The Line Was Very Busy

In 11th century Coventry the penalty for snooping was stern indeed: the original Peeping Tom, according to legend, was struck blind for stealing a glance at Lady Godiva during her famous ride. Nowadays, the punishment is less severe, but it is still enough to bring tears to the stoniest private eye. In a Manhattan courtroom last week Private Investigator John ("Steve") Broady, 52, was near to tears. Reason: he had been convicted of illegal eavesdropping, on 16 counts related to wiretapping. Maximum sentence: 27 years in prison.

Buzzing on BUtterfield 8. The Broady wiretap case first hit the headlines last February, when police raided an East Side Manhattan apartment and discovered a secret listening post, equipped with the latest recorders and a direct (though unlisted) line to 100,000 telephones that spread like a monstrous run all over the ten-denier silk-stocking district. Two telephone-company employees, Carl Ruh, a tester, and Walter Asmann, a "frame-man" who made cross connections for the company, were found on the premises. They were fired by the company and arrested, along with Warren Shannon, an electrician, in whose name the apartment was rented; all were charged with conspiracy and illegal wiretapping. The three pleaded guilty; Shannon and Ruh turned state's evidence and pointed to Broady, a lawyer turned private eye, as the top tapper who had hired them. As the stars in a parade of 39 witnesses at Broady's trial, the two provided the district attorney with his most damning evidence, the newspapers with enough gossip to keep East Side telephones, from PLaza I to BUtterfield 8, buzzing for weeks. Items: ¶ Blimpish John Jacob Astor testified that in 1954 he had hired Broady to tap the phone in his Fifth Avenue home in the hope of learning some of the secrets of Gertrude Gretsch Astor, his wife at that time. Mrs. Astor, meanwhile, was watching her husband with her own private eye.

¶ Two other jealous husbands, both subsequently divorced, admitted that they had subscribed to Broady's service to spy on their wives (TV Songstress Kyle Mac-Donnell and Glamour Girl Tauni de Les-seps), but both counts were thrown out of court, because in New York State it is legal for a client to have his own phone tapped.

¶ Robert Porter, general counsel and secretary of Charles Pfizer Company, manufacturing chemists, testified that his company had hired Broady to find out how the secret formula of a new drug (Tetracycline) had leaked to competitors. (Earlier this year Pfizer sued Bristol Laboratories, E. R. Squibb & Son and the Upjohn Co. for $50 million, charging infringement of patents.) Pfizer, Porter testified, had paid Broady to shadow 50 of its employees. Broady also tapped the telephones of Squibb and Bristol-Myers on his own initiative, but found no leak.

He got his fee of $60,000, nevertheless.

¶ Bernice Nicholls, wife of a polo-playing industrialist, swore that Broady invited her to his office once to hear a tapped recording of an alleged telephone conversation between her husband and ex-Ecdysiast Ann Corio. When Broady asked her if she would like him to make some more rec ords, she declined because, she said, "I was aware of the situation." (The Nicholls were subsequently reconciled, without Broady's dubious assistance.) ¶ Pepsi-Cola President Alfred N. Steele said that his telephone had been tapped without his permission or knowledge in 1954, when he was having "matrimonial trouble." Steele was later divorced and married Movie Queen Joan Crawford (TIME, May 23).

¶ Broady was a man of unlimited interests, according to Emmanuel J. Rouseck, a vice president of the Wildenstein Gallery, one of the world's topflight dealers in international art. For five months Rouseck paid Broady $150 a week to listen in on the conversations (in four languages) of Dr. Rudolph Heinemann, an eminent art buyer. For months Dr.

Heinemann was horrified and mystified when his telephoned trade secrets and sales tip-offs began to leak like a faucet.

When he closed the $750,000 sale of Van Eyck's Madonna to the Frick Collection, he was pledged to secrecy for six months; within a matter of days, however, the big deal was the talk of 5 7th street. When an antique dealer accused him of blabbing about their business deals, Heinemann, a discreet man, indignantly denied the charge. "Well," he quoted the antique dealer as saying, "Rouseck at Wildenstein asked me why I was getting all those old paintings from you--said they had better ones at Wildenstein." Rouseck denied any knowledge of three wiretaps that were discovered on the outgoing lines of Knoe-dler's, Wildenstein's No. i competitor.

After Rouseck's testimony, Wildenstein announced: "Mr. Rouseck has tendered his resignation." Shades of Al Capone. Throughout his trial Broady coolly denied any wrongdoing. All of his wiretaps, he maintained, had been strictly legal--authorized by his clients for their own telephones. He had "never heard of" the raided apartment, and besides, the whole case had been a frame-up by a rival private eye. In the course of his testimony Broady offered several new revelations. In January 1953, two months before she became Ambassador to Italy, Clare Boothe Luce's telephone had been tapped, he said--but he was unable to give the name or the motive of the tapper.

Only once in his testimony did Broady lose his composure--when he told how one of his agents, Geologist Clarence Sop-man, 29, had been murdered in Mexico when he was trying to recover part of $7,000,000 stolen from the Nationalist Chinese government by renegade Lieut.

General P. T. Mow (TIME, Aug. 25,1952).

The murderers, sobbed Broady, were members of Al Capone's old Chicago gang.

After 14 days of bewildering testimony the all-male, blue-ribbon jury took just three hours, nine minutes to find Broady guilty. In spite of the verdict, though, most of New York's 2,000,000 telephone subscribers were having trouble getting over that uncomfortable feeling that they might be addressing a large, unseen audience every time they answered the phone.

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