No one has ever been convicted of wire-tapping, although any layman or private detective caught tampering with someone else’s telephone cords is liable to arrest. So are police, for that matter, if they can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the tap is being made in the interests of crime detection. That obviously is a pretty easy thing for men in their position to do. The new induction coil, which involves no actual contact with a wire, is described in prospectuses as “entirely legal” and there seems to be no reason for doubting the claim. Criminal lawyers, whose own wires are frequently tapped, have worked hard for federal legislation against wire-tapping, but their efforts have always failed. The Senate has just passed a bill legalizing wire-tapping by government law-enforcement agencies, and it is now awaiting action by the House. The Bill of Rights Committee of the New York State Constitutional Convention voted down a proposal to prohibit wire-tapping, but the controversy over it there still continues. Till now, court opinion has been divided on the legality of evidence obtained by tapping wires. In 1928 the United States Supreme Court sustained the conviction of a bootlegger on evidence picked up by wire-tappers two miles from the defendant’s home. The late Justice Holmes dissented, remarking, “Wire-tapping is a dirty business.” A few months ago the same court decided that federal prosecutors may not use evidence obtained by tapping wires linking two or more states. The results of intrastate tapping, however, remain admissible. The popular belief that the police would stop tapping wires if evidence obtained by this means were ruled out of all courts is a delusion. Most wire-tapping is done to obtain information that may lead to arrests rather than for the purpose of obtaining evidence to be presented in court.
Mayor Mitchel, who was at City Hall when the public first became aware of the prevalence of wire-tapping, favored the practice and boasted that he had assigned detectives to listen in on the telephone conversations of the Catholic Charities during a feud he had with that organization. His Police Commissioner, Arthur Woods, conceded that the idea of tapping a wire was “revolting” but defended his men on the ground that “you can’t always do detective work in a high hat and kid gloves.” More recently, mayors have become tap-conscious for personal reasons. In 1929 someone broke into the telephone panel box in the basement of City Hall, located the cords of Mayor Walker’s line, and ran out several wires. Detectives traced one of the taps to a spot in the gallery of the aldermanic chamber, where the floor was littered with cigarette butts and matches, showing that a tapper had spent a long and nervous session at his listening post. Another tap ran through the old courthouse in the park to a vacant office in Worth Street. None of the tappers was ever found.