Subtlety was never Anthony Pellicano's trademark. A not-so-private investigator with a reputation for thuggery, he boasted of his ability to shred his foes' faces with a knife, kept a baseball bat in the boot of his car and cached grenades and military-grade explosives in his office safe.
Born in Chicago, the former Mafia capital of America, and descended from Sicilian immigrants, he was said to have 'more mob connections than J. Edgar Hoover' and revelled in his status as a Hollywood tough guy and protector of celebrity secrets.
'Anthony is one of those people who is, shall we say, a lion at the gate,' OJ Simpson, fallen American football star and a former client of Pellicano, once said admiringly. 'He is not a man to be on the wrong side of.'
Released from prison just days ago after serving 30 months for weapons offences, 61-year-old Pellicano - whose clientele once included Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Steven Seagal and Farrah Fawcett - is now back behind bars in a new case that is being billed as potentially 'Hollywood's biggest thriller of the year'.
The trial, which has been scheduled for April, is expected to shine a light on Tinseltown's dark underside.
It will expose studio executives, show-business lawyers, celebrity agents, telephone company insiders, computer hackers, corrupt police officers and perhaps even a few A-list stars to a hefty dose of embarrassment, if not some legal trouble of their own, in a plot that could have come straight from the big-screen.