Blonde Ambition (7 page)

   "Are you Jack Harding?" the man asked, dogs growling at his feet.

   "Yep," Harding answered.

   "Well, I'm John Nazarian, and I'm retained by Howard K. Stern."

   He handed Harding his business card: "John Nazarian of Nazarian and Associates, Investigations and Securities." Harding said the card had an interesting e-mail address on it: "will
[email protected]
."

   In June of 2006, the
Los Angeles Times
ran a front-page piece on John Nazarian, a fifty-five-year-old Hollywood gumshoe in the Sam Spade tradition. He, like many of the 2,100 licensed private eyes in Los Angeles County, are the hired guns the celebrities call when they need their problems to disappear. Nazarian, who claims to get $10,000 to $20,000 retainers and $400 an hour, has worked for a number of celebrity clients, including Peggy Lee (whom he protected from paparazzi), Dean Martin, and the television show
Extra
, which sent him to Mexico to hunt for Olivia Newton-John's boyfriend, who had disappeared after a fishing trip.

   Nazarian is also the only investigator used by the "dean of L.A. divorce lawyers," Sorrell Trope. Trope and Trope is the law firm where Ron Rale works. Ron Rale is the man who has been vigorously defending Howard K. Stern even though he says he's not Howard's attorney. He says he merely oversees the interests of Anna. But Ron Rale is said to be the one who introduced Howard K. Stern to Anna and is also listed, along with Howard, as the secondary executor of her will.

   "Lots of people are trying to be private investigators or security experts," John Nazarian says on his website, "but there is only one proven LEGEND." Certainly, Nazarian's interesting tactics have gained him a notorious reputation. Lynn Soodik, an attorney specializing in family law, told the
Los Angeles
Times
that Nazarian definitely tried to intimidate her during a case against one of Nazarian's clients. He sent a greeting card to her at home. "On the surface, it was not threatening," she said, "but you knew he was saying, 'I know where you live.'"

   Nazarian told the paper he also went through her trash, just to unnerve her. "Not that we break the law," he said, "but a private eye, by the mere fact of what we do, it's not like we're a bunch of choirboys. We're not."

   Incidentally, neighbors would later tell Harding that they saw a man in the neighborhood fitting Nazarian's description taking pictures of Harding's house.

   A former cop, Nazarian has a team of experts who work with him—a handwriting analyst, a forensic accountant, a lab technician, and technology whizzes—but it is perhaps his menacing looks and reputation that often goes the farthest to getting the job done. He looks like a professional wrestler, shaving his head like Kojak and shaping his black dyed goatee into an interesting wing-like spread across his jaw. His typical attire includes a hat, oversize designer shades, and lots of "bling." He owns a cream-colored Bentley and a Rolls Royce and wears two chunky trademark rings of gold and platinum that look like two squashed golf balls sitting atop his knuckles.

   "I'm looking for a guy who's 75," Nazarian told fellow P.I. Jack Harding as they stood in Harding's backyard shortly after Anna's death. Seventy-four-year-old Jack Harding knew the game being played. He was being intimidated. He was being not so subtly told to keep his mouth shut about what he knows. Nazarian then made comments such as "Hey, this is a good area you live in" and "Your house is worth a lot. You need to protect that place."

   "He was definitely threatening me and letting me know he's been doing research on me," Jack Harding told me. "It was clear that Howard K. Stern had sent his goon over to intimidate me."

As Daniel's body went to the morgue to await its mandatory autopsy, his mother was taken back to Horizons, the Bahamian home her former boyfriend Ben Thompson had signed over to her so that she could meet the Bahamian residency requirements.

   On almost one acre, the gated estate on Eastern Road in New Providence is lushly landscaped and has panoramic water views. The all-white, neo-Mediterranean style house is protected like a fortress behind locked gates and privacy bushes. Verandas and terraces overlook pristine gardens, a tennis court, and a gothic looking pool with Grecian statues.

   But besides the work of gardeners and handymen, activity on the outside of the house for Anna Nicole Smith was rare. It was inside the three-bedroom, three-bath house where all the drama occurred. She was sequestered inside the waterfront mansion, like an aging beauty hiding from the flash of cameras, or worse. She was a depressed new mother, who'd just lost her beloved other child, and was infused with mindnumbing drugs.

