Private Eyes
When thieves stole the remains of the showman Mike Todd in 1977, Anthony Pellicano—later the "detective to the stars"—stepped in to solve a case that had baffled police. Turns out Todd and Pellicano had lots in common, especially a craving for the spotlight.
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A movie star since 1944, when she made National Velvet opposite Mickey Rooney, Taylor was only 24 when she married Todd on February 2, 1957. She had already endured two very public marriages: a troubled nine-month union with the hotel heir Conrad “Nicky” Hilton and five essentially loveless years with the British actor Michael Wilding that yielded two children. That marriage ended in divorce, and after only a few days she married Todd. Seven months later, their daughter, Elizabeth Frances—called Liza—was born.
In March 1958, as Taylor began work on the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the Friars Club selected Todd as its Showman of the Year. Todd owned his own Lockheed Lodestar—the Lucky Liz—and he made plans to fly it from California to New York for the ceremony. Plagued by a terrible cold, Taylor canceled her plans to accompany him. The couple parted with a desperate kiss. “I’m too happy,” said Todd. “I’m afraid that something’s going to happen because I’m too happy.” Taylor later claimed that she too had a disturbing premonition about the trip.
While trying to fly through a storm, the Lucky Liz crashed in the Zuni Mountains about 75 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, killing Todd and three others. On the morning of March 23rd, Taylor’s doctor, Rex Kennamer, and two others arrived at the Todd home and delivered the news to Taylor. “All I could do was scream ‘No, no, no!’” Taylor recalled, according to J. Randy Taraborrelli’s Elizabeth. Clad in a skimpy nightgown, she ran into the street and fell to her knees, still screaming. “No, not Mike. Not Mike. Dear God, please, not Mike.”
The funeral was two days later at Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park, where Todd would be buried next to his father. The reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes had provided a TWA jet so that Taylor could make the flight to Chicago in private. Still in shock, she initially refused to make the trip, until the singer Eddie Fisher—he and his wife, Debbie Reynolds, were friends of the Todds’—convinced her she had the strength to get through the ordeal. (Fourteen months later, Fisher became Taylor’s fourth husband.)
Despite the cold weather, thousands of people turned out at the cemetery to try to catch a glimpse of Taylor. They had packed picnic lunches and spread out blankets among the graves. Taylor came away with memories of Coke bottles littering the grounds and empty potato chip bags blowing through the air. Clad in black and supported by Dr. Kennamer and her brother, Howard, she made her way from the limousine to a tent that shielded the gravesite from the crowd. She flung herself on Todd’s bronze casket and cried hysterically: “Oh, no! No! No! No!” In front of 38 mourners, a local rabbi led the traditional Jewish ceremony, though occasionally ushers had to step outside and implore the crowd to be quiet. “He was not only a father but the greatest human being in the entire world,” said Mike Todd Jr. “I loved him so much, oh, so much,” sobbed Taylor.
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On the day Michael Todd died, Anthony Pellican celebrated his 14th birthday in Cicero. Around two years later, having blossomed (by his own admission) into a street tough, he dropped out of high school, though he would earn his GED during a stint with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where, he claims, he was trained as a cryptographer. Following his discharge, he got a job as a skip-tracer with the Spiegel Company—tracking down people who had not paid their bills. In 1969, he established his own detective agency. Around this time, he restored the “o” at the end of the family name; his Sicilian grandfather had dropped that final vowel after emigrating to the United States.
Pellicano had several strengths as a private investigator. Known early on as “the man of a thousand voices,” he could easily assume whatever character the situation called for. “I’m an actor,” he told the Tribune in 1978. “I let people underestimate me. I will act stupid, ignorant, emotional, but I never am.” Pellicano was also an expert in what he called “forensic audio”: voice identification, electronic surveillance, detecting eavesdropping devices. He exhibited the kind of flair usually seen in a Hollywood film noir. He owned twin Lincoln Continentals and decorated his office with samurai swords. For a time he employed the pulp-fiction nom de guerre of Tony Fortune. A slight man who eschewed firearms—“A gun is a physical solution to a mental problem,” he told the Tribune—he had a black belt in karate and was known sometimes to brandish a Louisville Slugger. “I can’t do everything by the book,” he insisted. “I bend the law to death in gaining information.”
Pellicano’s law-bending—and his association with reputed mobsters—may have been greater than he let on. Within a few years of opening his own agency, the detective had already garnered some good publicity—in 1973 he detected a listening device in the office of Illinois’s then secretary of state, Michael Howlett—and won a seat on the influential Illinois Law Enforcement Commission. Things took a downward turn the following year when he filed for bankruptcy protection. During that process, Pellicano admitted he had borrowed $30,000 from Paul DeLucia Jr., the son of Paul “the Waiter” Ricca, who had briefly led the Chicago Mob in the 1940s. Pellicano insisted that DeLucia, his daughter’s godfather, was “just like any other guy in the neighborhood,” but the information was enough to force Pellicano to resign from the commission.
Testimony in the ongoing Family Secrets trial suggests that Pellicano may have had closer links with the Mob—especially with Joseph “Joey the Clown” Lombardo. Among other things, prosecutors have alleged that Lombardo was behind the 1974 murder of Daniel Seifert, who had been scheduled to testify against Lombardo in an embezzlement case. Lombardo’s lawyers claim he has a “rock-solid” alibi—provided, as it turns out, by Pellicano, who collected evidence demonstrating that Lombardo was having breakfast in a Chicago pancake house at the time two gunmen shot Seifert outside his Bensenville plastics company.
Other damaging tales have emerged in the trial. This June, Alva Johnson Rodgers, a career criminal, testified that Pellicano had paid him $5,000 in 1973 or 1974 to torch an empty Mount Prospect house; at Pellicano’s urging, Rodgers said, he also vandalized a Chicago restaurant, but balked at burning the place down. Pellicano’s lawyer, Steven F. Gruel, has repeatedly denied that his client ever had any ties to the Mob. (Gruel and Pellicano declined to comment for this article.)
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