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Wednesday Nov.12, 2003; 10:58 a.m. EST
Pellicano Tapes Could be Trouble for Bill and Hillary
Hollywood is buzzing over "investigator-to-the-stars" private eye Anthony Pellicano, who copped a plea earlier this year after the FBI caught him with a draw full of hand grenades and, in the words of one agent, enough plastique explosive to "take out a 747."
But Left Coast celebs may not be the only folks currently losing sleep over Pellicano - especially since news broke late last week that he had the habit of illegally wiretapping the targets of his investigations.
Besides causing trouble for headliners like Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, Kevin Costner and dozens of other stars, Pellicano's tapes could easily expose a certain political power couple to a new round of scrutiny, just as one of them sets the stage for a future presidential run.
Though the American press insists on not reporting this inconvenient detail, Anthony Pellicano was first hired by Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1992 in a bid to discredit Gennifer Flowers' steamy tape recordings of conversations with Mr. Clinton.
As noted in Ron Kessler's 1995 best-seller, "Inside the White House," "The Clinton camp made much of the fact that Anthony J. Pellicano, an expert on audio recording analysis, had told the press that a twelve-minute portion of the tape of conversations between Flowers and Clinton had been 'selectively edited' at two points."
To counter Pellicano's claims, Flowers submitted her recordings to Truth Verification Labs, which found them to be 100 percent authentic.
In 1999 Flowers filed a defamation suit against Clinton campaign officials James Carville and George Stephanopoulos - along with then-first lady Hillary Clinton - based on their attempts to use Pellicano's analysis to discredit her.
Arguing before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last year, Flowers' Judicial Watch attorneys tied Pellicano directly to the first lady-turned-New York Senator, telling the court, "Anthony Pellicano was a private investigator hired by Mrs. Clinton herself. And he's the one who did the analysis of the tapes."
The court ruled in Flowers' favor, allowing the lawsuit to proceed.
But that isn't the only time Pellicano has been linked to the Clintons.
Four days after the Monica Lewinsky story broke in Jan. 1998, ex-Lewinsky boyfriend Andy Bleiler came forward with the claim that she had stalked him. The Washington state school teacher also contended that Lewinsky wanted to become a White House intern so she could perform oral sex on then-President Clinton.
"I'm going to Washington to get my presidential knee pads," Bleiler's lawyer, Terry Giles, quoted Lewinsky as saying.
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