Private Eye

The case had all the makings of a TV private-eye drama - money, marital problems and murder. The plot: A self-made millionaire pharmacist from New York goes to a casino in Atlantic City to hire a hit man to murder his wife of 20 years, who is seeking a divorce. Fearing he would have to share the family fortune with her, Stephen Pohlot, of Westchester County, N.Y., stashes $1.5 million in negotiable bonds and sets out to have her murdered. Like the outcome of most TV dramas, Pohlot, 52 at the time, gets caught.

MUCH TO HER dismay, West Philly native Eve, is the star of the Internet's newest celebrity sex video. The 30-second clip, dated Nov. 20, 1999, shows a man using a sex toy on the naked Martin Luther King High graduate while he pleasures himself. The man has been identified by the New York Daily News as Bad Boy Entertainment producer Stevie J. A spokeswoman for Eve, formally Eve Jihan Jeffers, told the New York tab that the tape was made "years ago with her boyfriend of over two years.

The Philadelphia chapter of the Morgan Fairchild Fan Club - all five of us - were in full force at her latest vehicle, Deadly Illusion, happy to learn that Billy Dee Williams was at the wheel with rock star Vanity riding shotgun. Fairchild herself cheerfully rode rumble seat, and during the course of this amiably silly private-eye thriller, not one of her fans had the bad taste to muse aloud whether or not her performance was a step backward for hair mousse. No, Morgan's minions were giggling at a movie in which the plot was longer than its anti-heroine's hair, the dialogue shorter than her celebrated nose and shenanigans more preposterous than the idea of a Paper Dolls Reunion Special.

It's 1956. Eisenhower is president. Elvis is king. And the last honest cop in Los Angeles is looking for a drink. Several drinks. Kicked off the L.A.P.D. on trumped-up corruption charges, Jack Cleary (Michael Woods) wears stark black threads and a whisky-induced stupor as he drifts through the treacherous, morally brackish terrain of post-war Hollywood - a place where those that aren't bought and paid for are wearing glow-in-the- dark price tags. Jack's big brother, Nick, the "Joe DiMaggio of private eyes" (whatever that means)

It was sleuthing that would have made Philip Marlowe proud. Private eye Russell Kolins was hired by a defense lawyer to get evidence that would clear a veteran state security officer of charges that he impersonated a Philadadelphia cop to stop and harass a Narberth woman last Oct. 6. The woman testified yesterday at a Municipal Court trial for John McCabe, 53, accused of impersonating an officer and harassment, that the man who stopped her...

"Love at Large" is an offbeat detective spoof about a private eye who is debilitatingly hardboiled. In this case, the condition has spread to his brain. Tom Berenger stars as Harry Dobbs, an earnest but incompetent gumshoe hired by a breathy, beautiful dame (Ann Archer) to follow her mysterious, dangerous boyfriend (a peroxided Neil Young, in a cameo). Dobbs instantly botches the case, and, oblivious to his error, sets off like the lunkhead he is to inadvertently stir up the lives of the innocent and the not so innocent.

A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES Fiction. By Lawrence Block. William Morrow. $17. It's a pleasure to watch the development of Lawrence Block's disintoxicated detective, Matthew Scudder. He keeps changing and growing. And change and growth are scarcely staples of genre fiction. For those still unfamiliar with Scudder - a steadily diminishing number - he has been Block's protagonist eight times previously. A former cop, Scudder is now an unlicensed private eye. Much more important, he's a recovering alcoholic.

With the highly unwelcome arrival of Who's Harry Crumb? - a question that begs the answer "Who cares?" - a new kind of screen detective is born: The dumbshoe. Actually "misbegotten" would be a more accurate verb than "born" and that would still be overly generous to John Candy's latest offering. Who's Harry Crumb? is in the vein of Michael Caine's revisionist account of Sherlock Holmes as a drunken half-wit in the recent Without a Clue. But what we have here isn't a case of the elementary, so much as a movie that would have hard time appealing to anyone past the early grades of elementary school.

An attorney for Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger has hired a private investigator to look into a sexual-assault allegation made by a 20-year-old Georgia college student. Police in the college town of Milledgeville, Ga., continue to investigate, but have released little information since the accusation was made a week ago. The two-time Super Bowl champ's lawyer, Ed Garland, said he has hired his own investigative team. "Any lawyer representing anyone needs to know all the facts so that he can perform his duties," he said.

