prove they did it. Whether they violate the law or not, there is no way of going back and proving that you had that conversation; the information came only on that one conversation and your wire was tapped.

So I know from talking with lawyers all over the country, private detectives, that it is quite general. That includes Washington, D. C. Mr. COLLINS. I assume it is quite generally known that people not engaged in law enforcement, in the investigating profession, also tap wires?

Mr. SHINDLER. We are requested dozens and dozens of times each year where we have to turn it down flat. An individual wants a certain wire tapped and we can't do it, and that ends it. There are other people they might be able to hire to do it, and in some instances they do.

Senator WELKER. Mr. Shindler-if you will allow me to interrupt again counselor-there is not any question in my mind. As I stated before, if a man wanted to be dishonest, as we have had evidence here, he could alter a wiretap.

But I will ask you if it is not a fact, based upon your years of experience, that that would be the best way in the world to lose his case by a defense attorney catching the alteration of the wiretap? Mr. SHINDLER. It certainly would be.

Senator WELKER. In other words, if John Jones stood out in that room and told a deliberate lie about you and the Senator from Idaho, then Mr. Jones is put up on the stand before a jury of his peers, he is given his direct examination and he is given cross examination; then you and I would take the stand and deny that allegation and explain wherein it had to be wrong; I answer a question of fact for the jury, and I am one of those individuals who still believes in the verdict of a jury, even though at some times I have been rather saddened by them.

Do you agree with me on that?

Mr. SHINDLER. Yes, sir; I certainly do.

Mr. COLLINS. Mr. Shindler, as a private investigator, if you are called upon to do some private wiretapping, do you have certain standards that you follow, or certain ethics?

Mr. SHINDLER. Very definitely.

Mr. COLLINS. What are they?

Mr. SHINDLER. The only way today, since the legislation is as it is, that we would even consider such a thing, is for a client who is being threatened, has been receiving threats, blackmail or threats or other types over his phone; there is only one way of finding and locating that party and getting the evidence necessary. So we tap his phone in his office with his permission.

So it is his phone, it is not any stranger's. He has knowledge of it, he has ordered us to do it, and he is paying us to do it. And then we get a record of what the person says, and as a result of those calls we are able to locate the part of the city from which the person is making those calls, and frequently we can pick them up at the telephone booth where it happens.

This evidence is not out, it is not necessary. We get it as a result. We locate the person who started the blackmail, and we stop it wherever the case may be.

We are justified in doing that work. It is ethical to do it.

Mr. COLLINS. The investigator would tap his client's phone, but he would not try to put on illegal taps?

Mr. SHINDLER. If he did it on your phone without your knowledge, he is committing a crime for which he can go to prison. It is not only unethical, he is a crook under the eyes of the law. If he is caught he can go to prison.

Mr. COLLINS. From your knowledge and again confining it to New York City and New York State-do you believe there is a considerable amount of illegal private wiretapping going on?

Mr. SHINDLER. Yes, there is. There is no question about it.

Mr. COLLINS. Senator Welker pointed out that we are primarily concerned with trying to secure wiretap legislation so as to make admissible in evidence information obtained by wiretaps. The legislation pending before us is confined to two approaches: One, the wiretaps upon the express, written approval of the Attorney General; and, secondly, following the pattern of the New York State law, of an ex parte crder.

Now, from your experience in this field through many years, what are your feelings about these two approaches? Would you care to express any opinion as to which you would think would be the most expeditious and in the best public interest?

Mr. SHINDLER. The beginning of your question was two approaches? Mr. COLLINS. We have two approaches before us. One is that the wiretaps would be made upon the express, written permission of the Attorney General; secondly, that the Attorney General would have to go to court and get a court order from a judge before he can make the wiretap.

Mr. SHINDLER. My experience is that it should be the first, that the Attorney General should have the right to decide right then and there. The other delays and many times causes the crime not to be solved as a result of that. I am all in favor of the Attorney General having that authority.

The second one, to me, is ridiculous.

Mr. COLLINS. I have no further questions.

Senator WELKER. Mr. Shindler, the committee has been honored to have you here. On behalf of the chairman, Mr. Wiley, and the entire committee, we want to thank you profusely for coming down. I am very happy to have met you.

