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Plot Thickens in Seagal Mob Case
A celebrity detective linked to Steven Seagal is under siege from a former Los Angeles Times reporter over allegedly spearheading a campaign to get said reporter to stop looking into the actor's bizarre Mafia extortion case.
Hollywood P.I. Anthony Pellicano has been sued by former reporter Anita Busch for being the mastermind behind a series of well-publicized threats that "traumatized her and brought her illustrious career to a halt." The phone company SBC Communications and the City of Los Angeles are also named in the suit.
Busch was investigating the legal skirmish between Seagal and his former producer Jullian Nasso, a purported member of the Gambino crime family. Seagal claimed Nasso used his mob connections to threaten the actor when he backed out of four planned films. Nasso in turn sued Seagal for $60 million in damages.
Busch, a former editor of the Hollywood Reporter who had moved to the Times, was one of the reporters on the scene, and when she started digging deep into the case, she was purportedly harassed by Pellicano and his flunkies. To get her to stop her investigation, Pellicano allegedly resorted to such tactics as putting a dead fish in her car, along with a rose and a threatening note.
Busch's lawsuit says the harassment kicked off in June 2002, starting with threats left on her answering machine about blowing up her car. That was supposedly followed by nine months of bullying, including having her computer hacked and her hard drive destroyed, her car broken into and two thugs intimidating her by following her to her parents' home.
According to Busch's lawyer, Matthew Geragos, the lawsuit names Pellicano, as well as LAPD Detective Mark Arneson, ex-con and alleged muscle man Alexander Proctor and an unnamed client and the law firm connected to Pellicano as part of what Geragos said was the private eye's "ring of co-conspirators."
(Proctor, incidentally, claimed in November 2003 that Seagal, not the Mafia, was behind the threats to reporters in an effort to drum up sympathy for his cause. Seagal's reps dismissed the claim.)
Busch claims that SBC helped Pellicano tap her phones and that the city didn't monitor Arneson and allowed him to give Pellicano and Proctor information about her.
Busch is asking for unspecified punitive and actual damages, attorney fees and court costs. In the meantime, Geragos said she has chosen not to renew her contract with the Times and is "trying to get on with her life in terms of a new career."
So far, there is not a whole lot coming from the defendants' camp.
SBC reps could not be reached for comment. Pellicano, a well-known private eye who has worked with the likes of Tom Cruise Roseanne Barr and Elizabeth Taylor, among others, is currently serving time for an unrelated felony weapons charge and is also in the hot seat from the feds for wiretapping. And Proctor is also in the big house for unrelated drug possession charges and is awaiting trial on state charges for his harassment of Busch.
A spokesperson from the U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman said prosecutors are cooperating with the Los Angeles District Attorney in an ongoing investigation into the threats against Busch.
As for Seagal, the Out for Justice star was not named in the lawsuit. He's been trying to resurrect his faltering film career and has several movies in the works for release in 2004, including the action flicks Clementine, Out of Reach and Into the Sun.
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