Speaker 1: Pushkin the Last Archive A History of Truth?
Speaker 2: Are you going to answer that? I don't want to
Speaker 2: tell you what to do, but you're listening to this
Speaker 2: on your phone and your phone is ringing. Fine, I'll
Speaker 2: answer it.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 2: It's a character from a movie made in the nineteen fifties, Wiretapper.
Speaker 4: Could you develop equipment to listen in on a telephone?
Speaker 4: That is, record a conversation without the owner knowing anything
Speaker 4: about it?
Speaker 2: Wiretapper tells the story of Big Jim Voss, an electronics
Speaker 2: guy in Los Angeles who gets work bugging and slowly
Speaker 2: but surely gets sucked into a criminal underworld and winds
Speaker 2: up becoming a pretty big deal. There's this scene that
Speaker 2: shows the moment he becomes a wire tapper. You can
Speaker 2: tell he's hanging out with the mob because they're sitting
Speaker 2: around smoking, listening to jazz.
Speaker 5: Wiretapping is illegal, mister Remstey, just that the question, I
Speaker 5: could put the equipment together.
Speaker 2: The movie hit theaters early in nineteen fifty five. That
Speaker 2: same year, a best selling book called Wiretap was in stores.
Speaker 2: Columbia Pictures was said to be working on a movie
Speaker 2: called The wire Tappers. The stuff was all over the place.
Speaker 2: It was still a new thing for some people to
Speaker 2: have a phone in their house, and people were a
Speaker 2: little itchy about it. The newspapers kept writing stories about
Speaker 2: the dangers of wire tapping. Someone was listening in wiretapper
Speaker 2: of the movie was tapping straight into that fear. The
Speaker 2: ads for the film read, if you're on the phone,
Speaker 2: you're not safe.
Speaker 4: Even the police aren't a lot of tap private wires.
Speaker 4: Here's five hundred, there'll be another five. I have you
Speaker 4: do a good job.
Speaker 5: I guess if it's for the police, eh, it'll be
Speaker 5: all right.
Speaker 2: So this movie at first seemed to me like pretty
Speaker 2: straightforward in noir stuff. But it wasn't made by a
Speaker 2: major studio like Warner Bruthers or MGM or Columbia. It
Speaker 2: was made by the most famous evangelical Christian in the country,
Speaker 2: the Minister Billy Graham, which maybe I should have suspected
Speaker 2: from all the church scenes.
Speaker 6: The Bible says, what shall it properer man? He be
Speaker 6: gained the whole world and lose his home soul.
Speaker 2: So this put a pretty big question in my mind.
Speaker 2: Why was the most famous evangelist in America making a
Speaker 2: movie in the nineteen fifties about how if you're on
Speaker 2: the phone, you're not safe. Pulling on this thread. It
Speaker 2: turned out to be like yanking on a telephone gable
Speaker 2: and discovering that it's wired up to everything in the
Speaker 2: United States. Welcome to Season four of The Last Archive,
Speaker 2: the show about how we know what we know, how
Speaker 2: we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes
Speaker 2: lately as if we don't know anything at all. I'm
Speaker 2: Ben Matta Haffrey. Today's episode, We're Tapping the Phones. I
Speaker 2: was watching that movie Wiretapper, because I've gotten curious about
Speaker 2: the history of a feeling. I think a lot of
Speaker 2: people have. Now we're all on our phones all the time,
Speaker 2: and I at least have pretty much accepted that I'm
Speaker 2: constantly being surveiled, if not by wiretappers and cops, then
Speaker 2: by companies and bots. But this weird intersection of phone
Speaker 2: anxieties in American religion in the fifties caught me off guard.
Speaker 2: I wanted to understand how those things fit together, So
Speaker 2: I dug into the absolutely unhinged story behind that film,
Speaker 2: a story about the telephone, American spirituality, and most of all,
Speaker 2: that wiretapper, Big Jim Voss. Because it turns out He's
Speaker 2: a real guy.
Speaker 3: Yarn and raised in the city of Los Angeles, the
Speaker 3: son of a preacher.
Speaker 2: Jim Voss, son of a preacher, grew up in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: His first phone number was Broadway sixteen zero seven. That
Speaker 2: was more important than the son of a preacher thing,
Speaker 2: because Big Jim wasn't on track to become a preacher
Speaker 2: like his father. He was on track to become a
Speaker 2: telephone criminal.
Speaker 7: His father was definitely, you know, on the fundamentalist side.
Speaker 7: He had two sisters, but being the only boy, I
Speaker 7: think there were a lot of expectations that he would
Speaker 7: go into the ministry himself.
Speaker 2: Will Voss one of Big Jim's kids, who wrote a
Speaker 2: book about his father's life. Like his grandfather, Will is
Speaker 2: a minister. I called him up to talk about his
Speaker 2: dad and just to say if the interviews in this
Speaker 2: episode sound different than usual, it's because I recorded them
Speaker 2: by tapping my phone.
Speaker 7: You know, he really struggled with the level of expectation
Speaker 7: that was there, and in his younger life really rebelled
Speaker 7: against just the whole upbringing.
Speaker 2: This is a kind way of saying that from childhood on,
Speaker 2: Big Jim Voss was always in.
Speaker 3: Trouble thata guy would sell them out of it.
