
(04:23):
days where you know, that type of attitude was the
attitude I wanted to keep. What happened in the early
days that shaped that attitude. Well, I mean, I'm Sicilian,
and all of the attitudes that I attained, I guess
are used and cherished came from that life, and I
(04:43):
still have that attitude. This is an attitude that you
developed when where you're very young. As a matter of fact,
I was asked to and have written a novel which
will come out sometime, I guess in May. It's called
The neighborhoo It and it outlines, you know, the way
(05:04):
life was for me. Then this is a novel. It's not,
you know, a biographical thing in any stretch of imagination,
but it laid it out. And so you you developed
by association with people attitudes. And one of those attitudes was,
you know the attitude of keeping to yourself. You know,
(05:24):
sub rosa, everything is within you. You know, there's an
opera called Tourndo and he sings, my mystery lies within Me.
So that attitude kept with me. I I never never
forgot that, and I never forgot that attitude. What did
your dad do? My dad, he was a truck driver,
(05:44):
he was a doc foreman. He was, you know, a
salesman in the in the trucking business. And your mom
she was a housewife or she worked too. She worked too.
She worked for airline Pilots Associations for many years. But
you know, my mom and dad or divorced when I
was young, so I saw very little of my father
growing up. Did Yeah, what were you looking for? I mean,
(06:07):
I know that when my dad died. He died right
around the time that I started working in Los Angeles.
I mean, working on a more serious level, I wind
up seeking men to replace my father. I needed mentoring,
I needed advice. This was a critical time in my
life where the decisions I was making I could go
this way or that way. And my dad died. He
was only fifty, had cancer in three Right when I
(06:29):
went to l A, right when I'm surrounded by people
who are and I don't need to tell you, Hollywood
is the Harvard of bullshit. I mean, there's more people
full of ship out there than you can possibly imagine. Listen.
It took me an entire year to get used to that.
I was used to people saying, you know, giving you
their word and keeping it. I was used to people
(06:50):
telling you the truth. I I it took me a
year to get used to Hollywood, and it was a
tough year because of the attitude that I had when
I came across bullsh shit. You know, I reacted immediately
and I got a lot of people's attention because of that,
and that's why I think I would retain attained the
respect that I got because I was a no bullshit guy.
(07:12):
I was straight, right in your face, straight, and having
to deal with it as you had to deal with
it was cumbersome. The old man told me, he says,
you've gotta be more careful. I says, listen, the sharks
that we have in Chicago, don't compare it to the
sharks that are in Hollywood. You understand what I mean. Well,
(07:32):
I would say to people that if you want to
make money, and you want to make real money, go
to Wall Street. If you want to spend a lot
of time with beautiful women, go into the magazine business
and the modeling business. I said. If you want to
have power over people's lives, go to Washington money, sex, power.
But if you want the cocktail of all three, money,
(07:53):
sex and power, that's Hollywood, without any question, and I
would go out there. And the mistake I made was
I didn't realize that people will befriend you while you're
working together, and the moment what you're doing stops working,
the friendship is over. Well, you know, friendship, you can't
even equate people in Hollywood with friendship. I mean, the
(08:14):
guy that I'm closest to in the world is Ron Meyer.
He's like my brother. I mean, he took care of
me the whole time I was in prison, never stops
came to see me. You know. He was a stand up,
no bullshit man. He's a rare breed. Yeah. Yeah. But
getting back to father figures, I had lots of fathers,
you understand, because that's the way the family runs. You
(08:37):
had bosses, and you had this and that. But you know,
these were guys that I you know, I looked up
to and respected, and I respected that attitude and I
continue that attitude throughout my entire life. So going to
prison keeping my mouth shut was a no brainer for me.
At some point in your life, you pick up a
passion for, if not an obsession for gadgets and technology.
