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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When officials retrieved the remains of Mike Todd from the wreckage of the Lucky Liz in 1958, they didn’t come away with much. Todd was charred beyond recognition, and officials could identify him only through dental records. His wedding ring survived, and police returned it to Taylor. The rest—basically a handful of dust and what was likely part of a nylon seat belt—was scooped into a rubber bag and buried in Forest Park’s Waldheim Cemetery. There it rested until the weekend of June 25, 1977, a few days after what would have been Todd’s 68th or 70th birthday.

To get to Todd’s remains, thieves first had to move a 300- to 400-pound granite tombstone about ten feet. They then dug a four-and-a-half-foot-deep hole and unearthed the bronze coffin. They pried open the coffin’s lid, smashed a glass case, and extracted the rubber bag containing Todd’s remains. Police, who estimated the entire operation took at least five hours, said that the thieves—because the tombstone was so heavy, there had to be at least two—had dragged some tree branches around the grave to shield themselves. A search of the cemetery later turned up a shovel likely used by the thieves. There were no other clues.

For a couple of days, police remained stymied, while the media speculated about the who, what, and why of the whole affair. That’s when Anthony Pellicano showed up with some of the answers. On the morning of June 28th, he called Bill Kurtis, then the popular TV news anchor at WBBM/ Channel 2. Pellicano’s company—Voice Interpretation & Analysis—had recently performed some acoustical studies for a U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating the John F. Kennedy assassination, and Kurtis had reported that story. Now, over the telephone, Pellicano told Kurtis he thought he knew the location of Todd’s remains. “I got a tip,” he said (as Kurtis remembers the conversation). “Want to go out and look?”

Kurtis grabbed a cameraman and rushed out to Forest Park. At some point—he can’t recall exactly when—he also called police. At the cemetery (which Kurtis describes as resembling a savanna, with thickets of ash and oak trees and only a few graves), Pellicano and Kurtis headed for Todd’s grave. Pellicano recited aloud the instructions he had received and began pacing off distances from the grave. Finally, when he had walked about 75 yards, he cried out. “He yelled, ‘I think this is it!’” recalls Kurtis. “I came running over, and sure enough, it was.”

Though Kurtis aired the story that night, he says he was already “a little leery” of Pellicano—as were the police. “They had looked all over the cemetery,” says Kurtis, “and now [Pellicano] walks right up to it. It must have been embarrassing to the policemen [who had conducted the search].”

According to news stories at the time, Pellicano found a rubber bag containing the remains beneath a pile of branches, leaves, and dirt. He told the Sun-Times he had relied on a tip he had received from someone likely acting on behalf of the thieves. “I think they felt they made a tremendous mistake,” he said. “The information was volunteered to me. I’m a public figure, and I’ve handled many, many missing figures.”

Pellicano went on to reveal a possible motive. Other sources, he said, “told me the reason these people perpetrated this horrendous act is they were looking for a ten-carat diamond ring that allegedly was given to [Todd] by Elizabeth Taylor.” As it turned out, no ring or other valuables were in the grave with Todd. “I think [the crime] was very, very silly,” said Pellicano.

So exactly who looted Mike Todd’s grave? And how could Forest Park police have overlooked the remains? A 1993 profile of Pellicano in the Los Angeles Times cited a 1983 government sentencing report that claimed “a mobster-turned-informant told authorities that two Mob figures were the ones who exhumed Todd.

“But,” the article went on, “the story making the rounds in Chicago even today is that Pellicano orchestrated the event to gain publicity in hopes of being hired to help find Chicago candy heiress Helen Brach, who disappeared in 1977.” According to the Times, the PI’s critics—including Ernie Rizzo, another colorful Chicago private eye—“gleefully” referred to Pellicano as “the grave robber.” Pellicano, reported the Times, dismissed Rizzo as “a fruit fly.” (Rizzo died in 2006.)