Speaker 2: Voss grew up during the Great Depression, but he decided
Speaker 2: the reason his family was poor was because his parents
Speaker 2: were Christians. He wanted to get rich. When he was little,
Speaker 2: his parents took in borders to earn a little bit
Speaker 2: of extra cash, and there was one man who was
Speaker 2: always building radios. Voss would sit in the border's room
Speaker 2: and watch. Eventually, the man taught Kid Jim had to
Speaker 2: tinker himself, and he fell in love with sound machines, radios,
Speaker 2: microphones phones. Pretty quickly. He realized that one of the
Speaker 2: best parts about this gear was that he'll let you
Speaker 2: hear things you weren't supposed to.
Speaker 7: His first wired top experience is that he wired his
Speaker 7: sister's date in the family home.
Speaker 2: He was about twelve. His sister's boyfriend was coming over.
Speaker 2: Kid Jim dug around his electronics stash, snuck into the
Speaker 2: living room and hit a microphone behind the couch. He
Speaker 2: ran a wire from it out a window to a
Speaker 2: speaker in the backyard, and then.
Speaker 7: Sold tickets to kids in the neighborhood to come listen
Speaker 7: to his sister's conversation with her boyfriend.
Speaker 2: This is like his origin story that combination spying, recording devices,
Speaker 2: money betrayal. That was the story of Big Jim Voss'
Speaker 2: life in college at Bible School, he claimed he'd set
Speaker 2: up a fundraiser for the yearbook where people paid to
Speaker 2: watch a long distance call from Los Angeles to Africa. Then,
Speaker 2: according to his son Will, he embezzled the money and
Speaker 2: he flew to Florida. He got away with that, But
Speaker 2: it was mugging an old man at gunpoint that supposedly
Speaker 2: finally landed him in prison. He left his driver's license
Speaker 2: at the scene. But Big is like a cat with
Speaker 2: nine lives. World War II was for most people not
Speaker 2: a good thing. For Jim Voss, it was great because,
Speaker 2: he says, he left prison, got drafted, and was put
Speaker 2: to work using his electronic skills.
Speaker 3: The army was good to me, wiped out the record
Speaker 3: of conviction, detailed me to duty on the West Coast.
Speaker 2: This tape, by the way, is from a speech Foss
Speaker 2: gave a couple of years before that Wire Tapper movie
Speaker 2: came out. This is his version of his life story.
Speaker 2: The story that movie is based on, the story whose
Speaker 2: significance I'm trying to understand a lot of It is
Speaker 2: probably fluff, but there's important truths there if you sift
Speaker 2: for them. First truth, this is a story about how
Speaker 2: Big Jim Voss was bad news.
Speaker 3: Finally was court marshaled again, this time for misuse of priorities,
Speaker 3: misappropriation of government's property. I was sent in ten years hard.
Speaker 2: Labor misappropriation of government property, basically stealing equipment from the army,
Speaker 2: as he tells it. When the war ended he got out.
Speaker 2: He moved back home to Los Angeles in his parents'
Speaker 2: house to set up an electronics business. Now we're going
Speaker 2: to leave Big Jim there for a moment, just a moment,
Speaker 2: so I can tell you that that decade, the nineteen forties,
Speaker 2: Americans were spending a lot of time on the phone.
Speaker 2: The telephone had been around since eighteen seventy six, so
Speaker 2: to me, the phone seems practically ancient compared to say,
Speaker 2: the radio. But it was especially after the Second World
Speaker 2: War that the telephone system really exploded for the first time.
Speaker 2: More than half of Americans had phones in their homes.
Speaker 2: You can hear the thrill of it in those post
Speaker 2: war telephone ad campaigns.
Speaker 5: Lift a telephone receiver and the world is at your
Speaker 5: fingertaips speed and your voice spans oceans and continents with
Speaker 5: the speed of light.
Speaker 2: Everyone was getting a phone. There were ten thousand new
Speaker 2: hookups a day. More people got telephones right after the
Speaker 2: war ended than any other time in history up till them.
Speaker 2: In the four years after the war, the system grew
Speaker 2: by half, and in the sprawling, booming city of Los Angeles,
Speaker 2: everyone was patching in. It had always been a big
Speaker 2: phone city. As a historian Emily Bills points out, everyone
Speaker 2: thinks cars la, but before there were cars, trolleys, or
Speaker 2: even paved streets in downtown Los Angeles, there were telephone
Speaker 2: lines criss crossing all over the place, and over time
Speaker 2: it became a catch all technology. People used the phone
Speaker 2: for everything, the means.
Speaker 8: Were transacting business, the means for communicating information, for seeking help,
Speaker 8: for keeping all friends in touch.
Speaker 2: But people swiftly realized that the phone didn't just connect
Speaker 2: you to everything, It connected everything to your living room.
Speaker 2: That was a little anxiety inducing. Maybe all this connection
Speaker 2: wasn't such a good thing after all. There was a
Speaker 2: lot of concern about who might call, and the fact
Speaker 2: that they might call at any hour. But even more
Speaker 2: upsetting was the concern about who might be listening, which
Speaker 2: was on a lot of people's minds because they were
Speaker 2: all on something called a party line, which phone companies
Speaker 2: spend a lot of time and money getting people used to.
Speaker 5: You and the other fellow on your line can help
Speaker 5: each other to better telephone service by simply being good
Speaker 5: party line neighbors.
Speaker 2: Party lines were shared lines that connected a few houses
Speaker 2: to the network. Most phone users had them, so picking
Speaker 2: up the phone and overhearing someone else's conversation was a
Speaker 2: regular thing. I find that tension really interesting. Here was
Speaker 2: a device that lets you speak one on one to
Speaker 2: someone far away from the privacy of your own home.