(09:00):
When does that start for you? Well, when I went
into the Army, I found out at that time I
had a high i Q. And they sat me down
and they asked me what did I wanted? What I
wanted to do? Well, I'm a street kit. All I
know is the street, right, And I looked around and
I saw a magazine that set electronics. So I said electronics,
not knowing the thing about it, and go in and
(09:23):
they may make me a cryptographer. Where we stationed well
at schooling in Fort Gordon, Georgia. But then I was
stationed in France and I avoided the Vietnam War because
of it. While in the army, I learned a lot
about electronics, and I learned a lot about cryptography obviously,
and when I came out, I started getting heavily involved in,
(09:43):
you know, audio surveillance. So when when people asked me
about wire tapping, you know, I've been wire tapping since
nineteen sixty, never stopped. And the interesting thing about that
is the person that I learned about a particular recording
to ICE was Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson was the person
(10:04):
who put the Sony eight hundred B recorders in the
White House not mixing. So a Sony eight hundred B
recorder had a remote jack, so if you want to
record telephone conversations, and at that time it was really
real as you can imagine, what I did is I
devised a device that when the phone was on hook,
(10:28):
you had a certain voltage, and when it's off hook,
the voltage drops and it turned the record around and
every time they hung up, it would shut off. So
let's go away, way back. One thing I'll say about
Hollywood movie making, that's one of the benefits of it
is you can at times get access to things you
never imagined. And I wanted to talk to guys who
(10:50):
are part of the joint New York State FBI Organized
Crime Task Force, and we wound up going to a
really non to script block on like thirty second Street,
ninth Avenue. You're the middle of nowhere. Everything's closed, the
deli's closed, the coffee shops closed, everybody's all work now.
It's eight o'clock at night. And I walk in and
I go into the room and everything's been set up
(11:11):
by the studio and I go in and these guys
are there and it's an FBI wire tap nest and
they had the equipment there and up above was a
sign and it would say diminish four and they would
list husband, wife, parishioner, clergy, lawyer, client, doctor, patient. It
(11:31):
would tell them when they had to turn down the
volume and not record that conversation. Yeah, but they didn't
quite do that. Well, No, I don't know that I'll
leave it to you. But my point is this is
back in nineteen mid nineties, you'd hear this weird set
you here, like a big one, which was the guy
picking up his phone and it's a dial tone and
you'd hear boo boo boo boo boo boo boo here,
(11:57):
and then they know, now he's recording the equipment to
be boarding and real real, And then you hear the
guy go, Frank, what are you doing? Hi, Tommy? How
you doing Tommy? I went out to stand down and
talk to Joey about that thing? What do you say
that things will take care of? What about that other thing?
What thing? The thing would ray? You know? And everything
was that thing, that thing that nobody said nothing, And
(12:20):
I thought, oh my god, I couldn't believe that this
is the FEDS wire tapping these guys, these mob guys houses. Well,
there was a law pass where they had to minimize
they would have to record for a certain length of
time and then shut it off and you know, if
they weren't talking about something, you know, interesting, But they
never did that. But I'm the guy who coined the
(12:40):
term of forensic audio, and I devised you know, programs
through analyze tape recordings. I did the the eight team
in a gap, I did the sarvantep. Was it easier
then when you started or did it become gradually easier
or harder to do this kind of work technologically in
the old days of the old phone opening. If you're
talking about your bugging and while you're tapping and all
(13:03):
that stuff, explain to my audience what the difference is. Okay,
A wire tap is recording both sides of a telephone conversation,
and a bug is usually involved in a rumor and enclosure.
In other words, you know you because smart guys didn't
really use the phone to communicate certain things. They would talk,
you know, in their home in a certain room. You
(13:26):
know when when people asked me to come and debug
their homes, and I had elaborate amount of equipment to
do it, and I found lots of wire tap and
bugging devices. But I would tell them, if you really
want to keep a secret, you go out to the
golf course and you're whispering each other's ear and you
say nothing, Okay, you want to really keep you know,
(13:49):
what is a Benjamin Frankly that says the only two
people that can keep a secret, you know, and a
three person situation is if two of them are dead.
But one time I went to uh Barrett Jackson, the
vintage car auctioneer. We were shooting a film in Phoenix
and we went to the legendary Barrett Jackson and they
showed us pictures of I don't think we saw the
(14:10):
actual car that Howard Hughes had commissioned, where he did
an array of batteries in the back of this buick
or whatever he had. He wanted to be able to
drive into the desert in Las Vegas and have meetings,
and he wanted to have the air conditioning on but
the car turned off, and he wanted to be able
to speak with no potential for being bugged or eavesdropped.