As to the local investigation, Pellicano insisted police might easily have missed the bag containing Todd’s remains on their sweep of the cemetery. “You couldn’t see it coming up on it,” he said. Sgt. Richard Archambault, head of the Forest Park police investigators, concurred, pointing out that, in the wooded cemetery, “it would be possible to miss [the bag] on the first search.”

But in 1994, Joseph Byrnes, a Forest Park police lieutenant, told Los Angeles magazine a different story. “Seven patrolmen and I, walking shoulder to shoulder, searched every inch of that small cemetery, and we found nothing,” he said. “The very next day, Pellicano makes a big deal of finding the remains in a spot we had thoroughly checked.”

Kurtis, too, thinks it unlikely that police could have missed Todd’s remains. “The police had to have gone over that ground,” he says. “Whoever took [the remains] must have returned them. They were getting too hot to hang on to.”

That doesn’t mean Kurtis thinks Pellicano was the thief, although he hasn’t entirely dismissed that possibility. But he has difficulty accepting a scenario that involves Pellicano stealing Todd’s remains with the intent of later returning them to the cemetery where he could dramatically “find” them. To Kurtis, that just seems like too much work.

One thing Kurtis doesn’t doubt is Pellicano’s craving for the limelight. He notes that 30 years ago, in the pre-cable era, the local nightly news on Channel 2, which paired Kurtis with Walter Jacobson, was the biggest show in town. “Maybe the reason Pellicano called me is that we were so hot,” says Kurtis. “It would give him maximum exposure. He loved the publicity—and it was a hell of a story.”

* * *

Six years after finding Todd’s remains, Pellicano turned his back on Chicago and headed for California, where—according to Jeannette Walls’s Dish: How Gossip Became the News and the News Became Just Another Show—“a grateful Elizabeth Taylor introduced Pellicano to her Hollywood friends.” The high-powered L.A. attorney Howard Weitzman hired Pellicano to help him successfully defend the automaker John DeLorean on cocaine-trafficking charges. After that, Pellicano became the go-to guy for Hollywood’s A-list stars; most memorably, he was front and center in Michael Jackson’s 1993 counterattack against a 13-year-old boy who accused the singer of sexual molestation. His role in that case prompted a series of profiles that further thrust the detective into the public spotlight. Somewhere along the way, Pellicano had forgotten the advantages provided by silence.

Things began going wrong for Pellicano in 2002 when someone left a dead fish and a threatening note on the silver Audi owned by an L.A. Times reporter working on a story about the actor Steven Seagal. The petty crook convicted of those actions claimed Pellicano had hired him to scare the reporter—an assertion that led to the raid on Pellicano’s office and the discovery of illegal explosives and some interesting recordings.

Pellicano pleaded guilty to the explosives charge and received 30 months in prison. Before he finished serving that sentence, federal prosecutors indicted him on another 110 counts of illegal wiretapping and racketeering. This past May, a judge pushed Pellicano’s trial back to February 2008 so his lawyers would have time to review the government’s evidence: 150,000 pages and hundreds of telephone recordings. (Those recordings have much of Hollywood very worried, as stars, producers, and other entertainment heavyweights wonder what the tapes will reveal and whom they might implicate.) Pellicano awaits the trial in jail.

As for Mike Todd, his remains were returned to his original grave, and he lies for eternity in lot 66 of the Beth Aaron section of Waldheim Cemetery—presuming some fool with a shovel doesn’t concoct another harebrained scheme about digging for nonexistent diamonds. In the Jewish religion, death marks the end of the story; there is little emphasis on an afterlife. But ten years ago, anticipating surgery on a brain tumor, Elizabeth Taylor—nearly 65 and, after eight marriages, single once again—recalled the time she had nearly died of pneumonia in London a few years after Todd’s death. “I went through the tunnel and saw the most wonderful light at the end of it,” she told Life magazine. “And I longed to be there. But Mike Todd was at the end of the tunnel, and he told me I had to go back—and live!”