The tape recorder was fun. I spent the next few days taping some of the phone calls, especially the sickies, and interviewing some friends and johns. Of course, I would ask them for their permission first, and keep their identity unknown.
Once again, Abe came to visit. Not satisfied with having a bug in the bedrooms, he wanted to bug the sounds of the living room as well.
“No good,” I said. I thought that this was carrying reality too far, since I would certainly lose control in a big group of people. It was not till very much later I learned that Abe had put a tiny but powerful radio transmitter in the back of the night table next to my bed, and every sound in my bedroom could be picked up and broadcast to another tape recorder in an office a block from my apartment building, whether I pressed the switch or not.
Abe, it seems, had a sideline – selling information to law-enforcement agencies and others. I found out about the hidden bug and Abe’s sideline only when Knapp Commission investigators called me as a witness many months later. They had in their possession tapes, made in my apartment without my knowledge or consent. So our Abe the Bugger was a busy bug indeed. Carried away with his hidden electronic gadgets, he went even further.
About two months after Abe made his first appearance at my place, he showed up on a periodic visit to check my phones for “taps.” On this visit he burned off “a new one” for a quick $250, and unbeknownst to me left behind another gadget.
Approximately two weeks later Larry was pouring liquor from half-gallon bottles into smaller bottles and straightening up my place when he suddenly called me into the bedroom. He told me to stand on a chair and look at the back of the round golden mirror hanging above my bed. There in the middle of the back of the mirror was a little black metal box.
“Abe, you son of a bitch, what the hell does this mean?” I thought to myself. Larry gave a whistle and pulled the box off the mirror. We then put it away in my closet. Abe would have some explaining to do.
“It’s nothing,” he said the following day. That same smile again. “Just a booster for the tape recorder.” It was not until months later that Robin told me I had been on television.
It turned out that the little box was a television camera which worked something like radar. A laser beam directed at the camera in my apartment from a nearby office activated the black box and relayed pictures to the sophisticated receiving equipment in Abe’s office. Good old businesslike Abe had not only been listening to what went on in my apartment, he was watching as well. What he did was play with the dials of the big TV instrument in his office until he brought in the picture from my bedroom, and then sat down to watch, that liver-lips little voyeur.
But Abe wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. After all his work, he watched me in action for a total of only forty-five minutes. The picture actually got picked up and appeared on one of New York’s commercial UHF channels, a Spanish-language station, I believe. And these viewers, I gather, got to watch quite an orgy for forty-five minutes.
When the FBI was called in to investigate, the agents immediately assumed that only one person was capable of so sophisticated an electronic stunt. They called Abe in and threatened him with everything in the book if he did such a thing again, and I guess they scared him pretty badly.
To say the least, Abe is well known to the FBI and the various crime commissions operating in New York, and has sold information to them. Soon after he met me he suggested that I make payoffs to stay in business. Truthfully, it was difficult for me to go for more than four or five months without getting busted under normal circumstances, and he claimed that payoffs would ease this situation.
Abe admitted to me that he was doing work for two crime commissions investigating corruption. He also told me that anything I did to help this work was strictly a favor, and I could expect help in return.
Abe did indeed introduce me to Senator John H. Hughes and his legal counsel, Edward McLaughlin. Senator Hughes heads a committee in Albany – the weighty full title of which is the New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Crime, Its Causes, Control amp; Effect on Society – and he and his counsel offered me help with my immigration case in return for my future cooperation. I am always worried about being deported – with good reason, I’m afraid – and I believed that Abe really could speak on Senator Hughes’ behalf.
However, I never completely trusted the bugger. Even though he pretended to be such a good friend of the house, why then the “friendly” fees of $200 or $300? For burning off the supposedly existing wiretaps on my phones? Where was the prix d’amis?
One day I went to meet a friend at a lawyer’s office before lunchtime. I knew the lawyer from years before – Ed Jarmen. I’d never really cared for Jarmen – he was too slick and dealt with too many creepy individuals, and I would definitely regard him as a “shyster” lawyer. I chatted with Jarmen a few minutes before my friend took me out for lunch, and I happened to mention my problem of having been arrested several times in the past months. Jarmen immediately said he would introduce me that night to someone who might be of help to me.
Sure enough, late that afternoon a visitor was announced by my doorman as a friend of Mr. Jarmen’s. When I opened the door I found a tall, thin, black-haired man who perhaps was in his early forties. Smiling, he identified himself, and since he was both pleasant and well dressed, I let him in. Nick, as he had introduced himself, then further identified himself as a plainclothes detective who felt he should help me, since I was a friend of Ed Jarmen. He showed me his badge and I.D. card, and I wrote down the numbers.
We then discussed the fact that the “heat” was on. Mayor Lindsay’s “crackdown on prostitution” had not only curtailed street prostitution, but also private call girls and the houses run by various madams. The busts had been frequent, and in March, 1971, I was thrown into jail together with one of my German girls and an innocent roommate. The case was still pending, and it looked rather gloomy, since my biggest fear was a conviction, even if it was only for loitering for “the purpose of prostitution.” Anything regarded as moral turpitude could prevent my getting the all-important U.S. resident’s green card that I had been awaiting for so long. Of course, I mentioned this to Nick, and he asked me who the arresting officer had been in my case. I told him, and we left it at that. Nick then took me for a drink at P. J. Clarke’s, my favorite hangout, just around the corner from where I was then living. At P. J.’s Nick seemed to know everyone, and people kept coming over to our table, kidding around and buying us drinks. Mine were soft drinks, as usual, but Nick had several free belts. Nick and I finally made a date to meet with my boyfriend the next day at my house to discuss where to go next to solve my problem.
That evening both Larry and Abe were at the apartment, and I mentioned the meeting with Nick. Abe immediately became very interested and said that since he was in a position to check out cops better than Larry and I, we should let him pose as my boyfriend, meet Nick, and act as my intermediary in whatever proposal Nick might make. He meanwhile jotted down the numbers I had copied from Nick’s badge and identification card and left to check those out.
So, two days later when Nick came up to the apartment, Abe was there. Ugh! I hated even to introduce Abe as my boyfriend, since the thought of having him as a boyfriend almost made me puke. However, Abe and Nick seemed to get along well, and before I even could open my mouth, they’d made a deal for monthly payoffs of $1,100 to the police for protection.