It isn't likely your best beloved will put this book in your Christmas stocking. "The Infidelity Handbook" (Harbour Fields, $12.95) contains California private eye Michael Emilianow's advice on how to determine whether your significant other is cheating on you. Emilianow has developed infidelity-checking into something of a specialty, so much so that, a couple of years ago, Britain's BBC filmed a documentary about his techniques. When a client - usually a career woman thinking of marrying the gent in question - asks Emilianow to determine whether her love is true, he arranges to have an alluring woman play the role of temptress.

THIS WEEK, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey hired an outside law firm to investigate Inspector Jerrold Bates, a high-ranking superintendent in the police's Internal Affairs Bureau, following reports in the Daily News . This comes a month after the director of the Police Advisory Commission, the civilian oversight board, was removed from his job over lagging investigations. This may not be the nadir of police oversight in the city. But it's close. Ramsey has continually said he's commited to ferreting out corruption among the ranks; he has added 26 officers to Internal Affairs and added training and investigations.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission has quietly hired a private investigator from Western Pennsylvania to examine the turnpike's purchasing and contract-compliance practices. The turnpike authority hired Corporate Security and Investigations of Monaca, Pa., for $75,000 a year to provide "confidential investigative and audit services related to procurement, contract compliance and invoicing policies and practices as they apply to vendors providing supplies, services or construction.

Too many writers bank on early success and never expand their literary boundaries. Madi Distefano sprang onto the nascent Philadelphia theater scene in the mid-1990s and for a dozen years slashed her pen across the page in epic, edgy scripts about burnt-out youths chasing dreams of punk superstardom. Fifteen years later, she's set a different task. After staging small-cast, quick-costume-change shows like Greater Tuna and The Mystery of Irma Vep , Distefano has penned a quick-changer of her own in Meanwhile ... , now in its world premiere with Brat Productions.

Peter J. O'Shea III, 60, of Old City, founder of a private-investigation firm, died Friday, July 29, at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital of lung cancer. In 1994, Mr. O'Shea established OSI Investigations in Philadelphia. The firm, whose clients include law firms and insurance companies, provides background checks, comprehensive surveillance, and document and subpoena services. He operated OSI with his wife, Mary Carol Coyne O'Shea, a former teacher. The couple met while socializing with friends at McGillin's Olde Ale House in Center City and married in 1978.

APROMINENT Philadelphia crime sleuth is speculating that the region's high-profile murder mystery - the shocking discovery of ex-Pentagon official John "Jack" Wheeler III in a Wilmington landfill - might not be a murder at all. William Fleisher, an ex-cop who co-founded Philadelphia's murder-solving Vidocq Society, said that the discovery of eyewitnesses and surveillance video of a disoriented Wheeler before he died suggests that the 66-year-old man...

KRISTIN McKeever-Graham was not most people's image of a private eye. But she was just that for most of her career, catching hotel thieves and construction-site pilferers, tracking down lost children and providing security for business firms. She once joined a cult in which two children of a client were being held, videotaped strange ceremonies and eventually returned the kids to their father. And then there were those million-plus dollar payments she had to carry from banks to merchant ships on the river in the days before electronic payments made such trips unnecessary.

Two new series jump the gun on the fall season Wednesday, both chasing the small-network holy grail of television: "branding. " Terriers , 10 p.m. on cable's FX, and Hellcats , 9 p.m. on CW57, are solid exemplars of each network's sales strategy, on target with each one's desired audience. At FX, that means discerning adults, maybe a few more men than women, seeking offbeat fare with complex characters and perhaps a seasoning of dark humor. Terriers is one step below such FX paragons as Justified and Sons of Anarchy (which returns for its third season Tuesday)

Family Court mess needs a private eye Pennsylvania Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille should appoint an independent investigator to examine allegations concerning payments of more than $10 million to a lawyer/developer and others to locate a Family Court building in Philadelphia ("A judge should know better," Sunday). An unbiased and dispassionate examination, conducted by an individual without prior connection to the Family Court project or the parties involved, is the only way to ensure public trust in the findings.

An attorney for Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger has hired a private investigator to look into a sexual-assault allegation made by a 20-year-old Georgia college student. Police in the college town of Milledgeville, Ga., continue to investigate, but have released little information since the accusation was made a week ago. The two-time Super Bowl champ's lawyer, Ed Garland, said he has hired his own investigative team. "Any lawyer representing anyone needs to know all the facts so that he can perform his duties," he said.

"Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead" No. 2 takes an intelligent, imaginative concept and an incredibly intriguing character from the first issue and takes both to greater heights. The concept: Fifty years ago, the dead stopped departing to the afterlife and began drifting all over the world in the form of "blue lights" that feed on electromagnetic waste. The problem: There are too many "lights," and technology like the "suppressor towers" are not strong enough to keep them in check.