Federal authorities seem to have no intention of letting Hollywood's former detective to the stars go down alone.

Die Hard director John McTiernan became the 14th person--and the most well-known Tinseltown figure--to be charged with a crime in relation to the federal racketeering and conspiracy case against private investigator Anthony Pellicano.

McTiernan, a Hollywood veteran, who also helmed The Hunt for Red October and Predator, was charged with one count of lying to FBI investigators, according to federal court documents. The charges read that, during a Feb. 13 interview with federal agents, McTiernan told them that he knew nothing about Pellicano's alleged wiretapping activities and had never discussed wiretapping with the detective, when in fact he had hired Pellicano to do a job for him.

McTiernan, 55, allegedly commissioned the P.I. to bug the office of producer Charles Roven, whom the director had worked with on 2002's Rollerball and then supposedly discussed the findings from that wiretap with Pellicano, 61.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel A. Saunders, who has prosecuted most of the other cases related to Pellicano, also signed off on these charges.

The director, who faces five years in prison if convicted, was ordered to appear in court Apr. 17.

Meanwhile, Pellicano--who, if convicted, could go down in history as the world's most prominent eavesdropper--is facing 20 years in prison for each count of racketeering he has been charged with. He's looking at a total of 110 charges of racketeering, conspiracy, identity theft, witness tampering and destruction of evidence. The detective has been accused of illegally wiretapping and filching confidential information about a number of prominent performers, journalists and businesspeople.

Six others, including a former Los Angeles police officer and a former phone company worker, also face similar charges. Pellicano allegedly paid police officers to run illegal background checks for him.

Deadwood player Keith Carradine, who, along with Sylvester Stallone, Kevin Nealon and Gary Shandling, was one of the more high-profile targets of Pellicano's alleged grand-scale snooping, sued the detective last month for conspiring to illegally tap his phone. Carradine is charging that Pellicano was in cahoots with the actor's ex-wife, who wanted dirt on her hubby to use against him during divorce proceedings.

The three-year-long investigation into Pellicano's business began in 2002 when Anita Busch, a Los Angeles Times reporter working on a story about Steven Seagal's relationship with a Mob figure, found a dead fish placed on her car. The trail led to Pellicano, who had supposedly hired convicted felon Alexander Proctor to intimidate the journalist. The felonious fish flinger also told authorities that Pellicano was working for Seagal.

When Busch found in November 2002 that her phone was bugged, federal agents raided Pellicano's office, seizing more than a million pages of computer printouts and wiretap transcripts, according to the New York Times. Meanwhile, Pellicano maintained he was not involved with the fishy incident.

Federal investigators announced last week that there was no evidence connecting Seagal to the above scare tactics. That wouldn't have been very Zen of him, anyway.

Pellicano's only-in-L.A. career of tracking down info for the rich and famous was seriously compromised when he was sentenced in January 2004 to 30 months in federal prison for illegal possession of firearms and explosives. During the 2002 raid, U.S. Marshals turned up grenades and other no-no's.

The legally challenged detective was arrested on the current charges in February, a day before he was to be released from prison.