..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Episode Three: Neo-Connolly

Anthony Pellicano

In the six years I've known the journalist John Connolly, he's never lied to me. Half the stuff out of his mouth hasn't been true, but I do believe it's all been accurate.

Anyone who knows anything about Connolly and accused wiretapper Anthony Pellicano laughed when word leaked out on the morning of April 27 that Connolly was supposedly being threatened by Pellicano. This all had something to do with a Vanity Fair article that was about to be released on Pellicano by Connolly and Bryan Borrough.

(For fans keeping score, Connolly is the veteran Irish-American "reporter" with the face of a crushed Pabst can. Borrough is the blonde-in-a-blue-pinstripe-suit "writer" who VF trotted out to flack the piece on the TV morning shows.)

Pellicano has lost about 30 pounds since he's been jailed on February 6 on a no-bail hold in the Metropolitan Detention Center, and looks like he could croak at any minute. He can't receive visitors, and his mail and phone calls are heavily monitored. Unless his attorney, a former federal prosecutor, was passing along the threats, somebody was pulling somebody else's leg.

(In fact, federal prosecutors - anxious to keep Pellicano locked down while they sort through his wiretaps -- have relayed a whole slew of alleged jailhouse threats from Pellicano since he was arrested on possession of illegal explosives in November 2002. None of them have been substantiated to date.)

Friends of Connolly checked their watches on April 27. When trouble is afoot, Connolly likes to strike first. Sure enough, the first set of attacks on Connolly's journalistic integrity hit the wires four hours later on Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily when Kat Pellicano, one of the private eye's myriad ex-wives, challenged Connolly's reporting. Within a day, Hollywood's code-three publicist army spit mouthfuls of Perrier all over the Pellicano piece. One commentator even wondered what VF's "vaunted fact-checkers" were doing while the Pellicano piece was being put to bed.

Vaunted? Isn't this the magazine that runs Dominick Dunne?

Anybody who thinks VF editor Graydon Carter didn't anticipate any uproar over Connolly has got to live in movie-centric Hollywood and believes writers just send in their copy like Tom Wolfe and it runs without a peep of input.

I have never met a magazine editor who didn't know exactly what he was getting when he pushed the John Connolly button. Connolly is rough trade, a hired hit man who takes his craft seriously. He is also smart, aggressive, charming, conniving, and intensely loyal to those loyal to him. Think Joe Eszterhas without the addiction to strange ginch.

I'm writing this in the hope that Carter, unlike Connolly's previous editors at Details and Premiere, doesn't dump Connolly now that the heat's on.

In 2001, the newly-hired Premiere editor-in-chief Michael Solomon proclaimed to advertisers that he was going to make the mag look like Vogue while standing up to Hollywood. He immediately called Connolly, who had been run out of the magazine shortly after his 1998 piece on the alleged partying ways of the execs at New Line Cinema.

From Solomon's first Premiere issue in March 2001:

"A woman who went to the set of 1996's Eraser recalls the friend she was visiting there being asked to retrieve Schwarzenegger from his trailer for a shot that was ready to roll earlier than expected. 'He asked me if I wanted to meet Arnold, and I said sure. When we opened the door to his trailer, Arnold was giving oral sex to a woman. He looked up and, with that accent, said very slowly, "Eating is not cheating." I met him again about a year later and asked him, in German, whether or not eating was cheating, and he just laughed.'"

Within days of Connolly's "Arnold the Barbarian" piece hitting the newsstand and getting play in all the Gotham gossip columns, Solomon was flooded with letters stating that Connolly had played incredibly dirty pool with Arnold Schwarzenegger. When I was pulled off the Premiere bench a month later to do a whack job on Elie Samaha, a Premiere junior editor hissed to me: "We will never use Connolly again. He's a dirty journalist."

Oh, so every Premiere editor and lawyer at corporate parent Hachette Filipacchi just happened to miss the earlier hit job on New Line Cinema?

Here's what every editor in New York knows about Connolly. (If you get a call from him, you should know it, too. Then you can't bitch later.) A former cop and stock broker, he's not afraid to do dig through reams of paper to find the hidden nuggets of truth and dirt. He works off his phone in New York, a one-party consent state. Thus, he's almost invariably the only party giving consent to the phone call being taped.

If Connolly is writing about a public person, which he always is when he works the Hollywood circuit, the rules of engagement are defined by the 1964 landmark Supreme Court decision on New York Times v. Sullivan, which raised the bar to an extraordinarily high level for any such person to sue for libel successfully. If you're Brad Pitt being accused of using Pellicano by Connolly, you've got to prove "actual malice" - that any magazine using Connolly's work went to press with an article it knew was false, or it acted with "reckless disregard" for whether the article was true or false.

So Connolly gets a quote about someone on tape. It doesn't matter how good the source is or whether it's on the record of if the source even knew he was being taped. In the "Arnold-Going-Down" scene previously cited, Premiere could run that information without getting any verification from Schwarzenegger or the woman he was supposedly servicing. All the magazine has to do is offer Schwarzenegger a chance to refute the allegation.

In this case, Schwarzenegger's camp never responded when Premiere asked Schwarzenegger if he did, indeed, do what the tape recorded, not-for-attribution source said he did.

I have no idea if the information about Schwarzenegger was true, but I'm sure it wasn't Connolly's call how the information ran in the magazine.

I do know this: Then-Premiere editor Solomon was confident that the information was accurate in legal terms, and a 12-member jury hearing a defamation claim would never vote unanimously that it wasn't.

No one put a gun to your head when you hired Connolly, Mr. Carter. Don't hang him out to dry.

- by Ross Johnson
May 3, 2006

Ross Johnson is a veteran Hollywood journlaist and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire magazine, New York magazine, Los Angeles magazine, Premiere magazine, and USA Today. He has recently created a website called LA Indie which houses analysis of documents relating to the Pellicano case. You can reach him by e-mail here.

 

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