Speaker 2: It invited secrets, but it also gave you the constant
Speaker 2: awareness that someone might be able to hear them at
Speaker 2: any time. I feel that now when I Google something
Speaker 2: and then the next day see ads for it all
Speaker 2: over the place. This moment the nineteen forties, when a
Speaker 2: lot of people were getting their phones and Big Jim
Speaker 2: was in La setting up his electronics business, I think
Speaker 2: that feeling began to go mainstream by the way people
Speaker 2: called him Big Jim Voss, because what else do you
Speaker 2: call a guy who's six foot four weighs three hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty four pounds and is pursuing his passion for
Speaker 2: electronics in his parents' basement.
Speaker 3: Believe me, that's lige. Don't look so startled you've been
Speaker 3: wondering anyway.
Speaker 2: Imagine a guy that size, with slicked hair and big
Speaker 2: v neck lapels like a linebacker, who kind of looks
Speaker 2: like Elvis if you squint. He stood a head taller
Speaker 2: than pretty much anyone else. With his life of crime
Speaker 2: behind him, Big Jim went straight with his electronics business
Speaker 2: at his parents' house for like two seconds.
Speaker 3: One day, we were approached by the Los Angeles Police Department.
Speaker 3: They wanted us to aid them in the development of
Speaker 3: some equipment they thought would could have curbed crying.
Speaker 2: The LAPD had found Big Jim kind of by accident.
Speaker 2: A cop on their vice squad, Officer Charles Stoker, was
Speaker 2: investigating a tip about an alleged prostitute living in an
Speaker 2: apartment building. The other tenants had been complaining. When Stoker arrived,
Speaker 2: he checked in with the manager, who happened to be
Speaker 2: Big Jim Voss, helping out a friend. Luckily for us,
Speaker 2: Stoker was very much the hero of his own story
Speaker 2: and later wrote about this fateful encounter in a memoir
Speaker 2: called Thicker in Thieves, the nineteen fifty factual expose of
Speaker 2: police payoffs, graft, political corruption, and prostitution in Los Angeles
Speaker 2: and Hollywood. Stoker needed proof that the suspect was engaging
Speaker 2: in prostitution, but it was going to be hard to
Speaker 2: get the kind of evidence he needed, at least if
Speaker 2: he was going to do it legally.
Speaker 9: One glance at the apartment, and I knew that the
Speaker 9: arrest was going to be difficult, since defendans must be
Speaker 9: caught in the act of sexual intercourse. The apartment had
Speaker 9: a long hallway and the rooms were so far from
Speaker 9: the outer door it would be virtually impossible to detect
Speaker 9: incriminating conversation.
Speaker 2: Big Jim was there observing all of this. Truthfully, he
Speaker 2: didn't really care if one of the tenants was in
Speaker 2: aging and prostitution. He later wrote, I was keeper of
Speaker 2: no man's morals. But having watched the cops haplessly climb
Speaker 2: a tree in an attempt to catch the woman in
Speaker 2: the act, Big Jim sensed an opportunity. He revealed to
Speaker 2: officer Stoker that his real job was electronics microphones. He
Speaker 2: told them that he could bug the room and get
Speaker 2: them the proof they needed. The cops were thrilled. This
Speaker 2: plan wasn't exactly legal, but it probably seemed better than
Speaker 2: the climbing trees thing. So Big Jim Voss got to work.
Speaker 2: He hit a microphone in the room, and then they listened.
Speaker 9: To say that I was amazed what I heard would
Speaker 9: be an understate.
Speaker 2: Big Jim had struck gold. The vice squad cops loved him.
Speaker 2: He began making them all kinds of wire tapping gizmos.
Speaker 3: We had one gadget that made it possible for us
Speaker 3: who listen into telephone conversation, so that we didn't have
Speaker 3: to go anywhere near the telephone in question, but we
Speaker 3: could sit back on the other side of town and
Speaker 3: hear all what was being said on that telephone.
Speaker 2: Big Jim was kind of like Queue in James Bond.
Speaker 2: He kept coming up with new ways for the cops
Speaker 2: to spy on people. Mostly his innovations came from hiding
Speaker 2: miniaturized microphones in places and recording what he heard on
Speaker 2: a wire, an old recording format. He was especially proud
Speaker 2: of something he called a talking cane, which allowed cops
Speaker 2: to hear things through walls. It looked like a walking stick,
Speaker 2: except it probably had a tiny microphone hidden in the
Speaker 2: end and a wire running up the cane through the
Speaker 2: cops sleeves to an amplifier and then to an earbud.
Speaker 2: It also sent a signal wirelessly to a recording device
Speaker 2: hidden in a car outside, so they could tape everything.
Speaker 2: And then there were the wire taps that became Big
Speaker 2: Jim's signature.
Speaker 10: Tectologically speaking, in the days of the Copper eelephone system,
Speaker 10: the electro mechanical switching system, it was really quite easy
Speaker 10: to tap a line.
Speaker 2: That's Brian Hawkman, director of American Studies at Georgetown University,
Speaker 2: an author of the book The Listeners, a History of
Speaker 2: wiretapping in the United States, And.
Speaker 10: It's Big Jim Voss who was a true pioneer in
Speaker 10: the postwar electronic eavesdropping field and made an extraordinary name
Speaker 10: for himself on both sides.
Speaker 7: Of the law.
Speaker 2: Big Jim didn't make much money off the LAPD, but
Speaker 2: as his reputation grew, he started getting more work around town.