(14:32):
But if somebody really wanted to you would have figured
it out. But by then Hughes would have hired you
already and you'd be in his pocket, you'd be on
his staff. I've been involved in many of those adventures now.
But let me ask you, so, why are tapping or bugging?
Was it easier then when there was a simple bell
system in the old phone company. What's harder than or no? Well,
(14:53):
let me put it to you this way. When you
turn on a recorder, let's say you have on the tape.
You can listen for an hour, okay, you're going to
record an hour. That means you have to listen through
that hour, okay. So it's harder back then, because in
order to gather the information that you needed, you had
to listen to everything. So I devised a device and
(15:15):
you know, computer program where I could selectively record. In
other words, when you dial your mother, I didn't listen.
When you dial Domino's Pizza, I didn't listen because I
programmed all those telephone numbers in there, so if you
dial those numbers, it wouldn't record. So it's a matter
of efficiency, common sense, and logic to determine what you
(15:37):
want to do. I was ten times better than what
the FBI had, you know, and it was all encrypted,
by the way, so if somebody were to get the recordings,
they couldn't listen to him anyhow, only I could listen
to him. I would imagine that with the work you
were doing, you had people come into your life, and
there's a legitimate need for private investigation. There are things
(16:00):
that people are stealing from people, There are things, people
are cheating on them, marriages, you take a vow you this.
There's information that people are entitled to and they have
to take certain steps to get that information, and all
of that is legitimate and understandable. At the same time,
the relationship we might have had ends when the work
is over. Did people kind of distance themselves with you
when the dirty work, as far as they were concerned,
(16:21):
was done. Were there's some people that treat you that way?
Or were there other people who actually were gentlemanly in
an ongoing way. I made a lot of friends. But
let me just say one thing to you, which is
an adage that I used all the time. People love
you when they need you. That's say it all for
you that say it all that does say it. I'll
(16:42):
share Hollywood fixer Anthony Pelicano. I've talked to some pretty
tough characters, from Jimmy Cohn to Eline Stretch and Joe
Delessandro who went from juvenile delinquent to sex symbol and
talked about the first time he met the man who
made him famous, Andy Warhol. I never thought about it,
(17:06):
about the modeling thing. I had a couple of friends
in New York that introduced me to other people, and
and then one day one of these friends said, Hey,
I know this person that's uh making these campbell soup?
Can you know makes the candle sup? And I was
thinking we wore going to eat some soup, which I
(17:27):
was all for. Here more of my conversation with Joe
Delessandro that Here's the thing dot Org After the break,
Anthony Pellicano explains why he represented himself in court when
he was so well connected to some of Hollywood's most
powerful lawyers. I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to
(17:59):
Here's the Hang. In two thousand two, following up on
a tip, federal agents raided Anthony Pellicano's office on Sunset
Boulevard and found explosives in his safe. For such a
careful guy, it seemed like an uncharacteristic misstep. Well, there
wasn't any laughing judgment. The Sea four and the grenades
(18:20):
that I found were not mine. I tried to get
rid of them. I'm not gonna mention who they belonged to,
but I put them in and my evidence safe. They
were in an evidence safe in my laboratory and my
forensic laboratory. Now I didn't know that thirty FBI agents
were to come that day and with a search warrant
and find them. So it just was a matter of
(18:42):
time and circumstance and bad luck. When they went and
searched the vault or whatever it was, the safe and
got the Sea four in the grenades, well, they had
an array. I had an array of safe in my office,
and you know, I was commanded to open them up,
otherwise they were going to take a mountain and drill
the locks. So I just opened them all up. What
do they find in there other than the see four
in the grenades? Lots of things they contributed to the
(19:05):
case that took you down. No, not really. There's only
one thing in the in the and there that was
a recording that was it, and that that was because
the client wanted me to memorialize particular recording, which I
never did, by the way, and I had it on
a CD and he wanted to keep that for whatever purposes,
and I had it locked in my safe. But no,
(19:26):
I mean the actual search warrants entitled the government to
do just about anything, which they're always entitled to do
just about anything. You know, when you're fighting the federal government.
