Q 13

PLAYBOY: What's the best bugging job you've ever seen?

Anthony Pellicano: The jobs I like are when there's a lot of imagination, when the guy doing the bugging will throw in ten diversion devices -- three that you can find easily and seven that take a lot of time. In one case, I had gone through my normal routine and cleaned this place up and I found four devices. But I sat there and said, "I know there's something else." I was in the company president's office, trying to figure out what to do. We had taken the walls apart. Then I remembered hearing piped-in music in the halls and the other offices. But in the president's office, I didn't hear it. And I looked up, and there was a speaker. I walked out of the room, found the president and whispered in his ear, "I hate this music. Why do you have this stuff playing?" He said, "I love this. I had this installed." So I knew something was up. I said, "Well, why don't you have it in your office?" He said, "I do." We walked into his office, and there was no music coming out of his system. I traced the wires back from his speaker. His wire went through to a tape recorder. A speaker is nothing but a microphone in reverse, and the guy who bugged his office had used his speaker to listen to his conversations. He was clever.

Q 14

PLAYBOY: Most of the corporate surveillance work you do involves protecting companies' secrets from business spooks. Have you worked the other side of the street? If the money were right, would you attempt, for instance, to discover Coca-Cola's formula?

Anthony Pellicano: I've been asked to do that about ten times. And to be honest with you, it's not that hard to do. There are two or three people in the Coca-Cola Company who know the exact formula for the syrup. But what Coca-Cola did for years, that it recently stopped, was to introduce phony waste products into the plant's outflow and order ingredients that it wasn't using, just to throw people off. But there's been nobody willing to pay the couple of million dollars it would take to get the formula. And there's no way you could do it legally. Anyway, I've never done any business sabotage. It's more gratifying to me to catch people spying than it is to spy.

Q 15

PLAYBOY: What measures do you take in your personal life to protect your valuables and to elude prying eyes?

Anthony Pellicano: If you have lots of valuables, don't keep them at home. Put them in a safe-deposit box in the biggest bank you can find. If you keep them at home and somebody knows they're there, you won't have them long. As far as bugging goes, because of the nature of the cases that I encounter -- organized-crime cases, defense work -- I assume that I'm being monitored 24 hours a day. I just live with it -- in the same way I live with this nose I have. I don't do anything to try to find out if I'm bugged or wire-tapped. I live by a Sicilian saying, "Silence is a friend that will never betray you."

Q 16

PLAYBOY: This is the era of no-fault divorces, yet you handle a tremendous amount of lucrative detective work investigating adulteries. Why?

Anthony Pellicano: It's the nature of the human being. In California, all the adultery in the world isn't going to change the nature of a settlement. But people want to know. They know from their feelings or through an admission, but they want the proof. They also want to know who the other person is. Ego has a lot to do with it. If it's a woman, she wants to know, Is the other woman young? Is she pretty? Women especially want to know for those reasons, because they may still love their husbands, and if they know who the other woman is, they can act differently, dress differently or behave differently to entice their mate back into their arms again. For every person who wants to get a divorce as the result of an adulterous affair, there are five who want to be back with their spouses.

Q 17

PLAYBOY: If a person wants to cheat, what should he do to avoid getting caught?

Anthony Pellicano: He shouldn't lie, because lies are what get the other person suspicious. And usually, people lie about the silliest of things, like where they've been. For instance, if you were at a bar with a woman, say you were at that bar. If your wife asks who with, say with a bunch of friends. There are other stupid mistakes guys make. If they go out with a woman, they'll shower and put massive doses of cologne on themselves. And they'll come home and get into bed with their wives and wake them up by the smell of cologne, which is out of character. Or they'll come home after a "night with the boys," and their teeth are sparkling white from brushing. There's even a little tooth paste in the corner of their mouth. Why would a man brush his teeth that late at night, and where would he get the toothbrush?

Q 18

PLAYBOY: You don't carry a gun, and though you're a black belt in karate, you try your best to avoid getting into fights. In the final analysis, is the life of a private eye a dull one?

Anthony Pellicano: I have the attention span of a hyperkinetic six-year-old. Put me on a surveillance assignment and I'll go crazy. I have to use the warped part of my imagination to think of things to make it interesting. When I find best friends cheating, I have the most fun, because it disgusts me. A woman hired me, and I found that her husband was cheating with his best friend's wife. I caught them at a motel one night. I got the room across the hall, and I was trying to decide what to do to have some fun. So I called up the husband and told him to meet me. He got to the hotel, and I frisked him. I had told him that his wife was cheating with another man, but I didn't tell him with whom. So he says, "How do you know?" I say, "The other guy's wife hired me." He says, "Where are they?" I point across the hall. This guy was big, burly. He looks at me and asks, "What do I do?" He was mad. I say, "Knock on the door." So while he's knocking, I call the police, tell them that I'm the hotel manager, and that I've discovered a guy using phony credit cards. I say, "Come right away, and you can get him." Meanwhile, this guy is pounding on that door. Then he hears a sheepish voice from the other side: "Who is it?" He says, "The manager; open up." So the door opens, and this guy sees his best friend in Jockey shorts, his eyes about the size of watermelons, and his wife, who's got a sheet wrapped around her. He starts chasing his wife; then he starts chasing the fat little guy in Jockey shorts down the hall, through the dining room, right into the arms of the police. I didn't think that was good enough, though. So while he's at the station, I let the air out of his tires. When the police bring him back, he knows he's a beaten man. He's got his key in his hand, and he walks to the car and notices that it's six inches shorter than it used to be. He steps back, looks at the tires and he sits down in the middle of the road and starts to cry. It might sound a little cruel, but that's what I do to keep from going crazy.

Q 19

PLAYBOY: You're an expert in tape forensics. How can the study of tape recordings help solve crimes?

Anthony Pellicano: There was a group of men who were charged with rape and murder. This was the so-called Art Museum Murder in Philadelphia. As a result of the confession of one of the alleged rapists/murderers, eight men were convicted. One of these eight men relentlessly denied during eight years of imprisonment that he had had anything to do with it. Lo and behold, a tape recording came forward, and I was asked to analyze it. In this tape recording, I heard two confessions, the first radically different from the second. To make a long story short, the tape was recorded at a city hall that had a clock that would ring at the hour and at the half hour. Before the closing of the tape, which meant the stop/record signature, there was a bell for two o'clock. Fifteen minutes later on the tape was a bell for three o'clock, which meant there were 45 minutes of missing time. I was able to prove that. And these people went to jail as a result. The guy who hired me is now out.

Q 20

PLAYBOY: After years of dealing with distraught parents and lovers who have lost a child or a spouse, you must have grown somewhat inured to tragedy. Is there a case that managed to break your heart?

Anthony Pellicano: When I'm in a case, I'm purely emotionless and logical, sometimes too logical. But I've had some cases that have brought tears. My most vivid example is the case of a girl named Robin Reade, who disappeared in Hawaii. There had been many detective agencies hired to find her, and a lot of law enforcement people. But what was so heart-rending was what the parents went through to find their daughter. They were relentless in their search. They even went to psychics and were unable to find her. Thank God I was able to. Robin got in with a bad crowd, and she O.D.'d on cocaine almost the same way John Belushi did. The guy in whose house she died panicked, wrapped her up in a rug, carried her to the side of a mountain and buried her in a shallow grave. I inspired him to tell me where he buried the body. How I did it is for your imagination. I've never been more touched in my life than when that mother wanted me to take her to the side of the mountain and show her where her daughter was buried. Boy, that took a lot out of me. It was days before I got over that one.