Leave it to veteran Westside paparazzo Tony Vera (you know, the guy who Mike Tyson punched in the head at LAX, then lived to tell the tale) to pick Lindsay Lohan's stalker out of the Venice Boardwalk crowd.

Getting him to talk was another story.

In an exclusive video interview with 64-year-old Lonnie Short, Vera far outlasts your average TMZ heckler, breaking out all the moves to make Short at once comfortable and irked enough to blab.

Finally, at 6:25, he succeeds:

Here's the deal, according to stalkerman.

“When I went to her room — door — what I wanted to tell her was to drop the Marilyn Monroe image, because it's bad because Anna Nicole Smith died, and it's kinda like… Be Lindsay Lohan and forget about being Marliyn Monroe, and work on her career and stay off drugs. That's what I was wanting to say to her through the door. I didn't really expect to see her, and no one would talk to me. So that's my story.”

“Drop the Marliyn Monroe image”? Funny — that's kind of exactly what we always wanted to tell her. If not just in the annoying nostalgia aesthetic sense, also in the not-dying sense.

Along with Dr. Drew. And pretty much the rest of America.

Of course, the rest of America didn't go creeping around Lohan's Venice pad on New Year's Day 2012, demanding to tell her as much in person. From the Daily Mail:

'Officers were sent out on a service call to the home,' said Lieutenant Munoz of the LAPD Pacific Station.

'A man at the residence was allegedly asking for Lindsay to come out and he wouldn't leave.

'Ms Lohan called police who arrived and detained the man for trespass after Ms Lohan asked for him to be arrested.'

Guess that's what a guy gets for trying to save LiLo from a glamorous early grave.

But a couple other quotes from Vera's interview with Short still come off as a little suspicious: 1) “I'm a Lohan man, but I'm not a stalker, OK?” and 2) “I've got two years to go, and that's it.”

As in, Lohan's restraining order only lasts two more years. Uh-oh.

[@simone_electra / swilson@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]

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