You're not going to win. You are just not going
to there the litigant with the deepest pockets. It's not there.
It's not It's not only that. But they have immense power,
(19:49):
and people don't realize this. They don't know. People don't
realize the immense power that the United States government has.
They can do just about anything they want and get
away with just about anything. They what I mean, there
was a lot of things that they did that they
didn't have the power to do, and they did it anyhow.
I remember a famous actress and she was divorcing her
(20:09):
famous husband, and she joked and said that when her
friends would call, let's say, her famous husband's name was Bob.
And she said to me that she used to joke
that when her friends would call, she would say She'd
say say hi to Bob, and they go, what because
he knew that she knew she was divorcing Bob. And
she said, well, he's listening in right now. They're they're
(20:29):
tapping my phone, So say hi to Bob. And they
don't laugh and joke, and she she was like right
out there that this whole thing was going on. Well,
a lot of people imagine it too. You know, they
assume the ratio from actual wire tapping to the truth
is probably. You know, when you get these phone calls
from people who say, you know, I think my phones
(20:51):
are being tapped, I tell them the same thing. I
could come out there with an array of equipment. I
can find it and the next morn and they can
reinstall it. So you know, anybody is susceptible to anything
under the right circumstances. Is everything wireless? Now, can someone
sit in a car out in front of your house
and listen to everything you say on the phone? Oh,
(21:12):
we can be able to do that back in the sixties, really, yes, sir?
Oh my god. Well, if you use your imagination, you know,
anything is possible. And and today, with technology as it
is today, oh my god, you can do just about
anything you want, anything you want. So you go on
trial and you get sentenced to go to prison the
(21:34):
first round, and then we're gonna talk about how you
get to the end of that line, and then they
dump this whole other thing on you for this ungodly
amount of time. When you're in prison the first time,
what were you convicted of? Well, that was for the
CEA for in the grenades, right, and so and that
was sentence was how long? Well? That was for three years?
And you wound observing how long? Well? I finished that
(21:55):
sentence and walked out the door, and there were two
marshals who brought me back downtown and then I was
indicted for the racketeerian and everything else. And so when
that happened, do you think that these were people who
did this just to funk with you because you wouldn't
cooperate with them? Were they out to get you without
any question? Because they came to me with all kinds
(22:15):
of deals, and I, you know, I wouldn't talk about
my clients or lawyers or judges or senators or presidential
candidates or any of the other people that I represented,
nor would I talk about Chicago. So they wanted me
to cooperate, and I wouldn't. I'll give you a one story.
(22:36):
I'm sitting in prison and they come in and grab
me and they locked me in a caged room and
they tell me that I have visitors, And I thought,
my families here? Why am I here? And they says no,
it took him, you know, an hour and a half
to get here. I says, well, if it's who I
think it is, then tell them that now they know
how long it's going to take them to get back.
(22:58):
And I wouldn't talk, so and they were fisted about
that obviously. So no, they tried all kinds of machinations
to get me to talk, but I never would. They
sent you to how long well I I did. Essentially
sounded ten years altogether. So I did a film once
again in terms of this motion picture access thing. I
(23:20):
went to what was then Rahway State Penitentiary. The guy
that was the director of communications escorted me through minimum
security with some officers. We had bodyguards, and my goal
was to interview people in minimum security. They had a
maximum security block in the distance. When you say minimum
you're talking about a camp, yeah, I mean, I'm sure
you can quote them. It was one of the most
(23:41):
mesmerizing and eye opening experiences of my lifetime and the
stories I heard and the things I learned. It was
one of the guys that was one of the head
of the guards and he said to me, everybody says
they're innocent. They all say they're innocent, He goes, but
you can tell the ones that really are innocent. I said,
how he said, the ones most of them complain that
they're innocent, because but after about a couple of months,
(24:03):
they settled them because they know they belong here, because
they know they did it, he said. The ones who
are truly innocent, he says, they never adjust, never, they
never accepted one day. They're bitter and miserable. Well, I don't,
I don't know that I would agree with that, because
everybody was bitter and miserable. You know, I was guilty,
you know, I I served my time. I was guilty.
