Pellicano Allegedly Tied to Threat

Federal prosecutors said Thursday they had “corroborating evidence” linking Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano to a criminal threat made against a Los Angeles Times reporter who was researching a story about actor Steven Seagal’s relationship with a reputed Mafia figure.

In documents filed in U.S. District Court, the prosecutors said a search of Pellicano’s offices in November 2002 had turned up a file on reporter Anita Busch containing information about her physical description, home address and auto-license number.

Also seized, they said, was a separate file labeled “Stephen Seagal matter” and containing an earlier article Busch had co-authored about the actor, as well as a Vanity Fair article about Seagal by writer Ned Zeman.

Busch woke up on June 20, 2002, to find her car windshield punctured. On the car were a dead fish with a rose in its mouth and a sign that read “Stop.” In August of that year, Zeman reported that an unidentified man accosted him, pointed a gun and warned him to “stop.”

The government documents also cited toll records allegedly showing 36 telephone calls between Pellicano and Alexander Proctor, an ex-convict arrested in connection with the threat to Busch. Proctor, who is in custody, faces prosecution in state court on a charge of making a criminal threat.

Pellicano has not been charged in connection with Busch but is behind bars awaiting sentencing for possessing two illegally modified military hand grenades and a quantity of C4 plastic explosives. Those were found when FBI agents searched his office looking for evidence linking him to Proctor.

Prosecutors filed the documents Thursday to support their request that Pellicano receive 33 months in prison when he is sentenced Jan. 23 before U.S. District Judge Dickran Tevrizian.

Pellicano’s defense lawyer, Donald Re, called the latest allegations “utter garbage.”

Re said it was preposterous to suggest that Pellicano was working on behalf of Seagal to silence Busch or any other reporter. At the time of the incident, he said, Pellicano was trying to collect money from Seagal and the two were “adversaries.”

Jan Handzlik, an attorney for Seagal, has said previously that his client and Pellicano had a business relationship but it “ended on bad terms.” The two men, Handzlik said, have not spoken to each other in more than 10 years.

Re did not explain why Pellicano had a file on Busch, except to say that it consisted of nothing more than Department of Motor Vehicles data.

The defense lawyer accused the government of cobbling together “unproven, unsworn, untested and untrue” fragments of information to make it appear that Pellicano was involved.

Proctor, sentenced earlier this week to 10 years in federal prison for drug trafficking, told an FBI informant in a surreptitiously recorded conversation that Pellicano had hired him to firebomb Busch’s car. Concerned about setting fire to adjoining apartments and trees, Proctor said, he opted instead to puncture the car windshield and leave the fish, rose and sign.

In the secretly recorded talks, Proctor also allegedly said that he did the job to work off a $14,000 debt to Pellicano and that he was expecting to receive other assignments from him.

Re said Proctor’s claims were unbelievable and uncorroborated.

Pellicano, 59, who has represented some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, is also the target of a federal grand jury probe into widespread illegal wiretapping.

A onetime Chicago skip tracer who never finished high school, Pellicano gained prominence in the 1980s when he helped auto executive John Z. DeLorean beat drug-selling charges in Los Angeles. Pellicano dissected key government tapes and dug up damaging information about prosecution witnesses.

Afterward, he built a lucrative practice representing entertainers, including Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, Kevin Costner and Roseanne Arnold.

But his business dried up, he said recently, after the FBI’s highly publicized raid on his Sunset Boulevard office in 2002 and he subsequently shut it down.