The late Dutch Schultz loathed wire-tappers. “I hope your ears drop off,” he’d say bitterly before he put up his telephone receiver, reasonably certain they would hear him. The obsession grew worse in his last years as boss of the policy racket in New York, with federal agents and city detectives tapping his office and outpost wires, his sister’s home line, and his lawyer’s phone. Schultz got so that he distrusted all telephones; he would mark the location of an instrument when he entered a room and shy off as far from it as he could. When he was sober he would glare at a telephone and mutter. Drunk, he was apt to lose control entirely, tear out box and all, and smash the apparatus on the floor. Still, he needed telephones in his business and the instruments were always replaced.

Even in ordinary social conversation over the telephone with his men or with his mistresses, the Dutchman would drum on a desk or any other hard surface handy with a heavy gold pencil which he carried for the purpose. He had an idea he could talk under the pencil tap and confound the eavesdroppers. He never learned that the felt pads on which telephones rest absorbed the pencil raps, and that his speech came through clearly in spite of his drumming. Even when he hung up the phone in his office, a small microphone hidden in the earpiece of the instrument continued to function and carried his words to the listening posts over wires spliced into the regular telephone cord. This tiny “mike”—the wire-tappers have appropriated the radio term—is one of the trade’s newest devices. A telephone with the mike already installed is substituted for the subject’s own phone. If the detectives can’t manage to switch the instruments, they wheedle some telephone man into doing the job for them. He can usually think up some plausible excuse for making the change. The replacement takes only a few minutes.

The Dutchman got so he would never use names in telephone conversations. He taught his men to speak in cryptic phrases. Detectives would sometimes frown for days over these puzzling fragments, but usually figured them out in the end. One day they listened to a call that came into the offices of Dixie Davis, the Schultz attorney. “Listen,” the lawyer said. “He cannot see. He cannot give. Do you understand?” The voice answered, “I understand.” This has never been interpreted. If a Schultz retainer forgot the taboo he was apt to hear about it. Wire-tappers, for example, heard someone blurt to Davis, “Hey, Dick, did you take that matter up with George?” “You are about the most stupid bastard I ever saw!” Davis shouted. “I’ve told you and told you about mentioning names.” When these quotations came out in wire-tappers’ testimony during the Davis disbarment hearings, Referee John P. Cohalan was incensed. He said that wiretapping was a rotten thing for any government to engage in. “We’d better go back to the British government and give up our Declaration of Independence,” he commented.

Most law-abiding people become peevish rather than alarmed when their telephones start to rasp or grow faint in the middle of a conversation. Only the “tap-goofy,” as detectives refer to a nervous few, believe a bad connection means that someone is listening in on their wires. Although they probably are wrong, there is always a chance that they may be right. The police sometimes amuse themselves on a job by tapping nearby wires at random. More often, though, when business is dull they pick up calls from restaurants, poolrooms, and other places which they suspect may be criminal hangouts. “Blind angling,” they call it, and defend the practice on the ground that you never can tell when something significant in the crime line will turn up. The chances are that even if they should happen to intercept one of your calls, you’d never know it. Professional wire-tappers have learned how to work quietly.

Given the proper apparatus, almost anyone could tap a telephone wire. A simple tap involves scraping the insulation from a segment of the two wires required to make a telephone circuit. A receiver is attached to the exposed portions with metal clips and extension wires. The tapper thus is in the position of a gossip silently cutting in on a rural party line. That’s the basis of all wire-tapping, but the complexity of the modern telephone system and the increasing wariness of criminals like Mr. Schultz have necessitated many refinements in technique.

New York is the centre of wire-tapping activity, at least in this country. District Attorney Dewey’s office has had considerable success with it. In one instance, while Dewey wire-workers were listening in on the bakery racket, they accidentally picked up a conversation bearing upon a case entirely outside their province. They turned the information over to Special Prosecutor Todd, who was handling that matter, and he used it in securing the conviction of the Drukman murderers in Brooklyn. A hint of further activity by Dewey wire men has come out in the case of Jimmy Hines, the Tammany leader accused of having conspired with Dutch Schultz, Dixie Davis, and George Weinberg to establish lotteries in New York. A man in the office of Joseph Shalleck, Hines’ lawyer, expressed the belief that the Hines wires have been tapped steadily for the last two years, and that someone has been cutting in on Shalleck’s home and office lines. With customary legalistic caution, however, he refused to venture a guess as to who might have ordered this tapping, though he did refer significantly to a statement made by Mr. Dewey at the Hines arraignment: “We are prepared to prove that at ten-fifteen A.M. today Hines advised a witness in this case to leave his home, go to a hotel, assume a false name, and hide until this case blows over, as he put it.” The inference seemed to be that such evidence, if it existed, could only come out of wiretapping. Later in the arraignment proceedings Mr. Shalleck indicated a suspicion that his wires had been tapped by the District Attorney’s office.

Usually Dewey’s detectives follow the standard practice of cutting in on a telephone circuit, but for special jobs they use a Speak-O-Phone, a machine typical of the complicated processes lately developed by the craft. Included in the equipment are small microphones that can be concealed in a suspect’s room and a recording device with phonograph discs to take down voices. Stolen conversations thus can be preserved and played back when the occasion requires it. The federal government uses about a dozen Speak-O-Phone outfits in Washington, which, next to New York, is the eavesdroppers’ most fertile field. Commissioner Valentine’s staff, on the other hand, gets along with homemade apparatus because the Police Department’s budget is too skimpy these lean days to include fancy models. (A Speak-O-Phone with recording attachment costs about five hundred dollars.)

The Lindbergh case was a wire-tappers’ holiday. They cut in everywhere. Just before the ransom money was passed, as they were listening on Dr. Condon’s wire they heard Jafsie in conversation with a mysterious “Axel,” who announced he was coming to the Condon home. The tappers got the idea that “Axel” was the kidnapper, or one of the kidnapper’s aides. They hid themselves around the Condon home until a strange car drove up and were ready to swarm over “Axel” as he stepped from the car. They were stunned when their man emerged. It was Lindbergh. It turned out that he always used the name “Axel” to identify himself to the Doctor.