Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [31]
As the fireworks exploded on television, Shimon’s small group quietly recorded phone conversations of TWA lawyers staying at the Carlton and Mayflower hotels in Washington. Once again, Pan Am executives would have the inside track on their opponents’ strategy. And once again, it wasn’t enough.
By the time the hearings ended, Hughes was seen nationwide as an honest businessman who’d taken on the corrupt Washington elite. Brewster’s reputation was damaged, and Hughes drove home his victory a few years later, financing an aggressive Republican Party challenge that ousted Brewster from the Senate. Brewster died in 1961. Hughes lived until 1976 and became more involved in private espionage of his own, eventually becoming so suspicious of his enemies, real and imagined, that after 1950 he dropped from sight to live as a terrified recluse.
As for Lieutenant Shimon, in 1950 he was dragged in front of a hostile Senate investigating committee, where he denied running the wiretapping operation. His fellow cops, however, gave detailed accounts of the operation in a public hearing. A federal grand jury investigated Shimon in 1950, but did not indict him. It seems his career continued, unscathed by the controversy: by 1960, he had been promoted twice, and he eventually became an inspector in the Washington, D.C., police force.*
DESPITE THE HIGH drama of the Shimon case, the wiretapping itself was standard stuff. Shimon or his associates walked up to basement phone boxes and installed their taps right on the premises. All they needed to know was which cable to tap, and they got that information by calling the phone company and posing as repairmen out in the field. Helpful but clueless receptionists at headquarters always gave them the wiring details they needed.
But the ambitions of the wiretappers were growing ever more sophisticated. On February 11, 1955, a group of investigators, including two city detectives and two inspectors for the telephone company, knocked on the door of a midtown Manhattan apartment building and stumbled upon a wiretapping operation capable of bugging any one of 100,000 telephones in the neighborhood. The discovery set off a chain of events that would embarrass some of the most important companies—and some of the wealthiest people—in America.
The apartment building was conveniently situated just around the corner from the telephone office, and conspirators had strung a cable between the two.† With the help of a twenty-nine-year-old phone company employee, Walter Asman (who wore his hair in a stylish pompadour), the eavesdroppers had managed to assign apartment 4W at 360 East Fifty-Fifth Street ten fictitious phone numbers. Using those lines, they were able to tap ten telephones at the same time. When police got into the apartment, they discovered that it was equipped with automatic tape recorders for continuous recording. Two men and two women were found operating the machines, tapping phones in as many as ten different New York City exchanges, then known by their mid-century names, including the prestigious exchanges Murray Hill 8 and Eldorado 5.
In his book, Dash explained that the covered area included “large law firms; gigantic businesses and financial houses; major publishing companies; aristocratic hotels patronized by the wealthy and the famous; fashionable apartment houses; and other subscribers who daily on the telephone