Gossip Journalist Finds Himself at Center of Saga : Tabloids: A writer who says he is doing an expose on the business has been charged with stealing story ideas.

He was brash, controversial. As a writer he liked to incite anger--to “twist the knife,” as he put it, in vitriolic free-lance columns for the National Review attacking feminists, gays and other targets. And increasingly, Stuart Goldman gravitated to investigative journalism; he went undercover to research widely seen exposes of a TV evangelist and, later, an alleged UFO cult.

Early last year, Goldman, with typical zeal, undertook what he claimed was a long-range, undercover expose of the gossip media--the tabloid newspapers and TV shows that feed with shark-like frenzy on Los Angeles’ vast entertainment community. It was a project, Goldman said, that drew him into the seamy underside of journalism, a world tainted with greed, spying and payoffs to sources.

For months, he claims, he gathered material while free-lancing for the Enquirer, Fox Television’s “A Current Affair,” the Globe, the Star, Paramount’s “Hard Copy” and other organizations. Ultimately, however, Goldman got burned. On March 8, the 45-year-old writer was arrested at his Studio City apartment by Secret Service agents and Los Angeles police who confiscated a personal computer, floppy disks, Rolodexes and a loaded .38-caliber handgun.

Goldman now faces seven felony charges for allegedly entering Fox Television computers by telephone and stealing story ideas. One of those ideas, according to court records, was a fictitious tip involving “Ronald Reagan Jr.’s Lover,” planted by investigators as bait. Prosecutors say Goldman tried to sell the bogus tip to the Globe.

The case not only raises computer-age issues of privacy, idea ownership and journalistic ethics; it is a saga befitting the tabloids, a battle of the influential network versus the self-proclaimed muckraker.

Free from jail and awaiting an Oct. 1 preliminary hearing, Goldman denies the charge of trying to sell stolen information. His attorney, Joseph Yanny, claims Goldman was given authority to use the Fox computer while working as a free-lancer--authority that was never revoked.

“The evidence will show that this was one very elaborate setup intended to get Stuart Goldman,” Yanny said. “It was decided to get Stuart Goldman and to make an example of him--not only to him from doing what he was trying to do with respect to the (expose), but also to make an example of him to other reporters out there.”

Fox denies staging a setup.

Says Goldman: “These people will look very foolish when they get into court. I’m the good guy and I’m going to prove it. This is going to be the biggest soap opera you ever saw.”

On the latter point, he may be right. In the wake of the arrest, rumors are flying--about telephones being wiretapped, documents disappearing. Goldman has hired a private investigator; so has the National Enquirer, one alleged target of the expose. CBS’s “60 Minutes” has hauled in its cameras, filming a possible expose of its own.

Meanwhile, two associate producers at “A Current Affair” who were closely involved with Goldman--one of them a key prosecution witness--were laid off last month by Fox. Network representatives called the move a restructuring; one insider expressed belief that the layoffs were prompted by the furor over the Goldman case.

The drama, as bizarre as a purported Elvis sighting, is casting light on a journalistic world that few ever see. The ubiquitous tabloid medium probes zealously into the private lives of celebrities, painting an impressionistic portrait for millions. The Enquirer alone boasts a circulation of 4.3 million copies a week. Yet the tabloids so carefully guard their own secrets that the Enquirer and other organizations will not disclose how many reporters they assign to Los Angeles, never mind how they work or what they are paid.

Goldman--a dogged journalist with his own “rather jaded history,” as he once told a TV talk show host--sees irony in his arrest. After so many months in which he fit in so well, so convincingly, in the tabloid world, he was led away in handcuffs with Fox cameras filming it all.

His face, flashing a mysterious half-smile, was prominently featured on the evening news.

“Did you notice the two cops (who made the arrest) . . . wearing bulletproof vests?” Goldman asked indignantly, alluding to the newscast footage. “I said, ‘Did you guys really think I was that dangerous?’ They said, ‘Well, you never know what’s on the other side of the door.’

“Well, then, how come they let the cameraman stand in the line of fire? When I looked out my peephole, I saw a camera staring at me. If I had been nuts and had a shotgun, I would have wasted that guy!”

Goldman had been producing a free-lance TV segment for “Inside Edition,” a rival of Fox’s “A Current Affair,” at the time of his arrest. Now, with that segment in limbo, he is attempting to pitch his unfinished book manuscript, “Snitch.” The work has made him the bad boy of the tabloid press, a cynical former insider whose kiss-and-tell report is expected to create enormous embarrassment for those who once dared to hire him.

“There was a personal vendetta by members of the L.A. staff of ‘A Current Affair,’ ” Goldman said. “Once I had started pitching the expose . . . the word was out. They learned of this and decided they would pop me before I popped them. And they whacked me pretty good.”

