Q 6

PLAYBOY: Not all the disappearances you investigate involve victims abducted against their will. Some people -- in fact, most of us at one time or another -- would simply like to vanish. If you had just stiffed a loan shark and impregnated a Mafia don's daughter, how would you hide?

Anthony Pellicano: The only way to disappear is to continue to travel, never staying in one place more than two or three days; never using your name; never giving people any name; never talking to anybody or being friendly with anyone. When I look for someone, I don't look for the person I'm hired to find. I look for the one person who knows where that person is and get him to tell me. So a fugitive has to be constantly traveling. Your car is cold: Its license plates are stolen; it has no registration. You can travel forever with that car. Just steal another set of plates in every state you enter, so that you have in-state plates. As long as you don't violate any laws, nobody will stop you.

Q 7

PLAYBOY: What are the most common mistakes people make who try to disappear?

Anthony Pellicano: They end up doing the same things they did before. They domesticate. They find a friend or another person they can get close to, and they start telling their secrets to him. They never change their date of birth. People change their names, but that date of birth is very personal to them. They sometimes apply for Social Security or use their real Social Security number. And very often, they communicate with family -- and that's the biggest mistake.

Q 8

PLAYBOY: You grew up in a tough ethnic neighborhood in Cicero, Illinois. You were kicked out of high school and caused a little trouble. It's not a background that suggests either your present occupation or the fees you exact, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. How did you get into this business?

Anthony Pellicano: In the military, I was a cryptographer -- a person who codes and decodes secret messages. When I got out, there was nothing for me to do, because the majority of people who were doing crypto work were in cosmetics and toy manufacturing, where they were transferring coded information by telephone or telegraph. It wasn't all that thrilling to me. I wandered around, doing a bunch of things, until I was hired as a collector at Spiegel, the mail-order house. And I became very, very good as a skip tracer, locating people who had run out on their debts. Later on, I was looking for a guard who was missing, and I went through the Yellow Pages and there were all these ads under DETECTIVE AGENCIES. I picked out one of them, and I said, "Train me or allow me to do your missing-persons cases, because I'm the best." I had a small ego at that time, too. They gave me a case and said, "If you solve this, we'll hire you." I did, and I decided that this was the business I wanted to be in. The major factor was that I would be finding people to make other people happy. For all those years in the collection business, the people I found were not happy that I had found them. But now I'm able to reunite people with their loved ones and, boy, that's when it's really good.

Q 9

PLAYBOY: In your years as a collector, what was the best excuse you ever heard for not paying a bill?

Anthony Pellicano: God. You hear just about every excuse in the world, from, "My wife just had a baby" to "My mother died." The one that made me pause was when people were honest and said, "I just don't want to pay you."

Q 10

PLAYBOY: We've learned about private detectives from fiction and television. The stereotype P.I. has a contempt for authority, a healthy libido and a quick trigger finger. With that image in mind, when was the last time that a beautiful, leggy blonde like Evelyn Mulwray of Chinatown appeared at your door late at night with a problem?

Anthony Pellicano: I can remember only a couple of occasions when beautiful women walked into my office. And the problem was always the same: They wanted me to find out if their husbands were cheating on them. What bothers me about private-eye shows is that the detectives always have a gun, there's always a shooting, there's always a life-threatening situation. And, Christ, if that were the truth, you wouldn't make it past a week as a private investigator. If somebody wants to kill you, there is no chance you're going to get away. You can hire all the bodyguards in the world, have all the electronic security systems that are available. I never carry a gun, because a weapon is a physical solution to a mental problem. If a guy has a gun pointing at me, he's going to shoot me. If somebody wants you dead, you're going to die.

Q 11

PLAYBOY: You've said that you use imagination in cracking cases. How?

Anthony Pellicano: I learn all I can about a person, and I try to be that person, to think as he thinks. And that's how I find people. I become them. I'm probably better than any actor in Hollywood. But my acting isn't to impress an audience. It's to get someone to tell me what I want to know.

Q 12

PLAYBOY: What are some of the new devices in the world of corporate espionage that may make us even more uneasy about our eroding privacy?

Anthony Pellicano: There is a bugging device, the transmitter part of which is computerized. It has ten frequencies on which it transmits randomly. Imagine ten flagpoles, each with a different flag on it. Then imagine a video screen that shows the image of each flagpole, one at a time. So you scan very slowly: one, two, three, four, five, in time. Now you mix it up and scan from one to six to four to three, back to six, to one, only doing it in nanoseconds. If I were trying to detect a transmission generated in this way -- just one little spike -- a spectrum analyzer just couldn't pick it up. That's how this new transmitter works, only with sound. It's undetectable. Well, not undetectable if you know what to look for, but to the common person, it's virtually impossible. That's a little scary. In the near future in technology, everything is going to be light-transmitted -- including your telephone calls. Well, God, there will be ways of tapping with light that will be virtually undetectable.