TV Anchor Sets Sting for Colorful Promoter in Pornography Tale

In an industry that uses cardboard scenery and camera angles to turn diminutive actors into legendary tough guys, Gil Cabot may be the ultimate illusionist.

For two decades, the colorful promoter has used a variety of entertainment industry gimmicks to snare clients. But police and others say Cabot, once depicted in a flashy brochure as “Supermanager” in tights and a cape, is really a sophisticated con man.

“All he has ever done is preyed upon people for his own good,” said San Fernando Superior Court Judge Robert D. Fratianne, who sent Cabot to prison in 1982.

Now, however, the man described in one investigator’s report as “an Artful Dodger” has himself been flimflammed by a 28-year-old newswoman from Moline, Ill. Jann Carl turned the tables last year when Cabot allegedly offered to arrange for the destruction of sexually explicit pictures of her for $30,000.

Confident that no pictures existed, the KTLA-TV anchorwoman pretended to be frightened of exposure in a series of taped telephone conversations with Cabot that led to his arrest June 20 on charges of attempted extortion and conspiracy. He is free on bail while awaiting trial in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Carl played her part so well that Cabot’s attorney, Rowan K. Klein, said his client was entrapped by the slender, blonde newswoman. “She sniffed. She cried on the phone,” Klein said.

“Maybe Mr. Cabot underestimated me,” Carl said.

“A guy like me can’t win,” said the 43-year-old, mustachioed promoter. “It’s OK for the FBI to lie and manipulate” by having an agent pose as Carl’s fiance during the alleged extortion drama. “But when I lie and manipulate, it’s wrong.”

Despite his anger toward Carl, Cabot said he registered a script last year with the Writers Guild called “Film at 11,” about a distressed anchorwoman named Fran.

His involvement with Carl is the latest episode in a career that led from the recording industry in Tampa, Fla., to Sunset Boulevard. There, police said, Cabot preyed upon celebrities--he posed as KABC-TV anchorwoman Tawny Little’s husband and used actress Jaclyn Smith’s name to obtain appliances and a car.

However, research into his past shows that he is not just a Hollywood predator. He has worked, with no success, at selling real-life stories to television. And an actress on a once well-known television situation comedy, who requested anonymity, said he “did as many good things as bad things” for her.

His downfall, according to some people who knew him over the years, was his desire to be more than another businessman selling small film projects around Hollywood. These people say he wanted to be a star himself.

Some of Cabot’s former clients say they were lured by glossy promotions, one of which depicted Cabot as the “Supermanager.” Trade publications reported him winging from coast to coast, signing film deals. Only later, say his critics, did they come to believe that Cabot was more duper than super.

“We project what we know can be,” Cabot said.

True to that code, Cabot’s version of his life unfolds like a film script of a hard-driving, bankable executive with projects swirling on several continents at once.

He greets a visitor to his Topanga Canyon home dressed in a white robe. He has thick hair with streaks of gray and seems almost frail, despite his 6-foot height. His manner is urgent and intense.

He recalls his beginnings at 15 as host of a Tampa television dance show called “Gil Cabot’s Campus Corner.” Then, he says, came a career as the producer of million-selling records. Now the man who billed himself as a “star behind a star” says he is looking for projects for East German figure skater Katarina Witt, who he maintains wants to do movies with American muscle men such as Sylvester Stallone.

But Cabot’s claims often collapse when the curtain is pulled back.

Not Acquainted, Friend Says

Jirina Ribbens, a friend of Witt’s in New York, said that when she asked Witt about Cabot, “she didn’t even know who I was talking about.”

Telephone inquiries to libraries, newspapers and television stations in Tampa failed to turn up any evidence of a television dance show featuring Cabot.

Even the successful apparently are not immune to his charms. Anchorwoman Little said he tried to talk her into letting him represent her. “He’s a heck of an actor,” she said.

He was later arrested when he posed as Little’s husband to buy $800 worth of suits at Bullock’s, police said. The charge became part of the 1982 grand theft case against Cabot, police said. He was placed on probation but violated it, resulting in a two-year prison sentence at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, police said.

Cabot later used Jaclyn Smith’s name without permission to coax appliances out of Whirlpool Corp. and a car out of Chrysler Corp. for a charity ranch, police say. The charity is called CHARM. Cabot said his goal is to set up a retreat for victims of child abuse. So far, however, there is no land for the ranch, and police say Cabot’s mother is driving the Chrysler. Authorities are expected to launch an investigation of CHARM.

Cabot denies using Smith’s name in a promotion.

“He’s the best con artist I have ever personally seen at work,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Phil Rabichow, who prosecuted Cabot in 1982.

Police say his techniques are legendary. A client who pressed for an explanation of nearly $8,000 in expenditures of his money received a telegram from a Cabot associate saying that Cabot had been in a plane crash “while supervising the filming of opening sequences for his new ABC television series,” according to a source close to the investigation of the Carl case. Cabot was the only survivor and was in the hospital, the telegram said. “I trust you will continue to exercise patience and understanding,” the note concluded.