In a chapter of “Snitch” given to The Times but heavily expurgated by his lawyers, Goldman breezily recounts his early days at both “A Current Affair” and the Enquirer, describing with awe the Enquirer’s “gigantic network of informants.”

Those informants--paid hundreds, even many thousands of dollars for inside information about celebrities--were a major element of his research, according to Goldman. One such source, a man who draws blood for a living at a prominent Los Angeles hospital, leaks information to the tabloids for profit any time a celebrity checks in for surgery or to have a baby, Goldman wrote. The man’s code name is “Dracula.”

“Friends, PR people, executives, bodyguards, waiters, parking lot attendants . . . all of them provided information to the Enquirer,” Goldman writes. “All the tabloids functioned by making use of snitches.

“If (a reporter) gets a tip . . . within about two minutes (the tabloids) will know somebody in some office somewhere and they’ll start to get the story. It’s really incredible.”

Enquirer attorney Paul Wolff, who called Goldman’s disclosures about paid sources “old news,” declined to discuss the research involved in the paper’s stories. “We have in the past fought tooth and nail to keep our sources confidential,” Wolff said. “We’re not about to comment on them now.”

The war between celebrities and the tabloid press goes back years. Lately, however, with the advent of the so-called tabloid TV shows, the fight has escalated. Competition for stories has grown. One tabloid veteran, who asked for anonymity, said reporters are continually evaluated on the number of “leads,” or possible stories, they find. Critics contend that payoffs to sources induces unscrupulous informants to lie.

Carol Burnett, Johnny Carson, Frank Sinatra and Richard Pryor are among the increasingly outraged celebrities who have filed suit--and won out-of-court settlements--because of stories appearing in the tabloids. A besieged feeling exists among many top stars. Security consultant Gavin de Becker, whose clients include Madonna and Michael J. Fox, said some celebrities keep their trash cans behind locked gates because reporters comb the debris for tips.

“They get (medical) prescriptions, early pregnancy tests, letters, etc.” from the trash, De Becker said.

In recent interviews, Goldman described reporting practices he observed as part of his investigation--practices he considered unethical, at best. Tabloids hire private detectives, for example, to run illegitimate credit checks or to obtain unlisted phone numbers, he said. A reporter will telephone, say, the mother of a young boy who has died--and pretend to be the priest.

“And he’ll get the whole story out of the woman and have her cry, you know . . . and typically the most ruthless reporter will get the story,” Goldman said. One especially effective tabloid reporter weighed nearly 400 pounds and “literally couldn’t get out of bed,” he added. “But she could imitate anybody on the phone.”

Wolff called such allegations “flat-out false” and said of Goldman: “I’m familiar with the fact he has told people he was somehow engaged in an undercover project. We’ll see how it plays out in the courts.”

In the theory of some critics, Goldman has fabricated the “Snitch” project since his arrest to try to salvage his reputation and strike back at Fox. Free-lance writer Rod Lurie, who spent five months researching his own story on the tabloids, due out later this monthin Los Angeles Magazine, considered the question at length. He concluded that Goldman was, in fact, preparing an expose.

“He does have a history of gonzo journalism,” Lurie observed. “And another thing: He really was at all the tabloids. Nobody could be fired from that many places.”

Yet, Goldman’s past invites doubt. The former country-music guitarist, who once toured with Doug Kershaw, is an enigma, a do-anything, say-anything character seemingly drawn to controversy in the way old prizefighters are drawn back to the ring. Capable of great charm, Goldman can also be abrasive, unpredictable. Once, in 1988, he shocked his friends by distributing a fake suicide note, claiming an incurable disease and despair over a planet “ruined . . . by greedheads, liberals, feminists, homosexuals and other assorted swine. . . . “Please believe me, this is not a joke,” the letter read.

Days later, a fabricated obituary of Goldman appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News.

The prank cost him friends--”It wasn’t very smart,” Goldman acknowledged--but it symbolized a restive nature given to subterfuge, deception and the habitual use of aliases. Goldman describes himself as a “frustrated private detective.” He saw the tabloids as just one more subject to investigate, one that would lend itself to the undercover approach he favored while paying him in the meantime.

Network officials accuse Goldman of stepping over the criminal line in whatever he was doing. Unauthorized entries into Fox’s computer in Hollywood came to the network’s attention more than seven months after Goldman last worked for “A Current Affair,” the show’s attorneys noted. A sting operation began in early February and lasted four weeks, said Sgt. Dick Richardson of the LAPD computer crimes unit.

Computer activity was carefully monitored and telephone traces were made. The targeted calls, made with another employee’s pass code, were observed irregularly, sometimes twice or more in a day, sometimes not at all. Many lasted only a minute; a few stretched for as long as an hour. Eventually, investigators say, the calls were traced to Goldman’s apartment.

