Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [32]
The taping had been going on for years.
Initially, the investigators didn’t do much about their discovery, simply ordering the tappers to knock it off. Police forces in those days were themselves heavily engaged in quasi-legal wiretapping, and wouldn’t have wanted any undue publicity about the practice. And no one at the phone company wanted the public to find out just how easy it was to listen in on telephone calls. One of the investigators told the wiretappers that the team would come back the next day, and he wanted all the equipment out of the apartment by then.3 It looked as though the tappers might get away with it.
But the raid didn’t remain secret long. An anonymous tipster alerted a private citizens’ crime fighting group, the New York City Anti-Crime Committee, which in turn alerted the New York state legislature; and the media excitedly pushed government officials to launch an investigation into the goings-on in apartment 4W.
It turned out that the tenant in the apartment was thirty-year-old Warren Shannon. An employee of the telephone company, Carl Ruh (also thirty years old), was involved in the plot as well. But those two were junior players. They reported to a tough-looking, heavyset fifty-two-year-old attorney and private eye, John Broady, who hired the wiretappers and encouraged the scheme.* Broady was already infamous, having been indicted twice during the 1940s on wiretapping charges, and this new case would mark the fedora-wearing lawyer as one of the most legendary wiretappers of the twentieth century.
Investigators found that five active wiretaps were secured to the lines of executives of the pharmaceutical company E. R. Squibb and Sons—today, Bristol-Myers Squibb—and it was apparent what the tappers had been up to: “The circumstances make it clear that business intelligence may have been the reason behind them,” William Keating, counsel for the New York City Anti-Crime Committee, told a reporter for the New York Times several days later.†4
Court testimony revealed that Broady’s biggest client was Charles Pfizer and Company, the corporate parent of today’s pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Its executives worried that their corporate secrets were leaking to competitors. They hired Broady to tap the phones of several of their own employees, paying him $60,000 (a hefty sum at the time) for the project.
Working closely with Pfizer’s general counsel, Broady learned that the company was having trouble securing a patent for tetracycline, a cutting-edge antibiotic, that has been used in years since to treat many kinds of infections, from gonorrhea to acne. The development of this chemical was a significant breakthrough, but Pfizer’s patent application was stalled. Executives muttered darkly that a rival drug company, Bristol-Myers, must be holding up the process, and that this competitor had been selling illicit tetracycline to a third company, Squibb. Broady placed taps on the phones at Squibb, hoping to find out what it was doing to block Pfizer’s patent. He also had an accomplice tap long-distance phone lines that ran all the way to the Bristol-Myers headquarters in Syracuse, New York.
Broady met with Pfizer’s general counsel once a week, near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, as his spying activities got more and more elaborate. At one meeting alongside the traffic-choked entrance to the tunnel, the corporate lawyer handed Broady a list of about fifty employees and asked him to check their living standards, friends, and work habits. A government investigation later found that Broady’s reports became so detailed that Pfizer executives didn’t have time to read through all the intelligence he produced. The company asked him to condense the reports to just the most important findings.5
No one knows what Broady discovered during his elaborate eavesdropping scheme, but Pfizer won the fight over tetracycline, securing the coveted patent on January 11, 1955—just a month before authorities uncovered