We had our suspicions in the past but this photo now convinces us that Phil Spector is really Al Pacino. And the fact that you never see them together is proof. But that’s not the point of the following story.

WWW- MANIC music producer Phil Spector – charged with fatally shooting actress Lana Clarkson at his Los Angeles mansion on Feb. 3, 2004 – used to wander around London in the 1970s packing “two big U.S. police .38s.” Prosecutors in the murder case are said to have three women lined up who will testify that Spector – famed for his “Wall of Sound” recording technique – pulled guns on them over the years. But a new book, “Magical Mystery Tour,” reports Spector was armed and dangerous 30 years ago, when he was producing the Beatles.

Author Tony Bramwell – a childhood friend of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison – says that in 1970, after Spector turned The Beatles’ track “Let It Be” into a classic, the producer would hang out with him on each visit to London.

“The music industry couldn’t stand uncontrollable geniuses and Phil was convinced that they were conspiring to get rid of him because he was just too powerful,” Bramwell writes. “His reaction was to fan the flames of his natural New York poor boy paranoia by hiring a huge bodyguard by the name of George, and equipping him with the biggest handguns imaginable.”

Bramwell goes on, “Phil didn’t have a gun license in the U.K. but he always told me that he was never without his big U.S. police .38s, which he kept stuffed into his belt and in a shoulder holster beneath his capes. John [Lennon] was fascinated by the weapons and would discuss them at length with Phil.”

In the end, Spector’s behavior became too much for The Beatles: “Phil’s guns and his bodyguards were always much in evidence and eventually he retreated and got fortressed up in his own asylum with his own rules,” writes Bramwell.