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Hollywood sleuth charged with threatening reporter
2005-06-19
LOS ANGELES - Imprisoned celebrity sleuth Anthony Pellicano was charged Friday with threatening a Los Angeles Times reporter three years ago to keep her from pursuing a story about action movie star Steven Seagal.The criminal complaint charging Pellicano and an associate was brought a week after a U.S. appeals court ruled prosecutors were free to use evidence seized by authorities during a search of his West Hollywood office in 2002. A private eye for more than two decades, Pellicano, 61, is serving a 30-month federal prison term for his conviction on charges of keeping unregistered firearms, grenades and plastic explosives in his office safe. Pellicano, a self-described "sin eater" for celebrities he was hired to keep out of the press, worked for such stars as Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner and some of the biggest lawyers in the entertainment industry. The investigation of Pellicano was triggered by reports in 2002 that he had tried to intimidate reporter Anita Busch, then working for the Los Angeles Times, to keep her from working on stories about a suspected Mafia extortion plot against Seagal. FBI agents found the explosives and large volumes of wiretap transcripts while searching his office for evidence, leading to his guilty plea on felony weapons charges in October 2003. In the latest case, brought by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, Pellicano is charged with making criminal threats against Busch, and with conspiring with Alexander Proctor, the man he is accused of hiring to carry out those threats. According to prosecutors, it was Proctor who placed a dead fish with a rose in its mouth on the windshield of Bush's car outside her home in June 2002. He is also accused of making a hole that resembled a bullet hole in the windshield and leaving a sign with the word "stop" on the windshield. Proctor, 61, previously charged with threatening Busch but never arraigned in the case, is serving a 10-year term at a federal prison in Illinois on unrelated drug charges. Busch wrote a series of articles about a suspected shakedown plot against Seagal engineered by the martial arts star's former film producer partner Julius Nasso and the Gambino crime family. Reuters/VNU
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