(24:23):
They convicted me, and I was guilty. So but I
you don't You know, if you're a man, you don't
sit and cry about it. You do your time. What
you do in time. You're sitting now. You might go
through a lot of problems and pain while you're in prison,
but that's what you're essuchially doing. You've given up time
of your life. That's what you lose. You lose that time.
(24:45):
That time is never recoverable. But you know, I can
tell you that based on my experience, I only met
one innocent person the entire time I was in prison.
How did you know he was innocent? Because the guy
that actually committed the I'm confessed that they let him
out otherwise I wouldn't know. And by the way, you know,
when I was antisocial in prison, I didn't enjoin gangs.
(25:10):
I was my own guy. Were you asked to Oh God, yeah, sure,
but you know I I sith the claim I'm Sicilian
and I deal with Sicilians, So you know, go away.
And when you were in prison, did you have friends
and family on the inside, Well, there's there's a lot
of people that I knew that were in. But you know,
if somebody wants to hurt you, they're going to hurt you.
(25:32):
And I went through a lot of occasions where I
could have been hurt seriously, But you know, it's just
the way it is, and you have to live with that,
and you learn to live with that, and you learn
to get into what I would call a mindset where
this is where you are and this is where you're
going to stay for a period of time. Did they
offer you opportunities to talk and you could have gotten out,
(25:54):
Oh yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't have done a day
if I would have talked. But more I'm asking is
beyond the sentencing, is in an ongoing offer? Well they
tried a couple of times, yes, but that did work.
None of that work with me. You know, I was essentially,
you know, a closed mouth, you know, which you couldn't
pry open. And they learned that and I continue that
(26:18):
and I'm still that guy today. I'm the same man
that went in. I haven't changed my attitudes, my honor,
my word, and all of that is still the same.
So you know, you've got to be stand up or
you're not. You're gonna be honorable or you're not. That's
not a thing that you could learn. You're born with me.
I mean, there's lots of things in prison that would
(26:40):
make you, you know, give you pause. But that's just
the way it is. And by the way, I came
across more, you know, circumstances while I was free that
were more dangerous than when I was in prison. So
you know, I call it time and circumstance. Why did
you present yourself in court? You knew some pretty powerful lawyers,
(27:03):
and you had worked for some pretty powerful lawyers. What
happened to them? Yeah, but nobody knew more about me
than me. And I wasn't going to talk and I
wasn't going to interrogate my own clients. I told everybody
to tell the truth, and that's what I wanted everybody
to do. There's no sense of people going to prison
with me, I said, everybody, including my employees. You know,
(27:26):
they gave a bunch of people immunity anyhow. But I
told everybody to tell the truth. Why do you have
to suffer because I'm going to suffer. I'm not I'm
not that kind of guy and I and I wouldn't
testify against somebody else to save myself. But did you
also think that a lawyer would try to get you
to cut a deal? Like did you say to use
off y waste time? Because any lawyer is going to
say cut the deal, Well, they're gonna be frank with you.
(27:48):
I don't know anybody smart enough they handle that case.
And what I did as I went through the machinations,
I did subcross examinations and I saved clients by asking
them questions that would exonerate them, you know, So I
did that. I still was the loyal guy that I
(28:08):
always had been, even though I was in trial and
I knew it wasn't gonna win. There was no way
of winning. Did I know that the judge was going
to slam me? No? I thought that I was going
to do about five years. I never thought that I
would get the kind of time I did. But I
realized when the prosecutors told me that they were going
to very aggressively sentence me, you know, and I just
(28:31):
looked at him and do that. I said, do the
funk what you want to do. They're not going to
hurt me. I'm going to do whatever time the judge
gives me, and that's going to be it. But getting
back to being represented, what could a lawyer do that
could help me? Nothing? What could I do for myself?