   An employee who started working for them as soon as she and Howard moved to the house and stayed on for seven months up until her death, earned Anna's trust and confidence. He became her confidante. Later, he told me that "Howard never treated her right," and that what went on inside the house, both before and after Daniel's death, was "terrible and rocky." He said, "He'd cuss at her. I saw him push her down on the bed a couple of times. I asked her about it and she said, 'don't worry with it. He'll get over it.' She didn't want no hard feelings from me toward Howard, so she told me just to leave it at that."

   "He pushed her on the bed once and said, 'Get your fat, fucking ass away from me.' I walked in and he stopped. She just started crying. She told me everything would be okay . . . . I saw a lot. I know a lot."

   "Why did she tolerate the abuse?" I asked.

   "He had something on her that she couldn't bring to the public," he said. "She was afraid of him because he had something on her."

• • •

When they got back to the Horizons house the day Daniel died, Ben and Anna went to Howard's bedroom, while Gaither Thompson, Ben's son, and Ford Shelley, Ben's son-in-law, went to Anna's bedroom where Howard had started rifling through all of Daniel's things. Howard and Anna had separate bedrooms, approximately one hundred feet apart. While Ben comforted Anna, Ford says Howard was aggressively searching through Daniel's jeans, his shoes, his t-shirt, and baseball cap, which were all laid out on the bed in Anna's room.

   Both Gaither and Ford saw two pills fall out of Daniel's front pocket. "They were two white tablets," Ford Shelley said, "odd shaped. I'm not sure what they were."

   Howard took the pills, went into the bathroom and closed the door. Suspicious of what Howard was doing, Ford walked over to the bathroom door and heard the toilet flush. When he came out of the bathroom, Ford Shelley says Howard proclaimed, "I took care of the problem."

   "Why are you doing this?" Ford asked. "I wouldn't have done that if I were you."

   After a long pause, Howard said, "Well, I did."

   Ford believes Howard was protecting Daniel and Anna, but told me, "Jesus Christ! I can't believe he'd destroy evidence like that." Ford also told me, "I believe Howard was doing what Anna told him to do. I believe Anna told him to make sure anything suspicious was gone. No matter how drunken and out of it Anna was, she was still aware and knew she could not have drug evidence tied to Daniel."

   It should not go unnoted that Anna had been heavily sedated since the hospital—hallucinating and saying she wanted Daniel to come watch a movie with her. Anna would later say she had no memory of the morning her son suddenly and mysteriously died. Ford Shelley never spoke to Howard about those two pills again.

Bahamian coroner Linda Virgill called to ask Anna to come identify the body of her son, and Anna, overwrought with sadness and heavily medicated, signed a paper allowing Howard to make the positive identification. Howard K. Stern and Ford Shelley went to the morgue and identified the body as being Daniel Wayne Smith, the twenty-year-old son of the woman known as Anna Nicole Smith.

   At the morgue Linda Virgill told Howard that she wanted to come to the house and ask Anna questions about her son's death. Howard told her Anna wasn't up to visitors, that it would be better if she could come at a later time. Linda Virgill said no, she was going to the house now. Howard and Ford said they were hungry and wanted to stop and grab a bite to eat. Linda Virgill wasn't hungry and wanted no delays. There was no stopping. She was going to the house immediately.

   On the drive back to the house Howard and Ford Shelley were in a separate vehicle from Virgill. According to Shelley, Howard called and told someone on the other end of the phone, "Go put the pills away now!" He explained the coroner was on the way, and added, "Put the pills in the bag under the bed or in the bed in the master bedroom."

   The master bedroom was Anna's bedroom.

   "What are you doing?" Ford asked. "Maybe Daniel took something that would've killed him."

   For the rest of the drive, Howard was silent. "He clearly wanted to hide those pills before the coroner got there and started snooping around," Ford said.

