The ten year-old ties between Paramount Pictures chairman Brad Grey and indicted wire-tapper and onetime private investigator Anthony Pellicano are a bit clearer and more detailed due to a Page One story in Monday’s N.Y. Times, written by David Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner. The story is mainly about past acrimonious relations between (a) Grey, a big-time talent manager before being hired to run Paramount, (b) his former client Garry Shandling (whom Grey managed and also collected a fat fee for producing Shandling’s “The Larry Sanders Show”) and (c) former actress Linda Doucett, who briefly co-starred on “Sanders,” was engaged to Shandling in the early to mid ’90s and fell into (or maneuvered herself into) a position to collect money from the show, Grey and Shandling over this and that touchy matter. The long and the short, as indicated by the Times story, is that Grey may have hired Pellicano (or had his attorney Bert Fields hire him) to lean on Doucett over matters of money and testimony. (Read the Times story for the details.) Grey has been interviewed by the FBI and testified before the grand jury investigating Pellicano, and his lawyer “has said Grey has been repeatedly assured that he was not a subject or a target of the investigation.” In a “terse” statement released Sunday afternoon by Paramount spokesperson Janet Hill, Grey told the Times that he had been “casually acquainted with Anthony Pellicano” but “had no ‘relationship’ with Pellicano until my attorney, Bert Fields, hired him in the Garry Shandling lawsuit.” He also said that “the fact remains that I had no knowledge of any illegal activity he may have conducted.” Fields “also has denied knowing of Mr. Pellicano’s illicit activities,” the story said.