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With the post-golden Globes party in full swing
at Trader Vic's in Beverly Hills on the night of Jan. 21, FOX television
producer Bill Cipolla slipped away to use the men's room. "I was stopped
n the hallway by an army of guys in tuxedos, and I thought they were simply
waiting in line to use the bathroom," he says. "So, we're standing making
small talk and waiting and waiting and waiting, until finally Russell Crowe
emerges from the bathroom and all these guys fall in around him." In all,
Cipolla recalls, Six, perhaps eight, tuxedoed escorts attended the Aussie
superstar. At the time, says Cipolla, who has covered his share of Hollywood
award events, "I thought, 'That's a long way to go for a star to use the
bathroom.'"
Now it all makes sense. On March 6 the FBI confirmed
reports that the Oscar-nominated Gladiator star was the target of
an abduction threat. The feds subsequently declined to comment on a British
press report of "gangsters" bent on extorting millions of dollars in ransom.
Instead FBI spokeswoman Laura Bosley said simply, "We have to investigate
until we reach a conclusion. I couldn't tell you what the outcome will
be, but it's continuing." As for those undercover guys outside the men's
room, an FBI source says, "It's common knowledge that the FBI was at the
Golden Globe Awards."
With no evidence yet made public of either a threat
or a plot, skeptics are having a field day. After all, Crowe, 36, is the
same star whose highly publicized affair with Meg Ryan, 39, costar of his
latest film, Proof Of Life, ended last December, around the same
time the film tanked in the U.S. Now, just when Proof is hitting
screens in Europe and Australia, comes word of the mysterious threat -
a plot twist seemingly straight out of Proof, in which Crowe plays
a hostage negotiator working in South America. "Call me a cynic, but the
timing is extraordinary," says a top British security source.
Usually tight-lipped, the FBI is taking pains to
put out the word that the Crowe threat was no prank. "This is not a publicity
stunt," says Bosley. "We wouldn't expend the resources unless we believed
there was a credible threat."
Concern for the peripatetic Crowe, who treats international
air routes like the fast lanes on one giant interstate, seems justified
given the explosion of kidnappings outside the U.S. over the last decade,
particularly in Latin America. "We reckon there were something between
12,000 and 15,000 reported kidnappings worldwide last year, which might
only be 10 percent of the total figure," says Gerald Moore, managing director
of Inkerman, one of Britain's top kidnap-prevention organizations. "It's
an industry." Ann Hagedorn Auerback, author of the 1998 book Ransom:
The Untold Story Of International Kidnapping, says that over the last
15 years kidnapping for ransom "has become a big business, a well-known
way to make money. The kidnappers' perception is that the higher the profile
of the individual, the deeper the pockets."
It would be hard to find a man with a higher profile
than Russell Ira Crowe, who stands a decent chance of walking away on March
25 with the Oscar for Best Actor, thanks to his stoic, smoldering performance
in Gladiator. "He is in a league with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino
- definitely a heavyweight," says Michael Mann, director of The Insider,
for which Crowe won his first Oscar nomination last year. Later this month
Crowe will begin shooting Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, in which
he plays Nobel-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. - just the sort
of professional stretch on which the actor seems to thrive.
Publicly he jokes about the kidnapping threat. At
the Oscar nominees' luncheon in L.A. on March 12 he joked about what it
might be like for the kidnappers trapped in a small room with him. "They'd
be on the phone going, 'Look! We've passed the hat around, and we've got
a couple hundred bucks if you can take him off our hands!'" The blithe
tone suits Crowe's reputation as an Aussie bloke who's as tough as the
Outback is dry. Despite his A-list credentials in Hollywood, Crowe regards
a stuntman as a wimpy accessory (that's the man himself hanging out of
a helicopter in Proof), treats rugby as a religion (he had jerseys
flown in for a match on the Maltese set of Gladiator) and has a
history of bar fights in which biting is considered an option.
At the same luncheon Crowe told reporters that when
the FBI first approached him in January, "I was probably taking the situation
a lot less seriously than they did." Since then, friends say, Crowe has
wised up. "It's pretty serious when anyone's personal life gets stepped
on like that," says his Gladiator costar Djimon Hounsou. "He's being
careful."
Cooperating with authorities is a departure for
the headstrong Crowe. A high school dropout who, by his own admission,
was "an embarrassment" to his parents, caterers Alex and Jocelyn Crowe,
he has been known to stomp off sets when he doesn't get his way. His willingness
to work wit the G-men may owe something to his experience working on Proof.
