Crooks of Hollywood: the Dillon Jordan scandal is a tale as old as Tinseltown

It was the scale of film producer Dillon D Jordan’s alleged wrongdoing that caused jaws to drop so heavily last week. To the outside world, Jordan was the boss of a respected Los Angeles-based production company, Paperchase Films. But under the surface he is said to have been in charge of a global prostitution racket.

Jordan’s recent film credits include Sara Colangelo’s Sundance-winner The Kindergarten Teacher (2018), starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, and white supremacist drama Skin (2018), starring Jamie Bell and Vera Farmiga. He partnered on both projects with the London and New York based company, Maven Pictures, run by prominent British producers Trudie Styler and Celine Rattray and set up expressly to support female talent in the industry.

In the trade press, Jordan’s business partners have talked about his “instincts and vision”. A profile of the company on a business website claims he has “rapidly achieved acclaim for his strong cinematic sensibilities, protecting investor relationships, and funding provocative, award-winning material”.

What this description fails to acknowledge is that Jordan, according to prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, has also been running a global prostitution ring for several years. This ring extends as far as the UK where, “facilitating” his prostitution business, is a British-based madam named in the indictment against him as “CC-1”.

Jordan, it is alleged, went under several different names. He opened multiple bank accounts to accept payments for prostitution services, describing them as “modelling fees”, “massage fees” and “consulting fees”. He was making huge profits and using his film company to hide the proceeds.

If Jordan is eventually found guilty, he will be another in a very long line of crooks who’ve gatecrashed the film industry. For as long as it has existed, Hollywood has attracted forgers, swindlers, pimps, racketeers and mountebanks of every description. Their antics are often so outlandish that they make the plots of even the most far-fetched thrillers and melodramas made by the studios seem tame by comparison.

Few fictional private eyes on-screen have ever behaved with quite the ruthlessness of real-life Hollywood fixer Anthony Pellicano, notorious for threatening anyone who crossed his clients. This is a man who once tried to frighten off a journalist from a story by having a dead fish put on her car with a rose in its mouth and a note saying “stop”. Just in case she didn’t get the message, there was a bullet hole shot through her windscreen for good measure.

Pellicano used to drive around town with a baseball bat in the trunk of his car in case (as one newspaper put it) he needed to conduct “some impromptu intimidation”. The habit is shared by Liev Schreiber’s Ray Donovan in the long-running series of that name, partly inspired by Hollywood fixers like Pellicano. Donovan, though, had a chivalrous side and a fair amount of decency. These aren’t qualities anybody has ever associated with Pellicano.

Along with his thuggery, Pellicano specialised in wiretapping, illegally recording thousands of hours of conversations involving his clients’ enemies. He was a one-man News of the World. His victims included Sylvester Stallone and Keith Carradine. For good measure, he eavesdropped on his own clients, too. In spite of his dubious methods, top Hollywood power players hired Pellicano. Highly paid lawyers used him to dig up dirt on their opponents.

Pellicano has spent much of the last 20 years in prison. He only emerged from jail in 2019 but is already back in business, offering his services in “crisis communications”. He is no longer allowed to work as a private investigator but old friends remain ready to hire him. The former PI is the Hollywood crook as foot soldier. He is a minor player but a very scary one.

A crook far higher in the Hollywood hierarchy was the late David Begelman, subject of one of the best books written about the inner workings of Hollywood, Indecent Exposure by David McClintick. Begelman was a distinguished producer and former talent agent whose clients included Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. In the 1970s, he became president of Columbia Pictures and oversaw an extraordinary renaissance at the then-floundering studio. He helped greenlight films from Warren Beatty’s Shampoo (1975) to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He was also a compulsive thief and liar. The catalyst that led to his downfall and eventual suicide came when he forged actor Cliff Robertson’s signature on a cheque for the relatively trifling amount of $10,000.

Like Pellicano, Begelman bent the rules. One is a thug. The other was a swindler. However, their misdeeds didn’t affect their social standing with their peers. Their stories reveal the surprisingly indulgent attitude that Hollywood takes toward those who would be shunned in most other sectors of society. Breaking the law is neither here nor there when you are considered useful and your films are making money. Criminal records are treated like parking tickets.

Begelman may eventually have lost his job at Columbia but he soon found lucrative work elsewhere as head of MGM. His bosses were far more upset he had lied about going to Yale than they were about his embezzlement. He remained the same charming, extravagant man about town. What prompted his suicide in 1995 was a run of business failures and the prospect of bankruptcy.

Other fraudsters have often done surprisingly well in Hollywood. One of the most notorious was Giancarlo Parretti, an Italian film financier who had previously worked as a waiter aboard a cruise ship but who bought MGM for more than $1bn in 1990. He had borrowed the money from a European bank and had no resources at all with which to run the company or pay his bills. For a few months, Parretti lived it large, with Rolls-Royces, private jets and all the other trimmings. That was before the US authorities came after him on charges of racketeering and money laundering. Parretti was a Charlie Chaplin-like figure, a small-time crook from a humble background who somehow managed to take over Hollywood’s grandest studio. One of his stranger moves was appointing his 21-year-old daughter Valentina as the studio’s chief financial officer in a bid (as Variety later reported) to give her something to do and to stop her spending all her time shopping on Rodeo Drive.

Parretti didn’t last long at MGM; he left chaos at the studio in his wake, and eventually ended up in handcuffs and disgrace. Nonetheless, it wasn’t hard to detect a certain sneaking admiration for him. The reckless Italian shyster had lived out his own eccentric version of the American dream. It doesn’t matter where you came from as long as the box office tills are continuing to ring. As the actor Nick Nolte reflected after he was arrested in 2002 in a dishevelled state and far the worse for wear for drugs, as long as you aren’t into kiddy porn and haven’t killed anyone, Hollywood will continue to employ you.

Now, Dillon Jordan’s alleged “extensive and far-reaching prostitution ring” is the latest Hollywood scandal to preoccupy the gossip columnists. The story emerges a quarter of a century after prosecutors charged Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss with tax evasion after she failed to declare income from her prostitution business. Her clients included many top Hollywood figures.

Details remain skimpy about Jordan’s business and its clients. The US Attorney’s office acknowledged that the allegations against him are “merely accusations” at this stage and that he must be “presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty”.

Whatever happens now, though, this is a story as old as the Hollywood hills.

“More than a place, Hollywood is a state of mind. And the same elemental forces that drove it in the Twenties and Thirties still drive it today. In addition to the pleasures of power, there are money, fame, sex, a stake in creating American popular culture, and an opportunity to have a great deal of fun in pursuit of these pleasures,” McClintick wrote in Indecent Exposure.

That combination of money, celebrity and sex has always attracted crooks to the movie business. It is also partly what drives the public’s fascination with Hollywood.

If you want to burnish a stinking reputation, launder dirty money or generate artificial losses to throw the tax authorities off your scent, Hollywood is the perfect place. If you need a front for a global prostitution ring or you are a private eye looking for rich but unsavoury clients to protect, you will be able to do business here.

The mystery, then, isn’t that so many crooks are drawn to Hollywood but why there aren’t yet more of them.

‘The Kindergarten Teacher’ is available on MUBI