Speaker 2: He claimed to do a lot of work for movie stars. Specifically,
Speaker 2: he said he'd tapped Mickey Rooney's phone so he could
Speaker 2: prove his wife was having an affair.
Speaker 3: It's always interesting what goes on when people don't know
Speaker 3: they're being listened to by so many people.
Speaker 2: I think this line of business is basically the same
Speaker 2: as broadcasting his sister's date to the neighborhood kids, exposing
Speaker 2: women by means of technology. The history of the telephone
Speaker 2: and wiretapping is a history of privacy and concerns about
Speaker 2: privacy which have always been gendered. We made a whole
Speaker 2: episode about this a couple of years ago, The Invisible Lady.
Speaker 2: You can listen to it on your phone on Apple
Speaker 2: Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. Anyway, the idea of
Speaker 2: an electronic ear sitting in your living room was worrisome
Speaker 2: to the broader public, in part because it violated the
Speaker 2: sanctity of the home, and also because nobody particularly seemed
Speaker 2: interested in cracking down on it. Exhibit A. The cops
Speaker 2: were hiring Big Jim to do more of it.
Speaker 10: One thing that's extraordinary to note, Despite the fact that
Speaker 10: wire tapping was illegal in the state of California, private
Speaker 10: eavesdroppers for hire advertised their services openly in the LA
Speaker 10: Yellow Pages. And this was a business that was out
Speaker 10: in the olden It was illegal, but it was never prosecuted,
Speaker 10: and Boss emerges as a leader in this very strange
Speaker 10: gray area industry.
Speaker 2: Big Jim Voss, son of a preacher, two time convict
Speaker 2: cat on his third life, was now simultaneously working for
Speaker 2: a bunch of movie stars who wanted to expose There
Speaker 2: soon to be ex spouses, rich men who wanted radar
Speaker 2: guard at homes, and self righteous cops who wanted to
Speaker 2: wire tap call girls phones.
Speaker 7: I don't think at the time he thought much at
Speaker 7: all about the morality of the things he was doing.
Speaker 7: I think he thought it was great fun.
Speaker 2: It probably was fun until Big Jim got in over
Speaker 2: his head. We'll be right back. In nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 2: Big Jim Voss was wire tapping all over Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: He was basically a character in a film noir movie.
Speaker 2: Already that same year, an actual film noir movie came
Speaker 2: out that opened with an epigraph which reads to me
Speaker 2: like a mission statement for Big Jim.
Speaker 11: And the tangled networks of a great city. The telephone
Speaker 11: is the unseen link between a million lives. It is
Speaker 11: a servant of our common needs, the confidant of our
Speaker 11: inmost secrets.
Speaker 2: Big Jim Voss was wired tapping all over those networks,
Speaker 2: and he was about to get tangled up in something
Speaker 2: pretty serious. Among the many clients he claimed cops, movie stars, businesses.
Speaker 2: Big Jim had been working with a private detective who
Speaker 2: turned out to have a connection to the mob. The
Speaker 2: Mob realized he could use a guy like Big Jim,
Speaker 2: so they called him up.
Speaker 3: One day, we were called after a little habitashery on
Speaker 3: the Sunset Drip in Hollywood.
Speaker 2: Big Jim drove out to the Habitashery, a little hat
Speaker 2: shop on the Sunset Strip, and he made his way
Speaker 2: to the back.
Speaker 3: I was quite well impressed, first of all with the
Speaker 3: steel doors that I passed through to get into it.
Speaker 3: Secondly with its exquisite furnishing, walnut panels that ran from
Speaker 3: ceiling to floor, suspended television set in the corner, red
Speaker 3: leathered upholstered furniture in a semi circular death behind which
Speaker 3: SATIS famed man Mickey Cohen.
Speaker 2: Mickey Cohen was the head of the Los Angeles Underworld. Short,
Speaker 2: bald guy with a pretty odd personality, a cold blooded
Speaker 2: killer who loved eating ice cream and washed his hands
Speaker 2: fifty times a day. In the back of that hat shop,
Speaker 2: he explained the situation to Big Jim. The LAPD had
Speaker 2: bugged Cohen's house. Cohen wanted Big Jim to find the bug.
Speaker 2: He came by the next day piece of cake. Cohen
Speaker 2: was impressed, and pretty quickly he hired Big Jim to
Speaker 2: listen in on all of his enemies for him, including
Speaker 2: the LAPD, for whom Big Jim had also been wired tapping.
Speaker 2: He was a double agent, worked for the good guys
Speaker 2: and the bad guys, except as I came to realize,
Speaker 2: those were the same guys. In Los Angeles, there used
Speaker 2: to be something known as the combination, the alliance between
Speaker 2: city government, law enforcement, and the mob. Something like that
Speaker 2: still existed in Big Jim's day, so he didn't have
Speaker 2: to pick sides because there weren't really sides. He worked
Speaker 2: for the LAPD and he worked for the Mob. He
Speaker 2: got pretty cozy with them. Eventually he moved his electronics
Speaker 2: shop onto the Strip, right alongside the mobbed up Habitashery.
Speaker 2: The strip was outside city jurisdiction for quite some time.
Speaker 3: After engaging in this activity with mister Cohen, I found
Speaker 3: it convenience to work for him on the one side,
Speaker 3: and for law enforcement agencies.
Speaker 2: On the other Voss was still working with the LAPD.