Shortly before the film's U.S. premiere, Crowe said at a press briefing
that when he first received the script he knew little about kidnapping.
Then he launched into an informed discourse about the "K and R business"
- professional security lingo for kidnap and ransom - peppered with information
he had learned from K and R specialists while shooting the film. As for
kidnappers, Crowe said, "I don't think I can sympathize with this particular
way of getting your point across."
If Crowe is an unwitting victim, he is not an improbable
one. Though U.S. kidnappings are on the decline (in contrast to the global
trend), celebrities remain an obvious target. "It's not unusual to have
a threat like that, especially when you're dealing with high-profile people,"
says the FBI's Bosley. "It's not unusual, especially in Los Angeles, where
most of them live or at least visit." Author Auerback says she was not
surprised by the threat against Crowe. When she was researching her book,
she says she was warned that she could become a target of kidnappers wanting
to make a name for themselves by abducting a journalist investigating their
activity. "So," she says, "when [Crowe's] movie came out, I thought, 'He's
getting a lot more publicity and attention for that movie than I got. Oh
my God, this guy is a target!"
Last week a discreet but tight cordon of security
personnel attended Crowe as he maintained a busy schedule of pre-Oscar
appearances. On March 9, following two special screenings of Gladiator
in L.A., at least two security guards kept close watch on him as he fielded
giggly questions from a largely female audience. Two nights later Crowe
was surrounded by bodyguards as he chatted with Kate Winslet and Joaquin
Phoenix at the party following the Screen Actors Guild Awards (where Crowe
lost to Traffic's Benicio Del Toro in the Best Actor category).
Since early January Crowe has maintained tight security
while jetting between three continents to promote Proof and to attend
awards events honoring Gladiator. In London he reserved two additional
rooms at the Athenaeum Hotel to accommodate his minders. "It was the first
time he's ever had bodyguards," says a hotel source. "He's just not that
sort of person." In the end Crowe chose instead to stay at the Dorchester,
where all the press meetings took place. (The hotel declines to say if
he had his security entourage in tow.) "High-profile people need to take
measures, and the most effective one is unpredictability," notes Andreas
Carleton-Smith, a vice president for Control Risks Group, an international
firm that specializes in corporate investigations, security and kidnap
situations.
While the FBI has acknowledged only one instance
of attending Crowe in public, it is unclear how often his retinue has included
federal agents. "We don't do protection, like the Secret Service," says
Matthew McLaughlin, the FBI spokesman in L.A. "For celebrities we do investigative
work, and sometimes that requires us to go undercover." On this point Scotland
Yard is even less forthcoming. "We don't discuss matters of personal protection,"
says Angie Evans of the Yard's specialist operations unit. "We do not discuss
security issues, ever."
The FBI, it appears, only wished that were so. Last
month, around the time that Crowe was promoting Proof in London,
the FBI apprised Scotland Yard of its investigation. Lucy Panton, the crime
reporter at Britain's Sunday People who broke the kidnapping story,
says Crowe was then interviewed at length by a female officer in the Yard's
Criminal Intelligence Branch. ("The joke in their office afterwards was
'God, if it's taken that long, she obviously fancies him,'" says Panton.)
Subsequently, Panton says, she got her "tip-off from someone who knew the
officer who did the interview." The FBI's Bosley says she does not know
the source of the leak, but says that "in light of the fact that this was
already disclosed from another source, we did go ahead and confirm it."
Greg Boles, director of global-threat management
for New York-based Kroll Associates, one of the world's largest private
investigative firms, sees cause to worry when such incidents are revealed.
"It could have a contagious effect," he warns. "Other people could get
the idea and attempt a similar plot on someone else."
But then, what exactly is the plot? The FBI
isn't saying what the threat was, who made it, when it was made or why
Crowe was the target. It will not reveal whether it believes the threat
was made by a hotheaded novice or a seasoned professional. "No arrest is
imminent," says a security expert acquainted with the investigation.
While some security experts believe the recent publicity
has made an attempted abduction of Crowe less likely, that doesn't mean
that whoever made the threat has packed up and gone away. "If, in fact,
the announcement has thwarted this kidnapping," says Patrick Mullany, former
administrative agent in charge of the FBI office in L.A., "our thinking
is always that, if it is a credible plot, the suspects will just switch
targets."
People Magazine, 3/26/01