I could be myself and help me. So no, I
mean there was a lot of a ton of lawyers
(28:53):
that wanted to represent me for the publicity alone. You
got out of prison, win. Oh. I got to prison
my seventy feet birthday in March two thousand nine. So
it was pre pandemic. Yeah, although in two thousand in
seventeen that we had an outbreak of the flu that
was awful. As a matter of fact, I don't know
(29:15):
how to say this without something glib, but it was
worse than what it is here. I had a fever
for two days, a hundred two fever for two days,
and had that flu for six weeks, so it was
pretty awful. And everybody on the tier who gets the flu,
I mean, someone on the tier gets the flu. Everybody
in the tear gets the flu. There's no escaping anything.
(29:37):
When you're you're in a cage and there's no way
escaping it. You've got the very poor circulation, ventilation, et cetera.
So you're gonna get it. So you just get it,
and you just bear through it. And in prison, they
don't give you any medication. You know, they tell you
drink lots of water. I don't know if you ever
heard that growing up, when you have the flu, drink
(29:59):
lots of water. That's what they tell you. That. They
don't even give you a title. And now, now I
would imagine that there are people who erroneously compare the
pandemic to being locked down. That's kind of silly. They'll
sit there and say, hey, you get out of prison,
and now we're in a pandemic and everybody's locked down again.
But I'm sure like they don't know what lockdown is
until you go to prison, No fucking way, exactly. I
(30:23):
was in a hole for two of the years that
I was in prison. Why, But that's that's the reason
you know that. You know, that's serious time when you're
locked in a room with a little porthole and nobody
comes to the door except to feed you. So yeah,
I would imagine. Another thing is that when you're in prison.
This is what occurred to me. This may sound tried.
(30:43):
I mean, there's a lot of horrible things about prison.
I have always had. I've always maintained this fascination. Someone
said to me, if you had your life to do
over again, what are some of the other careers. There's
a little bit of a bouquet here of careers. I
might have psychiatrists. I find that very stating, and one
of them is to be in penology, to be the
warden of a prison. Oh you don't want to do that. Well.
(31:06):
What I wanted to explore was this idea that when
I did the Rahway thing again, because which was so informative.
You know, one guy says to me, I'm with a
white guy that looks like Gene Hackman. I said, what
did you do? He said he was? He said I
was a stick up man. He said, what was the game?
He said, One rule was always have your gun with you.
Never be with the biggest crime was to not have
your gun. I said, why, He goes, because if I
(31:28):
go to the gas station and the little old ladies
there by the counter and she has nine hundred bucks
in the register and none of my gun, that costs
me nine hundred bucks. He said, always have your gun
with you. Another guy said to me, when you get up,
this was my favorite one. He I go, what's the
first thing you do when you get out of prison?
He says, you get a girlfriend. And it was a pause, like, oh,
of course I get that. He goes, no, no, not
for that. He said, you need to have someone to
(31:49):
funnel all your paperwork through. I can't get a lease,
I can't get a bank account, I can't get a
phone turned on. You gotta get a girlfriend who you
can get everything turned on for you, so you can
kind of funnel all your administrative stuff through. But my
point is is that I was kind of shattered by
the idea that one guy said to me. He goes,
you go into prison. He said, you're in prison for
(32:09):
a month, two months, three months. You're sorry, if it's
a non violent craft, you didn't murder somebody. He goes,
you're in prison, four months, five months, six months. You're
really sorry, said, You're in prison for nine months. He said,
you're so fucking sorry. He goes, you keep me there
one day more than a year. He goes, I ain't
sorry anymore. Fuck you that you made me stay in
here all this time for something mine or like drugs
(32:32):
or what have you. My attitude was just the opposite.
I knew I was going to be in prison for
a long time, and I just settled in. What I
wanted to do is keep my mind active. My mind
was my most valuable possession. How did you do that? Oh?
I did all kinds of things. I read like two
thousand bucks while I was at prison. I wrote, I
did lots of high level geometry that took like five
(32:55):
hours a day. One problem took me nine days to
figure out. And when the lights go out, I developed
a technique and I call them, you know, memory movies.
It took me seven years to do this, by the way,
where I could selectively play back things in my life
(33:15):
that made me happy and ignore the things that didn't
make me happy. You play all kinds of games, mind games,
you know, to keep yourself sane and keep yourself active
and keep your brain working. Because otherwise you stagnate. And
if you're a guy that only wants to work out
all day, that's all you're gonna do. And at the
(33:38):
end of your prison term, that's all you got in
your pocket is that you worked out. You might have
developed some muscles, you might have developed a more healthy diet,
you understand, but that's all you got. And I refuse
to walk out of prison. You know, dumber than I
was when I came in, So I continue to educate myself.