Mr. SHINDLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am glad to have seen

you.

Senator WELKER. The next witness will be Mr. Bernstein, attorneyat-law of New York City.

STATEMENT OF NAHUM A. BERNSTEIN, ATTORNEY AT LAW, NEW YORK CITY

Senator WELKER. Will you state your name, and your residence? Mr. BERNSTEIN. My name is Nahum A. Bernstein, of the law firm of Silver & Bernstein. I reside at Locust Avenue, Rye, N. Y. My office is at 20 Pine Street, New York City.

Senator WELKER. And you are engaged in the practice of law.

Would you tell the committee principally what type of law you practice? Is it trial work, civil work, or general?

Mr. BERNSTEIN. We do a vast amount of trial work, particularly in the Federal courts. My partner, Mr. Silver, is present district attorney of Kings County, having at the last election succeeded Mr. Miles McDonald. He was formerly Assistant United States Attorney, Chief of the Bureau of Indictments of the Southern District, and Special Assistant to the Attorney General.

Mr. COLLINS. Would you give some of your other background, Mr. Bernstein, for the record, as to your private law practice? Were you in service during the war?

Mr. BERNSTEIN. Yes.

In conjunction with Mr. Silver, we conducted for over 4 years the heart-racket investigation in cooperation with the United States Attorney, which resulted in the conviction of over 100 individuals, including the leading law firms in the insurance field in New York City, unhonorable doctors, and so on.

In the course of that inquiry I supervised the installation of numerous setups for recording both room and wire conversations. That is one investigation. We recorded over 5,000 records; which could be a great many more conversations, there are many on each record.

During the war I was with the Office of Strategic Services. I headed up and wrote the so-called bibles for police methods. I taught wiretapping and microphone work and other police methods almost daily for a period of years during my course of service.

Since then I have been very close to the situation in the State of New York, particularly the problems relating to the practical problems of wiretapping, and the problems of obtaining a court order in order to effect wiretapping.

I should state the auspices under which I appear here.

I appear here because Mr. Ted Pearson of the Bar Association of the city of New York recommended that I appear here, to discuss or give such aid, if I can, with regard to the practical problems rather than the legal or theoretical problems relating to the bill you are considering.

Therefore, the first issue and I think it the most important issue I would like to take up—is the question as to whether the requirements of a court order would, in fact, hamper the job of the law enforcing agencies.

I don't know that I am any more competent than anyone else to advise the committee as to the value of a court order, or what sort of course it should adopt, but I think I am competent to advise the committee as to what will happen in the field, if you adopt one course or the other as a practical matter.

I disagree with a great many things the last witness testified about. I am of the firm opinion that much of what I consider loose thinking about this subject comes as a result of perfect good will, but by people talking in terms of general principle rather than in practical problems, just what does happen.

In order to do that, I would like to, if I may, sir, tell you just what happens in the field when we wiretap.

Senator WELKER. Very well. We would like to hear that.

Mr. BERNSTEIN. I am talking about many thousands of installations. not only that I installed or supervised, but in my association with the leading wiretappers of this country and the work they have done.

Actually, the simplest problem, when a decision is made "Let's tap So and So's wire," the simplest part of the problem is to ascertain the wire to be tapped. The reason why that is rendered simple, although it could be complex, is because we assume a qualified wiretapper has, through super function or connections, access to the telephone company's records. And where you have that access, the job of locating the party, which is the first start-you start with the telephone number or the name and location. It is easy enough to get the telephone number, although that presents difficulties, where it is an unlisted number or sometimes a secret number. That is a category the telephone company has.

Nevertheless, if we are talking about not private wiretappers, whose job is a little tougher in that regard, but people with the badge of authority, we assume that they have those connections.

Now, you have two distinct problems. You have big-city taps and you have rural, suburban taps. The big-city taps are easier than the rural, suburban taps.

You must understand that the telephone company does not run just one pair of lines from the exchange to any particular trunkline in a man's home. It would be highly uneconomical to do that. The result is that through the main cable are hundreds of pairs of wires, one of which is connected to a cross box which might be in the basement of an apartment house or an office building.

