Huffington Post contributor Allison Hope Weiner has posted a recording of a 2001 conversation between Courtney Love and Anthony Pellicano. Love was calling from the Vancouver set of Luis Mandoki‘s Trapped (which came out the following year) and looking for help from Pellicano with (a) her then-boyfriend Jim’s divorce and custody lawsuit and (b) concerns over an ex-assistant having hacked into her email account and threatened to publish all kinds of personal correspondence.
Love: “I need everything from refinement to fucking baseball bats, and I need them all under one roof.” Pellicano: “Courtney, if you come to me, that’s the end of that. I’m an old style Sicilian. I only go one way. My clients are my family, and that’s it. You fuck with my family, you fuck with me.”
Pellicano did me a dirty in ’93 (i.e., tapped into conversations I was having on my cordless phone) but it as just business. He didn’t do this to blackmail me; he was being paid to do it so somebody else might be able to, you know, theoretically “influence” me. But several years later he did me a favor for free. On some level, I think, he was saying to me, “I didn’t mean anything by that ’93 thing, not personally, and just to show you I’m not all bad, or maybe to make up for the ’93 thing on some level, here’s a small gift.”
I respected that for what it was. Doing things “the Sicilian way” obviously didn’t work out for Pellicano, but I respect the guy for at least being, after a fashion, straight with me.
And I like this line that he says to Love during their chat: “Silence is a friend that will never betray you.”