(34:01):
Former private investigator Anthony Pellicano. If you're enjoying this conversation,
tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the
thing on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts or
wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Anthony
Pellicano talks about finding ways to care for others while
(34:21):
in prison. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's
the thing. Anthony Pellicano refused to talk when he was
in prison, not just to the Feds, but to other
(34:42):
inmates as well well. I was in rooms by myself,
I was at cells, I was for a lot of time,
I was in a cage, okay, but there are times
that you're in a you're in a dormitory situation, whether
you're with the roommate, you know, two guys, four guys,
room full of people. I would imagine that for me,
the temptation to pass time would be just to talk
(35:03):
to people and shoot the ship. And did you find
you were incapable of telling them about your life because
of confidentiality, Well, listen if you're if you're gonna ask
me that I talk about what I did, No for
a mirrorment of reasons, because usually when people are asking
you questions while you're in prison, so that they can
use that information to try to get a better deal
(35:24):
for themselves to get out of jail. So you learn,
you learned, you just tell nobody a fucking thing. Yeah.
But I had such respect when I was in prison
because of my attitudes and because of who I was,
that I had many many sons. I had many, many
guys that I would mentor many many you know people
(35:45):
that I would advise about cases. I got like six
guys out of prison, and that was pretty much because
I was bored. I mean, I give you this one occasion,
the white shot caller came to me and says, you know,
I'd like you to help me. I said, I'm not interested.
He says, well, could you can I tell you about it?
I said no, I'm not interested. So he kept coming
(36:06):
back to me and coming back to me, and one
day he said the following words to me that changed
my mind. He says, my mother and father have been
calling my lawyer and and he won't return their phone calls.
So I says, well, they gotta have try harder, and
I walked away. He says, don't We've tried, We've done this.
I says, well, at the end of the day, what
(36:29):
is your lawyer doing for you? And then he paused,
and I said, wait a minute. When's the last time
you saw your lawyer. He says, a year and a
half ago. I said, excuse me, I told him. I said,
you said, your mother and father are calling your lawyer
and he's not taking their calls or you're speaking to
her receptions. Yes, you bring me their telephone bills for
(36:51):
three months, and you go downstairs and you asked for
a list of all your phone calls because you say
you were calling to well. Three months later, he got
all of this accumulated. So I wrote a letter to
the judge for him, saying that he hasn't seen his lawyer.
His lawyer has been inattentive, he won't answer his mother's
phone calls. I write this nice letter to the judge.
(37:13):
Two days later, gets called before the judge, and a
judge realms out his attorney and realms out the prosecutor.
He said, young man, how long have you been you
know here in the MDC. He says, five years, Your
hon her, he says, time served. Walked that kid out
the door that day. Okay, but yeah, but that's you
(37:34):
see that that all that took was logic and common sense. Well,
and also that you cared. He was lucky to meet you.
You cared in the way that you hoped your lawyer
would care. You just said the magic four letter word care.
Because people say they're gonna do this prison reform, they're
gonna do all of these things. I said, it has
to start with the four letter word. Somebody has to care.
(37:58):
Somebody has to go to somebody who goes to somebody
who goes to somebody, and that whole line of people
that you go through, they all have to care. If
they if somebody along that line doesn't care, you're dead.
You know, you can go all the way to a congressman.
And if your congressman doesn't care, you're dead, that's amazing,
(38:19):
that's amazing. I read somewhere that you were approached about
getting involved somehow in the Michael Jackson case. Represented Michael Jackson,
you representative, and what happened. What I do is when
somebody is accused of something, and I didn't handle that
many criminal cases, so you understand I do just the
opposite of what you would think. I try to prove
their guilty. I go out and do everything in my
(38:41):
power to prove that they're guilty. If I can't, then
the chances that they'll tell me the truth. But it
came a point in time with Michael Jackson that I
learned some things and I quit. I fired him. No,
I learned the truth. I fired him, and I was
end of that. And by the way, I gotta offered
(39:02):
tons of money to tell that story, and I have
never well, I you're the only person I know who
by closing his mouth and simply doing nothing and saying
nothing has cost yourself tens of millions of dollars. But anyway,
a plus years of your life. Um, you got at
a prison in two thousand nineteen, and of course we're
(39:23):
in the COVID. Now are you back to work? Are
you back to work in your old career, my old career.