Speaker 2: Tapping the phones was amazingly useful for those guys, because
Speaker 2: the phone has always been a kind of refuge for
Speaker 2: the things people can't do in public. That's one way
Speaker 2: to think about the telephone network as a kind of
Speaker 2: shadow of public life, the place where secret lives and
Speaker 2: longings go, things like prostitution. In the late nineteen forties,
Speaker 2: Voss's main gig with the police had been helping Stoker
Speaker 2: investigate probably the biggest prostitution ring in the city. It
Speaker 2: was headed up by a woman named Brenda Allen. She
Speaker 2: was a hard nosed businesswoman, glamorous, always in sunglasses. As
Speaker 2: Time magazine put it, somewhat absurdly, she had a mind
Speaker 2: like a cash register, and she hadn't been in love
Speaker 2: since she was twenty one. Like Big Jim, She'd found
Speaker 2: a good use for Los Angeles' vast telephone network. Brothels
Speaker 2: were risky, they could be raided, all the foot traffic
Speaker 2: would draw attention. But if you had a web of employees,
Speaker 2: each with their own phone, the modern adam could function
Speaker 2: like a telephone exchange. This is where the term call
Speaker 2: girl comes from. Brenda Allen had one hundred and fourteen
Speaker 2: of them all over town. She was always on the
Speaker 2: phone setting up secret rendezvous, and Officer Stoker wanted Big
Speaker 2: Jim to listen in. He wrote about the plan in his.
Speaker 9: Memoir We went to Brendan entered through the basement through
Speaker 9: a rear door, and in short order Voss had tapped
Speaker 9: rendered Lyne. There were more calls than she could possibly
Speaker 9: hand them. As soon as she received one call and
Speaker 9: dispatched a girl or girls, she would dial the telephone,
Speaker 9: exchange them and contact. The operator would give her the
Speaker 9: names of waiting customs.
Speaker 2: The scene was recreated in that movie Wiretapper, in loving detail.
Speaker 2: You can see the real equipment, and the conversation is
Speaker 2: straight from an account. Big Jim wrote of the night.
Speaker 12: Cord, who gave you this number? Why, mister Fielding, our
Speaker 12: sales manager. Oh, yes, Well, we have some very nice
Speaker 12: books the heroine and one is especially attractive, A brunette
Speaker 12: about five for three ads like very interesting reading. How
Speaker 12: about ten o'clock at the corner of Sunset and Lbrea.
Speaker 12: There'll be a picture on the front cover, a girl
Speaker 12: in a mink coat. That'll be fine. Goodbye.
Speaker 2: Stoker in real life was thrilled. Now he wanted to
Speaker 2: find out who the call girls were, so a day later,
Speaker 2: Big Jim came by with a device that could record
Speaker 2: all the numbers. Brenda Allen was dialing an impulse indicator,
Speaker 2: jammed in that basement, probably sweating, breathing as quietly as possible.
Speaker 2: Big Jim and Stoker gathered twenty nine numbers in one night,
Speaker 2: most of them for girls working for Alan. It was
Speaker 2: a huge coup. Stoker was greedy for more numbers, so
Speaker 2: he came back the next night with Big Jim's device,
Speaker 2: hooked it up to the wire, and began writing down
Speaker 2: all the numbers. And then he saw a number that
Speaker 2: he recognized, the number of the La Vice Squad his
Speaker 2: own department.
Speaker 9: My ears twitching, my nostrils flared as I listened. When
Speaker 9: someone answered Brenda's ring, she inquired if Sergeant Jackson.
Speaker 2: Was in Moments later, according to Stoker's account, Stoker and
Speaker 2: Big Jim were listening to one of the top aids
Speaker 2: to the head of the vice squad as he talked
Speaker 2: with the Cities number one madam about how much they
Speaker 2: loved each other. The call also confirmed that the vice
Speaker 2: squad was being paid off by Allan. The self righteous
Speaker 2: stoker was aghast crooked cops in Los Angeles.
Speaker 9: At the time. I had high ideals concerning the Los
Speaker 9: Angeles Police Department.
Speaker 2: Big Jim suffered from no such idealism, and when he
Speaker 2: teamed up with Mickey Cohen, he told the mob all
Speaker 2: about the recordings. It was too good not to share
Speaker 2: leverage on the cops. But when word got out about
Speaker 2: Big Jim's recordings of Brenda Allen and the LAPD, the
Speaker 2: situation spiraled why out of control. Here's how bad corruption
Speaker 2: was in Los Angeles in the nineteen forties. There was
Speaker 2: a grand jury that met every year to investigate corruption
Speaker 2: in government. When they caught wind of Big Jim's blockbuster
Speaker 2: Brenda Allen recordings, they launched an investigation. It exposed corruption
Speaker 2: all over the place, mobbed up cops, Brenda Allen paying
Speaker 2: people off. It was so bad that the chief of
Speaker 2: the LAPD even stepped down. Everyone was turning on everyone else,
Speaker 2: and somehow Big Jim Voss and his wiretap recordings were
Speaker 2: right at the center of it all.
Speaker 7: The police was looking for these tapes that my father
Speaker 7: had related to Brenda Allen. Then he wasn't giving them up.
Speaker 2: Will Voss, Big Jim's son, the pastor.
Speaker 7: Again he was leading them on a wild goose chase.
Speaker 7: You're sure these tapes agrees, yes. And then in the
Speaker 7: midst of all grand jury trial, you know he committed
Speaker 7: perjury implicating a police officer that you know that Cohen
Speaker 7: wanted to go down the whole thing.