Meanwhile, Fox officials planted two fictitious tips in the computer. One false lead, about New York real estate magnate Harry Helmsley, cited a “reliable” source who knew that Helmsley was leaving $50 million in a new will to a “houseboy” with whom he had possible “romantic” ties. The second bogus tip--provided to The Times by Goldman--purportedly involved “Ronald Reagan Jr.’s lover”:

“Contact says there are pictures and love letters, possible home videotape of two at Greenwitch (sic) Village Party 7/84. Do not contact Mr. Kim any more. . . . He says he will not deal with us. . . . However, other contact ‘Tyrone’ still seems agreeable but has to be approached very carefully. . . . He may want big bucks . . . but if info proves correct it will be well worth it. . . .”

According to investigators, Goldman copied the tip to his own computer and tried to sell the story to the Globe.

Goldman denies the allegation, calling it “absolutely untrue. I never attempted to sell a story anywhere. They have no proof of that.”

Had Fox really wanted to keep information private, Goldman argued, the network would have “locked it up” electronically so that reporters and free-lancers could not see it at will. “There’s nothing in those files . . . that would qualify as sensitive or valuable material,” he asserted. “They get (the information) by clipping the newspaper or by any and every method of subterfuge . . . (and they say) . . . ‘It’s ours, we developed it.’ Bull. It’s not theirs.”

The privacy issues are complicated by the fact that free-lance writers are often temporary employees whose access rights to information may change. In Goldman’s case, he had quit working for Fox under acrimonious circumstances.

Noted media scholar Ben H. Bagdikian, author of several books on journalistic ethics and professor emeritus of journalism at UC Berkeley, said the electronic convenience of a computer is generally no excuse for prying or stealing ideas. Computer data banks are not the equivalent of a newspaper that is available to anyone, he said.

“It’s one thing to take something that is in public domain,” Bagdikian said, “and another thing to take something out of a private file. Whether (information is) locked up or in somebody’s file or lying around on somebody’s desk, it is dirty pool for most ethical writers” to take it.

Goldman, who spent only three stormy months working at “A Current Affair,” began the stint, ironically, on the strength of previous undercover projects. He had gained a reputation in Los Angeles--at least two talk show hosts called him a “cult buster”--after the L.A. Weekly ran his expose of TV evangelist Terry Cole-Whittaker. He had just completed undercover research on author Whitley Strieber, whose best-selling book, “Communion,” describes Strieber’s purported capture by aliens in UFOs.

The UFO story, rejected by Penthouse magazine, became Goldman’s entre into tabloids. “A Current Affair” was interested in a segment on Strieber’s legion of followers--all self-proclaimed UFO abductees. Goldman was invited to produce it and given space at the show’s offices in Hollywood.

A former tabloid newspaper reporter named Riva Dryan shared her computer password, according to Goldman. In his version of events, he told Dryan about “Snitch.” For a time, he said, she agreed to be a partner in exposing the tabloids--until they quarreled over her unwillingness to devote time to it. At that point, Goldman said, he dropped her.

Dryan, a key witness against Goldman, was laid off last month by Fox and could not be reached for comment. But producer Audrey Lavin, who called herself a close friend of Dryan, strongly disputed Goldman’s account, saying Dryan knew nothing of an expose.

“I can’t stress enough that Riva was a completely innocent party,” Lavin said. “She loved her job as a tabloid reporter.”

Goldman’s battles did not stop there. He complained bitterly over the editing of his UFO segment, which Fox never aired. Then he left Fox to join Paramount’s rival show, “Hard Copy,” where he was interviewed on camera for that program’s own UFO segment. The action, he said, enraged Fox officials--who, in effect, were scooped on the story--and touched off a separate soap opera involving Strieber.

In the filmed interview--and again in a debate with Strieber on CBS’s “Good Morning America”--Goldman likened the author to cult leader Jim Jones, instigator of the mass suicides in Jonestown, Guyana.

“Jim Jones killed--he killed!” Strieber protested on national television; off camera, he filed a defamation suit. A chase then began between Strieber’s process servers and Goldman. Goldman dodged them for weeks. When at last he was cornered, by a crafty Venice private detective with his own penchant for multiple identities, Goldman invited the man in for coffee.

“I said, ‘This guy’s good,’ ” Goldman recalled. “ ‘I want him on my team.’ ”

In one of the strange twists to the saga, Strieber this summer abruptly--and without explanation--dropped the defamation suit against Goldman. The detective, Tony Kost, now works for Goldman probing the circumstances of Goldman’s arrest. According to Kost, the LAPD had no interest in the case until the phony tip was planted about Reagan’s son, attracting the Secret Service.

Fox’s attorney in New York said she would not dignify Goldman’s various assertions with comment.

Facing up to six years in prison, Goldman frets incessantly over the possible outcomes. Yet he is also stubbornly defiant, pressing on to bring the sleazy nature of tabloid journalism before the world. On the cover of his manuscript, Goldman quotes “Proverbs”: “The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a vanity tossed to and fro of them that seek death.”