From IEEE Spectrum, March 25:
On February 11, 1955, an anonymous tip led two New York Police Department detectives and two New York Telephone Company investigators to an apartment on the fourth floor of a residential building at 360 East 55th Street in midtown Manhattan. In the back bedroom of the unit, the group discovered a cache of stolen wiretapping equipment that turned out to have direct lines into six of New York City’s largest telephone exchanges: PLaza 1, 3, and 5; MUrray Hill 8; ELdorado 5; and TEmpleton 8. The connections blanketed an area of Manhattan running from East 38th Street to East 96th Street, a swath of the city’s most expensive real estate.
“There wasn’t a single tap-free telephone on the east side of New York,” professional wiretapper Bernard Spindel remarked of the arrangement. (Spindel was in all likelihood the source of the anonymous tip.) News of the discovery made the front page of the New York Times a week later.
The midtown Manhattan “wiretap nest,” as the 55th Street listening post came to be known, remains one of the largest and most elaborate private eavesdropping operations ever uncovered in the United States. Subscribers whose phones were tapped at the time of the raid included a range of New York commercial interests, with assets both large and small: a modeling agency and an insurance company; an art gallery and a lead mining company; and perhaps most sensationally, two publicly traded pharmaceutical corporations with competing patent interests. (The two firms, Bristol-Myers and E. R. Squibb, were at the time locked in a nasty legal battle over the commercial rights to the antibiotic tetracycline. Evidence later revealed that representatives from a third firm, Pfizer, had employed the wiretap nest to spy on both entities, paying more than $60,000 in cash for the service.)
Contrary to the popular image of the phone tap as either a technology of state surveillance or a tool of corporate espionage, the vast majority of the lines ensnared in the 55th Street operation turned out to be owned by private individuals. Some—like the burlesque artist Ann Corio, whose phone conversations were recorded in a dragnet search for incriminating information on prominent midtown residents—were the targets of blackmail. Others—like the New York socialite John Jacob Astor VI, who wanted someone to keep tabs on his wife—were involved in messy civil suits and divorce cases. By all accounts, the setup had the technical capacity to monitor as many as a hundred telephone lines at the same time. Between 50,000 and 100,000 individual subscribers were alleged to have been tapped over the course of fifteen months....
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