Speaker 2: It was the fall of nineteen forty nine and Big
Speaker 2: Jim was in a tight spot. Everything was splintering. He
Speaker 2: couldn't wire tap and bug for everyone anymore. The LAPD
Speaker 2: and Cohen weren't on good terms. There was a gang war,
Speaker 2: and Big Jim was involved in this whole other scheme
Speaker 2: that was jeopardizing his relationship with Cohen. Big Jim had
Speaker 2: been one step ahead of everyone the whole time, but
Speaker 2: now it was all catching up to him. He had
Speaker 2: nowhere to turn. In that exact moment, the modern evangelical
Speaker 2: movement came crashing into Big Jim's life.
Speaker 8: From Minneapolis comes a young evangelist, Billy Graham, to cooperate
Speaker 8: with Christ for Great Heir Los Angeles in a Great
Speaker 8: Revival campaign.
Speaker 2: You probably know the name Billy Graham. He brought the
Speaker 2: evangelical movement to political power in this country. His Los
Speaker 2: Angeles crusade was what would make him famous nationwide. Graham
Speaker 2: set up in a huge revival tent at the corner
Speaker 2: of Washington and Hill Streets. It was big news.
Speaker 8: There are sixty five hundred people seated here in this
Speaker 8: canvas cathedral, and several thousands more stand around the sides
Speaker 8: of the tent, approximately three hundred and fifty thousand total
Speaker 8: attendants in two months.
Speaker 2: Big Jim's preacher father was worried about him started trying
Speaker 2: to get him to check out Graham. In a town
Speaker 2: that loved celebrities, suddenly a preacher was one of the
Speaker 2: most famous guys around. Down on his luck, Big Jim
Speaker 2: decided to go.
Speaker 3: I thought to myself, well, I'll just drive by and
Speaker 3: see what's packed. I saw some fifteen thousand people trying
Speaker 3: to jam their way in. I drove on by. Then
Speaker 3: I thought, well, i'll park walk back.
Speaker 2: Big Jim was at this point a recognizable face from
Speaker 2: all the press coverage of the grand jury investigation. Someone
Speaker 2: saw him. He was hard to miss and went to
Speaker 2: tell Graham that a hardened criminal was in the audience.
Speaker 3: And I muscled my way to the front of the
Speaker 3: standing crowd. Some old lady got up and left her seat,
Speaker 3: and I grabbed it and I sat down and listened
Speaker 3: to the program, not enjoying it one bit.
Speaker 2: Big Jim was uncomfortable. And then Graham came on stage
Speaker 2: and began to preach this it's the climactic moment of
Speaker 2: the movie Wiretapper.
Speaker 6: As I've stood here this evening, I felt all evening
Speaker 6: that there's a man somewhere in this audience. He's heard
Speaker 6: this message many times before, and the Spirit of God
Speaker 6: is striving mightily with him at this moment, and if
Speaker 6: he doesn't come to Christ now, he may never come.
Speaker 6: We're going to wait a moment. There's still time for
Speaker 6: you to come and give your life to Christ.
Speaker 2: Big Jim said he felt like Graham was speaking straight
Speaker 2: to him. He stood up, he walked to the front
Speaker 2: of the Canvas Cathedral. He fell to his knees, and
Speaker 2: he gave himself to God. That speech you've been hearing, we.
Speaker 3: Had one gadget that made it possible for us to
Speaker 3: listen in the telephone conversation.
Speaker 2: It's a sermon. Big Jim Voss cat on his fourth life.
Speaker 2: After that night, he quit the mob joined up with
Speaker 2: Billy Graham and helped to make him one of the
Speaker 2: most famous religious figures of all time by preaching about
Speaker 2: the telephone. We'll be right back. Some people were a
Speaker 2: little suspicious of Big Jim Voss's conveniently timed conversion. Among
Speaker 2: them Officer Charles Stoker.
Speaker 9: Voss got himself a new code of celestial varnish. He
Speaker 9: said that he was tired of being a sinner and
Speaker 9: wanted to return to God.
Speaker 2: Now Stoker might have been a little too hard bitten there.
Speaker 2: Voss did ultimately set up a much acclaimed ministry called
Speaker 2: Youth Development Incorporated, tending the gangs in Harlem. But look,
Speaker 2: this episode is not about the ultimate state of Big
Speaker 2: Jim Voss's soul. It's about the telephone. Remember, and Big
Speaker 2: Jim was literally standing at the source of the twentieth
Speaker 2: century evangelical movement in America with his ear to the
Speaker 2: country's phones. Brian Hawkman, wiretapping historian on the line once again.
Speaker 10: And Graham used Vassa's conversion as one of his great
Speaker 10: kind of advertisements for his teachings.
Speaker 2: Big Jim started spreading the Gospel of the reformed Wiretapper.
Speaker 2: He even published a book with the help of Graham's network.
Speaker 2: It's called Why I Quit Syndicated Crime, and it was
Speaker 2: a hit. Then Graham's ministry made that movie in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty five, another success, albeit a really weird one. And
Speaker 2: then Voss started touring the country trying to save souls,
Speaker 2: and what he talked about all the time was his
Speaker 2: career wire tapping. He even brought wiretapping gear on stage
Speaker 2: with him.
Speaker 10: He was God's wiretap. Where God had been calling, he
Speaker 10: had never picked up the phone, and finally he tapped
Speaker 10: in at just the right moment.