I can't be a private investigator. You're not allowed to.
You've been barred from doing that. But I still can
do negotiations in troubleshooting, which is what I do, consulting.
I have a website that says Pellicano Negotiations and that's
what I do. And I think you might have read
(39:44):
about my most recent adventure with that. So yeah, But
to be honest with you, I have no desire in
the world to be a private investigator again ever, no
desire whatsoever. And like I told you before, I use
investigation as a tool to solve a problem. So let's
(40:07):
say I need somebody to gather information for me, I
could just hire them. But to the extent that you
do sound, I mean you do. You clearly sound so strong, steely, competent, smart, mature, sober,
you all these things. Was there a little part of
you that got a little high on the career you had?
Did you get high on it a little bit? No,
(40:28):
not at all, not at all. No, No, it was
a job. No, you were about to talk to say
things that I wish that I've never done. No, but
I didn't like everybody I worked for. I can tell
you that there are a lot of celebrities that I
had disdained, But you know, the lawyers who hired me
or the agents that hired me. I had to do
(40:49):
the job. And by the way, that's the name of
the game. You know. You come to me with a problem.
I solved the problem. You pay me, and that's how
I support my family. That's how I took care of
and that was my livelihood. So that's why you know.
But you know, there's nothing that I regret. There are
things that I would have done differently. I wouldn't have
(41:12):
given the degree of loyalty to certain people who didn't
deserve it. But I'm that guy. I can't be anything
different to the day I die. I'm going to be
that loyal guy. If I'm loyal to you, I'm going
to remain loyal to you unless you do one thing,
and that's the killer lie. Once you lie to me
(41:35):
one time, you're dead. What's your bucket list? Now you're
at a prison after this ungodly length of time, what
do you want to do with the time in your life. Now.
I want peace. That's all I want is peace. I
want to, you know, survive as long as I can survive.
I want to have the relationship with my children. I
(41:55):
want to have the relationship with the few friends that
I have. And that's it. How were your children when
you were in prison? What were they like when you
were in prison? Uh, they were devastated. It was terrible
for them, you know, and you know, if you want
to use the term regret, I'm sorry that they went
through what they went through. But you know, they came
(42:15):
to people. More people came to me and told me talk,
you know, and all you gotta do is talk. And
I'm not that guy. And I you know, my children
realized that, they realized that their father is an honorable
guy and he's just not going to do it. They
didn't like it, Nobody liked it. But that's what I am.
And I'm going to remain that. What's the first thing
(42:35):
you did when you got out of prison? What's the
thing you said? Just I gotta go do this? What
you do? You have a nice meal in a beautiful restaurant.
Ronnie Yer loves to tell the story, I'm out of prison,
they take me to lunch, and then he takes me
to Italian restaurant after eating gruel for all these years, Right,
I'm complaining about the food. He loves to tell this
fucking story. I said, this is ship. He looks at me.
(42:58):
You've been eating beans and race for all these years,
and you're complaining. I said, well, this is I'm gonna
tell you, and I cook this is ship. Well, I'm
gonna stay in touch with you. I'm coming out there
in a few weeks. I'm gonna look you up out there.
And what I wanted to advance is one promise from you.
You find the restaurant that you know you're not going
to complain about, because I want you to have a
(43:18):
decent meal. If you complain about that fucking meal, I
we'll start crying. Okay, partner, Okay, deal. Anthony Pellicano's novel
The Neighborhood is coming out later this spring. I'm Alec
Baldwin and this is here's the thing. We're produced by
Kathleen Russo, Carrie donohue, and Zach McNeice. Our engineer is
(43:41):
Frank Imperial. Thanks for listening. Nat
Host
Alec Baldwin
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