Ami Shafrir .com
Small Fry in a Big Net
The high-profile legal saga of private detective Anthony Pellicano has many subplots. Meet the nanny, the lawyer and the ex-husband.
By Paul Lieberman, Times Staff Writer
February 18, 2006
A nanny grows disillusioned with her employer — Canada's richest woman — and helps the woman's rival in a child custody fight.
A fledgling lawyer complains that she was sexually harassed by her firm's boss, a man made famous by the film "Erin Brockovich."
A Beverly Hills couple goes through a bitter divorce that provides an opening for a convicted swindler to gain control of their business and real estate empire, once worth $40 million.
Three more soap operas that played out in Southern California courts. Three more disputes to destroy people's reputations and livelihoods, if not their lives. And three more cases bearing the fingerprints of Anthony Pellicano, the bat-wielding private detective who promised his clients, "Your problem becomes my problem."
The 61-year-old Pellicano is dealing with his own problems these days. He just finished a 2 1/2 -year prison term for possessing illegal explosives. Now he faces a federal racketeering indictment accusing him of bribing police and using illegal wiretaps to dig up dirt on those he was paid handsomely to investigate — charges that he denies.
Although initial reports have focused on the boldface names on the list of his alleged victims — such as actor Sylvester Stallone, comedian Garry Shandling and CAA talent agents — the indictment and other court records provide evidence that Pellicano also used his police contacts and eavesdropping skills against individuals who were hardly power players on the Hollywood scene, or any scene.
The nanny, the novice lawyer and the businessman all complained long before Pellicano's indictment that they felt overwhelmed in a legal system that was supposed to guarantee them a fair fight, but in which their deep-pocketed adversaries sometimes seemed to know their next move ahead of time, as if they were mind readers. All told their lawyers they thought their phones might have been tapped — and one screamed it to anyone who would listen, to no avail.
He and the others were dismissed at times as paranoid, if not "looney-tunes." They sometimes couldn't be sure themselves whether their suspicions were true or only their imaginations at work.
Even if there had been no Anthony Pellicano, it is likely that all three still would have become obsessed with the legal disputes that threatened them with ruin on the one hand while promising redemption on the other. Even with last week's unsealing of the 110-count indictment against Pellicano and six others, and the indictment Wednesday of a Hollywood attorney who employed Pellicano, there's much they don't know. But part of their obsession now is making sure there's a price to pay for the people who allegedly crushed them with the help of the detective who once said, "I only use intimidation and fear when I absolutely have to."
In retrospect, Ami Shafrir could point to depositions he gave on Nov. 2 and Nov. 8, 2000, and say, "I knew."
He was being sued then by one of his own former companies, AmTec Audiotext, located in one of his own former office buildings — on Wilshire Boulevard — and he had been reduced to representing himself and ranting about how everything had been taken from him in a giant con.
Among the things that stunned him were questions from an opposing lawyer who asked about "an assistant United States attorney named Olson" and queried, "Now you have spoken with an FBI agent named Walker, correct?"
Shafrir shot back, "Is there a way you are obtaining information in an illegal way?"
He later explained his suspicion by recalling how he had been relating his story to FBI Agent Dale Walker and was arranging to meet federal prosecutor Steven Olson but "didn't tell anyone."
How could these people have known?
The lawyer told him, "I don't answer questions here," so Shafrir keep making speeches: "You are part of the conspiracy, OK. You are burning my money." Asked about a conversation with a former associate, he said, "We were talking about girls, OK … about life, about Genesis, about the creation of the world, about the birds in the sky." Shafrir blew up also at Beverly Hills Police and the LAPD, one of whose officers did off-duty security chores for the people Shafrir saw as driving him to ruin.
At least he did not have to wait for the indictment of Pellicano to receive assurances that he was not nuts. Two years ago, the federal government arrested Israel native Daniel Nicherie on a 44-page warrant that described him as a man with 11 aliases who had left Shafrir and his wife "defrauded out of at least $40 million," in part by using their own money to fund "approximately 106 lawsuits and 10 bankruptcy filings." The government said the accused swindler had used $154,000 of the Shafrirs' money to pay Anthony Pellicano.
Well before Pellicano came under official scrutiny, this case provided a window into what the detective did for such fees.
Ami and Sarit Shafrir had come to the U.S. from Israel in 1989 and made their fortune through companies that provided phone lines and billing services to connect callers with psychic hotlines and racy chat rooms. They bought a home on Mount Olympus, above the Sunset Strip, but the marriage collapsed after two children when Sarit came to believe she was not getting enough credit for the businesses and that her husband was straying. "Sometimes, when you make a lot of money the wife gets ugly and the house gets smaller," she said. Her anger led to "my stupid mistake," she added.
In one court declaration, she said fellow Israelis Daniel and Abner Nicherie presented themselves as "wealthy businessmen" able to help make sure her husband did not cheat her in their divorce. One way they gained her cooperation, she said, was by sharing dirt that Pellicano dug up. They called him "the doctor," she said, as in, "We have to go to the doctor today."
Most of the lawyers and clients identified as using Pellicano have maintained that if he did anything illegal, he hid it from them. But Sarit Shafrir said Pellicano let the Nicheries hear recordings of Ami's phone conversations, perhaps because some were in Hebrew and he needed help translating them.
She said she regularly dropped off Abner Nicherie at the detective's office, where Nicherie, who had to leave his cellphone at the front desk, would sneak in a second phone, "small, like a Snickers bar." He would place it next to the headphones, on his lap, when no one was looking, and call her cellphone, Sarit said. She thus "listened to conversations Ami had with the FBI and with his attorneys," she stated in a court declaration.
She also heard her husband "talking to his mother about me and the children," she recalled. "I really wanted to bury this man."
But by mid-2001, she had second thoughts about working with the brothers and announced, during a dramatic court appearance, that they were pulling a "big scam." She told a judge, "They showed me how to lie. They showed me how to forge." They even tried to brand Ami a child molester, she said.
Sarit Shafrir later testified before the grand jury investigating Pellicano, while Ami gave investigators samples of his voice — and, like Miller and Cohen, over the years also spewed out to the FBI details of the stories related here. Federal authorities seemed to be most riled by the possibility that Pellicano had listened in on one of their agents, he said.
As in all the cases, though, law enforcement officials revealed little to the couple, who were separately trying to rebuild their lives. Sarit did help Ami win a civil judgment against the Nicheries, but he had little hope of collecting a penny.
Ami had to settle for the moral victory of the call from someone with the federal government on Feb. 6. "He said, 'Good morning, how are you?' 'Fine.' 'I'd like to inform you your name was mentioned as a victim of a wiretap.' "I said, 'Thank you for letting me know.' "