Speaker 2: This was the early nineteen fifties. There was talk of
Speaker 2: a bugging epidemic in America, but also a sense of
Speaker 2: just how miraculous this technology was. Bill Labs, the famed
Speaker 2: research arm of the telephone company AT and T, had
Speaker 2: just invented the transistor, the electrical device that made possible
Speaker 2: the miniaturization of everything, including the phone in your pocket.
Speaker 10: So the story that Boss tells his congregation, illustrated through
Speaker 10: the eavesdropping devices, is that no man can hide from God.
Speaker 10: If man can't hide from man, if all conversations can
Speaker 10: be recorded, everything hidden can be known, how can man
Speaker 10: hope to hide from God?
Speaker 7: Here?
Speaker 10: Were man made miracles, evidence of the almost divine power
Speaker 10: of technology to change the world.
Speaker 13: And there's also, I guess, the sort of the way
Speaker 13: in which your secret in our life is a saying
Speaker 13: no normly to God that is now possibly also known
Speaker 13: to man, and this is through things like the wire
Speaker 13: tapping devices.
Speaker 10: Absolutely he titled his sermon no Place to Hide.
Speaker 2: This story has it all crime, corruption, electronics, evangelicals, but
Speaker 2: I think the phone is the thing that brings it
Speaker 2: all together. In Big Jim sermons and Billy Graham's wiretapper,
Speaker 2: electronics are miracles to be wondered at. But they also
Speaker 2: threatened to expose you to men like the old big Gym,
Speaker 2: to take the secret things that once only God or
Speaker 2: your priest and a confessional could have known, and broadcast
Speaker 2: them to everyone. And it's kind of a classically American story.
Speaker 2: No other country took to the phone as quickly or
Speaker 2: as thoroughly as we did. People fretted about how the
Speaker 2: suburban sprawl was telephone aided in a country this big,
Speaker 2: the phone holds it all together. There's something really American
Speaker 2: about that idea of this one vast, fragile system connecting
Speaker 2: all these crazy disparate lives together, wiretappers to preachers, call
Speaker 2: girls to cops. It's like democracy as a technology, but
Speaker 2: again like a shadow democracy. The phone is what you
Speaker 2: use for the things you don't want to be seen
Speaker 2: in public, the place you lead your secret life, whatever
Speaker 2: that consists of. It reminds me of those nine hundred
Speaker 2: numbers that became a big deal in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 2: which were famously used for phone sex and also for spiritualists.
Speaker 2: That's kind of always been the thing with the phone,
Speaker 2: secret longings and spiritualism. A lot of people thought maybe
Speaker 2: you could reach the spirit world through the telephone lines.
Speaker 2: All this to say, the experience of hearing a voice
Speaker 2: from miles away almost instantaneously, it collapsed time and space
Speaker 2: in a completely unreal, visceral way. And because it lets
Speaker 2: you share things privately without showing your face, it invited confessions.
Speaker 2: It's always created this kind of otherworldly private feeling that
Speaker 2: religion deals with. That's part of why I think Big
Speaker 2: Jim's wiretapping was such a rich vehicle for any evangelical message.
Speaker 2: But that message, as Graham used it, was a little
Speaker 2: Old Testament. The phone's like a God who hears all
Speaker 2: and spares no one. It's a connection to all the
Speaker 2: sin coursing through the country. Like that poster for Wiretapper
Speaker 2: of the movie said, if you're on the phone, you're
Speaker 2: not safe. But there was another side to it. As
Speaker 2: Big Jim was touring the country talking about the phone
Speaker 2: and wiretapping and the state of his audience's soul, another
Speaker 2: religious movement was beginning in Ocean Away that was also
Speaker 2: all about the phone. So let's leave Big Jim Voss
Speaker 2: for a minute and make a long distance call from
Speaker 2: the northeast under the sea on the cable that stretches
Speaker 2: from North America along the ocean floor and up the
Speaker 2: craggy Rocks to England, down the winding streets of London
Speaker 2: to a church Saint Stephen Wahlberg, a church that had
Speaker 2: been bombed out during the Blitz. It's nineteen fifty three
Speaker 2: and an Anglican vicar named Chad Vera is starting the
Speaker 2: very first suicide hotline.
Speaker 14: Vera had for a long time been really aware of
Speaker 14: suicide and suicidality and been very preoccupied by the pain
Speaker 14: that suicidality and suicide brought into communities, alongside, of course
Speaker 14: the loss of individuals.
Speaker 2: Hannah's Even is a historian of science who wrote a
Speaker 2: book called The Distance Cure, A History of Teletherapy. Most
Speaker 2: people think suicide hotlines are a secular kind of therapy,
Speaker 2: but they came from the Church at a post war
Speaker 2: moment when the suicide rate was rising in the US
Speaker 2: and the UK. Chad Vera that Anglican vicar was trying
Speaker 2: to figure out how to address it, and so.
Speaker 14: Vera in the early nineteen fifties had become not only
Speaker 14: really preoccupied with the fact that there was this increase
Speaker 14: in suicidality in this society, but also that there weren't
Speaker 14: social mechanisms for intervening and helping those in crisis, not
Speaker 14: only because it's unspeakable and all of the things that
Speaker 14: might trouble someone so greatly or unspeakable, but also because
Speaker 14: it was a felony.
Speaker 2: To the cops. Suicide was a crime. To the church,
Speaker 2: it was a sin. So who could hear suicidal people
Speaker 2: talk about it? They were totally isolated.
