Anthony Pellicano may be America's most tenacious private detective. An expert at locating missing persons, he is also a wizard at criminal-defense work, corporate spying, electronic surveillance and the relatively new science of audio forensics. In 1983, Pellicano gained notoriety by assisting John DeLorean's attorney's in puncturing the cocaine-smuggling charges against the car manufacturer. Now, through an ongoing association with DeLorean lawyer Howard Weitzman, Pellicano is working on another headline-making case: He is gathering information to use in defending Cathy Smith, the former heroin addict and self-described groupie who is expected to go on trial for the murder of comedian John Belushi. Steve Oney talked with Pellicano in the detective's Los Angeles office. He reports, "In L.A., it's impossible to think of private eyes without thinking of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, but there could be no one less Marlowesque than Pellicano, a wiry Mensa member who operates out of a suite high above the Sunset Strip. The heart of a business isn't a file cabinet containing a bottle of Jack Daniel's but an impressive electronics center--computers, spectrum analyzers, microscopes, pieces of equipment so revolutionary that in some cases, Pellicano has had them longer than the F.B.I."

Q 1

PLAYBOY: Why do you think Cathy Smith is not guilty of murdering John Belushi and that you'll be able to blow holes in the prosecution's case?

Anthony Pellicano: They have a very weak case to start with. The Government has admitted that its case is based on what Smith said to two journalists from the National Enquirer -- who paid her to get an interview. If you listen to it, she was extremely inebriated at the time, and she was being fed liquor by those people. Any admission that she made as far as injecting Belushi is a moot question. But did she give him the fatal injection? I took her through my own interrogation, which most people find to be very effective, and I found that she did not. And we're going to be able to prove that she wasn't the last person to see Belushi alive, either. A lot of people in the entertainment field are going to get shook up as a result of this case. Not because of any involvement in his death but because they lied, tried to hide the fact that they used drugs themselves and might have been involved in some activities they wouldn't want the public to know about. If they had told the truth, Cathy Smith probably wouldn't have been brought to trial.

Q 2

PLAYBOY: In the DeLorean case, you took on the chief Government witness, James Timothy Hoffman, and, along with the defense, helped discredit him. What did you do and how did you do it?

Anthony Pellicano: In the beginning, DeLorean and his lawyers made all kinds of comments about a British secret-service operation, an FBI operation, a Secret Service and CIA conspiracy to get DeLorean because the British government was mad at him. When I got on the case, I immediately said, "That's all bullshit. The reason they're after DeLorean is that somebody told them something that they believed." Because of my work with CIA-type people, I knew that if they had wanted to get rid of DeLorean, you'd never have seen him again. But Hoffman had conned these people. And we just exploited that. He conned not only DeLorean but also the United States Government. They were so zealous and eager to get DeLorean that they overlooked what Hoffman truly was. The Government should learn a valuable lesson from this: When you deal with a person who is informing, he's informing for a reason, and that reason leads him to say things that may not be true.

Q 3

PLAYBOY: You once remarked that DeLorean was no saint. If he could have gotten away with funding his company through drug dealing, do you think he would have?

Anthony Pellicano: Sure. But I don't think that he would have thought of it as funding it through drugs. He had approached everybody to try to get money to save his company. Along came these people who said that they had all this money through a venture-capital bank account. To save his company, he sat and listened. He didn't give a shit where they got their money. He was desperate. When you finance your car and take a loan from a bank, do you ask the bank where it got the money? And listen, there are movie deals and corporations being built on the assets of drugs right now. There are taxes being paid from drugs. So the U.S. Government is partly funded from drugs.

Q 4

PLAYBOY: You've made your name by tracking missing persons and claim you put together a streak of nearly 4000 successful cases. Tell us about your most nagging failure -- the one that got away.

Anthony Pellicano: The most perplexing case involved Elaine Graham, the 29-year-old wife of a Southern California doctor, who disappeared in 1983. With a random disappearance or murder -- where somebody pulls somebody else off the street, kills him and leaves him lying somewhere up in the mountains -- it's virtually impossible to find the victim. We would never have found Elaine Graham had it not been for a girl who was out hiking with her boyfriend. As she was going down this steep crevasse, she lost her footing and slipped. And when she fell to her knees, she found a skull -- Elaine Graham's skull. I made a mistake in logic on the case, because I had never experienced a random kidnaping. My logic was fighting with my imagination. Mrs. Graham had done a lot of things the day she disappeared that suggested she was unhappy. She had tears in her eyes when she left her baby. She left early, though normally she was habitually late. Everything on that day led me to believe she had just had it. I've had cases similar to that where women run away from their husbands. My suggestion to Dr. Graham was that we look for her as if she were alive, because if she had been, we would have been able to let her know that everything was OK to come back. Unfortunately, she wasn't.

Q 5

PLAYBOY: If you were approached with a renowned missing-person case -- say, the case of Jimmy Hoffa -- what would you do that no one has yet done?

Anthony Pellicano: I wouldn't get involved with Jimmy Hoffa. In order to find remains, you have to have something to find. I believe he's a liquid now.