Tinseltown is a nasty little neighborhood, full of rumors and secrets and tattletales. Just when you think you've made it, someone pops up to soak you or soil you or sic the cops on your tail.

Somebody has to look out for all those big names and big checkbooks. Somebody has to be gumshoe to the stars. And this year's Beverly Hills 911 is Anthony J. Pellicano Jr., the least private private eye in town.

Here he is on "Larry King Live," sticking up for Michael Jackson. There he is battling gossip linking a Columbia Pictures executive to accused madam Heidi Fleiss. Magazines report that a coterie of stars pooled $2 million each to pay Pellicano for protection from the tabloids. He even made the big screen as a technical adviser on "The Firm."

To those closest to him, Pellicano is a devoted family man, a onetime punk who was raised by a divorced single mom and who has vowed that his own children will never experience his hard knocks. "Family is sacred to me," he said, his office walls overflowing with photos of his second wife and nine children. His voice grows thick when he recalls the day his 5-year-old autistic son learned to kiss.

But to those on the business end of his $25,000 retainer fee, Pellicano is part hard-boiled detective and part hardball PR man, a tough talker in a thousand-dollar suit who does not carry a gun but whose telephone Muzak is the Sicilian opera used in "The Godfather, Part III."

"You always want to be on the right side of Anthony Pellicano," warned "Top Gun" producer Don Simpson, whom Pellicano helped shield when an ex-secretary took Simpson to court.

His critics--whom he calls "wimps" and "babies" and worse--agree, in harsher terms.

"He goes in like a junkyard dog to find dirt," said Charles Theodore Mathews, lawyer for the plaintiff in the Simpson suit.

Pellicano, meanwhile, is proud of what he does. "Anybody who wants to malign one of my clients, I dig into their pasts," he said. "So they gotta take the same heat that they dish out."

*

Behind the wheel of his jet-black Lexus, the one with the Louisville Slugger in the trunk, the dark-eyed man in the crisp, white shirt glared at a traffic jam. Somewhere, a roomful of sweating, cursing reporters awaited the latest damage control in the Michael Jackson child molestation investigation. It was his job to deliver. And here he was, stuck in a construction zone.

"What is this? What, are we \o7 goin' crazy\f7 here? What is this, \o7 no left turn?\f7 "