Pulp Friction

Bo Zenga's Hollywood tale began like one of those implausibly bright MGM musicals: a plucky unknown from south Jersey moves to Tinseltown with dreams of becoming a big shot. Before you know it, he's selling film ideas to topflight Hollywood execs. "Pitching in the Big Leagues," the Writers Guild magazine gushed in July 1998, with a cover photo of Zenga standing, script in hand, on the mound at Dodger Stadium. (Get it?) But Zenga's Technicolor fantasy quickly became the stuff of film noir. Convinced that he'd been cheated out of a producer's credit and millions of dollars for work he did on the hit film "Scary Movie," Zenga sued the talent-management company that brought him in on the project, a firm headed at the time by Brad Grey, now chairman of Paramount. To help fight Zenga, Grey and his high-profile lawyer, Bert Fields, turned to the one man in Hollywood you could always count on to dig up dirt on your rivals: Anthony Pellicano, whose reputation as a thuggish gumshoe was only enhanced by his penchant for toting a baseball bat.

Hunting for embarrassing tidbits, the private eye contacted Zenga's friends, former business partners, an old girlfriend--and even hassled Zenga's mother, says Zenga's lawyer, Gregory Dovel. What Zenga learned only later was just how far Pellicano may have gone to get his information: according to a sweeping, 112-count federal indictment unsealed last month, Pellicano is at the center of a wide-ranging conspiracy to gather damning information about his clients' opponents through unauthorized police background checks and illegal wiretaps. Seventeen of those counts--15 percent--stemmed from the Zenga litigation. Pellicano, who is being held without bail, has pleaded not guilty to all charges. But Hollywood bigwigs who hired him--and there are many--are on edge. Meantime, Pellicano's alleged victims are keeping L.A. lawyers busy filing civil suits against the detective and his associates. Last week Zenga expanded a civil suit he's filed against Pellicano to include Grey, Fields and their law firms.

Zenga's story offers a glimpse at how Pellicano's clients benefited from the private eye's activities, and raises questions of what they knew and how they knew it. Grey, Fields and Fields's law firm have repeatedly denied sanctioning or knowing of any lawbreaking by Pellicano. Sources close to the investigation--who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the probe--say the Paramount chairman, who made two appearances before the grand jury more than two years ago, has been told several times by prosecutors he is only a witness in the investigation. Fields has said he is a "subject" of the investigation, but not a target. (While "subjects" of federal investigations are open to indictment, they are not the primary focus of an investigation.) "The biggest shoe left to drop is whether Bert Fields will be indicted," says Loyola Law School's Laurie Levenson. Prosecutors have kept mum, saying only that they expect to file a new, expanded indictment in April.

In his "Scary Movie" suit, filed the day the film opened in 2000, Zenga maintained that a manager at Brillstein-Grey Entertainment promised him that he and the firm would be equal producing partners on the project. Brillstein-Grey denied it ever made such a promise, and then told Zenga he would have to negotiate on his own with the studio that bought the project, Miramax's Dimension Films. In the end, "Scary Movie" was a hit, earning $157 million at the box office. Grey and his firm walked away with more than $7 million from the deal, according to Zenga's suit. Zenga's take: $150,000.

From the beginning, Fields tried to discredit Zenga by painting him as a liar. Pellicano helped bury Zenga in a blizzard of allegations about his own conduct, including accusations that he'd puffed up his résumé. As a result, Dovel instructed Zenga not to answer hundreds of questions at a subsequent deposition. That led the trial judge to bar Zenga from testifying in his own case. Zenga lost, and failed on appeal, too. His lawyer blames the private eye. "If Anthony Pellicano had not been in the case, Bo would have testified, and we would have won," Dovel says. "He was incredibly effective."

Pellicano made his appearance in this drama about seven months into the suit. Grey had first encountered Pellicano in the late 1980s when their offices were in the same building on Sunset Boulevard. Years later, Grey approached HBO about developing a Pellicano idea for a TV series brought to Grey by a prominent agent and a famous director. Whose idea was it to bring Pellicano into the Zenga matter? "As the Zenga case was moving to trial, Mr. Grey and his counsel ... decided to engage Mr. Pellicano, whom the law firm had recommended and hired in prior litigation," says a Grey spokeswoman, who added, "Mr. Grey did not know of, and never condoned, any illegal activity by Mr. Pellicano."