Authorities say there is no evidence of such a plane crash.

Pop Record Produced

But there is substance to some of Cabot’s contentions. For instance, he was involved in the distribution of a pop music record called “Love (Can Make You Happy),” by a group called Mercy in 1969.

Jack Sigler, the one-time Tampa high school student who wrote the song, said the record was put out on Cabot’s tiny Sundi label but that Cabot did not produce it, as he claimed. Further, he said, Cabot later formed a band with his wife and called it Mercy, sparking a 3-year-long lawsuit over rights to the name.

But what confounds some of his critics is that he has been able to deliver on other occasions. An author who was trying to market an AIDS book was impressed with Cabot’s ability to place him on a morning talk show in Los Angeles, even before the book was in stores.

“Gil Cabot has never given me a reason to doubt him,” said Jenny Sherman, Cabot’s partner in a company that markets television movies of the week. So far, none has been produced.

Cabot said he makes ends meet by living off the royalties of his recordings.

Planned Talk Show

Cabot wanted to use Carl as host for an interview show to be called “Up Close and Personal,” for which he said he had lined up Whirlpool as a sponsor (which Whirlpool denies). But he said he was shown a videotape that was making the rounds of bachelor parties in Los Angeles. The star performer appeared to be Jann Carl, fresh out of a hot tub, cavorting in front of hidden cameras, Cabot said.

“I saw the jaw and I saw the mole,” he recalled. “I hit my machine with my fist and threw” the videotape.

Cabot was angry, he said, because he knew his project was doomed. Nobody would want an interviewer who had starred in a stag film, even unknowingly.

He said he discussed with Carl ways to get rid of the tape and of pictures that were taken from it for publication in a magazine, only as a favor to a distressed woman.

Carl, however, was not thankful. “This is the first time in my life someone has committed such a severe wrong against me personally. It’s my nature to stand firm.”

The daughter of a farm-equipment executive, Carl decided on journalism as a career at Moline Senior High School. But when she went for advice to the University of Missouri, a teacher discouraged her.

“That made me so mad that I knew that was what I wanted to do,” she said. “I was determined at that point.”

Has Iron Will

According to friends, that attitude is typical of a woman who presents a deceptively innocent face to the world. She excuses herself when she says “damn,” chooses restaurants for their onion rings, and counts as her favorite actors Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart. Behind all this, these people say, is an iron will.

At age 23, she became a street reporter for WLS-TV in Chicago, one of the nation’s most competitive news towns. A year later, she was wooed away by KABC-TV in Los Angeles, where she went to work on “Eye on L.A.,” the fast-paced “infotainment” show that specializes in stories about haunted houses and bikini-clad bathers.

“We joked that we would eventually do haunted bikinis,” Carl said.

She took the anchor chair next to Hal Fishman at KTLA two years later.

In April, 1988, a man calling himself Terry called her news director, Jeff Wald, about the sexually explicit video. Over the next few weeks, there was a series of calls that led from Terry to a man identified as Christopher Wright to Gil Cabot. When tapes of all three were played in court, witnesses said they sounded alike.

Carl said she never considered quietly paying off, just to ensure her privacy and safeguard her career from scandal. She never thought about telling the caller to lay off.

“I knew he would go on to someone else,” Carl said. “The next woman may not have a supportive boss, and she might pay it. It would be my fault.”

She decided to feign fear of exposure.

‘Need Your Help’

“I’m frightened,” she said in one tape-recorded conversation. “Gil, I really need your help.”

The plot was complex and carefully woven, police said. Cabot’s undoing, according to authorities, was his choice of a victim. He assumed “anyone in the business would have a Rolodex of partners,” said one officer.

But Carl said she was confident that no tapes could exist. She had been involved in one relationship for the past seven years, to television sales representative David Sears, whom she recently married.

Cabot and his attorney, Maurice J. Attie, were arrested after a meeting June 10 with Carl and an undercover FBI agent. The payment from Carl was discussed during that session, according to a tape played at Cabot’s preliminary hearing two weeks ago. Charges against Attie were dismissed after Los Angeles Municipal Judge Karl W. Jaeger concluded that there was not enough evidence that Attie knew what was going on.

Rowan K. Klein, Cabot’s attorney during the hearing, maintained that Carl entrapped Cabot. “Supposedly nothing my client said was true,” he said. “Yet Miss Carl took it upon herself to call him and plead to get these pictures back.”

Carl was never in fear, he said. “That’s one of the reasons there is no crime in this case.”

Ironically, even his critics praise Cabot as a dynamic man with a pot always boiling with ideas.

“He was bright and intuitive in ad campaigns,” said Dick Hieronymus, a record producer who worked with Cabot. “Had he stuck to promotion and been honest,” he would have been a success.

“The real problem is he wanted to be a superstar.”

OTHER TARGETS

TAWNEY LITTLE: Cabot wanted her to work with him. “He’s a heck of an actor,” she said.

JACLYN SMITH: Used her name without permission to coax companies to donate appliances and a car to his charity.

KATARINA WITT: Says he represents her in the United States. A friend said she doesn’t know him.