   When they arrived at the house, Linda Virgill asked a lot of questions about drugs, prescriptions, and that night in the hospital. She also looked around the minimally decorated house, taking in the home environment of the Bahamas' newest celebrity resident. Ford Shelley says Howard repeatedly told Linda Virgill, as he would also tell other Bahamian authorities, that there were no drugs present and no drug history for Daniel. "There is no way any drugs could've played a role," Howard said.

   Ford says he was shocked by Howard's clear lie. They knew Howard had taken those pills out of Daniel's pocket before he made those statements to the coroner and also had all the pills in the house as well as the "goodie bag" put away. "He had already tampered with evidence," Ford said.

   That night, the air conditioning in Anna's bedroom didn't work, and when Ford, his wife, and Howard lifted the mattress to move it into another room to sleep on, his "goodie bag" fell from between Anna's mattress where it had been hidden and onto the floor. Howard picked it up, gave it to Ford's wife and instructed her to "put it in a safe, concealed place."

   In talking with Ford Shelley and Ben Thompson about Linda Virgill's last minute visit that day, Howard announced, "We need to get her removed. She's going to be a problem."

Two days later, Her Majesty's coroner Linda P. Virgill announced the death of Daniel Wayne Smith was "suspicious" and scheduled a formal inquiry, an "inquest," which could lead to criminal charges. Bradley Neely, chief inspector of the coroner's office, was quick to explain to the Associated Press, "Whenever there is a suspicious death we would have an inquest to determine how the person died."

   Virgill went further, saying authorities believe they knew what killed Daniel, but said that the autopsy and toxicology reports would not be released until the inquest. "It would not be fair to the Bahamian public simply because we need to take our jurors from that pool and you do not wish to contaminate them," she told reporters. She did, however, say that there was no sign of physical injury and confirmed rather ominously that "there was definitely a third person in the room at the time of death and I do know who that person is."

   The inquest was scheduled for the week of October 23. If jurors at the inquest were to decide that a crime took place, the case would then be sent to the attorney general's office.

   Reginald Ferguson, the assistant commissioner of the Royal Bahamian Police Force, told the press that no drug paraphernalia or traces of illegal drugs were found on Daniel Smith, in the hospital room, or near the room.

   He didn't mention the two pills that nurse Nadine Carey found in the bed of the "third person" in the room, the bed where Howard K. Stern had slept.

   The following day in a continued volley, Michael Scott, the Bahamian attorney representing Anna, delivered a prepared statement. "The devastation and grief over Daniel's sudden death, coupled with the sedation, has been so extreme that Anna Nicole experienced memory loss of the event." He went on to say that "Anna Nicole was so distraught at the loss of Daniel that she refused to leave his side and it was necessary to sedate her in order to check her out of the hospital." Later, he said, Anna had to be reminded that Daniel had passed away.

   In concluding his statement, Michael Scott said he wanted to clear up the mystery of the third person in the room. It wasn't a mystery or even unusual. The third person in the room was "another one of Anna Nicole Smith's attorneys," a man named Howard K. Stern.

Expert examiner Dr. Cyril Wecht, who has performed approximately 14,000 autopsies and has supervised, reviewed or been consulted on approximately 30,000 additional postmortem examinations, was brought to the Bahamas by Callender and Company, the Bahamian law firm of Michael Scott, to perform a second autopsy "on behalf of the family." Dr. Wecht, a frequent cable news guest, has been utilized in many high profile cases including the 1969 drowning death of Kennedy campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne, the murder case of American heiress Sunny von Bulow, and the strange suicide of Whitewater figure Vincent Foster. Now, after spending three hours in a chilly morgue on a hot Sunday afternoon in the Bahamas, Dr. Cyril Wecht has added Daniel Wayne Smith to the list.

   According to Dr. Wecht, he found no scratches or marks on Daniel's body, and blood tests ruled out the presence of alcohol and other drugs including cocaine, opiates and amphetamines. The procedure he performed detailed Daniel's death as an accidental lethal combination of two anti-depressants— Zoloft and Lexapro—and methadone. Though methadone is supposed to be carefully administered by a doctor and has typically not been thought of as a "street drug," recreational use of the drug has become a problem. According to Wecht, Daniel had no known addiction to morphine or heroin. Methadone is commonly used to wean people off of those drugs.