But they don't let it go at that because if that building were to be torn down and another building erected, or they wanted to change the service, that entire miles of line would be lost. So the knowledge of the economy of the phone system is one of the working tools of the wiretapper. He knows that in addition to the pair in the cross-box in the building, in which the party resides whose wire you are going to tap, there are 2, 3, 4, sometimes 5 multiples of that wire, which will appear in other bridging points, or other cross-boxes anywhere from a half block away to sometimes 5, 6, or 8 blocks away. There might be a choice of 2 or 3 locations.

Now, fundamentally, I brought with me a typical bridging point. This is the smallest type. But it makes no difference. What you see here is just on a small scale of what you would see in a giant cross-box in the Empire State Building. Instead of one line of lugs, there would be many, many lines of lugs.

On the box you will see the cable number would be written, like 292 would be the cable number. That means all wires running into this box come from cable number 292. Therefore, if you know that a man has Circle 7-4380, and you have access to the record, they will tell you 4380 is cable 292, pair 4.

They will also tell you another piece of information, that the crossbox is located in a certain building, in his own building, let us say, and there are multiples of that in three other addresses. So you then know what avenues are available for wiretapping: The building in which the man resides and 3 or 4 other locations.

After that comes your real job. Then your work first begins. You can't go, as a rule, into the man's building and sit in the cellar and wiretap from there. So you go shopping around, and if it is a secure type of investigation, you shop under cover. You don't go in and flash your badge necessarily.

They do in New York City, if it is a bookmaking investigation and the problems of exposure are not too serious. If it were a spy investigation, or any real conspiracy-I know in the mail fraud investigations we conducted in the heart racket, we never operated under badge of authority. We always created a legitimate cover.

I recall where I not only set up a rented place, but we set up a textile firm. We made sure that firm had a rating in Dun and Bradstreet, so that if people were to check us they would find out we made sales; we had a bank account; we had officers and directors, if they checked. And we brought our equipment in under complete cover.

You will find out that in sensitive jobs, such as spy investigations, the badge of authority is only infrequently used and only as a matter of dire necessity. So the difficult job of shopping goes on.

You find it is hard to get an office in a particular building, or you find, coming in and out of an apartment house, one of the great problems is that the apartments are all taken. People go into a place where some woman first gave us consent; she was perfectly willing to help the law enforcement agencies, but she didn't realize that 4 or 5 men were coming in and out, and neighbors would begin to talk that she received male visitors. So we had to create some other setup.

The point I am trying to make is that creating a secure listening post is an extremely difficult job, more difficult in proportion to the sensitivity of your investigation; less difficult when you are dealing, let us say, with bookmaking or a petty larceny case; extremely difficult and time-consuming when you are dealing with Federal agencies where security is extremely important.

One of the things when I hear testimony about this problem, and people say you have to move at a moment's notice, I think that ought to be determined by what in fact has been the experience of people who had to move, and who had to move not only on one occasion but on thousands of occasions.

So I have brought with me-and I would like to submit to the committee and comment as I go along-first of all, a letter which was based upon my long association and my recent discussions with the man I consider the dean of wiretappers in the United States, and I think who is generally considered to be so, Mr. William J. Mellin.

Mr. Mellin has only recently gone into retirement, but still is active on special assignments. He is probably responsible for the initial invention of devices and the training of most of the men who are now doing the job for our Federal agencies today.

Let me read this to you. It is dated May 11, 1954. It is addressed to me:

DEAR MR. BERNSTEIN: I wish to confirm our discussion in your office today concerning the issue as to whether important investigations involving national security might be hampered by the delay necessary in obtaining a court order. I speak from the experience of more than 40 years devoted almost exclusively to wiretapping. After 5 years of varied experience with the telephone company, including wiretapping, I devoted the rest of my life to the science of wiretapping for local, State, and Federal authorities. These included the various district attorneys in New York State, state troopers, New York City Police Department, United States Railway Police, Narcotic Service, Intelligence unit, Postal Service, Department of Justice, and the United States Army, Navy, and Coast Guard. I have checked the telephones of at least two Presidents of the United States and members of the Presidents' Cabinet.

Among innumerable underworld investigations, I conducted wiretapping operations in the investigations of Dutch Schultz, Waxey Gordon, Charles Lucky Luciana, Al Capone and the Diamond gang.