Speaker 14: Well, he really understood was that in a urgencies, right,
Speaker 14: we are conditioned to reach for the telephone then as
Speaker 14: now it's a different form of telephone, no doubt, but
Speaker 14: that that was already a kind of habitast of your
Speaker 14: any given individual. Nine one one as a formulation didn't
Speaker 14: exist for some time in the US. In the UK,
Speaker 14: that history is a little bit different, right, They did
Speaker 14: have a unified number already, So it makes sense in
Speaker 14: terms of telephone history, right that British folks were already
Speaker 14: conditioned to call nine nine nine. So instead of putting
Speaker 14: fire and police, and also while not making it, a psychiatrist,
Speaker 14: Vera knew that we needed some kind of his society
Speaker 14: needed some kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Vera decided to make a kind of telephone church. No
Speaker 2: physical congregation, just phones and Vera with a secretary, Vivian Prosser,
Speaker 2: offering counseling to people contemplating suicide twenty four hours a day.
Speaker 7: Then Vera got to work.
Speaker 14: He writ he offered this kind of serracutic confessional remediated.
Speaker 14: And it was so popular because immediately it became a
Speaker 14: feel good story in the popular person.
Speaker 7: On the radio.
Speaker 2: Vera was offering a kind of half psychoanalysis, half pastoral counseling.
Speaker 2: But the key thing was the telephone, the privacy of
Speaker 2: that conversation, the anonymity had offered, and the connection to
Speaker 2: someone when you needed them most. It was a brilliant
Speaker 2: idea and immediately it was extremely popular, and.
Speaker 14: So Vera and Prosser couldn't handle the urgency of the
Speaker 14: calls on their own, and it couldn't be truly twenty
Speaker 14: four hours a day. That was another problem. So in
Speaker 14: order to meet the demand for help over the phone
Speaker 14: in its earliest moment, Vera trained fifty volunteers.
Speaker 2: It kind of reminded me of Brenda Allen's call Girl Network,
Speaker 2: the private thing that someone wouldn't seek out in public
Speaker 2: but could ask for on the phone. It's like a
Speaker 2: system of tunnels under polite society, connecting someone filled with
Speaker 2: despair and bedroom to a kindly ear in a blitz
Speaker 2: bam church in London.
Speaker 14: And I just love this. The term of art is befriending,
Speaker 14: which is this kind of ancient Christian term remade as
Speaker 14: this new person to person, that mediated form of care.
Speaker 14: And this is a Samaritans, which is the world's oldest
Speaker 14: and also most used suicide hotline, and it's still active today.
Speaker 2: Various ideas spread all over the world. The hotline went
Speaker 2: on to take a lot of different forms, but it
Speaker 2: was right there in the nineteen fifties a big news
Speaker 2: story right alongside Big Jim's conversion narrative, two stories about
Speaker 2: invisible listeners, overhearing you at your lowest point, and understanding
Speaker 2: who you really are. Since the nineteen fifties, there have
Speaker 2: been hotlines and dial of something services for pretty much
Speaker 2: everything you can imagine, from the serious like nine to
Speaker 2: eight eight today's National Suicide Hotline in the US, or
Speaker 2: hotlines Fraid's Information in the nineteen eighties, to the less
Speaker 2: serious nine five one two, six ' two three zero
Speaker 2: six two Santa's Hotline six ' four to one seven
Speaker 2: nine three eight one two two dial a pone. Even
Speaker 2: Big Jim Voss started one one eight hundred hit Home,
Speaker 2: a hot line for runaway kids looking for shelter. Will Voss,
Speaker 2: big Jim's son, remembers working for it when he was
Speaker 2: in college.
Speaker 7: I did do a lot of listening to kids, and
Speaker 7: you know, I didn't I didn't have to prompt them
Speaker 7: very much, you know, to pour their hearts out. It
Speaker 7: to stappen naturally.
Speaker 13: It would have happened in the same way if you'd
Speaker 13: been face to face with them.
Speaker 7: Probably not. Yeah, I think the anonymity really helped.
Speaker 2: The anonymity helps the phones a tool of alienation, the
Speaker 2: phones a vehicle for connection. It turns out both things
Speaker 2: are true. And what's amazing to me about these big
Speaker 2: stories that people were using to understand the phone in
Speaker 2: the fifties wiretaps and hotlines, is they've got these shadows,
Speaker 2: spiritual messages. I think the phone still has those vestiges
Speaker 2: baked into it. It's like a tiny god in your pocket,
Speaker 2: wire tapping everything you say, surveilling and sometimes saving. The
Speaker 2: Last Archive is written and hosted by me Ben Natapaffrey.
Speaker 2: It's produced by me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by
Speaker 2: Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on
Speaker 2: this episode by Arthur Gombert's sound design by Jake Gorsky
Speaker 2: and Lucy solib Our. Executive producers are Sophie Crane and
Speaker 2: Jill Lapour. Thanks also to Julia Barton Pushkin's executive editor.
Speaker 2: Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of stell
Speaker 2: Wagon Symphonet. Many of our sound effects are from Harry
Speaker 2: Jannette Junior in the Stargenette Foundation Special. Thanks to Gary Goff,
Speaker 2: Emily Bills, Emily Bannis, and Lydia Jencott. Archival audio courtesy
Speaker 2: of Buswell Library and Archives and Special Collections, Wheaton College, Illinois.
Speaker 2: For a bibliography, further reading, and a transcript and teaching
Speaker 2: guide to this episode, head to the Last Archive dot com.
Speaker 2: The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. If
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Speaker 2: I'm Ben Nanna Faffrey.