The rich, powerful and famous often think they’re above the law, and in Hollywood, that’s resulted in an enormous market for shadowy operatives willing to bend (if not outright break) the rules for clients. In that ugly arena in the ’80s and ’90s, no one was more highly coveted than Anthony Pellicano, a Chicago-born private investigator who became “Mr. Fix-It to the Stars”—until his widespread wiretapping business landed him behind bars.
The latest installment of FX’s “The New York Times Presents” documentary series, Sin Eater: The Crimes of Anthony Pellicano (March 10, on FX and Hulu) is a two-part exposé about Pellicano’s clandestine conduct on behalf of luminaries such as Chris Rock, Courtney Love, Farrah Fawcett, and Die Hard director John McTiernan, who eventually served time thanks to his connection to the notorious P.I. The study of a man who was apparently very comfortable getting his hands dirty—by intimidating and terrorizing targets—for entertainment’s biggest heavyweights, it confirms that Los Angeles is a viper’s nest of duplicity and depravity, and that its inhabitants will do whatever it takes to further their ambitions and hold onto what they’ve attained.
Smartly directed by John Pappas, Sin Eater: The Crimes of Anthony Pellicano is juiciest when presenting never-before-released clips of phone conversations between Pellicano (who recorded all his calls) and clients like Love, former CAA and Disney bigwig Michael Ovitz, and Rock, who discusses his dilemma regarding a woman he slept with (behind his wife’s back) and now claims was raped and is carrying his child.
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To hear Rock talk about how he’s being framed for a dalliance during which he removed his condom in order to ejaculate on her backside is to get an unvarnished peek at the tawdry side of A-list celebrity. For Pellicano, that seedy milieu was home sweet home, as evidenced by his telling Rock, “I want to blacken this girl up totally… I want to make her out to be a lying, scumbag, manipulating cocksucker. That’s what I want.”
Pellicano’s background with an abusive alcoholic father whom he replaced with other street-tough paternal figures provides telling context for his segue into a career as a private investigator with a particular focus on wiretapping. Self-described as “the Prince of Darkness,” Pellicano used mafia-esque tactics, a notion emphasized by his statement to Love, “If you come to me, that’s the end of that. I’m an old-style Sicilian. I only go one way. I’m very heavy-handed, honey.”
His big break came when, following a successful run in his hometown, he relocated in 1982 to California and served as part of attorney Howard Weitzman’s successful defense team for automotive industry titan John DeLorean. With that high-profile win under his belt, Pellicano quickly proved a hot commodity, and by the early ’90s, he was partnering with L.A.’s top lawyers, including Weitzman, Terry Christensen, Marty Singer, Dennis Wasser, and Bert Fields. Consequently, when Michael Jackson was accused in 1993 of molesting children, Pellicano was retained to do what he does best—make problems disappear by any means necessary.
In that case, as in numerous others mentioned in Sin Eater: The Crimes of Anthony Pellicano, the private investigator employed his skills for the benefit of Goliaths rather than Davids, who suffered thanks to the frightening pressure he applied. Jude Green, the ex-wife of financier Leonard Green, recalls Pellicano harassing and monitoring her throughout her divorce. The same goes for Linda Doucett, former girlfriend and colleague of Garry Shandling, whom Pellicano was hired to handle by Shandling’s friend and producing partner, Brad Grey (who eventually became CEO of Paramount Pictures).
Of the nightmares presented in this docuseries, however, none is as shocking as the one recounted by reporter Anita Busch, who—while working on a story about actor Steven Seagal’s ties to organized crime—received numerous death threats, including an initial one in which a dead fish with a rose in its mouth was left on her car windshield with a note that read, “Stop.”
According to Sin Eater: The Crimes of Anthony Pellicano, the real culprit behind the vicious bullying of Busch wasn’t Seagal but, instead, Ovitz, who didn’t take kindly to Busch and fellow The New York Times reporter Bernard Weinraub’s series of articles about him. What’s not in doubt, though, is that Pellicano was the guy employed to scare Busch. In order to address (and defend himself against) these charges, Pellicano appears in a new interview in the show’s second hour, but it’s largely for naught; boasting that, “I broke the law all the time" but that “I never went after innocent people,” he comes across as an individual who wants to project candidness while not admitting to any of the wrongdoing persuasively laid out by the federal agents, journalists and victims featured here.
Once Pellicano found himself in the FBI’s crosshairs, Hollywood’s elites got rightfully nervous that their secrets were on the verge of being broadcast to the world. Fortunately for (most of) them, Pellicano was shrewd enough to make sure his treasure trove of wiretap recordings never fell into authorities’ hands. What ultimately got him locked up for 15 years were his own phone chats with clients, which made plain that he had been up to no good. Still, since his 2019 release, Pellicano has supposedly landed on his feet back in his glitzy old stomping ground, and the fact that Ron Meyer, co-founder of CAA and once-COO of Universal Studios, continues to call him a friend (and praise his refusal to rat out his clients) speaks volumes about an industry culture that continues to value Pellicano’s covert, underhanded services.
