Abe is one of those electronic geniuses who can bug anything: apartments, phones, offices, or cars. He was introduced to me by my co-author, Robin Moore, who wanted to have Abe install a tape-recorder system in my bedroom in order to get authenticity for this book.
Abe the Bugger is not an easy person to describe in words. He must be seen to be believed. Think of 190 pounds of fat held in a five-foot-six body. Cover this with a baby-pink wrapping; add two thick – ever moist – lips, and dot with powder-blue eyes – each forever magnified by a couple of Coca-Cola bottle bottoms for glasses – all sitting under three strands of hair assigned the impossible task of covering something that only a loving mother could call a head. Then you might have a feeling for Abe the Bugger.
Perhaps because he thinks his eighteen-month jail sentence a few years ago was unjustified, Abe’s seeming ambition in life is to turn up evidence against crooked political figures and judges. He was constantly assuring me that today he leads a perfectly straight life, saving his pennies and living on what he makes as an investigator. Indeed, he reminded me of nothing more than a sneak of a bad penny, always turning up at the wrong moment.
But of course once Abe was in, he really was in. First, he wired most of my telephones and connected them to a huge tape recorder hidden in my closet. At this moment I had second thoughts. “But I thought that we were going to have one of those small tape recorders that I simply turn on and off!” I told him.
“No, no, no, Robin wants all the sound,” Abe insisted.
Abe the Bugger was Robin’s man. How could I, madam though I may be, ever confuse artistry with art.
“How about the switch?” I pursued. “Listen, I want to be able to turn this thing off.”
“Okay,” he said. “Here is the switch. Press it here and it goes on, and press it there and off it goes. So you see, now you can record any conversation you want, and if you don’t want to record it, you don’t even have to put it on,” he replied with a cherubic smile.
Like Pandora’s box, Abe, once turned on, was evil energy unleashed. “Your phones…”
“What about my phones?” I asked.
“They could be bugged.”
“Oh?”
“I will check them out.” And check them out he did. I have never seen such activity. Electronic gadgets with all sorts of flicking lights and purring noises.
“Aha, it is bugged. You got a bug here.”
“Where?”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry, I know.”
“How? How do you know””
“The… [a spew forth of words I knew to be English but that sounded more like Einstein going mad]…and when it registers on this meter, I know there is a bug.”
“Okay. There is a bug.” I mean, who the hell could argue anyway?
“Aha [click, click, push, pull, click click]…and this one has a penregister.”
“How the hell, never mind… what the hell is a penregister?”
He told me it records all the numbers dialed. I wanted to know what I should do. He quickly explained; there is that smile again. I was to do nothing, he would do it all. He opened up another black box with meters and lights, and after half an hour’s work he sighed in satisfaction. “No more bug. I have just burned it off. It will take them ten days to get a court order to put a new one on. As for the penregister phone, just use it for incoming calls or to call out for shopping or food deliveries or general chitchat talk with friends.”
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.